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Since the massacre, Poles have alleged that the U.S. government was involved in a coverup. The newly released documents suggest that their suspicions were correct, a surprising and upsetting revelation that some historians are calling "potentially explosive."

Then, in June 1941, in complete violation of the Nazi-Soviet nonaggression pact, Hitler launched a devastating surprise attack on Russia. The Soviet Union was forced to clamor back to Britain and its allies. In just a matter of a few months, the Russians were defending a front line that extended from Leningrad down to the Black Sea — a distance comparable to a line running across the continental United States.

President Roosevelt was desperate to see this Eastern Front hold, especially in consideration of Allied activities in North Africa — and their planned invasion of Western Europe. Maintaining friendly terms with the communist and despotic U.S.S.R. was seen as a necessary evil; America quickly forgot about the Red Scare and Stalin's pact with Hitler.

In this period, the European Union has stopped functioning as it did five years ago and has yet to see its new form defined. China has moved into a difficult social and economic phase, with the global recession severely affecting its export-oriented economy and its products increasingly uncompetitive due to inflation. The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq has created opportunities for an Iranian assertion of power that could change the balance of power in the region. The simultaneous shifts in Europe, China and the Middle East open the door to a new international framework replacing the one created in 1989-1991.

the driving force behind developments in Europe in 2012 will be political, not economic.

The United States has long encouraged Japan to normalize its military and national defense posture, but now Japan's accelerating that process may inflame some of the longstanding tensions in the relationship.

Washington officials asked Japan to clarify an element of the defense guideline revisions that would allow Japan to strike enemy bases first, particularly to defend against ballistic missiles that pose an imminent threat.

As the Japanese broaden their definition of self-defense, their neighbors raise objections -- especially China and the Koreas, victims of Japan's imperialism in the first half of the 20th century.

Damascus' close ties to Iran and Russia give the United States reason to be hostile toward Syria, and Washington participated in the campaign to force Syrian troops out of Lebanon. Still, the United States has learned to be concerned not just with unfriendly regimes, but also with what could follow such regimes.

U.S. President Barack Obama therefore adopted an extremely cautious strategy. He said that the United States would not get directly involved in Syria unless the al Assad regime used chemical weapons, stating with a high degree of confidence that he would not have to intervene.

Central Asia is linked to Afghanistan geographically; Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan share borders with Afghanistan that collectively span more than 2,000 kilometers (about 1,240 miles).

the topography of Afghanistan's frontiers with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is largely desert. 

Let’s talk about manufacturing. You say a country that stops doing mass manufacturing falls apart. Why? In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.

You also say that manufacturing is crucial to innovation. Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing—from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What’s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.

American companies do still innovate, though. They just outsource the manufacturing. What’s wrong with that? Look at the crown jewel of Boeing now, the 787 Dreamliner. The plane had so many problems—it was like three years late. And why? Because large parts of it were subcontracted around the world. The 787 is not a plane made in the USA; it’s a plane assembled in the USA. They subcontracted composite materials to Italians and batteries to the Japanese, and the batteries started to burn in-flight. The quality control is not there.

The armies fought to the limits of their empires and, after a series of wars culminating in the Treaty of Zuhab of 1639, the Zagros Mountains came to define the borderland between the Ottomans and Persians, with the Kurds stuck in the middle.

The Turkic-Persian competition is again being fought in Kurdistan, only this time, energy pipelines have taken the place of gilded cavalry.

Roughly 25 million Kurds occupy a region that stretches from the eastern Taurus Mountains in Turkey through the Jazira Plateau of northeastern Syria across the mountains and plateaus of southeastern Anatolia before dead-ending into the northern spine of the Zagros Mountains, which divide Iran and Iraq.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced June 16 that Iran remains interested in talking to the United States but that the conditions for such talks have changed. After a sanctions move against Iran that effectively exposed the weaknesses in the Russian-Iranian relationship, Washington announced a day earlier that it is ready to talk when Iran is. Both Tehran and Washington have a strategic interest in pursuing these negotiations, but Tehran is now looking for new ways to regain the upper hand in these talks. All indications point to Iraq as Iran’s battlefield of choice.

The Russian Duma on June 11 voted in favor of expanding the powers of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

The bill essentially would allow the FSB to take action against anyone without needing a legal reason.

For the Kremlin, the new law is about opening its doors to foreign firms and money while keeping an eye on foreigners’ moves and removing their presence if need be.

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check. Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apopleptic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

So it's pretty standard "shining amazing good guys who can do no wrong" versus "evil legions of darkness bent on torture and genocide" stuff, totally ignoring the nuances and realities of politics.

