At a hearing yesterday, Pfc. Bradley Manning took full responsibility for leaking the documents that came to be known as the Afghan and Iraq war logs and the "Cablegate" archive of classified diplomatic cables to Wikileaks. Given the fate that likely awaits Manning, it's a bit hard not be struck and saddened by his statement that he leaked the documents in order to “spark a domestic debate of the role of the military and foreign policy in general” and “cause society to reevaluate the need and even desire to engage in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations that ignore their effect on people who live in that environment every day.”

Whatever the impact of Wikileaks documents, it would be hard to argue they had a major impact on the foreign-policy attitudes of the American public, or even provided much new information that might cause readers to revise their attitudes. 

But two years after the Cablegate leak, there is one legacy of Wikileaks that confronts us nearly every day: the cables have become one of the vital tools of international journalism. Nearly every day, newspaper, wire service, and magazine dispatches from around the world feature theremarkable but no longer unusual phrase, " according to classified State Department cables released by WikiLeaks."

Here are just a few examples from a quick Nexis search of recent coverage:

• The Los Angeles Times' Paul Richter opens an article on Secretary of State John Kerry's trip to the Middle East with an anecdote from the then Senator's meeting with Bashar al-Assad in 2009. The conversation, in which Kerry asked Assad why so few Arab leaders trust him, was pulled from a Wikileaks cable.
• A Reuters article on the death of AQAP leader Said al-Shehri sources the claim that he "allegedly joined al Qaeda and helped to facilitate the movements of Saudi militants seeking to travel to Afghanistan via Iran" to a Wikileaked Pentagon document. 
• A New York Times article on a British lawsuit involving a U.S. drone strike cites a 2008 cable reporting that "British officials demanded to be given full details of intelligence-gathering flights the United States flew from its base in Cyprus, in case they “put the U.K. at risk of being complicit in unlawful acts.”"
• Reporting on the recent killing of a Kurdish cativist Sakine Cansiz, the AP notes that "in a 2007 cable, U.S. officials had identified Cansiz as one of the outlawed PKK's top two "most notorious financiers" in Europe and wanted her captured to stop the flow of money to the rebels." 
• A Washington Post feature on Yemen's rival clans quotes a classified dispatch from former Amb. Thomas C. Krajeski, describing how former president Ali Abdullah Saleh had allowed the powerful al-Ahmar tribal family to “run their affairs with informal armies, courts and economic empires”. 
• An AP story on the international soccer match-fixing scandal describes how "An American diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks quoted the U.S. Embassy in Sofia as reporting that "Bulgarian soccer clubs are widely believed to be directly or indirectly controlled by organized crime figures who use their teams as a way to legitimize themselves, launder money and make a fast buck.""
• Writing on Europe's planned Galileo GPS system, Andrew Higgins of the New York Times mentions that a 2009 cable from the U.S. embassy in Berlin "quoted the OHB chief, Berry Smutny, describing Galileo as doomed to fail."  

Often allegations made in Wikileaks cables are used by reporters as a kind of shorthand for situations where a foreign official is widely believed to be corrupt but there's little publicly available factual data to back up the claim. 

• For instance, reporting on the Paraguayn presidential race, the Times writes that "State Department diplomatic cables obtained by WikiLeaks revealed allegations that a bank under Mr. Cartes’s control was involved in money-laundering in 2007."
• A Los Angeles Times dispatch on the removal of a statue of Azerbaijani leader Heydar Aliyev from a Mexico City park quotes a cable in which "a U.S. ambassador compared his family to the Corleones of "The Godfather" fame."

Ironically, given the political goals of Wikileaks, the use of the cables by reporters often gives U.S. officials the final say on which foreign officials are bad guys.

But on the other hand, if the ultimate goal was to introduce a bit more transparency to international politics, Manning's actions have to be considered at least partially successful. 

Dennis Rodman, the retired Chicago Bulls star, rabble-rouser, and all-around weird guy got the red-carpet treatment on his bizarre trip to North Korea, improbably becoming perhaps the highest-profile American to meet with new leader Kim Jong Un, apparently a big roundball fan.

Vice, the magazine that sponsored this fantastic voyage, has already written up a brief and possibly drunken account of an exhibition game played by a couple Harlem Globetrotters and some North Korean stars, noting, "Following the game, Rodman gave a stirring speech that extended an olive branch to the Hermit Kingdom. The VICE crew is currently having a reception at the Supreme Leader's house, and Duffy has invited Kim Jung-un to America for a tour of the VICE offices."

