International military exercises “Summer Shield 2019” officially began this week in Latvia. The exercises will take place from May 13 to 25, reported mil.lv.

Is John Bolton about to get the Iran war he's always wanted, or is he on the verge of losing his job? Over the past several days, President Trump's national security adviser has made comments and issued statements about Iran and Venezuela that are usually reserved for the run-up to military campaigns. Yet Bolton's boss doesn't seem to be playing along. Let's hope so.

When I attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in 2002-3, the leadership training was excellent. It included discussion of the British Army’s values and the laws of armed conflict. However, I received no ethics training for the occasions when neither values nor laws would fully prepare me to make complex moral decisions in faraway fields populated by people with very different cultural norms.

The U.S. Navy has drafted a procedure to investigate and catalogue reports of unidentified flying objects coming in from its pilots. But the service doesn't expect to make the information public, citing privileged and classified reporting that is typically included in such files.

Our new Middle East war just wouldn't be the same without you!

How should we read Thucydides? By Johanna Hanink.

In the 1980s, people across the US created panels for a quilt that ringed the Pentagon in a protest against nuclear war. Each panel represented what the maker could not bear to lose, but would lose, in a nuclear war. I contributed a panel with representations of my family members, animals, trees, and the natural landscape.

Shigeaki Mori was 8 when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He survived and committed himself to uncovering the names of all those who died — including 12 American POWs.

The Real News

Lest we forget what? What exactly? And who is this “we?” By George Theodoridis.

The U.S. has spent over $5.9 trillion on wars that have directly led to the deaths of close to 500,000 people since the 9/11 attacks in September 2001. Around 370,000 died due to direct war-related violence, while several times more died as a result of the indirect effects of war such as malnutrition and damaged infrastructure, according to Costs of War, an annual research project published by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

In an extraordinary and sobering report meant to educate the nation on a growing threat, a new military study warns that an electromagnetic pulse weapon attack such as those developed by North Korea, Russia, and Iran could essentially challenge the United States and displace millions.

There could be no more consequential decision than launching atomic weapons and possibly triggering a nuclear holocaust. President John F. Kennedy faced just such a moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and, after envisioning the catastrophic outcome of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange, he came to the conclusion that the atomic powers should impose tough barriers on the precipitous use of such weaponry. Among the measures he and other global leaders adopted were guidelines requiring that senior officials, not just military personnel, have a role in any nuclear-launch decision.

America’s muddled involvement with Syria. By Charles Glass.

While I was embedded with the US Army in Iraq, I heard a story about two soldiers killing a child in cold blood. I've spent 16 years trying to find out the truth.

Radio War Nerd

How a terrible but little-known conflict continues to shape and blight a nation

Ramadan Romih, the heavyset manager of the White House Net, an Internet café up the street from the U.S. embassy in Cairo, sat on a chair on the sidewalk outside his shop, smoking a large tobacco water pipe.

The Cairo-based photographer Moises Saman has been covering the Arab Spring and its repercussions since the revolution’s inception. “The past two years in Egyptian politics have been like a turbulent soap opera, playing out on the streets of Cairo for all the world to see,” he told me.

President Francois Hollande says French troops are taking part in operations against Islamists in northern Mali.

Child soldiers in Syria are involved in shelling, airstrikes, and sniping. They've also been subject to arbitrary arrest, torture and rape, as reported by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry..

Former president and ex-interior minister to face new trial for complicity in killing of protesters in 2011 uprising.

Photographs from Vietnam in 1963, when America was escalating its involvement in a conflict that would, in time, come to define an era.

The photo shows the bomb's mushroom cloud split into two distinct portions, one on top of the other.

A local photographer got more than he bargained for when he bought an antique camera unknowingly loaded with vintage photographs of the World War I era.

More than 80 people have been killed by two blasts in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, activists and officials say. The explosions reportedly struck an area between the University of Aleppo's halls of residence and the architecture faculty on the first day of exams.

Human rights advocates question whether US-manufactured ammunition and helicopters were used against civilian protesters.

Everything you think you know about those 13 days is wrong.

Innocence" lay for 11 hours in the rubble of a building flattened by an aerial bombing Saturday until neighbors dug her out alive.

Breaking North Korea News, Opinion, Culture & Curiosities + Professional, Academic & Student resources on North Korea / DPRK

Britain's Prince Harry has acknowledged that he killed Taliban insurgents on his latest tour of duty in Afghanistan as a crew member of an Apache attack helicopter.

Escalating tensions among China, Japan and the U.S. could ignite armed conflict -- and sink the global economy.

North Korea said on Thursday it would carry out further rocket launches and a nuclear test that would target the United States, dramatically stepping up its threats against a country.

Forty years after the Paris Peace Accords were signed in January 1973, LIFE.com revisits one of the most indelible, searing photographs made during the long, divisive war in Vietnam.

The idea that we are not so different from our enemies is one of the undercurrents of Justin Barton's photographs of former Cold War Intercontinental Ballistic Missile launch sites. Graphically composed, Barton's shots of the silos' interiors downplay national identity.