By Kylie Atwood & Margaret Brennan @ CBSNews.com, July 14

As Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's regime violently assaults the southern region of Syria, an area formerly protected by the Trump administration, the members of the all-volunteer rescue organization known as the White Helmets are in danger of assassination.

Analysis by Mark Landler & Julie Hirschfeld Davis @ NYTimes.com, July 14

[...] Just a few hours after President Trump doused expectations of extracting any confession from President Vladimir V. Putin on Russia’s election meddling when they meet on Monday, his own Justice Department issued a sweeping indictment of 12 Russian intelligence agents [....]

By Julie Miller @ VanityFair.com, July 13

Weinstein’s lawyer called his client’s sit-down with The Spectator columnist “a social meeting between old friends” and “not an interview.”

When we speak of government, we refer to the various technical and bureaucratic means by which policies and plans are delivered. Government involves officials, data-gathering, regulating and evaluating. As a governmental issue, Brexit involves prosaic problems such as how to get trucks through ports. Sovereignty, on the other hand, is always an abstract notion of where power ultimately lies, albeit an abstraction that modern states depend on if they’re to command obedience. As a sovereign issue, Brexit involves bravado appeals to “the people” and “the nation.” These are two incommensurable ideas of what power consists of, although any effective state must have both at its disposal.

NATO spends more than 13 times as much as Russia on defense. Even if you didn’t count U.S. spending, the other members combined spend more than four times as much as Russia. And that’s without most of them reaching the 2 percent of GDP goal.