Taliban Prisoner Swap Frees U.S. Soldier Held Nearly 5 Years  —  WASHINGTON — The lone American prisoner of war from the Afghan conflict, captured by insurgents nearly five years ago, has been released to American forces in exchange for five Taliban prisoners held at the Guantánamo Bay …

N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images  —  The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

THE PROBLEM ISN'T THE VA OR ERIC SHINSEKI … Eric Shinseki resigned today as a result of the unfolding scandal within the Department of Veterans Affairs.  This event became inevitable the moment that Shinseki sat down before the Veterans Affairs Committee of the United States Senate.

Prisoners of Sex  —  IN an ideal world, perhaps, the testimony left by the young man who killed six people in Santa Barbara would have perished with its author: the video files somehow wiped off the Internet, his manifesto deleted and any printed copy pulped.

Are Reform Conservatives Serious?  —  After Lyndon B. Johnson's landslide victory in 1964 and during the rush of progressive legislation that followed, Republicans decided they needed to respond with some proposals of their own.  It was the high tide of Great Society liberalism …

Investor, Bettor, Golfer: Insider Trading Inquiry Includes Mickelson, Icahn and William T. Walters  —  The divergent lives of a championship golfer, a high-rolling gambler and a billionaire investor have collided in a federal insider trading investigation.  —  Federal authorities are examining …

Laverne Cox Is Not a Woman  —  The world is abuzz with news that actor Laverne Cox has become the first transgender person to appear on the cover of Time magazine.  If I understand the current state of the ever-shifting ethic and rhetoric of transgenderism, that is not quite true …

Scalia's Genius and His Curse  —  When our sensibilities were fed from different sources, it used to be said that, with spring, “the voice of the turtledove has been heard in the land.”  But in these recent weeks the landscape has been filled with the sounds of “disinvitations” …

War Nerd: What's happening in Eastern Ukraine is very simple, rational, and straightforward … What's happening in Eastern Ukraine is very simple, rational, and straightforward.  —  Russia has what it wanted—Crimea, a Russian-majority peninsula with better beaches than the rest of Russia put together …