Five Best Monday Columns
Eleanor Clift on State of the Union stakes, Andrew Brown on the pope's resignation, Marc Thiessen on Jack Lew's offshore investments, Connie Rice on the LAPD's culture, and Fouad Ajami on drones.
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Russia's Federal Security Service claims to have thwarted a terrorist attack being planned for central Moscow, killing two suspects in the process.
Eleanor Clift on State of the Union stakes, Andrew Brown on the pope's resignation, Marc Thiessen on Jack Lew's offshore investments, Connie Rice on the LAPD's culture, and Fouad Ajami on drones.
The Vatican confirmed this morning that Pope Benedict XVI will resign his position as head of the Catholic Church later this month.
Things aren't going so hot over in Tunisia. First, somebody assassinates an opposition leader. Then, after the prime minister's failed attempt to shuffle the cabinet, the president's own party straight up quit the government.
Like some kind of paranoid Banksy, a woman entered a Louvre gallery today and scrawled 9/11 conspiracy graffiti on Eugene Delacroix's canvas Liberty Leading the People.
The offices of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team were set ablaze last night, apparently in ongoing fight over the team's two new Muslim players.
Michael Crowley on Congress' drone anxieties, Michael Hastings on waking up to drone realities, Jonathan Last on immigration filling the population gap, Ruy Teixeira on the population non-problem, and Jason Dorrier on job-stealing robots.
After French forces changed the dynamic of the conflict in Mali, it has now taken on another new, and sadly predictable, turn—suicide attacks.
You know that top secret drone base in Saudi Arabia everyone's been crowing about lately? If Wired's sources are correct, that's a picture of it to the left. Runways, hangar, sand — it's all there. It's not very secret, either.
You've probably read a lot of scary stuff about what's going on in Syria right now, and that's fine, because it's the truth. That's why it's refreshing to see some happy Syrian faces for once.
Al Cardenas on creating an immigrant-friendly GOP, Ezra Klein on disingenuous GOP rebranding, Daniel Gross on the new Interior Secretary, Adam Davidson on money buying happiness, and Bryan Appleyard on the world's entitled elites.
For the second time in one week, Japan's foreign ministry has had to lodge an international complaint after a neighboring military power got a little too close for comfort.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi to be perfect, so when he found out who was behind the delays of the site's ski jumping complex, he did the understandable thing and axed the Russian Olympics Committee deputy chief.
Iran is jumping on the drone news bandwagon today, with expertly timed released of it claims is decrypted surveillance footage taken from a downed American drone.
Nobody likes a lost dog. The owners lament her absence. The public fears her bite. And authorities have better things to do than chase down pets. So why not just put tracking chips under their skin?
David Kravets on Obama's drone problem, Michael Kugelman on global agribusiness, Doyle McManus on the mortgage interest taxes, Duncan Black on the failure of 401Ks, and Alec MacGillis on Eric Cantor's call to cut the medical device tax.
Chokri Belaid, a Tunisian politician who has been a leading critic of the new government, was shot and killed outside his house on Wednesday, setting off a wave of protests from supporters and other opposition leaders.
This morning's 8.0-magnitude earthquake in the South Pacific generated a 3-foot tsunami which struck the Santa Cruz Islands — a remote part of the Solomon Islands — killing four elderly people and one child.
Wednesday morning was a scary one for folks within about a thousand miles of the Solomon Islands, where an 8.0-magnitude earthquake generated a tsunami that spread across the region.
The British House of Commons have shown overwhelmingly for same-sex marriage legislation that could soon bring soon make gay marriage a reality, but the victory isn't the end of the fight.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to Egypt has not gone so well, as he was lectured by a Sunni Cleric, mobbed by aggressive glad-handers, and had someone else throw a shoe at him.
Based on this new picture, people, including a South Korean intelligence agency, have concluded that North Korea's supreme leader uses an HTC smartphone.
Bulgarian officials announced that the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah was behind a bus bombing that killed five Israeli tourists last summer, a ruling that could force Europe to officially sanction the group.
Yes, little old Iceland made the list. So did the Hague's neighbors in Belgium, and Sweden and Finland. Why?
Everyone is anxious about the "white paper" that finally begins to detail the Obama administration's opinons on targeted assassination, but what seems to have even more people worried on the morning after — and less than 48 hours from John Brennan's confirmation hearing — is what's missing from that argument.