And now, the North Korean state press has weighed in. Here are some shots from Rodong Sinmun, better known for its grandiloquent denunciations of U.S. imperialism and threats to turn Seoul into a sea of fire. It seems a good time was had by all:

According to the Washington Post's Chico Harlan, the headline reads, "Roughly, the great KJU watched a basketball game of mixed teams and then met former NBA star(s)." And the account says, "Rodman went up to the auditorium to bow to Kim Jong Un. Warmly welcoming him, Kim Jong Un let him sit next to him. ... The players and audience broke into thunderous cheers, greatly excited to see the game together with Kim Jong Un."

At the reception, it looks like Rodman, ever the clothes horse, embraced the crowd's uniform attire of black with pink accents (and is that a Cosmo to match the Worm's scarf?).

Interestingly, North Korea watcher Adam Cathcart notes, seated two seats away from Rodman in the top photo is Kim Gye-gwan, North Korea's top nuclear negotiator. What that portends is anyone's guess.

This month, a two-year-long investigation into CIA records on Noam Chomsky concluded with a surprising result: Despite a half-century of brazen anti-war activism and countless overseas speaking engagements, the Central Intelligence Agency has no file on the legendary MIT professor.

"Our searches were thorough and diligent, and it is highly unlikely that repeating those searches would change the result," reads an agency reply to a Freedom of Information Act request for any and all CIA records on Chomsky. The request, obtained by Foreign Policy, was submitted by Portland-based writer Frederic Maxwell, who's writing a book about the renowned linguist.

At stake is not so much the CIA's reputation (the agency's forays into domestic spying in the 60s and 70s are well-documented), but Chomsky's: For what's a towering leftist dissident without a lengthy CIA file -- that ultimate rite of passage for 60s-era dissenters?

Was Chomsky maybe even a little disappointed by the lack of a CIA file? Last, week, I presented him with the CIA's findings, which he hadn't been privy to.

"I don't care," said Chomsky, refusing to take the bait during a phone interview. "I had nothing to do with the request." While not particularly enthusiastic about the idea of being seen as envious of CIA surveillance, he did insist that he was the focus of another federal entity's dragnet. "I'm sure the FBI has a big file," he said.

But hold on. No CIA file? And Chomsky's not suspicious? I reminded him of his impeccable qualifications for such surveillance.

Over the years, Chomsky's broad criticisms of the U.S. government (a "terrorist state") made him the only person on both Richard Nixon's Enemies List and the Unabomber's kill list. In the 60s and 70s, he undertook frequent overseas speaking engagements in countries that included Cambodia and Vietnam. He contributed to the leftist political magazine Ramparts, itself a target of CIA surveillance. Detailing the agency's obsession with the magazine's writers, former CIA director Stansfield Turner wrote in his 2006 book Burn Before Reading that "the CIA investigation of the staff of Ramparts was definitely illegal." He added: "It was also just a small part of a much larger [President Lyndon] Johnson-initiated project that went by the codeword CHAOS."

Indeed, that program, initiated in 1967 under Johnson and expanded under Nixon, targeted the anti-war movement on U.S. college campuses, in which Chomsky was a major player. In total, the CIA program collected files on at least 10,000 American citizens. But nothing on Chomsky?

Kel McClanahan, a seasoned national security lawyer who submitted the FOIA request on behalf of Maxwell, was surprised by the CIA's final findings. It was "not a Glomar response, not 'we can't tell you if we have records,' an actual 'no records' response," he told me. In fact, the CIA's first denial about a Chomsky file came back in September 2011. McClanahan then appealed the outcome and received another denial letter this month.

"The Agency Release Panel (ARP) considered Mr. Maxwell's appeal and determined that despite thorough and diligent searches of the appropriate records systems, we were unable to locate any records responsive to his requests," read the Feb. 1 CIA letter.

Interestingly, Chomsky, a man forever mistrustful of U.S. government statements, actually believes the CIA's denial. But it's not because he's warming to the agency as he grows older: It's because he's convinced of its incompetence.

"These agencies are good at killing people, targeted assassinations and overthrowing governments," he told me. "But if anyone were to honestly look at intelligence records, they'd find it all to be a very dubious affair as far as competence is concerned." That is to say, the agency may have had no ethical qualms about spying on Chomsky, but whether it did, and successfully organized that information into its databases, is another story. "We shouldn't be overwhelmed at their pretense of superhuman knowledge," he added. "That's mainly for spy novels." 

Chomsky FOIA request by John Hudson

Think horse meat in your lasagna is unappealing? Try some water buffalo sausage.

