All three shooters in today's attack are either dead (two of them) or in custody (the other one), but police are working slowly (for safety reasons) to search their dwellings, cars, and the like, so it will still be a while before much is known. The prime suspect is a US citizen named Syed Farook, … Continue reading San Bernardino updates

The news all afternoon has been consumed with the still-developing story of yet another mass shooting in the United States. This time the scene was the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California, a facility that serves people with developmental disabilities, though the specific target appears to have been a conference room in which a … Continue reading The things we do to one another

First it's King Tut's tomb that may be hiding the burial chamber of another Egyptian pharaoh, and now archaeologists may have found something similar beneath the ruins of the Great Temple in the former Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán: Archaeologists in Mexico have found a passageway and two sealed chambers beneath one of the largest temples of … Continue reading What’s up with all these sealed tomb chambers?

December 2 is a national holiday in the United Arab Emirates, commemorating the day in 1971 when its six (later seven) component emirates, formerly known as the "Trucial States," stopped being British protectorates and united into a single independent nation. Happy birthday, UAE! There's evidence of human activity in the area known today as the … Continue reading Happy UAE National Day!

In what appears, at least for the moment, to be that rare bit of good news, Burkina Faso's voters elected themselves a new president on Sunday, former Prime Minister Roch Marc Christian Kaboré. The election of Kaboré specifically is almost beside the point; electing anybody is a big deal in a country whose voters have … Continue reading Meet Burkina Faso’s new, democratically-elected president

Lebanon has been mired in political gridlock for months, under a caretaker government that can't even properly manage trash collection, but things are starting to look up. Details have been emerging over the past few days about a potential compromise that would, at the very least, give the country its first non-interim president in over … Continue reading Don’t look now, but Lebanon may be about to get a president

An explosion struck a metro station in the Istanbul district of Bayrampaşa a short time ago, and the mayor of Bayrampaşa is now telling reporters that it was caused by a "pipe bomb." There have been conflicting reports about casualties, with some outlets reporting one fatality but others saying only that several people were injured. … Continue reading BREAKING: apparent bombing in Istanbul metro station

It took the Russians a few days to properly formulate a response to Turkey shooting down its Sukhoi Su-24 aircraft, but over the weekend they finally took vengeance on the real villains: Syrians who eat bread and drink water. I really do wish I was joking: A reported Russian airstrike on Saturday in central Idlib … Continue reading Punishing the truly guilty

It's no secret that ISIS thrives on power vacuums. Its rise from the ashes of al-Qaeda in Iraq was fueled by the chaos created by the actual Syrian civil war and the undeclared civil war between Iraqi Sunnis and the Maliki government. Its expansion abroad has similarly targeted places that are unstable or potentially unstable: … Continue reading A great argument for ending the Libyan civil war

The University of Chicago is closed today, apart from its hospitals. I can tell you from personal experience that this is almost unprecedented. It took real-deal blizzards (and I mean "blizzard" by Chicago standards, which means "so much snow that it would shut DC down for a month") to get that place to even consider … Continue reading Al-Shabaab: the terror group that has Kenyan authorities terrorizing their own people