Last March, John T. Booker, a 20-year-old from Kansas, checked himself into a mental health facility for evaluation. Now, a year later, he faces the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison, charged with attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction — the fake bomb that he was provided by undercover FBI informants. Booker was arrested earlier this month in an alleged plot to attack a Kansas military base. Booker, who had reportedly been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, had publicly expressed violent and extremist views for roughly a year before FBI agents…

North and South is a novel defined by the resolution of binary conflicts: heroine Margaret Hale is presented with a number of divisions of sympathy, between industrialists and the working class, between conflicting views of Mr. Thornton, and even between her conflicting views of her own intelligence.1 In almost all cases, Margaret does not so much choose sides as acknowledge mutually dependent and beneficial relationships. The ending of the novel, in which a proposal to loan money to a newly benevolent Mr. Thornton manifests the confluence of her compassion and her business sense, binds these seemingly dichotomous elements together. However, it also…

The US government blows the lid off Israel’s nuclear weapons program by declassifying a top secret document, a report says. Last month the United States released documentation from its 1987 assessment of Israel’s nuclear weapons capabilities, following a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the Jerusalem Post reported on Saturday. The 386-page document, formally titled Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations, was commissioned by the Department of Defense and complied by Leading Technologies Incorporated. According to the report, the document gives a detailed breakdown of Israel’s nuclear weapons development in the 1970s and 1980s. Israel is “developing the…

ثبت، مرة أخرى، أن لدى اليمين الإسرائيلي أكثرية سياسية (و حتى سوسيولوجية). هذه حقيقة ثابتة، لم تتغير منذ عام 1977، فقد تقلصت القواعد الاجتماعية لحركة العمل الصهيونية، مع تحول الاقتصاد إلى الرأسمالية المتطورة، و ازدياد مشاركة اليهود الشرقيين في المجال السياسي، و هم الذين لم يرتبطوا تاريخياً بحزب العمل و مشروعه، بل باليمين. كما تراجعت أهمية حركة العمل الصهيونية التاريخية مع إنجاز مهمة بناء الدولة (على أساس تهجير العرب و"جمع الشتات" اليهودي). فبعد العام 1967 و احتلال غزة و الضفة الغربية (بما فيها القدس)، طرحت أجندات أخرى مرتبطة بالاستيطان و علاقة الدين بالقومية، أجاب عليها اليمين الإسرائيلي بشكل أكثر تلاؤماً…

The White House said it was “encouraged” by the return of a last-ditch bill to jettison the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of US phone records, even as the bill’s reauthorization of expiring surveillance powers under the Patriot Act is costing the bill civil libertarian support. The 2015 version of the USA Freedom Act was released on Tuesday, following nearly 10 weeks of closed-door negotiations in Congress. Advocates of the bill, which passed the House in May before narrowly failing in the Senate in November, are leveraging the imminent expiration of a surveillance authority in the 2001 Patriot Act to…