Horse meat is what's making headlines at the moment, thanks to widespread discoveries of the unusual product lurking in so-called beef across Europe. But the past few weeks have been big in general for unexpected meats -- thanks in some cases to testing that took place as a result of the horse meat scandal.

In a study released on Monday, for example, South African researchers found mystery ingredients ranging from soy products to donkey to goat to water buffalo in up to 68 percent of the meat products they tested.

In Switzerland, the Swiss Central Islamic Council found traces of pork in supposedly halal kebabs. And in the U.K., firms submitted to tests as part of the horse meat probe were found to also be selling donkey meat as beef. The Daily Mail conducted its own investigation on that British takeaway favorite, the lamb kebab, and found that they were often being bulked up with cheaper beef and chicken meat.

While the horse meat discovery sparks soul-searching in Europe over the modern food supply chain and the unintended consequences of horse-cart bans, it appears to be fueling what looks like schadenfreude across the pond (the Washington Post: "According to folklore, Europeans have always treated their food with reverence, eating Grandma's slow-cooked stews concocted with farm-fresh ingredients while Americans wolfed down the genetically modified, chemically preserved junk that is symbolized by burgers and fries.").

And as food scandals continue to pile up, it seems more and more likely that horse meat -- or maybe even donkey or goat -- could end up in a burger on this side of the Atlantic. The safest bet? Go vegetarian.

We're excited to announce that Louie Palu's powerful photography from the U.S.-Mexico border, which appeared in FP's January/February issue, has won multiple awards from the White House News Photographers Association (WHNPA). The image above, which shows a 20-year-old from Chiapas, Mexico in a migrant shelter the night after she was deported from the United States, won first place in the WHNPA's Portrait category. The picture also finished in second place in the Pictures of the Year International's Portrait category. 

The photo below, of a man shot multiple times in drug-related violence in the Mexican city of Culiacán, won first place in the WHNPA's International News Picture category.

You can see Palu's full photo essay for Foreign Policy here. And check out this video of Palu discussing why he embarked on the ambitious project, which was funded by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. "I had been seeing a lot of news reports on the escalating violence, and I wanted to peel away the layers of what's really happening on the border," he explains.

On Monday, Park Geun-hye, South Korea's first female president and the daughter of the dictator who ruled the country in the 1960s and 1970s, was sworn into office. "Consider her roles: daughter, first lady, mother" writes novelist Suki Kim in a recent New York Times op-ed. "This woman, widely lauded as her country's first female president, is no symbol of latent feminism but of something far more traditional -- a girl who grew up before the nation's eyes, only to lose both parents violently, and then become the mother for whom they had carried a torch since her own mother's martyrdom."

But she's not the only feminine leader on the Korean peninsula. "Despite his young years Kim Jong Un is already being praised for his motherly solicitude, just like his father was," BR Myers, author of The Cleanest Race, a book on North Korean propaganda, wrote in an email to me.  

In his email to me, Myers explained that Kim Jong Un "is also equated with the 'Mother Party,' like with the phrases 'The Dear Marshal Kim Jong Un is our Mother Party,' or 'The Dear Marshal's breast is the Party's breast.' (This is not a purely Korean phenomenon. Goebbels compared Hitler to a mother: 'The whole nation loves him, because it feels secure in his hand like a child in the mother's arm.') It has always been striking in North Korea, however, because it runs so counter to the popular Pyongyang-watching myth of a Confucian-patriarchal state."

Myers has argued that North Korea's true ideology is not Communism, Juche, or Confucianism, but a race-based, paranoid nationalism, where its people are "too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a parental leader." Myers hones in on the word parental; explaining that "because the Korean race is born good, it has no need for an educating father figure like Stalin or Mao; instead, Kim Jong Il appears in the personality cult as more of a maternal figure."

Last week, the Iranian government organized a conference on "Hollywoodism" in Tehran, at which an international group of activists, religious figures, filmmakers, and politicians discussed the ideology of Hollywood films. In particular, many of the participants argued that films like Argo promote an anti-Iranian, anti-Islamic agenda.

One of the more suprising participants in the event was Mike Gravel, the former two-term Alaska senator, best known for reading the Pentagon Papers into the public record, who ran in the Democratic and Libertarian presidential primaries in 2008. During the campaign, Gravel attracted attention for his anti-establishment views as well as his unconventional advertising. Since leaving electoral politics, he has spoken in support of WikiLeaks and called for a new investigation of the 9/11 attacks.

