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The Times goes on to say that Moussaoui’s testimony, if found to be factually accurate, could change our understanding of Saudi Arabia and its relationship to 9/11: [T]he extent and nature of Saudi involvement in Al Qaeda, and whether it extended to the planning and financing of the Sept. 11 attacks, has long been a subject of dispute. *** That may be so, but the Times, like the rest of the traditional media, has ignored earlier evidence of deep Saudi royal ties to the 9/11 attacks—evidence that isn’t dependent on a man whose sanity has been questioned. Back in 2011, a small non-profit news outfit in South Florida, the Broward Bulldog, which does primarily local stories, published an article that also appeared in a major traditional newspaper, the Miami Herald. Despite the story’s explosive content, it was widely ignored.

That article revealed that a well-heeled Saudi family, living in a gated community in Sarasota, Florida, had direct connections to the hijackers. Phone records documented communication, dating back more than a year, between this Saudi family and the alleged plot leader, Mohammed Atta, his hijack pilots and 11 of the other hijackers. In addition, records from the guard house at the gated community showed Atta and other hijackers had visited the house.

The family left the country abruptly just before the 9/11 attacks. Family members abandoned enough valuable possessions—such as three cars—to testify to the speed of their departure. The article also revealed that the FBI had quietly investigated the family and documented numerous interactions between them and the alleged hijackers. They, however, neglected to tell Congressional investigators and the evidence didn’t appear in the 9/11 Commission Report. You might think these revelations would attract widespread attention, considering that 15 of the 19 purported hijackers were Saudi citizens. Yet the Bulldog story generated barely a blip.

PERIES: So, Michael, these international banks represented by the finance ministers now in Brussels, when they were in crisis and we the public treasury bailed them out, they had no problem with that. Why are they now refusing to assist Greece at a time of need when in fact some politicians and even the troika is being more receptive to what Greece is saying? HUDSON: Because what's at issue really is a class war. It's not so much Germany versus Greece, as the papers say. It's really the war of the banks against labor. And it's a continuation of Thatcherism and neoliberalism. The problem isn't simply that the troika wants Greece to balance the budget; it wanted Greece to balance the budget by lowering wages and by imposing austerity on the labor force. But instead, the terms in which Varoufakis has suggested balancing the budget are to impose austerity on the financial class, on the tycoons, on the tax dodgers. And he said, okay, instead of lowering pensions to the workers, instead of shrinking the domestic market, instead of pursuing a self-defeating austerity, we're going to raise two and a half billion from the powerful Greek tycoons. We're going to collect the back taxes that they have. We're going to crack down on illegal smuggling of oil and the other networks and on the real estate owners that have been avoiding taxes, because the Greek upper classes have become notorious for tax dodging.

Well, this has infuriated the banks, because it turns out the finance ministers of Europe are not all in favor of balancing the budget if it has to be balanced by taxing the rich, because the banks know that whatever taxes the rich are able to avoid ends up being paid to the banks. So now the gloves are off and the class war is sort of back. Originally, Varoufakis thought he was negotiating with the troika, that is, with the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the Euro Council. But instead they said, no, no, you're negotiating with the finance ministers. And the finance ministers in Europe are very much like Tim Geithner in the United States. They're lobbyists for the big banks. And the finance minister said, how can we screw up this and make sure that we treat Greece as an object lesson, pretty much like America treated Cuba in 1960?

The announcement this week that the Kiev regime struck a major deal with the United Arab Emirates for military weapons raises strong suspicions that the US-led NATO alliance has found a new backdoor into Ukraine. We say «new» because it is believed that the US and its NATO allies, Poland and Lithuania, are already covertly supplying weapons to the Kiev regime. 

