Libya’s internationally recognized government–desperately trying to hold the shattered nation together against warlords, terrorist gangs, and the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL/IS)–has banned visas for visitors from a number of Middle Eastern and African nations, including Yemen, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, and Bangladesh.
Hard on the heels of reports that China and Russia are busy using stolen U.S. government data to identify American intelligence officers and assets, comes word that the Obama administration is considering retaliatory sanctions against Russian and Chinese targets.
The Hillary Clinton era was a time of much “consternation” for State Department technical staff and security experts, to borrow a word used in today’s Politico article about Clinton aides pushing for the ability to view secret and top-secret material on their personal electronic devices. Just imagine what’s in the 30,000-plus emails Clinton deleted before investigators, Congress, and the American people could see them, if the stuff she eventually decided to hand over is this alarming and embarrassing.
In fact, one of the worst things about politicized economics is the false promise that politicians know what the ideal economy looks like, never mind having solid plans for getting there. Is the ideal economy one in which everyone’s basic needs are covered? Welcome to the endless grey fog of the collectivist welfare or communist state, which always proves unsustainable and fails to deliver on those promises anyway.
A group of migrants overran a high-speed train in Calais on Tuesday and attempted to ride on the roof through the Eurotunnel into the U.K. welfare state.
Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland just became the deciding Democat vote to push President Obama’s nuclear sellout to Iran through Congress.
Hillary Clinton originated at least six emails containing classified information, contrary to her spin that she was just a helpless unwitting recipient of material others should be blamed for compromising. Many of the messages contained information that was “born classified” – indisputably classified at the time Hillary sent or received them, under a 2009 executive order signed by President Obama, contrary to Clinton’s repeated false claims that none of her emails included information that was marked classified at the time she handled it. Some of these emails had to be redacted in their entirety before they could be released to the public.
On the whole, the candidates’ websites seemed surprisingly timid, even backward, as if the designers were primarily afraid of (a) soaking up too much bandwidth from visitors, and (b) leaving some important scrap of text off the main screen, for fear that visitors would explore no further. These are both very last-generation concerns. Seriously, folks, it’s 2015. A dash of animation, such as Fiorina and Chris Christie offer, will not cause anyone’s computer to chug.
Former CIA director and retired Army general David Petraeus is suggesting America should team up with al-Qaeda to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
The Japanese Defense Ministry has requested its largest budget ever, a 2.2 percent raise following three years of steady increases, driven by concerns over Chinese expansion in the South China Sea.
On Saturday morning, Thai police raided an apartment on the outskirts of Bangkok and arrested a man they regard as a prime suspect in the horrific bombing attack on the Erawan Shrine last week, in which 20 people were killed. Word soon spread that the suspect was a Turkish citizen.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, adapted from their forthcoming book “Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America,” in which they compare President Obama’s Iran deal to the infamous act of capitulation that launched World War 2.
According to U.S. officials cited by the L.A. Times, China and Russia are cross-indexing the mountain of data stolen in the Office of Personnel Management hack earlier this year with other major data breaches, including stolen airline bookings and the Ashley Madison subscriber database, to identify intelligence officials, their agents, and assets.
According to the Kurdish news agency Rudaw, two unknown gunmen carried out a hit-and-run attack on the Islamic State’s radio station in Mosul this weekend.
Donald Trump is doing a bit more than merely “trolling” Jeb Bush with his Instagram account, as the headline at National Journal has it. Trump is playing a longer game here, and he’s also playing rougher than terms like “trolling” or “minor ribbing” would suggest.
Ed Henry of Fox News reported that the number of Hillary Clinton emails in the new release has increased to 7,000, while the number of messages that had to be redacted to protect classified material is more than double what was expected. (The report is slightly confusing on this point, because Henry later suggests there are 150 more classified emails in addition to 63 that were already expected.)
One of the important lessons to take away from China’s stock market crash is a lesson nobody on Earth should need repeated: communists lie.
You might think, as many investors do, that a loss of confidence in Beijing caused the Chinese market rout, but Beijing thinks you’ll find the real culprits along the banks of the Potomac.
More details are emerging about Junaid Hussain, the twenty-something British expatriate who served as a key player in the Islamic State’s online army until a U.S. drone strike took him out this week. According to an article at the Wall Street Journal, Hussain was involved in most of ISIS’s hacking and social media exploits.
The other Clinton scandal is back in the news, courtesy of a report from ABC, which picked up some State Department emails that “shed light on Bill Clinton’s lucrative speaking engagements and show he and the Clinton Foundation tried to get approval for invitations related to two of the most repressive countries in the world – North Korea and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
The Maserati-driving CEO of the Ashley Madison adultery site has divorced himself from the company, following the discovery that he betrayed the trust of his cheating customers, his monied shareholders, his well-paid board and his self-serving wife.
Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio came on strong in a radio interview, hammering Hillary Clinton on her abortion extremism, pushing back against Clinton’s outrageous rhetoric comparing the GOP presidential candidates to terrorists, and describing Clinton as a failed candidate frantically trying to draw attention to herself and distract from the investigation of her conduct as Secretary of State.
A civilian analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency has charged that military officials have been providing excessively optimistic assessments of the bombing campaign against ISIS to other branches of the administration, including the White House. The Pentagon inspector general is reportedly investigating these allegations.
From Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post comes an argument that Europeans resisting the wave of migrants from Middle Eastern hell-holes have got it all wrong. The new arrivals will actually save Europe, by repopulating it with someone other than Europeans.
Has there ever been a more spectacular performance of Republican “Failure Theater” than the Iran deal? Senator Bob Corker (R-TN), who long ago made it impossible for Congress to stop the deal, now comes forth to tell us Congress probably can’t stop the Iran deal, even as public opposition soars into solid majority territory, and more Democrats stage their own little Failure Theater sideshows of “conscience.”
