Favorite When Russian forces seized Crimea in 2014, paving the way for President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Ukrainian peninsula, a large number of world leaders and international organizations condemned the invasion as illegal. But Putin and other senior Russian officials were never prosecuted in any court of international law for the crime of aggression:…
Favorite Ever since Ukraine launched a successful counteroffensive against Russian forces in late August, American officials have tried to claim credit, insisting that U.S. intelligence has been key to Ukraine’s battlefield victories. Yet U.S. officials have simultaneously downplayed their intelligence failures in Ukraine — especially their glaring mistakes at the outset of the war. When…
Favorite In a cheerfully animated promotional video, a woman narrates Cubic Transportation Systems’ vision for the future. Travelers will pay fares using a ticket-free mobile account. Real-time data will be aggregated, linked, and shared. Deals — such as 50 percent off at a partner coffee shop — may even incentivize users to select certain transit routes at…
Favorite In early 2018, former National Security Agency chief Keith Alexander worked out a deal with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the cyber institute led by one of his closest aides, Saud al-Qahtani, to help the Saudi ruler train the next generation of Saudi hackers to take on the kingdom’s enemies. While the agreement…
Favorite Early on the morning of August 15, 2021, Shershah Ahmadi was struggling to find a ride home. In Foroshgah, one of the busiest open-air bazaars in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, crowds swarmed around money-changers and lined up at banks as people scrambled to lay their hands on the cash they would need to escape…
Favorite Last week, FBI agents executed a search warrant on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, seizing 11 sets of classified documents, including one at the highest classification level in the U.S. government. The search warrant cited three criminal statutes. One related to obstruction — which the New York Times said could be…
Favorite The United States played an unacknowledged role in the 2017 bombing of an internally displaced persons’ camp in Nigeria that killed more than 160 civilians, many of them children. A surveillance plane circled above the Rann IDP camp, which housed 43,000 people and was controlled by the Nigerian military, before a jet arrived and…
Favorite The Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 9, 2022. Photo: Stefani Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images For more than 100 years, the Espionage Act, one of the worst laws in American history, has stayed on the books, impervious to reform. A relic of World War I, when the government sought…
Favorite IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi shows journalists a camera like the ones Iran is removing from nuclear sites, during a press conference at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna on June 9, 2022. Photo: Joe Klamar/AFP via Getty Images The nuclear deal negotiated by President Barack Obama and Iran in 2015 was based on a…
Favorite FBI agent Grayden Ridd had a confidential message for his informant. An FBI team had been given the green light by the Justice Department to ambush and derail a planned meeting between a reporter and a source, and the informant’s job was to let the FBI know when and where the meeting would take…
