In 1919, President Woodrow Wilson dispatched a theologian named Henry King and a plumbing-parts magnate named Charles Crane to sort out the Middle East. Amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, the region’s political future was uncertain, and the two men seemed to provide …

Retired Army Gen. Mike Flynn, a top intelligence official in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, says in a forthcoming interview on Al Jazeera English that the drone war is creating more terrorists than it is killing. He also asserts that the U.S. invasion of Iraq helped create the …

According to paragraph 67 of the new nuclear deal with Iran, IAEA inspectors in charge of monitoring the agreement may only be “from nations that have diplomatic relations with Iran.” This means that no inspectors will be American (unless the U.S. unexpectedly reestablishes the diplomatic ties with Iran that it severed …

There are lots of ways that government spies can attack your computer, but a U.S. drone company is scheming to offer them one more. Boeing subsidiary Insitu would like to be able to deliver spyware via drone. The plan is described in internal emails from the Italian company Hacking Team, which makes off-the-shelf software that …

    Worst-case scenarios for 2015 SYRIA Violence from Syria spills over into Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and beyond after Islamic State and the Assad regime defeat the last vestiges of the moderate opposition. ISRAEL A third Palestinian uprising against Israel breaks out after the March elections. It turns …

Madrid, Barcelona and other major Spanish cities are now governed by independent citizen fronts called “confluences.” Ahora Madrid, Barcelona en Comú, Zaragoza en Común and La Marea Atlántica (A Coruña) are confluences weaved together by the M15-Indignados social ecosystem. Other political parties, like Podemos and Equo, have joined …

Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, the 2016 presidential candidates leading the money race in the Democratic and Republican fields, are amassing fortunes that will leave them politically indebted to some of the most influential lobbyists in Washington. Disclosures to the Federal Election Commission reveal how lobbyists for Walmart, …

It’s hard being a big private bank these days. Ongoing awareness of the role that Goldman Sachs played in the Greek debt crisis; that Greek voters said no to Europe’s harsh austerity demands; recent revelations of unreasonably high fees and interest rates for lending to municipalities, and the …