White House counterterrorism official John Brennan detailed the Obama administration's rationale for using drone strikes against al-Qaeda targets, the first time the Obama administration has publicly laid out its defense of targeted killings outside of "hot" battlefields such as Afghanistan.
Guest op-ed by Amy Greene, New York Times, April 27/28, 2012
[....] Our governor, like many of our state’s political leaders past and present — from Estes Kefauver and Cordell Hull to Howard Baker and Lamar Alexander — was born and raised here in East Tennessee, and he knows well how deep-rooted our spirituality is in Appalachia.
But he seems to have forgotten where it comes from.
By Nicholas Confessore and Derek Willis, New York Times, April 20/21, 2012
President Obama’s re-election campaign is straining to raise the huge sums it is counting on to run against Mitt Romney, with sharp dropoffs in donations from nearly every major industry forcing it to rely more than ever on small contributions and a relative handful of major donors.
By Steven Erlanger, New York Times, April 21/22, 2012
PARIS — Arthur Muller, Vincent Pons and Guillaume Liegey, young Frenchmen who met in Cambridge, Mass., at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and M.I.T., are working hard to get out the vote, American-style, for the Socialist challenger for the French presidency, François Hollande.
By William Langewiesche, Vanity Fair, May 2012 issue
Lede: [For years before they caught him, the Italian police had no idea that Paolo Di Lauro was one of Naples’s most powerful crime bosses, running a drug and counterfeit-goods empire—and responsible for a peace his turf had rarely known. Now authorities may long for the days when he was in charge.]
By Spencer Ackerman, Danger Room @ wired.com, April 12, 2012
The Lexington Institute is probably the defense industry’s favorite Beltway think tank. If there’s big defense dollars at stake on a project, Lexington’s experts will reliably write thousands of words about why national security will suffer unless the Pentagon sees the project through. But on Wednesday, the Institute decided to step away from military matters, and turn its attention towards the 2012 presidential race [....]
By Brian Braiker in New York, guardian.co.uk, 11 April 2012
A powerful lobby group that represents the interests of the biggest Hollywood movie studios has aligned itself with an obscure Miami gay porn producer, in the ongoing battle to protect copyrighted material online.
By Jeremy Page, Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2012
[....] The new details about what drew Mr. Heywood to Chongqing, how he spent some of his final hours, and his claim to possess the documents about the Bos' foreign business interests shed fresh light on his mysterious death in his hotel room. Chinese authorities on Tuesday characterized the death as an "intentional homicide."
[....] Al Jazeera's Anita McNaught, reporting from Antakya in southern Turkey, said the incident signifies "a remarkable escalation in tensions on this already tense cross-border area". The incident occurred as reports indicated that Syrian government forces were trying to prevent refugees from entering Turkey. Thousands of Syrians are sheltering in eight refugee camps set up in Turkey's southern provinces of Hatay and Gaziantep, while others have crossed into Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq [....]
From Dana Bash and Deidre Walsh, CNN, April 6, 2012
Washington -- The same week that a report documented massive overspending at the General Services Administration, a video emerged Thursday showing an agency employee joking about the excess spending and saying he would never be investigated for it.
By Alexi Barrioneuvo, New York Times, April 3/4, 2012
More than 200 real estate brokers and lawyers, many of them among the most ambitious in the Manhattan real estate world, filed into an Off Broadway theater last month for three hours.
Neal Ascherson's review of Jason Stearn's Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, New York Review of Books, April 5, 2012
By Joshua Keating, Passport @ Foreignpolicy.com, April 4, 2012
It was already a bit bizarre when the United States offered a $10 million reward on Monday for information leading to the capture of Hafiz Saeed, the founder of the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba who is accused of orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
By Noah Schachtman, Danger Room @ wired.com, April 3, 2012
It’s a story so convoluted, only Washington could serve it up. Eighteen months ago, the Pentagon’s chief ordered the Air Force to start building a king-sized blimp that could spy on whole Afghan villages at once. That blimp is almost ready for flight testing. But the Air Force doesn’t want to deploy the thing, for reasons both sensible and not. So now a pair of influential senators are demanding that the Air Force send the blimp to the skies above the warzone.
