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It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives.

If Olympic Games failed, he told aides, there would be no time for sanctions and diplomacy with Iran to work. Israel could carry out a conventional military attack, prompting a conflict that could spread throughout the region.

Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, took reporters on a tour of the plant and described grand ambitions to install upward of 50,000 centrifuges. For a country with only one nuclear power reactor — whose fuel comes from Russia — to say that it needed fuel for its civilian nuclear program seemed dubious to Bush administration officials.

The tense Russian-American jockeying over the fate of Ukraine escalated on Thursday as a Kremlin official accused Washington of “crudely interfering” in the former Soviet republic, while the Obama administration blamed Moscow for spreading an intercepted private conversation between two American diplomats.

he Obama administration declared Thursday that a global Bill of Rights-style treaty imposes no human rights obligations on American military and intelligence forces when they operate abroad, rejecting an interpretation by the United Nations and the top State Department lawyer during President Obama’s first term.

The United States first expressed the stance in 1995 after the Clinton administration was criticized for its policy of intercepting Haitian refugees at sea, and the Bush administration later amplified it to defend its treatment of terrorism suspects in overseas prisons.

“The United States continues to believe that its interpretation — that the covenant applies only to individuals both within its territory and within its jurisdiction — is the most consistent with the covenant’s language and negotiating history,” said Mary McLeod, the State Department’s acting legal adviser.

he top American military commander in South Korea said on Friday that he believed North Korea had most likely completed its yearslong quest to shrink a nuclear weapon to a size that could fit atop a ballistic missile

For years, American intelligence agencies have been scouring the evidence — from satellite photographs, human spies, intercepted calls and computer transmissions, and the tracking of nuclear suppliers — in an effort to assess when the North would be capable of marrying its nuclear and missile programs.

But even if General Scaparrotti is correct, it does not mean that the North is ready to threaten the United States with a nuclear-tipped missile

Sweden spent the past week trying, unsuccessfully, to find a foreign submarine thought to be lurking in its waters. But on Friday, having scoured the coast, the Swedish military called off the search. So what's going on in the Baltic?

What it means is that they've been searching among the islands and skerries off Stockholm for a submarine that shouldn't be there, bringing back dormant memories of the Cold War. Back in the 1970s and 80s Sweden regularly scoured its territorial waters for Soviet subs, almost always without success.

Once a a nuclear-armed whiskey-class submarine ran aground near a Swedish naval base, causing a diplomatic incident that became known inevitably as Whiskey on the Rocks. Fast forward to today, and a time when countries around the Baltic Sea are casting nervous glances towards a newly assertive Russia

Swiss police have arrested two people and found traces of explosives in a car as security remains high around Geneva amid a terrorism alert

They were arrested on suspicion of the manufacture, concealment and transport of explosives or toxic gases, as well as on suspicion of violating the prohibition of groups such as al Qaida, ISIS and similar organizations.

The Swiss alert came after a tip from U.S. intelligence officials, who told their Swiss counterparts that they had intercepted communications among extremists discussing the idea of attacking Geneva, as well as Chicago and Toronto,

Fake ambulance drug smugglers jailed for between 18 and 28 years

Three drug smugglers have been jailed for at least 18 years each for transporting as much as £1.6bn worth of cocaine and heroin into the UK using a fleet of fake ambulances.

A third man, Richard Engelsbel, 51, was given an 18-year jail term after admitting that he acted as a driver or driver’s assistant on 25 smuggling trips purporting to be journeys to pick up injured patients.

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany.

Wilson cited Germany’s violation of its pledge to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, as well as its attempts to entice Mexico into an alliance against the United States, as his reasons for declaring war.

While Wilson weighed his options regarding the submarine issue, he also had to address the question of Germany’s attempts to cement a secret alliance with Mexico. On January 19, 1917, British naval intelligence intercepted and decrypted a telegram sent by German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German Ambassador in Mexico City. The “Zimmermann Telegram” promised the Mexican Government that Germany would help Mexico recover the territory it had ceded to the United States following the Mexican-American War. In return for this assistance, Germany asked for Mexican support in the war.

In 1889, Paris hosted an Exposition Universelle (World’s Fair) to mark the 100-year anniversary of the French Revolution.

The commission was granted to Eiffel et Compagnie, a consulting and construction firm owned by the acclaimed bridge builder, architect and metals expert Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel.

it was one of his employees—a structural engineer named Maurice Koechlin—who came up with and fine-tuned the concept

Mr. Bolton, President Bush’s under secretary of state for arms control and international security, had a general disdain for diplomacy that rankled several Republican members of the committee, including George Voinovich of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Mr. Lugar had quietly counseled the administration not to nominate him.