According to the New York Times, Gravel argued at the conference that it was  "'fundamental' to discuss the American movie industry’s ways of portraying Iran in order to prevent 'an insane war.'"

I spoke with the 83-year-old Gravel Thursday on the phone from his home in California about his impressions from the trip.

Foreign Policy: So who invited you, how did this come about?

Mike Gravel: I've been angling to go to Tehran for some time. I'd been there 40 years ago when I was in the Senate, for a few days, and so I was hoping I'd get a speaking gig where they could pay my way. I can't afford myself to take these kind of trips if they're not funded. So what happened, unbeknownst to me, this was the third Hollywoodism conference.

A fellow by the name of Kevin Barrett [the former University of Wisconsin professor and 9/11 truth activist] who I know, I had spoken on his television show, or radio show, frequently. He suggested to them that they invite me and it took off from there. I've been interviewed on average about once a week on PressTV and so my views are very well known over there and obviously quite safe for an invitation because I wasn't going to rock any boat.

FP: So as I understood it, many people at the conference were arguing that Hollywood movies like Argo are motivated by some kind of pro-Israel, anti-Iranian agenda. What did you think about that?

MG: There was various elements of extremes. I am very much a movie buff, and there's good stuff that comes out of Hollywood and there's bad stuff that comes out of Hollywood. You can take your pick. They take a different viewpoint. [The Iranians] operate from a religious viewpoint and they feel that some of the extremes of Hollywood has deteriorated human culture worldwide and so that's what they're trying to have this conference. They want to try and see if they can't develop an alternative to Hollywoodism and I don't think they can, I think that they will have an influence in their area of movies. Part of the deal was they gave us two, or I'd say 20, maybe more, movies to watch that were part of the conference so I'll be doing that for part of the time here to try to get a feel for how realistic they are.

FP: What were your general impressions of Iran?

MG: I can't tell you how warm the people were. How giving, considerate. And, the thing that was very surprising to me. If you follow American media, you think they're on the ropes. I gotta tell you, there's no question the sanctions are a discomfiture, but in the long run it is the best thing that's ever happened to Iran. It's made them totally independent, and forcing them to internalize their economic activity, to build machines. We rode for about 10 miles right through the heart of Iran where they're building an elevated highway. Boy, I'll tell you, that was an impressive work area. So the city is just like a normal thriving city. It has prosperity. You could tell by the traffic jams. The architecture's extremely attractive and imposing, and so what's happened to the country is it's being forced into independence. But that's exactly what a developing country does. You force domestic wares to be produced and then you turn around and you can export your product very competitively because your money is depressed, and so that's what's going on in Iran. And I don't think the United States has any inkling that what it's doing is counterproductive to arriving at a solution in that part of the world.

FP: Do you think war between the U.S. and Iran is inevitable?

MG: First off, I think it'll happen by accident. I equate what's going on today as to what was going on in February and March of 1914. Everybody's psyched up to the hilt, armed to the hilt. All you need is an accident, all you need is an accident to just blow the whole thing wide open. And that's my fear. When you see a poll, and the polls I've seen vary, but from 40 to 55 percent of the Americans would tolerate an invasion of Iran. Now, I don't think that toleration would last beyond 30 days, but when you see a situation like that and politicians read the tea leaves, they think they can do what they want in this regard.

Let me back up. The sanctions are illegal. There's nothing that I see that Iran ahs done that warrants the sanctions against them. If you want to sanction somebody, do it to Saudi Arabia who has funded the madrasas with Wahhabism, hatred of the gentiles. That's not the approach of the Shia. The Shia is the more benign wing of the Islamic world, and the Ayatollah Khamenei, the imam, is the, literally the pope of all the Shiitex in the world.

FP: The Obama administration publicly says it's trying to avoid war. Do you believe that?

MG: No, I think there's a great insincerity on part of the Obama administration unfortunately. Probably the best approach to this, the Imam has stated very clearly they are not going to pursue the acquisition of the bomb because the Koran dictates that they cannot do that. Now at face value, when you recognize that this is the spiritual leader of the country and the spiritual leader of the world of Shiites and he's making a statement that the Koran does not tolerate an atomic bomb. Now, if you took that at face value, then a lot of things become a little ridiculous, like when the President says ‘well we've got a red line here you can't cross.' They're not going to cross it, they've already said this repeatedly. And there's no intelligence estimates that indicate they're pursuing a bomb. None at all.