Kiev President Petro Poroshenko hailed the new strategic partnership with the Persian Gulf kingdom while attending the International Defence Exhibition (IDEX) in the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi. Poroshenko, who was royally received by UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al Nayhan, declared himself a «president of peace» but that Ukraine, or rather the rump state that his regime commands, needed strong defence because of its «Russian enemy». A giveaway to the real significance of the surprise development is that Poroshenko and his Arab hosts also reportedly held discreet meetings with Pentagon officials and US weapons manufacturing executives during the weapons exhibition. That indicates that Washington is coordinating the expected arms transfers.

Although the Kiev-UAE partnership lacked any public detail, one can safely assume that the Arab supply of weapons to Ukraine is simply a conduit for American and NATO military support to the Western-backed junta, which seized power in Ukraine last year in an illegal coup. Its war of aggression on the separatist eastern Ukraine has inflicted at least 6,000 deaths, mainly among the ethnic Russian civilian population. Earlier this month it soon became clear that Washington and its NATO allies would pay a heavy political price for an audacious move to openly increase their military involvement in the Ukraine conflict. When Washington announced that it intended to go ahead with Congressional provisions to send «lethal aid» to Kiev there was much international consternation over such a reckless move. Moscow warned Washington that any further military support to the reactionary, anti-Russian Kiev regime on its western border would constitute a «disastrous escalation». US President Barack Obama then appeared to back off from the proposal to supply lethal munitions. America’s normally servile European allies also baulked at the Washington arms move. Germany, France and even Britain indicated disproval by stating that they would not be following suite by sending arms to Ukraine. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel was perhaps the most forthright in her reservations. While on an official visit to Washington she reiterated her «no weapons» position to US media while being received in the White House by Obama.

On February 12, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, announced that the IMF had reached an agreement with the Ukrainian government on a new economic reform program. Ms Lagarde’s statement, made in Brussels, came only minutes after peace negotiations between the heads of the German, French, Russian und Ukrainian governments in Minsk, Belarus, had ended. The timing was no coincidence. Washington had been left out of the negotiations and now reacted by sending its most powerful financial organization to the forefront in order to deliver a clear message to the world: that the US will not loosen its grip on the Ukraine, if not by sending weapons, then at least economically and financially.

The loans will be based on the terms of an economic program for Ukraine for 2015 – 2020, passed by the Kiev parliament in December 2014, and are tied to harsh conditions laid down in a letter of intent, signed by prime minister Yatseniuk and president Poroshenko in August 2014. Some of the measures have already been implemented, others will follow. Among those already in force is the flexible exchange rate regime which has not only led to a 67% devaluation of the hrivna, lowering the average monthly wage of Ukrainian workers to less than $ 60, but has also opened the doors for international currency speculators who have already made millions by indebting themselves in hrivnia and repaying their debts in euros and dollars. The rate of inflation, running at 25 % in 2014 and expected to rise even higher in 2015, and a hike in gas prices by 50 % in May 2014 made survival almost impossible for the weakest 20 % of the population who already lived below the poverty line in 2013. Among the measures still to come are the layoff of 10 % of the country’s public employees and the partial privatization of health care and education. The retirement age for women is to be raised by 10 years, that for men by 5 years, most benefits for old age pensioners are to be abolished, the pharmaceuticals market is to be deregulated. Retirement pensions will be frozen, and there will be no more free lunches for school children and patients in hospitals. Benefits for victims of the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl are to be cut, and the boundaries of the officially designated radioactive hazard zone will be revised. The country’s monthly minimum wage is to remain at 1,218.00 hrivna ($ 46 at the current rate of exchange) until at least November 2015.

Ukrainian food prices are rising at a rate faster than in the ‘90s. But the Yatsenyuk government is still blaming the situation on the ignorance of the population and speculation by supermarket chains.

They used to blame currency exchangers, now they are blaming supermarket directors. However, you can’t feed the people with such tales.

The government’s “economy block” hastily summoned the director of the Ukrainian State Reserve Vladimir Zhukov. They demanded that he open the storehouses and fill the shelves with flour, sugar, canned meat, and buckwheat from its stores. In response the keeper of Motherland’s strategic stores revealed a terrible military secret to Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko: the storehouses are empty.

