One of the mainstay tropes of fiction is sunken treasure: pirate treasure, ancient payrolls, treasure of the ancients... to quote The Goonies, "rich stuff". Gold. Gems. Artifacts. Stuff that would make Indiana Jones push his professorly duties off onto his overworked and underpaid grad students, grab his khakis, fedora, and bullwhip, and make a beeline for the middle of nowhere. However, since diving and its associated technologies have advanced over the years sunken treasures are growing more and more rare. Maybe there is only so much treasure to go around and a lot of it's been salvaged already. Maybe the …

At some point in the past year or two, twenty-five undercover CIA operatives traveled to Italy to abduct one Abu Omar, an Islamic cleric suspected of involvement in an act of terrorism in Milan back in 2003. However, they didn't follow secure communications procedures (or those same procedures need to be updated badly), and they were rumbled by Italian law enforcement, who are now trying the agents in absentia for kidnapping. Like many people these days, the operatives used cellular telephones to keep in touch with one another through the course of the op. Unfortunately, the prosecutor was able to …

It's just about the middle of January, and just now has winter come to DC. I don't want to say that it's cold or anything but we've gone from wearing t-shirts and shorts outside to frost on the windows and multiple layers of clothing because the temperature has been below freezing for much of the day. As if that weren't enough, the wind's been cold enough to feel like it's cutting right through you, and the pressure waves of cold air coming off of the Metro trains when they arrive at the station are enough to deaden one's sense of …