Citizen Cartwright

Taliban in Afghanistan: A 'new worst-case' for the West

In "one of the most significant coordinated assaults on the government in years," the Taliban have attacked police and government facilities across several districts in northern Helmand Province, The New York Times reported over the weekend.

"With a deepening political crisis in Kabul already casting the presidential election and long-term political stability into doubt, the Taliban offensive presents a new worst-case situation for Western officials: an aggressive insurgent push that is seizing territory even before American troops have completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan," says the Times.

Is ISIS defeating al Qaeda when the war on terror couldn't?

One of the ironies of the current battle for Iraq is that for all the billions spent on the war on terror and lives lost, what ultimately may defeat al Qaeda isn’t the West but a group from within the jihadist movement, says The Washington Post.

Maybe.

But we're also seeing articles like this one from The Wall Street Journal suggesting that ISIS' brutality risks losing the hearts and minds of the people of territories it takes over.

"It's a debate within the movement in multiple ways, particularly about brutality. ISIS has alienated a huge chunk of the Syrian population, as it had alienated a big chunk of Iraq's population in 2005 to 2007," says Daveed Garrenstein-Ross, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

On Sunday, ISIS said it's establishing a caliphate, or Islamic state, on the land it controls in Iraq and Syria with its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as caliph and "leader for Muslims everywhere."

Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday took his first public stand in support of Kurdish independence, says The Jerusalem Post.

In a speech in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu said recent events have shown the dangers of a security strategy that's overly dependent on Western powers — and the importance of building a regional axis of cooperation with moderate forces in the Mideast.

Behind the Supreme Court's recent unanimous decisions

While the justices have unanimously agreed on 12 of the 16 decisions they've handed down in the past two weeks, their agreement on the outcome has sometimes been for different reasons, says the Los Angeles Times.

For example, in the unanimous rulings on President Obama's recess appointments and on Massachusetts' buffer zones for abortion clinics, the justices split 5 to 4 on the underlying legal issues, the Times notes.

“The justices are not more in ideological agreement than in past years,” says University of California at Irvine Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. “Scalia has not moved to the left, nor Ginsburg to the right. But in a surprising number of cases, they have found a narrow resolution where they can be unanimous.”

Worker nondisclosure agreements violating whistleblower laws?

The federal government has encouraged people to report wrongdoing ever since the Civil War, when Congress passed the False Claims Act to punish war profiteers, says The Washington Post.

But lawyers who represent whistleblowers say they're seeing a rise in the use of overly restrictive nondisclosure agreements that prevent employees from reporting fraud — even to government investigators.

Fear of retaliation for reporting fraud in the workplace is increasing, federal employees and workers on Wall Street say in surveys.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a leading advocate for whistleblowers, says he's discovered that most federal agencies have been failing to comply with anti-gag provisions of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act.

Under that 2012 act, federal agencies are required to notify employees that they'e obligated to report fraud allegations, even if they've signed nondisclosure agreements.

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Iraq's Maliki says Russian jets will turn the tide against rebels

"God willing within one week this force will be effective and will destroy the terrorists' dens," the prime minister says in an interview with the BBC.

Maliki says the process of buying U.S. jets has been "long-winded" and that the militants' advance could have been avoided if air cover had been in place.

He confirms in the interview that Syrian forces conducted airstrikes against Islamist militants at a border crossing between Iraq and Syria.

Iraq hadn't requested the strikes but "welcomed" them, he says.

What the Supreme Court said about recess appointments

The court unanimously ruled on Thursday that President Obama exceeded his constitutional authority in appointing officials to the National Labor Relations Board in 2012 when he declared the Senate to be in recess.

At that time, the Senate was holding pro forma sessions — convening but conducting no business — every three days precisely to prevent the president from making the appointments.

Justice Stephen Breyer said in his majority opinion that a congressional break has to last at least 10 days to be considered a recess under the Constitution.

But Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for himself, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, said he would have upheld the reasoning of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

That court said the only recess recognized by the Constitution is the once-a-year break between sessions of Congress — and that only vacancies that arise during that recess could be filled.

There may be few immediate practical effects of the ruling, given the recent overhaul of the Senate’s filibuster rules.

But "the decision was nonetheless momentous, involving a constitutional adjudication of the balance of power between the president and the Senate," says The New York Times.

Supreme Court unanimously rejects abortion clinic buffer zone

The court said the Massachusetts law mandating the buffer zone violated the freedom of speech rights of anti-abortion protesters.

The relatively narrow ruling allows the state to enact a new, less-restrictive law, says Reuters.

Where are you on the political spectrum?

Are you a "steadfast conservative," a "solid liberal," a "young outsider?" Or do you fit better in one of five other groups?

Here's a quiz for you to find out, put together by the Pew Research Center.

Pew says it's sorting people into the groups based on their attitudes and values, not their partisan labels.

The effort is based on the biggest political survey Pew has ever taken, of 10,013 adults.

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Massachusetts enacts highest minimum wage among states: $11 an hour

Federal health-exchange plans set to automatically renew

One in 10 deaths among adults linked to excessive alcohol use, CDC says

Howard Baker, former Senate majority leader and Reagan chief of staff, dies at 88