As a secular Jew, I don’t do much praying. But this week, as the powerful pro-Israeli- government lobby AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) holds its annual policy meeting in Washington, I’m praying that this year marks the beginning of the end of the lobby’s grip on US foreign policy. From March 1-3, over 10,000 AIPAC supporters will descend on the nation’s capital. The meeting comes at a time when the relationship between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is at an all-time low. House Speaker John Boehner’s invitation to Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress right after he speaks at the AIPAC conference is seen by the White House as a direct attempt to undermine the president and his administration’s nuclear talks with Iran. In an unprecedented move, over fifty brave members of Congress have decided to skip Netanyahu’s address. AIPAC’s support of the Israeli prime minister over the US president is turning AIPAC into a Republican-biased lobby, which could prove fatal to its future influence in Washington. Here are ten reasons why this would be good for world peace:

According to an Israeli media report, Saudi Arabia has agreed to let Israeli warplanes fly over Saudi territory to save fuel while attacking Iranian nuclear sites, the latest indication of how the two former enemies have developed a behind-the-scenes alliance that is reshaping geopolitics in the Middle East.“The Saudi authorities are completely coordinated with Israel on all matters related to Iran,” a European official in Brussels told Israel’s Channel 2 in a report broadcast on Tuesday and described in other Israeli media outlets.

Riyadh’s only condition was that Israel make some progress in peace talks with the Palestinians, a stipulation that may be mostly cosmetic so the Saudis can save face with other Arab states without really interfering with an Israeli flyover to strike Iran.Disclosure of this Israeli-Saudi military cooperation also comes as the United States and five other world powers rush to finish an agreement with Iran to curtail but not eliminate its nuclear program, which Iran says is only for civilian purposes. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to appear before the U.S. Congress on March 3 to undercut President Barack Obama’s negotiations.The reported Saudi permission for Israeli warplanes to take a shorter route to bomb Iran also suggests that Netanyahu may be laying the groundwork for his own plans to attack the Iranian nuclear sites if the international negotiations are successful. Netanyahu has denounced a possible deal as an “existential threat” to Israel.

Mulloy said the quality of China's submarines was lower than those built by the United States, but the size of its undersea fleet had now surpassed that of the U.S. fleet. A spokeswoman said the U.S. Navy had 71 commissioned U.S. submarines.

He said the U.S. military did not believe China carried nuclear missiles on its submarines, but that it had been producing missiles and testing them.

My War on Terror Letter to an Unknown American Patriot By Tom Engelhardt Dear American Patriot, I wish I knew your name. I’ve been thinking about you, about all of us actually and our country, and meaning to write for a while to explain myself.  Let me start this way: you should feel free to call me an American nationalist.  It may sound ugly as hell, but it’s one way I do think of myself. True, we Americans usually reserve the more kindly word “patriot” for ourselves and use “nationalist” to diss other people who exhibit special feeling for their country.  In the extreme, it’s “superpatriot” for us and “ultranationalist” for them. In any case, here’s how my particular form of nationalism manifests itself. I feel a responsibility for the acts of this country that I don’t feel for those of other states or groups.  When, for instance, a wedding party blows up thanks to a Taliban roadside bomb, or the Islamic State cuts some poor captive’s head off, or Bashar al-Assad’s air force drops barrel bombs on civilians, or the Russians jail a political activist, or some other group or state commits some similar set of crimes, I’m not surprised.  Human barbarity, as well as the arbitrary cruelty of state power, are unending facts of history. They should be opposed, but am I shocked? No.