The Daily Show host knows why the monkey Iran launched in space looks nothing like the monkey who returned to Earth.
Japan's Ministry of Defense is upset with the Chinese navy frigate that locked onto a Japanese navy ship with radar usually used to shoot missiles.
The companion of the woman who was raped and then killed in the horrific Delhi bus attack last year, appeared in court today to become the first witness to testify against the five suspects being tried for her murder.
North Korea likes to drop hints about wanting to annihilate the United States, but just to make it clear, they've produced a helpful propaganda film to show exactly how that's going to go down.
It's a made-in-Iran, "super advanced," radar "evading" military jet, prepared to unleash hell upon the regime's many enemies. Only there's now one major problem: Aviation experts say this plane can't even fly.
As President Obama takes to the road to sell a "comprehensive set of commonsense ideas" about gun violence, Senate Democrats are reportedly working on a gun-control bill that will include all of the his policy proposals — except the one that might be the biggest.
After speaking publicly for the first time since her attack at the hands of the Taliban, the 15-year-old Pakistani shooting victim had two surgical procedures to repair her skull and restore her hearing.
Michael Lewis on Goldman Sachs, Steve Kornacki on the remaking of the GOP, Charles C.W. Cooke on Black History Month, Jennifer Vanasco on pedophilia in the Boy Scouts, and Michael Tomasky on the paranoia of the NRA.
What monkey? Unfazed by questions about whether his country's space monkey mission was staged, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is pretty gung ho about being his country's first man sent to space.
Israel still isn't (officially) talking about what they were doing in Syria last week, but American officials have revealed a few new details about their cross-border attack.
For the first time in three years Fidel Castro appeared in public, voting in Cuba's general election on Sunday and looking good for a guy everyone thought was pretty much dead just a year ago.
Not satisfied with upsetting the entire world with a new nuclear weapons test, there's now speculation that North Korea may be planning two tests, possibly back-to-back or even simultaneously.
Scientists in England have announced that they can now conclusively say that a skeleton found under a parking lot in Great Britain last year belongs to the Richard III, the famous king who was killed (without his horse!) more than 500 years ago.
In a roomful of world leaders at a security conference in Munich, Iran's foreign minister, Ali Akbar Salehi, said on Sunday that his country is prepared to resume nuclear negotiations in Kazakhstan.
If you're from a country like the United States where the Constitution is sacrosanct, it's hard to comprehend a burgeoning political movement in China that's demanding its leaders obey the country's basic law.
We always knew this day would come. Someone call Charlton Heston. The real rise of the planet of the apes has begun in Saudi Arabia. A group of baboons are terrorizing a village with coordinated attacks on empty houses while they look for food.
Protestors set fires outside the gates of Egypt's presidential palace on Friday as Cairo endured a second straight week of demonstrations against Mohammed Morsi.
Iran made a pretty big deal about their supposedly successful attempt at launching a monkey into orbit and returning him safely to Earth. But looking closely at evidence from the mission, experts have easily called Iran's bluff.
A huge truck filled with fireworks exploded on an elevated highway in China on Friday, destroying a large section of the road, and sending vehicles plummeting nearly 100 feet to the ground.
Jonathan Tobin on how Hagel blew it, Chris Cillizza on why Hagel will still get confirmed, Flynt and Hillary Leverett on the need to accept Iranian power, Paul Krugman on the search for austerity successes, and Ron Fournier on covering Hillary.
Want one more sign that North Korea is getting closer to their third nuclear test? They've started to camouflage and cover the entrance to an underground nuclear testing tunnel at the Punggye-ri facility so that no one can see what they're doing.
A bomb exploded outside the entrance to the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, on Friday in an apparent suicide attack that killed two people.
Fourteen people are dead, up to 100 injured and another 30 remain trapped beneath the rubble, after an explosion tore through the Mexico City headquarters of the state-owned Pemex oil company.
A Russian judge recently thought it would be a good idea to take his holiday in Syria and pretend to be a war correspondent. And guess what happened: he got shot in the face and almost died.
Matthew Yglesias on the stupidity of sequestration, Caroline Baum on Paul Ryan's deficit elimination plan, Daniel Gross on the GDP report, Erick Erickson on Rubio's immigration play, and Rory Carroll on Venezuela's post-Chavez void.
Both Iran and Syria are ramping up the rhetoric this morning, not-so-subtly threatening Israel over its attack within Syria's borders on Wednesday.
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