Listening to the 911 call of Brent McFarland, as he waits for an ambulance to come to the aid of his choking fiancee, is awful. He screams helplessly, tries to perform CPR, and begs her not to leave him for an excruciatingly slow 12 minutes. But what is arguably just as painful to witness is the ineptitude of the 911 responder, who …

If true, the defection of Col. Shcherbakov would be a very unusual human intelligence coup for the U.S. against Russia. Traditionally the Russians better Americans on humint, while the U.S. has the upper hand on signals and other technical intelligence. That match-up didn’t always work in Washington’s favor, as when Robert Hanssen …

UPDATED BELOW.

It is not unusual for political spouses to disagree with their husbands. (Laura Bush, famously, was in favor of gay marriage and pro-choice.) It is, however, unusual for a political spouse to shoot a public service announcement that seems to publicly call out her spouse on the eve of a vote about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in …

Say what you want about Niccolò Machiavelli. He’s the champion of chicanery, the sultan of schemes. But the 16th-century author of The Prince, a how-to guide for the power-hungry, also identified the political truths that dominated the midterm elections earlier this month. And more often than not he didn’t just say it first — he …

Speaker Pelosi offered the following on-the-record response to the post below, by way of denying that she is backing off her opposition to the proposal presented yesterday by the chairmen of the President’s Fiscal Commission:

“Any viable proposal from the President’s Fiscal Commission must achieve the goals of reducing the …

Mark Thompson’s excellent story in this week’s TIME magazine, Bringing Dogs to Heal, is not yet online, but you should take the time to watch the accompanying video below. This is after all a day to praise and remember those who have served our country. And we tend not to remember exactly what so many of them have gone …

Is Nancy Pelosi backing off her opposition to the proposal by the chairmen of the President’s debt commission? Pelosi aides are trying to send that message. “In the end I think we’re going to be OK with it,” one top Pelosi aide told me this afternoon.

Politically speaking, the most striking thing about the draft proposal floated …

You can find reasons to slam the guy from both the left and the right. But not every member of Congress chooses to spend their spare time trudging through Africa on missions like this one:

Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, and a delegation of Pentagon officials visited the laboratories on Wednesday for the first

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