Still -- and I accept the irrationality of this -- when my country wipes out wedding parties in other lands or organizes torture regimes and offshore prison systems where anything goes, or tries to jail yet another whistleblower, when it acts cruelly, arbitrarily, or barbarically, I feel shock and wonder why more Americans don’t have the same reaction. Don’t misunderstand me.  I don’t blame myself for the commission of such acts, but as an American, I do feel a special responsibility to do something about them, or at least to speak out against them -- as it should be the responsibility of others in their localities to deal with their particular sets of barbarians. So think of my last 12 years running TomDispatch.com as my own modest war on terror -- American terror.  We don’t, of course, like to think of ourselves as barbaric, and terror is, almost by definition, a set of un-American acts that others are eager to commit against us.  “They” want to take us out in our malls and backyards.  We would never commit such acts, not knowingly, not with malice aforethought.  It matters little here that, from wedding parties to funerals, women to children, we have, in fact, continued to take “them” out in their backyards quite regularly. Most Americans would admit that this country makes mistakes. Despite our best efforts, we do sometimes produce what we like to call “collateral damage” as we go after the evildoers, but a terror regime? Not us. Never.

And this is part of the reason I’m writing you. I keep wondering how, in these years, it’s been possible to hold onto such fictions so successfully. I wonder why, at least some of the time, you aren’t jumping out of your skin over what we do, rather than what they’ve done or might prospectively do to us. Let’s start with an uncomfortable fact of our world that few here care to mention: in one way or another, Washington has been complicit in the creation or strengthening of just about every extreme terror outfit across the Greater Middle East. If we weren’t their parents, in crucial cases we were at least their midwives or foster parents.

A long-awaited showdown this week between the White House and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has far-reaching implications for ties between the two countries, for the shape of power and influence in the Middle East and for a potential international agreement on Iran’s nuclear program.

(Reuters) - Thousands of Iraqi soldiers and Shi'ite militiamen sought to seal off Islamic State fighters in Tikrit and nearby towns on Tuesday, the second day of Iraq's biggest offensive yet against a stronghold of the radical Sunni Islamist militants. Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani, who has helped coordinate Baghdad's counter-attacks against Islamic State since it seized much of northern Iraq in June, was overseeing at least part of the operation, witnesses told Reuters.His presence on the frontline highlights neighboring Iran's influence over the Shi'ite fighters who have been key to containing the militants in Iraq.

In contrast the U.S.-led air coalition which has been attacking Islamic State across Iraq and Syria has not yet played a role in Tikrit, the Pentagon said on Monday, perhaps in part because of the high-level Iranian presence.Iraqi military officials said security forces backed by the Shi'ite militia known as Hashid Shaabi (Popular Mobilisation) units were advancing gradually, their progress slowed by roadside bombs and snipers. They have yet to enter Tikrit, best known as the hometown of executed former president Saddam Hussein, or the nearby Tigris river town of al-Dour, which officials describe as a major center for the Islamic State fighters.

On the southern flank of the offensive, army and police officials said government forces moving north from the city of Samarra could launch an attack on al-Dour later on Tuesday.Soleimani, head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Force, was directing operations on the eastern flank from a village about 55 km (35 miles) from Tikrit called Albu Rayash, captured from Islamic State two days ago.With him were two Iraqi Shi'ite paramilitary leaders: the leader of the Hashid Shaabi, Abu Mahdi al-Mohandis, and Hadi al-Amiri who leads the Badr Organisation, a powerful Shi'ite militia."(Soleimani) was standing on top of a hill pointing with his hands toward the areas where Islamic State are still operating," said a witness who was accompanying security forces near Albu Rayash.

It could hardly have been a more perfect storm, and it was all because of a single question in a routine briefing.On Feb. 19, U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for military operations in the Middle East, gave reporters a standard background briefing about the ongoing campaign against the Islamic State. The official who conducted the briefing responded to one question with a discussion of a particularly sensitive part of the campaign: the U.S.-led coalition’s plans to take back Mosul, a key Iraqi city that the Islamic State captured in a shocking victory last summer. The official indicated that 20,000 or more Iraqi troops would ideally start the Mosul offensive in April 2015.Within hours, headlines were screaming with the apparently sensitive information CENTCOM had released. Opponents of the Obama administration screamed too. “Never in our memory," hawkish Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) wrote to President Barack Obama the day after the briefing, "can we recall an instance in which our military has knowingly briefed our own war plans to our enemies.”

