Another oil train collided and started another big fire.

We were lucky this time — the collision took place in a deserted area and it seems nobody was directly hurt. Oil trains go through towns and cities, and we can't be lucky every time.

States that vote right-wing tend to take from the Federal government, while Democratic states contribute.

The NSA has a special unit to crack security of machines that are hard to crack.

It is legitimate to have a unit like this, but its operations must be very strictly controlled, and we cannot trust officials that lie to Congress to do that.

The comparison with "plumbers" is telling, since Nixon used the same metaphor to describe his team of burglars, whose best known crime was in the Watergate hotel.

The NSA's catalog of attack software: they can attack BIOSes, routers, even the firmware of hard drives.

The Israeli government displayed its contempt for Kerry's "peace negotiations" by backing a plan to annex a large fraction of the West Bank in order to keep it permanently under siege.

Netanyahu does not care how this affects the "negotiations", since he has no intention of making a peace agreement. I think his goal is to show that he still has the US government cowed; that he can ridicule the US and the "negotiations" and Kerry won't dare make a peep.