NSA reforms are legacy of Snowden

THE HILL COLUMN: …“This is a man who has done great damage to his country,” Secretary of State John Kerry said last year in calling for Snowden to “man up” and come back home to stand trial. A very different view was advanced last month when a fiberglass and cement bust of Snowden was placed […]

Amtrak Crash Raises Question of Seatbelts on Trains

But a train is so massive, with so much momentum, that it almost never experiences that kind of deceleration. (One exception is when two trains collide, which is very rare.) Less extreme deceleration usually means less extreme impact injuries. A train hitting a car or truck at a grade crossing barely slows down at first…

Exercise in Democracy? Surely, we can do better.

[On Tuesday] A couple million of us (at the most) will trek to the polls and vote for one or more choices for more than 15,000 local political offices. For the most part, we will not have a clue as to the significance of our vote. This is not surprising because most people running for these offices do not have a clue what they will do if they win.

A look at same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania, 1 year later

“What you have to understand, in many cases, [legal same-sex marriage] is actually being treated as a non-event,” said Kathleen Schneider, a Regent Square lawyer and LGBT activist. “These folks who thought they wouldn’t ever be able to be married, treated themselves as being married. They already had joint financial accounts, they owned real estate jointly, named one another as beneficiaries in 401(k) plans and their wills. They did as much as they could within the confines of the law.”

A Diplomatic Victory, and Affirmation, for Putin

NEW YORK TIMES: For Russia, victory came three days after Victory Day, in the form of Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit this week to the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. It was widely interpreted here as a signal of surrender by the Americans — an olive branch from President Obama, and an acknowledgment […]

Arabs weigh ‘rapid response’ force with U.S. blessing

POLITICO: Following a summit with Gulf Arabs the ended with no apparent breakthroughs, a buried line in a joint statement hinted at a potentially major development: possible American support for a new pan-Arab “rapid reaction” military force. The language stood out to some foreign policy observers, in part because a number of Obama administration officials […]

ISIS Fighters Seize Government Headquarters in Ramadi, Iraq

NEW YORK TIMES: In a major setback for the Iraqi government’s efforts to defend its hold on Ramadi, a crucial regional capital, Islamic State militants conquered the city’s government sector on Friday, raising their black flag over the main compound before setting fire to the building, local officials said. The new jihadist assault began under […]