And almost immediately, the notoriously leak-phobic Obama administration entered damage control mode. The White House said it could not confirm the comments, instead punting the question to the Department of Defense. Meanwhile, hours after the briefing, newly confirmed Secretary of Defense Ash Carter refused to address the specifics, even though they had already been provided to reporters. Asked about the timing of the Mosul offensive, Carter said, “Even if I knew exactly when that was going to be, I wouldn’t tell you."To make matters worse, the two U.S. partners who are essential to the plan's success -- the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Kurds -- seemed equally perturbed. Iraq's government issued a protest over the revelation, and the Kurdish region's representative to the U.S., Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, said on Thursday that her government was "surprised" by the announcement.Neatly wrapped in newsprint, a little scandal had landed in the laps of skeptics who have long questioned the White House's strategy to combat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. After a week of mixed messaging from all corners of the Obama administration, the Pentagon indicated late on Friday that the attack is likely to come in the fall. The announcement leaves last Thursday's briefing seeming even more puzzling and the White House’s strategy looking even clumsier and more disorganized.

The ongoing confusion about who knew of the Mosul details and who approved their release has given critics two equally powerful lines of attack: first, that officials are careless enough to release details of war strategy that could prove helpful to U.S. enemies; and second, that the administration can’t even coordinate the release of its own sensitive information.

The European Union’s foreign policy chief on Tuesday said an Iran nuclear deal was “at hand” and urged different sides to show political will ahead of a new round of talks scheduled in Geneva next week

“We cannot miss this opportunity,” Federica Mogherini, whose predecessor Catherine Ashton chairs the talks in Switzerland, said at Chatham House, a think tank in London.

“A good deal is at hand if the parties will keep cooperating as they did so far and if we have enough political will from all sides to agree on a good deal and sell it domestically,” Mogherini said. “We have a series of internal domestic political dynamics we have to handle with care,” she said, listing “tensions” in the US Congress, Israel’s elections and Sunni-Shiite rivalry in the Gulf region. “A comprehensive agreement would be mutually beneficial for all sides,” she said. US Secretary of State John Kerry earlier on Tuesday said world powers “had made inroads” since reaching an interim deal with Iran in November 2013 on reining in its suspect nuclear program. “We expect to know soon whether or not Iran is willing to put together an acceptable, verifiable plan,” Kerry said after returning from talks in Geneva with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif.

The Iraqi popular forces who shot down a US helicopter carrying weapons for the ISIL forces in Al-Baqdadi region released the photos of the shot down chopper through the Internet. A group of Iraqi popular forces known as Al-Hashad Al-Shabi shot down the US Army helicopter that was carrying weapons for the ISIL in the western parts of Al-Baqdadi region in Al-Anbar province on Thursday.

Last week, Head of the Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee Hakem al-Zameli announced that the helicopters of the US-led anti-ISIL coalition were dropping weapons and foodstuff for the ISIL terrorists in the Southern parts of Tikrit. He underscored that he had documents and photos showing that the US Apache helicopters airdropped foodstuff and weapons for the ISIL.

Last Monday, a senior lawmaker disclosed that Iraq’s army had shot down two British planes as they were carrying weapons for the ISIL terrorists in Al-Anbar province. “The Iraqi Parliament’s National Security and Defense Committee has access to the photos of both planes that are British and have crashed while they were carrying weapons for the ISIL,” al-Zameli said, according to a Monday report of the Arabic-language information center of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. He said the Iraqi parliament has asked London for explanations in this regard. The senior Iraqi legislator further unveiled that the government in Baghdad is receiving daily reports from people and security forces in al-Anbar province on numerous flights by the US-led coalition planes that airdrop weapons and supplies for ISIL in terrorist-held areas. The Iraqi lawmaker further noted the cause of such western aids to the terrorist group, and explained that the US prefers a chaotic situation in Anbar Province which is near the cities of Karbala and Baghdad as it does not want the ISIL crisis to come to an end. Earlier today, a senior Iraqi provincial official lashed out at the western countries and their regional allies for supporting Takfiri terrorists in Iraq, revealing that US and Israeli-made weapons have been discovered from the areas purged of ISIL terrorists.

