
U.S., Japan Deploy Planes to Check for Radiation After North Korean Bomb Test
The U.S. Air Force and Japanese Defense Ministry have both dispatched nuclear-sniffer planes to investigate North Korea’s latest nuclear test.

The U.S. Air Force and Japanese Defense Ministry have both dispatched nuclear-sniffer planes to investigate North Korea’s latest nuclear test.

The term of art for how the State Department handled information requests pertaining to Hillary Clinton’s email is “inaccurate and incomplete response,” but that means lying in plain old English. As the Washington Post reports, the State Department Inspector General found at least four cases

Security experts across the world are increasingly worried about the possibility of a cyber-attack that would target infrastructure – anything from communications and traffic control to electric power or utility services. Just such an attack is believed to have occurred on December 23 in Ukraine.

German police are still mumbling about having insufficient resources to follow up on leads, but they’ve got infinite resources to crack down on “hate speech.”

In the long-delayed final act of a story from last summer, Turkey has released VICE News journalist Mohammed Ismael Rasool on bail.

A sharia court in northern Nigeria has sentenced Muslim cleric Abdul Nyass to death for insulting Mohammed last May.

The Department of Veterans Affairs racked up over 10,000 serious breaches of privacy since 2011, making it “the nation’s most prolific violator of laws protecting patients’ personal medical information,” as the Washington Examiner puts it.

North Korea claims to have detonated a hydrogen bomb – as they described it, an “H-bomb of justice” – that would represent a massive escalation in the Communist dictatorship’s nuclear capability, putting them one major step closer to having weapons that can hit the continental United States.

The morning after President Obama held a tearful press conference to announce almost entirely meaningless executive orders that wouldn’t affect “gun violence” in the slightest, the increasingly unhinged New York Daily News declared everyone who stands against Obama is homicidal monster.

A watchdog group called the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reports finding more evidence of chemical weapons deployment, including sarin gas, or a substance very similar to it.

The Saudi execution of insurrectionist Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr threatens to touch off a conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims across the Middle East and beyond. Massive Shiite protests have occurred across the region over the past few days and have spread into Asia.

Debt is a fantastic way to control people, because politicians can offer to relieve portions of that debt in exchange for votes. The political battlespace has been well-prepared by teaching citizens to hate the banks that loan them money to fulfill their ambitions and satisfy their desires.

There would seem to be something ideologically incongruous about honoring the godfather of Chinese communism with a giant golden statue, but the story of the Mao colossus of Zhushigang gets worse with each new detail. The imposing 120-foot statue, made from steel and concrete covered in gold paint, towers over the surrounding trees.

In early December, a Hindu leader in India named Kamlesh Tiwari referred to Mohammed as “the world’s first homosexual.” This did not sit well with the local Muslim community, which called for the government to prosecute Tiwari for everything from “blasphemy” to making “anti-social” statements “designed to incite a riot.”

The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial on Sunday afternoon titled, “Who Lost the Saudis?” It lays out a convincing case for why Russia and Iran are out to get the House of Saud—which, for all of its many, many flaws, is still an impediment to the agenda of America’s primary geopolitical adversaries.

Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, a spokesman for the Iranian judiciary, claims that unnamed Americans have tried to arrange a prisoner swap to secure the freedom of captive Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian.

Turkey has accused the Russian government of having a hand in cyberattacks launched against government and private Turkish websites, after the downing of a Russian fighter in November.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s New Year’s resolution is to create an artificial intelligence that can manage his household, help him run his company, and even keep an eye on his child.

Protests over Saudi Arabia’s execution of Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr have spread through Iran, Iraq, Bahrain, Pakistan, Lebanon, Turkey, and now India, especially in districts with a heavy Shiite population.

Even the New York Times is conceding that the huge number of Americans willing to pay a special tax to escape from ObamaCare is newsworthy, although the paper tries to sugar-coat the bad news as much as possible:

Bahrain and Sudan have joined their ally Saudi Arabia in formally severing diplomatic ties with Iran, while the United Arab Emirates has “downgraded” its diplomatic team, recalling its ambassador from Tehran and announcing that it would reduce the number of diplomats assigned to Iran.

The conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran escalated another notch on Monday morning, as the Saudis announced the suspension of air travel to and from Iran.

A Chinese company called Boyalife Genomics is planning to open a factory the size of three football fields in Tianjin this year, and what they’ll be manufacturing is… cows. Clone cows. 100,000 of them per year to start, but company founder Xiao-Chun Xu dreams of cranking that production level up to a million per year.

One particular execution carried out by Saudi Arabia this weekend, that of Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr, led to violent protests and the sacking of the Saudi embassy in Tehran.

An updated assessment of Russian national security, signed by President Vladimir Putin on New Year’s Eve, names the United States as a threat, along with NATO. The report does not, however, list Syria as a threat, even though Russia is currently bombing rebel forces in that country.