Once again, the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has released a video showing the beheading of another American. This time the video shows the beheading of freelance American journalist 31-year-old Steven Sotloff. The video begins with Sotloff identifying himself in the footage titled, “A Second Message to America.” In the […]
More than 100 angry relatives of Iraqi soldiers who were abducted by Islamic State militants in June have stormed the country’s parliament. The crowd, mostly from Iraq’s Shi’ite majority, smashed some equipment, assaulted at least two staff members they mistook for lawmakers and were refusing to leave the building, said officials inside. “They were ready […]
Lebanon was created out of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. This agreement between Britain and France reshaped the collapsed Ottoman Empire south of Turkey into the states we know today — Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and to some extent the Arabian Peninsula as well. For nearly 100 years, Sykes-Picot defined the region. A strong case can be […]
The era of sliding drawers full of aging FBI files is drawing to a close. Millions of fingerprint cards, criminal history folders, and civil identity files that once filled rows upon rows of cabinets—and expansive warehouses—have been methodically converted into ones and zeroes. The digital conversion of more than 30 million records—and as many […]