...and then, in the entire rest of the show, over five or six different big wars, they never use the superweapon again. Seriously. They have this whole thing about a war in Vietnam that lasts decades and kills tens of thousands of people, and they never wonder if maybe they should consider using the frickin' unstoppable mystical superweapon that they won the last war with. At this point, you're starting to wonder if any of the show's writers have even watched the episodes the other writers made.

Russia’s chief medical officer and head of the Federal Consumer Protection Service Gennady Onishchenko said June 30 that Russia will tighten control of Moldovan wine exports to Russia after several batches of wine failed to meet Russian safety standards.

The crises threaten the wheat harvest in Russia, which is one of the world’s largest wheat exporters. Russia is no stranger to having drought affect its wheat crop, a commodity of critical importance to Moscow’s domestic tranquility and foreign policy. Despite the severity of the heat, drought, and wildfires, Moscow’s wheat output will cover Russia’s domestic needs. Russia will also use the situation to merge its neighbors into a grain cartel.

Russia is one of the largest grain producers and exporters in the world, normally producing around 100 million tons of wheat a year, or 10 percent of total global output. It exports 20 percent of this total to markets in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

This year, the Kremlin announced Aug. 5 that it would temporarily ban grain exports from Aug. 15 to Dec 31. Two reasons prompted the move.

the West would do well to pay attention to just how closely the methods and intentions of Russia's current intelligence agency, the SVR, replicate those of Soviet-era intelligence agencies.

the Russian spy ring wasn't an aberration, but a reflection of precisely the way that Putin wants his intelligence agencies to operate.

Ultimately, the use of illegals is as much a sign of desperation as of malicious intent. Perhaps the SVR is proud of upholding these traditions, but the U.S. intelligence services should be forgiven for not feeling envious.

When we say that some object such as a cat or dog exists, we mean that they have a substantive, independent existence “in reality."

When Objectivists insist that “existence exists,” in what sense do they mean it? In the cat and dog sense, or in the unicorn sense?

it seems that Objectivism endorses the cat and dog sense of existence. Existence exists becomes merely a pithy way of saying reality exists.

The saga of the missing Iranian nuclear scientist who disappeared from Saudi Arabia last year while on pilgrimage to Mecca reached a critical stage Tuesday.

By mid-morning on the United States’ East Coast, Washington had issued its official response: Amiri came to the United States on his own accord and now wanted to leave. It’s significant that this is the first time the U.S. government acknowledged that the Iranian scientist was in the United States. These dramatic developments come in the wake of multiple YouTube videos featuring a man or men claiming to be Amiri and who made contradictory statements, including that he was happily studying in the United States.

What is of interest is what is not being discussed in the Situation Room. By this, we do not mean Iraq — or even Iran. We mean the countries that will define American foreign policy for the next decade (or decades): Russia and China. These two heavyweights have interests most at odds with those of the United States and the power to do something about it.

The lack of meaningful competitors, in other words, allowed a relatively weak entity to take center stage.

That means it is entirely possible that a slew of miscalculations are being made today. One of the most widespread misconceptions about the U.S. political system is that a president who is weak at home is by default weak abroad. This is a belief primarily promulgated by Americans themselves. After all, if one cannot get behind one’s leader, what business does that leader have engaging in global affairs? But in reality, a president who is weak at home often wields remarkable power abroad. The U.S. Constitution forces the American president to share domestic power with Congress, so a split government leads to domestic policy gridlock. However, the Constitution also expressly reserves all foreign policy — particularly military policy — for the presidency. In fact, a weak president often has no options before him except foreign policy. This is something that the rest of the world repeatedly has failed to grasp. Domestically weakened American presidents have often done more than engage in foreign policy: They have overturned entire international orders. Former U.S. President George W. Bush defied expectations after his 2006 midterm electoral defeat and launched the surge in Iraq, utterly changing the calculus of that war. Clinton launched the Kosovo War, which undid what remained of the Cold War security architecture. Most famously, John Kennedy, whom the Soviets had written off as a weak and naive dilettante who had surrounded himself with incompetent advisers (sound familiar?), gave the Russians their biggest Cold War diplomatic defeat in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The United States might be distracted and its president domestically weakened, and undoubtedly most of the world will assume that they know what this means. But history tells a very different story, and this president — like his predecessors — is not done just yet.

First, I’m far less interesting than my writings are.

Second, the world is also far more interesting than my writings and me, and pretending otherwise is narcissism.

Consider the juxtaposition of ancient ritual sacrifice so widely practiced that it requires global trade to sustain it.

Turkey will emerge as one of the great regional powers of the next generation, or so I think. It is clear that this process is already under way when you look at Turkey’s rapid economic growth even in the face of the global financial crisis, and when you look at its growing regional influence

Turkey’s emergence in the current context makes that anxiety all the more intense. A newly powerful and self-confident Turkey perceived to be increasingly Islamic will create tensions, and it has.