NATO convened an emergency meeting today after a Syrian mortar attack that apparently left five Turkish civilians dead. Turkey retaliated with an artillery strike on Syrian military targets, and for a few brief minutes that afternoon we were all, like, "UHHHH."
"MUSLIM RAGE," screams Newsweek's new cover story about last week's violent anti-American protests. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the well-known anti-Islam activist, is here to tell "us" (The_West) how to "end it." And it's true, isn't it? All Muslims are constantly raging about everything. So to pay tribute to Ali's article —…
Bees reportedly chased Hillary Clinton out of Malawi yesterday. The State Department described the bees as "normal."
An explosion on a bus carrying Israeli youth in the Bulgarian resort town of Burgas killed as many as seven people and injured at least 20 at around 5:20 p.m. local time. It's unclear what happened — apparently some are claiming it was a female suicide bomber, while the Israeli Foreign Ministry says it wasn't a…
Gina Chon, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was forced to resign after emails were leaked showing that she was romantically involved with a Bush Administration official while covering the war in Iraq, defended herself today in an email sent to friends and colleagues.
The Wall Street Journal announced today that reporter Gina Chon, who was revealed by recently leaked emails to have slept with a National Security Council Iraq expert while covering that country, has resigned.
"You can't fuck the elephants while you're covering the circus" is an old journalistic maxim—often attributed to the Washington Post's Ben Bradlee the New York Times' Abe Rosenthal—delineating the boundaries of appropriate reporter-source relationships. Sleep with whomever you want, in other words, with the exception…
The Antarctic region is losing its glaciers to global warming, but now comes evidence humans are helping erode the ice masses in a more direct way: Chilean authorities arrested an entrepreneur for making off with five and a half tons of the Jorge Montt glacier in Patagonia.
Our old pal to the South, retired Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, has been watching these Republican debates, including the most recent one in which the candidates talked about Fidel Castro going to Hell. He has not been impressed, writing in an editorial that "the selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency…
It must be that Rick Perry's too scared to go home and face the constant howling mockery of every person in Texas for the rest of his life, because there's no reason for him to be in this presidential race anymore. That is, unless he wants to ruin whatever political stature he has left with increasingly desperate…
Hackers in China have reportedly gained total access to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's computer systems, including six weeks of emails relating to the lobbying group's Asia policy. After the FBI alerted the Chamber to the breach, the pro-business group hired private computer investigators to fix the problem. But the…
Now this is strange. What compels a Speaker of the House, as he's (supposed to be) trying to reach a deal to preserve various expiring government goodies before Congress recesses for the year, to move a resolution that would "commission the placement of a bust of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in…
The grim situation in Scandinavia worsened over the weekend as the Norwegian government, attempting to cling to power in the face of a severe butter shortage, arrested two Swedes who'd been attempting to smuggle 550 pounds of butter over the border.
Steve Jobs could fairly be remembered as either a madman or as a business deity. If this seven-foot-tall, 485-pound bronze statue out of Hungary is any indication, he'll be worshipped as the latter rather than mocked as the former.
Two Four people are dead after a man (men?) threw as many as four hand grenades at a bus stop in Liège, Belgium. One of the dead is apparently an the attacker; there are seven critically injured and 47 injured total. And apparently people are saying it was part of an attempted jailbreak?
What's wrong with you, America? While you leer at "hoochie mamas" on VH1 and use "sext messages" on your "crackberries," a very real international crisis is being ignored across the ocean: Norway is running out of butter.
It took Iranian authorities mere hours to blockade "Virtual Embassy Tehran," an American attempt to restore influence in an Islamic republic with which it ended formal relations in 1979. Apparently Hillary Clinton's website was a "cybercrime" and a "spy plot."
Iranian students stormed the British embassy compound today, possibly taking hostages (who may have later been freed), and, in a brutal blow to the British psyche, stealing those two great symbols of the United Kingdom: a picture of the Queen, and a Pulp Fiction poster.
The Arab League is hitting Syria with even harsher sanctions, including a ban on travel for Syrian officials and politicians and "a halt to all dealings with the Syrian central bank," because nothing else has worked at stopping the violence.
President Obama and fellow Pacific leaders didn't don any "silly shirts" — a.k.a. "festive local garb" — at last week's APEC conference in Hawaii, breaking from the conference's proud tradition of dressing powerful global leaders in clown costumes. "I got rid of the Hawaiian shirts because I looked at pictures of some…
