As in other capitalist armies, poor treatment of the troops by their commanders led to widespread poor morale. One of the martyrs of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, Oliver Law, was apparently fragged by his own men out of fear that his enthusiastic incompetence was going to get them killed.

While Darius had a significant advantage in numbers, most of his troops were of a lower quality than Alexander?s. Alexander’s pezhetairoi were armed with a six-meter spear, the sarissa.

A skirmish between troops will be held at 2 p.m.

The fighting with machine guns and mortars raged around the stronghold of the Hilles clan, which is allied with Hamas rival Fatah. Loud explosions could be heard throughout Gaza City, and ambulances and police cruisers raced to the scene.

I find it interesting in that the Times’ Jerusalem Bureau Chief was in Gaza last week reporting on a museum, and apparently was unaware of any simmering tensions between Fatah and Hamas. It's possible that he wasn't looking for a story on those tensions

The museum hopes to receive a grant to pay the estimated $6,000 cost of restoring the document, said Sharon A. Smith, the museum's president and chief executive. This book is short but abundantly documents Wilson's entwining of faith and foreign policy.

These two works, and others like it recently (including Harry Stout’s Moral History of the Civil War ), make me wonder if faith will become a touchstone for historical studies of American foreign policy in the way that race recently, and justly, has become (as in the recent excellent works on race and international relations during the civil rights era).