That disdain, in and of itself, did not sink his nomination. Rather, it was the testimony we heard and evidence we uncovered that Mr. Bolton had a habit of twisting intelligence to back his bellicosity and sought to remove anyone who objected

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Pakistan's defence minister Khurram Dastgir Khan has announced that he has suspended intelligence sharing with the US - the latest twist in the US-Pakistan row. But how much does it matter?

Relations between Washington and Islamabad have been in the spotlight since US President Donald Trump's New Year's Day tweet, where he accused Pakistan of "lies and deceit".

US officials have said that the suspension in security assistance is temporary, and that funds may still be reimbursed on case-by-case basis, depending on measurable co-operation extended by Pakistan. Meanwhile, few expect Mr Khan's announcement to be of more than of just symbolic value.That's because Pakistan has already limited much of the intelligence it shared with the US over the last two decades.

glories of Queen Anne’s reign (1702-14), ‘that short period of our History, which contains so many illustrious Actions

The most significant of these actions were in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13, Britain not involved until 1702), as the European powers jostled for control of the Spanish empire following the death of the last Spanish Habsburg king, Charles II, in 1700. On July 23rd, 1704, British naval forces captured Gibraltar and held out against Franco-Spanish attempts to regain it, while a few weeks later on August 13th, John Churchill, then Earl of Marlborough, heavily defeated a Franco-Bavarian army at Blenheim in Bavaria

The Blenheim campaign was crucial in preventing French hegemony in western Europe. Allied with Britain and the Dutch against France, the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (r.1658-1705) was central to the struggle on the European mainland as his defeat would have allowed the French to dominate both Germany and northern Italy and to concentrate against the Anglo-Dutch efforts in the Low Countries and the lower Rhineland

The scientists who study how diseases emerge in a changing environment knew this moment was coming. Climate change is making outbreaks of disease more common and more dangerous.

Over the past few decades, the number of emerging infectious diseases that spread to people — especially coronaviruses and other respiratory illnesses believed to have come from bats and birds — has skyrocketed.

A new emerging disease surfaces five times a year. One study estimates that more than 3,200 strains of coronaviruses already exist among bats, awaiting an opportunity to jump to people.

A 24-hour sequence of political bombshells began on Saturday afternoon, when Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri announced his resignation from the Saudi capital of Riyadh, blindsiding his country's political establishment. Hours later, Saudi Arabia's official news agency reported that the country's military had intercepted a Yemen-borne ballistic missile over Riyadh.

Some of Saudi Arabia's most high-profile princes and businessmen were being sacked and detained in an anti-corruption drive led by bin Salman.

The events serve as an opening salvo for a new period in the region's crisis-ridden history, analysts say.

Saudi Arabia Charges Iran With ‘Act of War,’ Raising Threat of Military Clash

Saudi Arabia charged Monday that a missile fired at its capital from Yemen over the weekend was an “act of war” by Iran, in the sharpest escalation in nearly three decades of mounting hostility between the two regional rivals.

“We see this as an act of war,” the Saudi foreign minister, Adel Jubair, said in an interview on CNN. “Iran cannot lob missiles at Saudi cities and towns and expect us not to take steps.”

Journalist Arrested During Trump Inauguration Faces New Felonies That Carry Decades in Jail

Journalist Aaron Cantu made an initial court appearance Friday to face new criminal charges that could carry decades in prison for alleged rioting and property destruction during President Donald Trump’s inauguration. Cantu, who works for the Santa Fe Reporter and has had articles published by Vice, The Nation, The Guardian and The Intercept, declined to comment inside a courthouse in the nation’s capital. His attorney Chantale Fiebig also declined to comment on the case, which the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has criticized. Cantu, wearing a suit and tie, appeared alongside more than three dozen other defendants crowded in a horseshoe around Judge Lynn Leibovitz. He accepted an Oct. 15, 2018 trial date and entered a not guilty plea for three separate rioting charges and five felony destruction of property charges.

Russian TU-95 Bear bombers were spotted flying about 41 miles off the coast of Alaska on Tuesday

It is unclear if these were the same planes that were intercepted by the F-22s on Monday, but defense officials told CNN that it was a separate violation.

The closest the bombers came was 36 nautical miles off the mainland Alaskan coast

We have gone from rightly defending the minority to wrongly problematizing the majority. It should surprise no one that, at some point, the majority will find all of this, as Josh Barro recently explained, “annoying.”

I say this as someone happily in the minority — and who believes strongly in the right to subvert or adapt traditional gender roles.

But you can’t subvert something that you simultaneously argue doesn’t exist.