Key Democrats are hardening their opposition to President Barack Obama’s proposal for attacking Islamic militants in Iraq and Syria, raising fresh doubts the White House can win congressional approval of the plan as concerns grow over its handling of crises around the globe. In interviews this week, not a single Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee expressed support for the president’s war plan as written; most demanded changes to limit the commander in chief’s authority and more explicitly prohibit sending troops into the conflict.

That opposition puts the White House and Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, in a quandary — stuck between Republican defense hawks who are pushing for a more robust U.S. role against the terrorist group known as Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and liberals who fear a repeat of the Iraq war. In an interview, Corker issued a stark warning: If Democrats refuse to lend any support to Obama’s request for the Authorization for Use of Military Force against ISIL, he may scrap a committee vote, making it less likely the full Senate or House would even put it on the floor, much less pass it. The comments put pressure on the White House to deliver Democratic votes or witness the collapse of a second war authorization plan in Congress in as many years.

“He is asking us to do something that takes us nowhere,” Corker said of Obama. “Because from what I can tell, he cannot get one single Democratic vote from what he’s sent over. And he certainly wouldn’t get Democratic votes for something Republicans might be slightly more comfortable with. … It’s quite a dilemma.” Corker added: “Before we begin the process of considering marking up a bill, I want to know that there’s a route forward that can lead to success.” Last month, the president proposed a draft AUMF aimed at giving him the flexibility to wage war with ISIL, but also restricting his own authority. The plan would set a three-year time limit and ban “enduring offensive ground combat operations.” While ISIL, also known as ISIS, is the main enemy targeted by the plan, the U.S. would have the flexibility to attack forces “associated” with the terrorist group. And while Obama sought to rescind the 2002 Iraq War authorization, his plan would leave in place the post-9/11 war powers resolution that the U.S. is currently using to justify its ongoing military campaign against ISIL and terrorist organizations worldwide. The effort, to carve a middle ground between hawks and doves, appears to have pleased nobody on Capitol Hill. Republicans want to give this and the next president wide latitude to “degrade and destroy” ISIL, while Democrats want to impose a round of new restrictions further prohibiting ground troops while rescinding the 2001 war authorization.

China’s new draft anti-terror legislation has sent waves across the U.S. tech community. If there is a brewing tech war between U.S. and China over government surveillance backdoors and a preference for indigenous software, China’s new draft terror law makes it clear that Beijing is happy to give the United States a taste of its own medicine. The law has already drawn considerable criticism from international human rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for its purported attempts to legitimize wanton human rights violations in the name of counter-terrorism. Additionally, China has opted to implement its own definition of terrorism, placing  “any thought, speech, or activity that, by means of violence, sabotage, or threat, aims to generate social panic, influence national policy-making, create ethnic hatred, subvert state power, or split the state” under the umbrella of the overused T-word. The problematic human rights issues aside, the draft anti-terror law will have important implications for foreign tech firms within China. According to Reuters’ reporting on the draft anti-terror law, counter-terrorism precautions by the Chinese government would essentially require foreign firms to “hand over encryption keys and install security ‘backdoors’” into their software. Additionally, these firms would have to store critical data — certainly data on Chinese citizens and residents — on Chinese soil. The onerous implications of this law could have lead to an immediate freeze to the activities of several Western tech companies in China, the world’s second largest economy and a booming emerging market for new technologies.

On the surface, the most troublesome implication of this law is that in order to comply with this law, Western firms, including non-technical ventures such as financial institutions and manufacturers, will be forced to give up a great deal of security. In essence, corporate secrets, financial data — all critical data — would be insecure and available for access by Chinese regulators. The new law would also prohibit the use of secure virtual private networks (VPNs) to get around these requirements.

