By Allyson Chiu, Amy B Wang & Meagan Flynn @ WashingtonPost.com, March 3, 11:28 PM

At least 23 people are dead in Alabama, including children, after tornadoes ripped through parts of the Southeast on Sunday afternoon, according to Lee County Sheriff Jay Jones.

“Unfortunately, I feel like that number may rise yet again,” Jones told reporters late Sunday, adding that search-and-rescue operations were stopping for the night and would resume Monday morning. “We’ve done everything we feel like we can do this evening,” he said. “The area is just very, very hazardous to put anybody into at this point in time.” Jones said people are still missing and several have been transported to hospitals, some with “very serious injuries.”

Located about 100 miles southwest of Atlanta, Lee County, Ala., which includes the city of Auburn, has a population of more than 161,000 and covers roughly 600 square miles [....]

By James A. Piazza @ Lawfare​Blog.com, March 3 published in cooperation with Brookings.edu

James A. Piazza is Liberal Arts Professor of Political Science at The Pennsylvania State University. Piazza’s research investigates terrorism, its causes and consequences, militant organizations, counterterrorism policy, and politics in the Islamic world.

Editor’s Note: Terrorist groups often draw on ethnic or religious brethren in other countries. These communities raise money, provide arms, offer volunteers, lobby host governments and otherwise try to advance the terrorist cause. James Piazza of The Pennsylvania State University goes deep on diasporas. He identifies the ways in which they make a terrorism problem worse and why fighting terrorism requires countering the influence of militant diasporas. ~ Daniel Byman

This includes an excellent unbiased analysis of what actually happened since the suicide bombing.

Op-ed by Basharat Peer @ NYTimes.com, March 2

Both countries share responsibility for reducing Kashmir to a ruin and destroying generations of lives.

Mr. Peer is an editor in the Opinion section and the author of “Curfewed Night,” a memoir of the conflict in Kashmir.

By Amy Knight @ New York Review of Books, March 21 print issue and free online now

[....] Trump’s reactions are part of his established pattern of excusing the Kremlin’s misdeeds. But his reluctance to address Russia’s political murders is not a sharp departure from past presidents’ responses. After President George W. Bush asked Putin about the October 2006 killing of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya in a telephone call just a few days after it occurred, he was apparently reassured by Putin’s promise that there would be a thorough investigation (there never was one). Despite the fact that only weeks later the exiled Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko announced on his London deathbed that he had been poisoned by Putin, Bush welcomed Putin at his summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine, the following summer, so that the two could “work on their personal relationship” and enjoy a ride in Bush’s speedboat.

President Obama’s response to the most shocking of all Russian political murders, the February 27, 2015, shooting of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, was also muted. Although he immediately condemned the crime and called on the Russian government to conduct an impartial, prompt, and transparent investigation, Obama did not follow up on a Senate resolution introduced on March 4, 2015, by John McCain and Lindsey Graham urging him to seek a United Nations Security Council resolution that would establish an independent investigation into the assassination. (It eventually died in the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.)

Now, four years later, John Dunlop’s remarkable investigation has shed new light on the Nemtsov assassination, although he cautions that “there remains much that needs to be learned concerning how the crime was committed.” Dunlop calls it the “Russian crime of the twenty-first century.” Not only was Nemtsov brazenly shot to death at the Kremlin’s doorstep; as the Russian documentary films Nemtsov and The Man Who Was Too Free make clear, he had a huge influence on Russian politics for two and a half decades. In the words of a former Nemtsov colleague: “He was like some sort of meteorite…. He soared, lit everything up—and then he was gone.” [....]

By Leyland Cecco in Toronto @ TheGuardian.com, Feb. 28

[....] Canada’s prime minister, Justin Trudeau, is facing the biggest political scandal of his administration. The affair centres around allegations that his former attorney general, Jody-Wilson Raybould, was improperly pressured by some of his closest advisers to prevent the prosecution of a large Canadian engineering firm over accusations of fraud and bribery. Thus far, the scandal has been politically costly; Gerald Butts, a longtime friend of Trudeau’s, and his closest adviser, resigned two weeks ago. Wilson-Raybould has resigned, too. A handful of polls are showing the scandal is politically unpopular for the governing Liberals – which is worrying for them, given there is a federal election in October.

What is the company accused of?

SNC-Lavalin, based in Montreal, is accused of paying C$48m worth of bribes in Libya to Muammar Gaddafi’s family, in order to secure lucrative contracts. The bribery is alleged to have occurred between 2001 and 2011 [....]