Of course, there's a lot of conflict with the IAEA and I don't know if you remember the memo, from the um, Amamo, the Japanese guy, the head of other IAEA to the ambassador in Austria, telling the ambassador that, oh, he's very grateful for the United States in getting the job and that he guarantees that American interests will be protected. Now, I don't particularly view that as an independent kind of a situation, not even fair, but by the same token, Iran has not violated anything of the IAEA. It has had investigators all over the place, and they're going to continue to do that.

FP: So who else did you have a chance to meet with? Did you talk to any officials?

MG: Oh yes, some, but I didn't' recognize who they were. I didn't meet Ahmadinejad. They were trying to put something together, and it sort of fell through. Obviously I didn't meet the Imam. But met other officials who were party to the conference because the whole conference is funded by the government, and so they were at various levels, cultural levels, and maybe not so cultural were monitoring the conference and I was interviewed extensively by the various networks. And I gave the same opinions that I have right now giving to you.

FP: Were you able to talk to any opponents of the regime?

MG: Nope. I know Trita Parsi here in the States but no, I didn't get any feel for any opposition. You know, we were staying at the hotel and then we would just go out to forays. My wife was with me and so she likes to see things. I would just rest in the hotel. You know, I'm 83 at this point, I don't need a whole lot of gallivanting around.

But, we were talking about meeting people from about 35 people from all over the world, motion picture people, writers, activists, and some were off the charts.

FP: What do you mean "off the charts"?

MG: Oh, their attitude toward Zionism. But that wasn't so much. They don't talk about the Jewish lobby, they talk about the Zionist lobby, in their terminology, which is interesting. I doubt there's any change that they'll be able to bring forth. But what they will bring forth is an independent, powerful nation able to defend itself, and will certainly be a leader of the non-aligned, and that's not always in the United States' best interests. And I resent a lot of our imperial attitude that we have to, we're the self-appointed policemen of the world. We police when it's our interests and if not, we don't police very well.

FP: Did it seem like the officials you met with were open to opposing views? Were they tolerant of dissent?

MG: Oh yeah. Yeah. They're very open. Because they know, from their public pinion, that they're operating in the blind. And, oh, there's one other thing I came away with that fascinates me. I, the last 25 or 30 years, I've focused my attention on structure of government, you know, how human beings in society attempt to govern themselves. I look for models. Like Switzerland for direct democracy. They have an interesting model. They have married a theocracy and a political system, and it appears to work. Now, all I can say is that's nothing to cause fear. What we should do is encourage models like this to see how they operate and see what contributions they can make to human governments.

FP: So you think we can learn from the Iranian political model?

MG: Oh yes I think we can. Not so much for ourselves. We say we've got separation of church and state. Well I've gotta tell you Joshua, when you pay your taxes, you are supporting all the churches in the United States. That's the nature of the beast. Since Islam is such a devotional kind of religion -- I mean I was in a couple of meetings where I had to sit there and meditate while they were praying -- this has something to tell us. They have a successful country, and make no mistake about it, they are a very successful country and are suffering as a result of our injustice.

We hear plenty about drugs and conflict diamonds; but the international black market for timber -- a global trade that has been plaguing the forests of South America, Central America, and Asia for years, and one that is estimated to be worth anywhere from 30 to 100 billion dollars a year -- gets a lot less attention.

Illegal wood had a rare moment in the spotlight on Feb. 19, when Interpol reported the results of its first international operation to target timber trafficking. "Operation Lead," which brought together law enforcement agencies from twelve Latin American countries, was carried out over a month late last year and resulted in the seizure of the equivalent of 2,000 truckloads of timber (worth millions of dollars) and the arrests of more than 200 people.

While individual countries in the region, such as Columbia and Brazil, have cracked down on the illegal trade in the past, the transnational nature of the crime makes it difficult for domestic law enforcement agencies, which are limited in their jurisdiction, to be very effective. An international approach has the potential to be more successful. According to the head of Interpol's Environmental Crime Program, Operation Lead has laid the foundations for future efforts to combat the global trade.

So why timber? It is not as lucrative as the drug trade, but it still brings in a fair amount of cash. According to a recent Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) report, in Laos, rare rosewood logs can fetch $18,000 per cubic meter. The EIA also notes that traffickers can earn $1,700 for a high-quality mahogany tree on the Peruvian black market, and about $1,000 for a cedar tree. In 2006, illegal logging in Peru was bringing up to $72 million in profits per year. Some estimates put the yearly profits in Columbia as high as $200 million.

In Latin America, the drug and timber trades aren't mutually exclusive. Though the extent of the connection is not yet clear, timber trafficking overlaps with organized crime and the drug trade in interesting ways in countries like Colombia and Peru.

