In the photo, Daniel Tragerman stands proudly next to his Lego tower. He wears a blue-and-white Lionel Messi jersey, dark shorts and sandals; brown bangs tickle his forehead, and he looks at us with a charming half-smile. He seems, like most four-year-olds, soft, innocent and irresistibly huggable.
The State Department says that Islamic State terrorists were not sending the United States a message when they beheaded American photojournalist James Foley.
Uh, yes, they were.
On Tuesday, Russian president Vladimir Putin will meet with his Ukrainian counterpart, Petro Poroshenko, in Minsk, Belarus in an effort to bring an end to the crisis in Ukraine. The summit is shaping up to be a critical turning point in the six-month-old conflict over the soul of Ukraine.
American politician and poet Eugene McCarthy once said that the media are like blackbirds on a telegraph pole. Once the impulse goes through, they all jump in the same direction. Fortunately for McCarthy, the Washington punditocracy was not as developed then as it is now.
Is America headed back to Iraq? On August 7, President Obama took the first step in that direction when he authorized the use of air strikes to prevent the further advance of the militant Islamic group once known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) and now known as the Islamic State. Since then, the U.S. military has commenced a limited bombing campaign against Islamic State detachments in northern Iraq and added 130 military advisers to the 300 already stationed in the country.