Mimi Hall | USA Today.com The Postal Service is ready to deliver lifesaving drugs to about a quarter of the residents of Minneapolis-St. Paul, the only metropolitan area in the nation where letter carriers have been trained to dispense medication after a large-scale terrorist attack involving biological weapons. Six years after the government began exploring [...]

Ilya Shapiro | Cato At Liberty.org Elena Kagan’s confirmation represents a victory for big government and a view of the Constitution as a document whose meaning changes with the times.  Based on what we learned the last few months, it is clear that Kagan holds an expansive view of federal power — refusing to identify, [...]

Declan McCullugh | CNet.com For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.” Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing [...]

Kay Armin Serjoie and Thomas Erdbrink | Washington Post.com An explosive was thrown at the motorcade of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in central Iran on Wednesday, witnesses said. But his office quickly denied any attack had taken place, saying a “firecracker” had gone off. Witnesses described the incident as minor. One person was arrested, according [...]

Gareth Porter | Anti War.com That statement was in line with the pledge he had made on Feb. 27, 2009, when he said, “Let me say this as plainly as I can: by Aug. 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.” Seventeen months after President Barack Obama pledged to withdraw all combat brigades [...]

Mario Andrade | Dead Line Live.info Earlier this week, Sinaloa drug cartel leader Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel was killed in a raid conducted by the Mexican military. According to several media and official Mexican government reports, Coronel had a long criminal history and played significant roles mostly within the Sinaloa cartel. He was currently a member [...]

Laura Donnelly | Telegraph.co.uk Some of the most common operations — including hip replacements and cataract surgery — will be rationed as part of attempts to save billions of pounds, despite government promises that front-line services would be protected. Patients’ groups have described the measures as “astonishingly brutal”. An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has [...]

Endy Bayuni | The Jakarta Post.com The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a prestigious foreign policy think-tank organization based in Washington, recently launched its Southeast Asian studies department with funding from the widely diversified Bakrie Group, one of Indonesia’s largest business conglomerates. “Southeast Asian nations are critical players in the international community and global economy,” [...]

Agence France Press | Raw Story.com Iran’s main economic partner China has invested around 40 billion dollars in the Islamic republic’s oil and gas sector, a senior Iranian official said on Saturday. Deputy Oil Minister Hossein Noqrehkar Shirazi also said that Tehran’s oil exports to China fell by 30 percent in the first six months [...]

Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff | Project Censored.com The New York Times, Washington Post, and most other newspapers in the US are censoring or under-reporting the WikiLeaks documents that show US Task Force 373 (TF 373) is an out-of-control assassination unit responsible for the deaths of many hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan. Nick Davies’ lengthy article [...]