For one, it has been suggested that timber offers drug traffickers an opportunity to invest in a new illegal market -- to "diversify their portfolios" -- as some governments become more successful (however slightly) in cracking down on the drug trade.

In Peru, where an estimated 80 percent of total timber exports are illegal, the wood trafficking network has become so sophisticated that drug traffickers are now piggybacking on the timber trade -- literally. In 2006, a U.S. State Department cable (later released by WikiLeaks) reported that drug traffickers in the Andes moving coca paste and opium "appear to be getting involved in transport of illegal timber, for both its profitability and its utility as concealment." In 2010, Peruvian police seized nearly 400 kilos of cocaine and coca base hidden in a single shipment of Sinaloa cedar.

Logging may also be viewed as a profitable way to open land for the farming of coca. According to a 2011 UN report, since 1981, more than 3,000 square miles of Columbia's forests have been cut down illegally to make way for coca crops. In 2008, then Columbian Vice President Francisco Santos Calderon announced, "If you snort a gram of cocaine, you are destroying 4 square meters of rainforest."

All considered, it isn't surprising that the illegal logging trade has taken a violent turn in some countries. Last year in Cambodia, an anti-logging activist and a reporter covering the illegal trade were both murdered. Three Brazilian activists were killed in 2011 -- just three out of dozens that have been murdered over the past several years.

It should be noted that illegal logging is not entirely run by timber kingpins and "wood mafias." Local communities also cut down wood illegally (to use, not to sell), and have probably been doing so for generations.

The countries affected are going to have to take strong action if they want to save their forests, because the problem is not going to fix itself. The world's appetite for high-value wood is high and is only getting higher. In its report entitled "Appetite for Destruction: China's Trade in Illegal Timber," the EIA states that between 2000 and 2011, the quantity of global log imports tripled, with a value that increased fivefold. China -- with wood product exports that have increased almost sevenfold in the past decade, with new construction projects beginning every day, and with a new bourgeoisie that covets fancy rosewood lounge sets (which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars), cars with wood-embellished interiors, and yachts -- comprises a large part of that demand. According to the EIA, China is the world's top importer of illegal timber. "More than half of China's current supplies of raw timber material are sourced from countries with a high risk of illegal logging and poor forest governance," including Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Madagascar, Myanmar, and Papua New Guinea.

Nicaragua in particular has seen enormous growth in its illegal timber market thanks to Chinese demand. In 2008, Nicaraguan exports of granadillo totalled about $127,000. In 2011, after other Central American countries enacted stricter wood export regulations, that number grew fifty fold, to $6 million.

China is in the midst of efforts to increase its own forest coverage; but Beijing is certainly going to have to step up its efforts at home if it wants to make up for the damage it is doing abroad.

If you are an American living abroad in an unstable country, it's not unusual for the local U.S. embassy to send you updates about the security situation. The advice is pretty basic, and largely useless -- be aware of your surroundings, avoid large protests, consider delaying travel. Yesterday, however, the State Department took a different tack: It warned Americans that terrorists could be lurking behind any corner. At any time. Across the globe.

"Current information suggests that al-Qaida...continue[s] to plan terrorist attacks against U.S. interests in multiple regions, including Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East," the State Department wrote yesterday in a "Worldwide Caution" alert.

So, be careful when traveling -- well, anywhere, basically. But perhaps the U.S. government could at least tell its citizens where they will be most at risk? Here's what the State Department says about that: Targets could include "high-profile sporting events, residential areas, business offices, hotels, clubs, restaurants, places of worship, schools, public areas, and other tourist destinations both in the United States and abroad where U.S. citizens gather in large numbers, including during holidays."

Now, you probably shouldn't be traveling anywhere if this sort of advice is news to you. But let's assume there's a novice explorer out there who stumbles across this State Department warning and takes it to heart. What will he see as the primary threats that he will face as he embarks on his journey?

In Europe, the first thing he reads is: "Current information suggests that al-Qaida...continue[s] to plan terrorist attacks against U.S. and Western interests." In Africa, al Qaeda is also the first threat -- after that, pirates. In South and Central Asia, al Qaeda again. And in the Middle East, you guessed it, al Qaeda.

