A Nile dam project has Ethiopia and Egypt butting heads and has already led to a major gaffe by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi that could threaten relations between the two nations.

The dispute stems from a plan to divert the Blue Nile by 550 yards off its natural course in order for Ethiopia to build a dam.

The Blue Nile is one of two tributaries of the Nile, which Egypt and Sudan both sit upstream from.

Ethiopia has …

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After the troubling revelations of the May 8 Senate hearing on Benghazi, much remains unclear about the attack that killed four Americans last September. Were the killers aiming to prove the incompetence of American power? Or was the assault directed more specifically against CIA operations? How did the White House, the State Department, and the CIA all agree to say so early and wrongly that the attack could have been the spontaneous action of a …

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WASHINGTON — Reports that the National Security Agency is collecting the phone logs of millions of U.S. Verizon customers may have hit with a boom Wednesday night, prompting concerns of government overreach and infringements on civil liberties — but don’t expect Congress to do anything about it.

On Capitol Hill, some lawmakers expressed immediate alarm to news that a FISA court had granted a request for an “ongoing, daily basis” collection of call data, as reported …

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New Jersey Attorney General Jeffrey Chiesa (R), who Gov. Chris Christie (R) just announced will temporarily fill the U.S. Senate vacancy left by the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), supports a gun buyback program that took thousands of guns off of New Jersey’s streets and he says that reinstating the death penalty in his state is not a “good idea.”

Chiesa indicated his opposition to the death penalty in an interview with New Jersey’s public media …

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TOKYO — Workers at a crippled Japanese nuclear plant are investigating why highly radioactive water leaked from a new storage tank, amid concerns that the problem could further hamper cleanup efforts.

The Fukushima Dai-ichi plant suffered multiple meltdowns after a massive earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 knocked out power. It is currently using a fragile makeshift cooling system that creates large amounts of highly radioactive water.

Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Thursday that the …

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American liberals rejoiced at Samantha Power’s appointment to the National Security Council. After so many dreary Clintonites were stacked into top State Department positions—Dennis Ross, Richard Holbrooke, Hillary herself—here was new blood: a dynamic idealist, an inspiring public intellectual, a bestselling author of a book against genocide, a professor at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights. And she hasn’t even turned 40. The blogosphere buzzed. Surely Samantha Power was the paladin, the conscience, the senior …

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(CNN) — Decades after the end of colonial rule, thousands of elderly Kenyans are getting compensation and an apology from Britain for years of torture during the fight for independence.

Britain announced a £19.9 million ($30 million) settlement Thursday for human rights violations during its colonial rule in the East African nation.

“The British government sincerely regrets that these abuses took place and that they marred Kenya’s progress towards independence,” British Foreign Secretary William Hague said.

The victims …

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Outrage and rebuke are flying after explosive news broke late Wednesday that the National Security Agency, claiming authority under the Patriot Act and using a secret court order, has demanded (and been receiving) millions of phone records from Verizon which include all the company’s “telephony metadata” for all its US-based customers over a three month period.

The “metadata” being provided to the NSA does not provide individual names for each record, but is a blanket order …

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Although the Harper government seems to believe it has successfully buried the mountain of evidence demonstrating Canada’s long-term, large-scale systemic complicity in illegal Afghan detainee torture and the CIA’s horrific worldwide “extraordinary rendition” scheme, this ghost may soon rise again to haunt all of Canada in a big way.

The UN Committee against Torture (UN CAT) last June followed its legal mandate to review Canada’s compliance with Geneva Convention obligations prohibiting detainee torture and complicity …

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Ten-year-old Philadelphia resident Sarah Murnaghan only has a couple weeks to live unless she receives a lung transplant soon. Sarah, who has end-stage cystic fibrosis, has waited for over a year to receive a lung from a child donor, even though she is at the top of the pediatric organ list. Because there are no child donors available, Sarah is also on the list to receive an adult organ — but at the very bottom, …

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