The U.S. diplomatic response to Beijing’s new draft law is perhaps best captured in the fact that a whopping four cabinet members in the Obama administration, including Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, wrote the Chinese government expressing “serious concern.” China, for its part, seemed unfazed by U.S. concerns. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told the press that she hoped the United States would view the new anti-terror precautions in “in a calm and objective way.” Indeed, following Edward Snowden’s revelations regarding the extent of the United States’ surveillance of private firms both within and outside the United States, Beijing likely views U.S. concerns as hypocritical. One U.S. industry source told Reuters that the new law was ”the equivalent of the Patriot Act on really, really strong steroids.”

In the age of ubiquitous government surveillance, the only way citizens can protect their privacy online is through encryption. Historically, this has been extremely difficult for mere mortals; just watch the video Edward Snowden made to teach Glenn Greenwald how to encrypt his emails to see how confusing it gets. But all of this is quickly changing as high-quality, user-friendly encryption software becomes available. App maker Open Whisper Systems took an important step in this direction today with the release of a major new version of its Signal encrypted calling app for iPhones and iPads. The new version, Signal 2.0, folds in support for encrypted text messages using a protocol called TextSecure, meaning users can communicate using voice and text while remaining confident nothing can be intercepted in transit over the internet. That may not sound like a particularly big deal, given that other encrypted communication apps are available for iOS, but Signal 2.0 offers something tremendously useful: peace of mind. Unlike other text messaging products, Signal’s code is open source, meaning it can be inspected by experts, and the app also supports forward secrecy, so if an attacker steals your encryption key, they cannot go back and decrypt messages they may have collected in the past.

Signal is also one special place on the iPhone where users can be confident all their communications are always fully scrambled. Other apps with encryption tend to enter insecure modes at unpredictable times — unpredictable for many users, at least. Apple’s iMessage, for example, employs strong encryption, but only when communicating between two Apple devices and only when there is a proper data connection. Otherwise, iMessage falls back on insecure SMS messaging. iMessage also lacks forward secrecy and inspectable source code. Signal also offers the ability for power users to verify the identity of the people they’re talking to, confirming that the encryption isn’t under attack. With iMessage, you just have to take Apple’s word for it. Strong, reliable, predictably-applied encryption is especially important at a time when the world just found out, via a report by The Intercept, that American and British spies hacked into the world’s largest SIM card manufacturer and stole the encryption keys that are used to protect communication between handsets and cell phone towers. With these keys, spies can eavesdrop on phone calls and texts just by passively listening to the airwaves.

iPhone users can find Signal here. For Android users, the product is, at the moment, split into two apps: TextSecure for private texting and RedPhone for private voice calls. “We’re working towards a single unified Signal app for Android, iPhone and the desktop,” says Marlinspike. It’s important to keep in mind that no technology is 100 percent secure, and an encrypted messaging app can only be as secure as the device you install it on. Intelligence agencies and other hackers can still exploit security bugs that have not been fixed, known as zero day exploits, to take over smartphones and bypass the encryption that privacy apps employ. But apps like Signal go a long way to making mass surveillance of billions of innocent people infeasible.

The Justice Department is preparing to file corruption charges against Senator Robert Menendez, a scrappy 61-year-old veteran of New Jersey politics, after a two-year investigation into allegations that he accepted gifts and lavish vacations in exchange for political favors for a longtime friend and political benefactor.A law enforcement official said on Friday that the charges would be filed within a month against Mr. Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants, who rose from a childhood in the tenements to become the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and is now the highest-ranking Latino Democrat in Congress.

With the senator aggressively raising money for a legal-defense fund for more than a year now, charges against him had long been anticipated. But even in New Jersey, a state with a long history of political corruption, the case is jarring.