This isn't just overly broad to the point of being useless, it's actually a wildly distorted account of the threats Americans face abroad. Take Egypt, the country I call home. There is no shortage of radicalism here: The head of al Qaeda, a product of Cairo's most virulent strain of Islamist extremism, grew up a few neighborhoods over. And yet, a foreigner is far more likely to be hurt or killed in the city's insane traffic, mugged by a thief, or caught up in the running clashes between protesters and police. Fear of roving al Qaeda terrorists doesn't enter the picture.

So be careful out there, travelers. Just not for the reasons they tell you. 

Israelis are in an uproar over the recent news that their prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, spends a whopping $2,700 per year of public funds on ice cream. The story dominated Israeli headlines over the weekend, causing outrage in a country that has faced large-scale unrest over soaring food prices and cuts in government spending. Particularly controversial was the lack of transparency surrounding the ice cream dealings:

Originally this expenditure wasn't included in the Netanyahu family's maintenance budget, but his aides managed to bypass the bureaucratic procedures - transferring one budget item to another normally requires a tender - and get the go-ahead to buy his favorite ice cream flavors from a neighborhood ice cream parlor.

Netanyahu tried to spin his penchant for ice cream -- pistachio in particular-- as being for official entertainment purposes, but the Israeli press isn't buying it. Uzi Benziman, in an editorial for Haaretz, offers a few pointed questions against the prime minister. If the ice cream really serves diplomatic purposes, why should Bibi backtrack now? Also, how could the PM possibly know his guests would prefer pistachio?

...if  Netanyahu not only knows who'll be visiting him in the coming year, but also that their favorite flavors also happen to be vanilla sorbet and pistachio, then what do we need the Shin Bet and the Mossad for?

So what does the prime minister's love of pistachio say about him? One not-so-scientific look at ice cream flavor as personality test, describes pistachio people:

You are a highly individualistic and straight-to-the-point person. No one should mess with you. ...You seek to distinguish yourself from everyone else and take pride in being distinctive and exclusive. You are usually both smart and good-looking and are loved by many, even if you don't know it. However, you can be quite intolerant of certain things in life and you do not like change. You are a diligent planner and seek comfort in the routine things. Perhaps you should loosen up a little and do something spontaneous and totally unplanned - you might surprise yourself!

Ideal Partner: You get along well with banana and vanilla fans

Incidentally, Mrs. Netanyahu's preferred flavor: Vanilla. President Obama, on the other hand, is a fan of chocolate, perhaps explaining the two leaders' rather frosty relationship.

This morning, Russians in Chelyabinsk, an industrial city 950 miles east of Moscow, were jolted awake when a meteor exploded in the sky, producing shockwaves that shattered windows, set off car alarms, and injured at least 500 people. The meteor was traveling at 19 miles per second, according to Russian authorities, before exploding mid-air, likely as a result of the immense heat generated as a large object speeds through the atmosphere.

On the ground in Chelyabinsk, Russians witnessed a scene that must have seemed ripped out of an apocalyptic film, as a bright, flaming object suddenly appeared in the sky, streaked across the horizon, and unleashed a bone-rattling shockwave. The extraordinary developments were captured on video, in part through the automobile dash-cams that are nearly ubiquitous in Russia.

Below, we've compiled a selection of some of the best videos of the meteor shower, along with translations of the reactions of the stunned Russians on the ground. 

At 1:40, the speaker says that there was an extremely bright flash going across the sky. Once the blast can be heard he says, "What the hell? ... Something fell. Do you hear? You know what that was? It was supersonic. It must have been an asteroid, and that's the blast wave." At 2:38, the speaker exclaims, "What the fuck?" They look at the broken windows and say it's like something out of the war. Then, another speaker says, "It must have been a rocket or something." While they're cursing up a storm, one of his friends says, "It must have been the Chinese!"

The video below gives a sense of the magnitude of the blast's shockwave.

This video, shot across the border from Kazakhstan about 200 miles from Chelyabinsk, shows how far from the city the meteoroid could be seen.

The blast blew out windows in Chelyabinsk. The closed-circuit video below gives a sense of how many Chelyabinsk residents likely experienced the meteoroid.

This video of a street in Chelyabinsk, which doesn't capture the direct path of the meteoroid, shows how the meteoroid lit up the street, casting a veritable klieg light on an entire city block.

This video compilation shows how residents experienced the meteroid across the city, and includes footage from a Chelyabinsk school right after the explosion was felt on the ground.

In his State of the Union address last night, President Barack Obama announced that he would seek to raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour, a measure that would form the centerpiece of an agenda aimed at reducing incoming inequality in the United States.

That announcement got us wondering: How does the U.S. minimum wage stack up against the minimum wage in other countries? The answer depends somewhat on how one chooses to measure the minimum wage and the standard against which it is measured.

