Is he a fickle defector or an unhidden hostage? Whichever is true of Shahram Amiri, one thing is certain: He is an international man of mystery.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is planning a final vote Thursday morning on a sweeping overhaul of financial regulations.
In the rapid-fire spy swap, the United States and Russia worked together as only old enemies could.
The talks leading to the largest U.S.-Russian spy swap since the Cold War began when CIA Director Leon Panetta approached Russia's spy chief with a proposed deal, a U.S. official says.
Melanie Phillips is an Oxford-educated award-winning columnist for London's Daily Mail; author of several books, among them "Londonistan"; and a splendid polemicist who sees the increasingly disjointed world around her clearly and pulls no punches when describing it.
As Iran continues with its efforts to become a nuclear power, President Obama has signed into law sweeping new economic sanctions against companies found to be trading with Iran. This action follows the adoption of a new sanctions resolution last month at the United Nations Security Council and a tightening of European Union sanctions.
The swap of 10 Russian agents for four prisoners was the largest prisoner transfer of its kind since the 1980s, when U.S. and Soviet bloc spies and agents were traded over the bridge separating the American sector of West Berlin from communist East Germany.
A Paris court on Wednesday convicted former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega of laundering drug money in France in the 1980s and ordered him to spend seven years behind bars — a sentence that comes on top of his two decades already spent in a U.S. prison.
Well, well, well - now it appears that even Soviet - strike that! - Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is afflicted by the general mediocrity of the moment. There was never any reason to doubt that the Soviet grasp of the third-rate and meretricious should not survive into the Russian renaissance. A Zil, the cumbersome Soviet limousine, is still a Zil - and no one ever buys a Russian computer if there is one or a Russian hamburger.