It revolves around the friendship between the senator and Salomon Melgen, a wealthy Florida eye surgeon. The two spent holidays together at Dr. Melgen’s home in the Dominican Republic, a gated oceanfront resort where the neighbors included Oscar de la Renta. Dr. Melgen eventually delivered hundreds of thousands of dollars to benefit Mr. Menendez and the national Democratic Party.Mr. Menendez accepted two round-trip flights aboard Dr. Melgen’s private jet for personal vacations in the Dominican Republic in 2010, but failed to report them as gifts or to reimburse Dr. Melgen at the time, as required under Senate disclosure rules.

A profound transformation of the global monetary system is underway. It is being driven by a perfect storm: the need for Russia and Iran to escape Western sanctions, the low interest rate policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve to keep the American economy afloat and the increasing demand for Middle East oil by China.The implications of this transformation are immense for U.S. policy in the Middle East which, for 50 years, has been founded on a partnership with Saudi Arabia.

A profound transformation of the global monetary system is underway. It is being driven by a perfect storm: the need for Russia and Iran to escape Western sanctions, the low interest rate policy of the U.S. Federal Reserve to keep the American economy afloat and the increasing demand for Middle East oil by China.The implications of this transformation are immense for U.S. policy in the Middle East which, for 50 years, has been founded on a partnership with Saudi Arabia.

s economic sanctions are increasingly part of the West's arsenal, those non-Western countries that are the target -- or potential target -- of such sanctions are devising a counterpunch: non-dollar trading. It would, in effect, nullify the impact of sanctions. Whether in yuan or roubles, non-dollar trading -- which enables countries to bypass U.S. claims to legal jurisdiction -- will transform the prospects facing Iran and Syria, particularly in the field of energy reserves, and deeply affect Iraq which is situated between the two. President Putin has said (in the context of reducing Russia's economic vulnerabilities) that he views the dollar monopoly in energy trade as damaging to the Russian economy. Since hydrocarbon revenues form the most substantive part of Russia's revenues, Putin's desire to take action in this area is not surprising. In the face of sanctions, Putin is seeking to reduce its economic dependence on the West. Russia has signed two "holy grail" gas contracts with China and is in negotiations to offer the latter sophisticated weaponry. It is also in the process of finalizing significant trade deals with India and Iran. All of this will be to the benefit of Iran, too: the Russians recently announced a deal to build several new nuclear power plants there.

The Islamic State's destruction of cultural antiquities in Iraq has stepped up a notch recently, with members of the extremist group both bulldozing the 3,000-year-old Nimrud archaeological site near Mosul and ransacking the similarly ancient ruins of Hatra in the past few days. Now, the United States' top military officer has said the U.S.-led coalition against the Islamic State would "consider" intervening to protect such sites. But Gen. Martin Dempsey stopped far short of any promises – and added that any action would have to "fit into the priority of all the other things we're being asked to do on behalf of Iraq." Dempsey – who was on a day-long visit to Baghdad, Iraq, during which he was joined by reporters including The Post's Missy Ryan – made his remarks after Iraq's antiquities ministry acknowledged reports of a third attack, on the ancient city of Dur Sharrukin, and called on the international community to intervene to stop the Islamic State from  “erasing the history of humanity.”

“We have warned previously and warn now that these gangs with their sick, takfiri ideology will continue to destroy and steal artifacts as long as there is no strong deterrent, and we still await a strong international stand to stop the crimes of Daesh that are targeting the memory of humanity," the ministry said in a statement published by the Guardian, using the Arabic acronym for the group. Separately, Iraqi Tourism and Antiquities Minister Adel Shirshab told reporters that only the U.S.-led coalition had the power to protect these sites. "Our airspace is not in our hands. It's in their hands," Shirshab said on Sunday, according to Reuters, alleging that coalition aircraft could have monitored attacks on archaeological sites and prevented them.

The U.S. government is well aware of the threat to antiquities posed by ongoing violence in Iraq and Syria – last year, the U.S. Department of State and the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR) signed a deal to document that damage caused to Syria's cultural heritage sites. There have also been a number of internal attempts in Iraq and Syria to defend sites that might be at risk, including the covert work of a group of preservationists dubbed modern-day "Monuments Men."