One handy way of comparing the minimum wage across borders is to measure it relative to  median full-time wages, which indicates the gap between the lowest wage earners and the mid-point of the income spectrum. On that measurement, the U.S. minimum wage is about 38 percent of the median, which is indicative of high levels of income inequality in the United States. Countries like Australia, Belgium, France, Ireland, and New Zealand have both higher absolute minimum wages and minimum wages that fall closer to median wages. In other words, living on the minimum wage in one of those countries puts an individual much closer to achieving a median income than it would in the United States. Unstated in all of this, of course, is that the United States is significantly wealthier than all of these countries. The graph below, courtesy of the International Labor Organization, illustrates the distribution.

Minimum wage levels in selected developed economies, in PPP$ and as a share of median full-time wage, 2010

If one looks at minimum wage from an hourly perspective, the picture is much the same. Of the 23 countries for which the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has data, the United States ranks 10th in hourly income in PPP dollars, a measurement of purchasing power that indicates how much stuff an employee can buy with an hour of work.

All this is to say that, relative to its wealth, the United States underpays its least-skilled workers.

Whether Obama's minimum wage initiative has the votes to pass a Republican-controlled House remains a fairly dubious proposition, but his advocacy on the issue might at the very least bring attention to the U.S. wage gap.

Just days after R. Jeffrey Smith reported at Foreign Policy that Barack Obama and his advisors were set to cut the U.S. nuclear arsenal by at least a third (from the 1,550 warheads allowed under an existing arms treaty to closer to 1,000), the New York Times is suggesting that the president could endorse such cuts in his State of the Union address on Tuesday. White House spokesman Jay Carney insists that Obama won't be unveiling any new, specific proposals in his speech, but that doesn't mean the president won't touch on nuclear disarmament more broadly.

"The big question is how to accomplish a reduction that Mr. Obama views as long overdue, considering that Republicans in the Senate opposed even the modest cuts in the new arms reduction treaty, called Start," the Times notes.

But here's another Big Question: What actually happens to those warheads if they're cut? After all, as Jeffrey Lewis and Meri Lugo pointed out at FP back in 2009, "you can't just leave the warheads out on the curb on Tuesday morning for the garbage collector to pick up." Fortunately, Lewis and Lugo went on to outline what nuclear arms reduction looks like in practice. The warheads suffer a slow death, equal parts mundane and perilous:

Retiring a weapon is accomplished through paperwork. If the weapon is in storage, it continues to sit there. Eventually, small steps begin to indicate its fate on the nuclear weapons equivalent of death row. Workers come along to remove the batteries and other so-called "limited-life components" that have to be regularly changed in active nuclear weapons.

At some point -- perhaps years later -- the Energy Department ships the weapon to Pantex, the central U.S. nuclear weapons factory near Amarillo, Texas. It is a homecoming of sorts because the weapon was most likely built there. Disassembly is the assembly sequence in reverse, with each step occurring in a precise order over a few days to a few weeks, depending on the type of bomb or warhead.

The work is time-consuming and dangerous. The warheads now undergoing dismantlement were not designed to come apart -- other than very rapidly, over the Soviet Union. Because nuclear weapons contain explosives and other hazardous materials, workers must take care to minimize health risks, for example berylliosis -- a lung disease caused by inhalation of the toxic metal beryllium.

Pantex has about 40 operational bays and cells in which teams of workers can take apart nuclear weapons. The most sensitive operations occur in so-called "Gravel Gerties" -- concrete buildings covered with gravel. In the event of an explosion, the building would collapse in on itself, burying the hazardous materials -- and the workers, who would not have survived the blast. Once the nuclear weapon is disassembled, the remains can be stored for future use in different weapons (as in the case of plutonium pits) or disposed of (the explosives are incinerated).

Obama might very well reiterate his vision for a world without nuclear weapons on Tuesday night. Just don't expect him to mention the part about paperwork, batteries, and years of painstaking disassembly.

The marching chant by Chilean sailors in the video above is the kind of thing that probably worked better in the pre-YouTube era. CNN translates:

"Argentineans I will kill; Bolivians I will shoot; Peruvians I'll behead."

The government has opened an investigation into the incident after the video surfaced, prompting complaints from the Argentinian, Bolivian, and Peruvian governments. The chant is likely to be particularly offensive to Bolivians, who are locked in a long-running dispute with Chile over the coastline they say was taken from them during a war in the late 19th century.

Veterans say the chant has been around for decades.