Beth Cole, a special adviser on violent extremism at the U.S. Institute of Peace, told CQ she liked much of what she was hearing about Lumpkin’s strategy for the Global Engagement Center. She said it was critical for the safety of local actors including citizen journalists, local nongovernmental organizations and sympathetic religious leaders that any aid from Washington be channeled through intermediaries such as larger nonprofits, so as not to expose them for accepting funding from the U.S....

A bomb exploded at an airport checkpoint in Somalia on Monday. But it's what the bomb was in that has the United States worried. The bomb was hidden in a laptop computer and shattered windows at the small airport north of the Somali capitol Mogadishu. 

Growing up, in Maplewood, New Jersey, where her father was a narcotics detective and her mother a special-education teacher, Ibtihaj Muhammad competed in softball, tennis, volleyball, and track. “In our family, you didn’t have a choice of whether to play sports,” she told me. “You only had a choice of what sports you played.”

The Obama administration is sending disaster response teams to northern Ethiopia to try to address a humanitarian emergency and avoid a national security risk to the U.S. should the drought there spiral out of control.

For the first time since its blitz across Syria and Iraq, in 2014, the Islamic State is on the defensive in both countries. Its caliphate, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is shrinking. Its numbers are down. It hasn’t launched a new offensive since May, 2015.

A powerful setback for hard-liners in Iran’s parliamentary elections may present President Hassan Rouhani with a golden chance to speed up his country’s reopening to the world and remake an economy long weakened by Western sanctions.

Iranians revel in political humor. Over the weekend, as election results began to show that long-entrenched hard-liners were losing, a new joke circulated in Tehran: Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had called Secretary of State John Kerry with an offer: “John, we have just succeeded in defeating our hard-liners. Let us know if you want advice on how to beat Mr. Trump.”

More than 30 million Iranians voted Friday in parliamentary elections. It is the first national ballot since the completion of a nuclear deal that led to the removal of most international sanctions. The elections are seen as pivotal – a referendum on president Rouhani’s reform agenda, support of the nuclear deal, and opening up more to the west. Preliminary results show reformists and moderates making significant gains.