David Sanger reports for the NYT: Most of the arms shipped at the behest of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to supply Syrian rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al-Assad are going to hard-line Islamic jihadists, and not the more secular opposition groups that the West wants to bolster, according to American officials and Middle […]

Another day, another dollar: New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority is set to raise transit fees yet again. This time around, the MTA was considering ending the MetroCard Bonus program, wherein a rider who puts $10 or more on his card gets a 7 percent bonus automatically added on. The proposal didn’t fare well: “The […]

Conventional wisdom always tries to sound timeless, but it’s almost always a herd reaction to events. “Debates don’t matter,” was the old conventional wisdom, and it was uttered very wisely by sages of all stripes. Now, suddenly, debates do matter, and it’s hard to find a pundit who disagrees with wisdom so ancient and traditional.The […]

The biggest news of the week was the escalation of the conflict between Syria and Turkey. The Syria conflict leaves America with no good options, but supporting the least bad of the rebels with arms and information looks to us like the best of a bad field, especially with al-Qaeda gaining ground in the region: […]

AP: Fighters from a shadowy militant group with suspected links to al-Qaeda joined Syrian rebels in seizing a government missile-defense base in northern Syria on Friday, according to activists and amateur video.It was unclear whether the rebels were able to hold the base after the attack, and analysts questioned whether they would be able to […]

A few weeks back, we highlighted the story that Iran was emerging as a viable cyber-threat. What wasn’t clear at the time was the extent to which the Iranian government was directly behind the attacks. Today, the Wall Street Journal reports, all doubts can be cast aside: The hackers appear to be a network of fewer […]

It may be years before self-driving cars are widely seen on our roads and highways, but much of the technology is already in place, and auto and tech companies like Google, Toyota and GM are hard at work perfecting their systems. But the technology will be useless if it’s illegal, which is why Google alone has […]

Hezbollah’s chief financial officer and the head of its internal communications department has just fled to Israel with $5 million in cash and a nice thick sheaf of classified documents. Al-Arabiya has a report from a local Lebanese news site: The news website, Now Lebanon, cited Hezbollah officials saying that the 29-year old telecommunication engineer, […]

Just in time for the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded, WRM’s review essay on the history of peace movements has gone live on Foreign Affairs’ site. He reviews Jay Nordlinger’s Peace, They Say, as well as Clifford Bob’s The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics.(Also, in case you missed it, here’s Nordlinger […]

A reader writes: I haven’t bothered your great minds since you decided to eliminate banal comments from your postings.  OK, maybe not all comments were banal but mine were.But now you’ve gone too far.  You’ve needlessly insulted my home of Kansas twice in the past two days.  First you insist on depressing me yesterday by […]