International Security

This incident may be a bad omen. The Taliban may be behind this awful shooting. The NYT reports that the soldiers had taken off their body armor and helmets
never thinking that they would be attacked by one of the men they lived and worked with, said a local provincial official.
The Times also noted a similar [...]

Around Boston, Whitey and Billy Bulger are famous brothers. Whitey as the long-time head of a violent criminal gang; Billy for being a tenacious politician who fell out of favor near the end of his public career.  For many years, Whitey has been on the run and is on the top of the FBI’s Most [...]

Anna Politkovskaya, the investigative journalist, gets another day in court.
The NYT reports
There is no question whom she held responsible for the carnage [in Chechnya]: the Russian Army and Mr. Putin. On the day she was killed with four shots from a silenced pistol, she was about to deliver a major report to her newspaper on [...]

A Thai Court has refused to extradite the notorious arms dealer, Victor Bout,  aka “Merchant of Death”, to the U.S.  to stand trial on terrorism charges. He is described by the NYT as
a Russian businessman and suspected global arms trafficker accused of agreeing to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to agents posing as [...]

A story in the NYT today:
A prominent Russian human rights campaigner, Natalia Estemirova, who worked to expose government-backed kidnappings in Chechnya was killed after being kidnapped herself there on Wednesday.
Sad and perhaps not so ironic twist: this courageous woman won the Anna Politkovskaya Award in 2007.
Ms.  Estemirova in London.
(Photo: Dylan Martinez/Reuters)
UPDATE: good story [...]

[Follow up on post from June 9]
The State Department’s weekly Iraq Status Report (6/10/09):
The five were accused of being in possession of controlled items during a search of their place of residence as part of the investigation into the killing of James Kitterman, who was found dead in Baghdad’s Green Zone in May. On June [...]

BBC reports that the three men accused of “being involved” in the murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. None of the three was actually fingered as the shooter however. The Wall Street Journal says “the alleged triggerman, Rustam Makhmudov, fled Moscow and is now living in Europe, according to officials.”
A re-trial brings the story back [...]

DOD reports that a soldier at Camp Liberty, a stress clinic in Baghdad, shot and killed 5 fellow soldiers and wounded two others today. Details still unknown but a very sad story nonetheless. Sky News notes that it comes two months ahead of the US pulling back from city bases in Iraq.
It raises the question [...]