• "The business of America is business" said Calvin Coolidge, America's greatest president; the obvious implication is that the business of America's enemies, the Foreigns, is using their eight weeks of vacation to sit around in romantic cafes, smoking and discussing their latest extramarital affairs with rueful detachment. That's why it's particularly disheartening to learn that America remains a nation of unemployed slobs while European countries like Germany, Spain, and even (shudder) France are doing better. That's just pathetic, America. Pathetic.[BBC]
• Top-level military officers are unsettled by Robert Gates's plans to cut the number of top-level military officers. [WP]
• One of the spies that we traded those sexy Russian spies for seems kind of ungrateful! He wants to go back to Russia, the country that put him in a Siberian prison camp, and still isn't sure how sending newspaper clippings to foreigners constitutes treason. [NYT]
• The Afghan National Army launched a big-boy operation all on its own, without NATO help! It went "disastrously wrong." [BBC]

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