Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo The Sharaf family, refugees from Syria, shopping in November in Troy, Mich. The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, has repeatedly called on world leaders to accept refugees, but his pleas have been met with reluctance. Credit Salwan Georges for The New York Times UNITED NATIONS — The Obama administration’s effort to step up…
TAMPA, Fla. — The U.S. military is pouring money into hypersonic research, and it’s making China and Russia —which have their own similar programs — nervous. But the accelerating effort to build missiles that fly at speeds between Mach 5 to Mach 19 is also alarming some in the nonproliferation community. Despite Pentagon officials’ assurances that superfast weapons will…
*** CONTENT STARTS HERE *** How to Hack an Election Andrés Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a decade. He tells his story for the first time. By Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley, and Andrew Willis | March 31, 2016 Photographs by Juan Arredondo From BODY COPY CENTERED It was just before midnight when…
For almost a year, a Saudi-led coalition of Middle Eastern countries, backed and armed by the U.S. and U.K., has been bombing Yemen, the poorest country in the region. Saudi Arabia hopes to destroy Yemeni rebel groups such as the Houthis, and has bombed hospitals, homes, schools and even a refugee camp in the process….
In laymen’s terms, “kill boxes” sound like torture devices. In military jargon, they are almost incomprehensible; as defined in the Department of Defense Dictionary, they are “a three-dimensional area reference that enables timely, effective coordination and control and facilitates rapid attacks.” But despite their ominous name and complicated technical definition, kill boxes are actually relatively simple…
“Luckily, I drank blood. If not, I’d be crazy, calling to prayer from the trees,” says Inong, a thin, old man in a knitted skull cap. “If you drink blood, you can do anything! Salty and sweet. Human blood.” The seventy-two-year-old is the former leader of a village death squad in The Look of Silence,…
The shockingly brutal Saudi air campaign in Yemen has been led by American-made F-15 jet fighters. The indiscriminate bombing of civilians and rescuers from the air has prompted human rights organizations to claim that some Saudi-led strikes on Yemen may amount to war crimes. At least 2,800 civilians have been killed in the conflict so far,…
START “MORE FROM” Custom END “MORE FROM” Custom For half a century, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been the linchpin of U.S. Mideast policy. A guaranteed supply of oil has bought a guaranteed supply of security. Ignoring autocratic practices and the export of Wahhabi extremism, Washington stubbornly dubs its ally “moderate.” So tight is…
ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — The Latest on Turkish airstrikes on Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq and aftermath of Ankara bombing (all times local): 3:10 p.m. A Turkish Foreign Ministry official say the ambassadors of the five permanent U.N. Security Council member states have been invited to the ministry separately and are being briefed on the…
(Photo: Mike Mozart / Flickr) The Greek playwright Aeschylus — who fought at Marathon in 490 BC, the battle that defeated the first Persian invasion of Greece — had few illusions about the consequences of war. No wonder, in the tragedy Oresteia, he gave his character Agamemnon these verses: They sent forth men to battle….