MassLive, the online arm of The Springfield Republican, has the article US Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey oppose President Obama’s Syrian rebel training plan.

U.S. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey on Thursday broke with the president and opposed the request to train and arm the rebels for a war against Islamic state militants.

The Senate approved the request late Thursday on a 78-22 vote.

Warren said she wasn’t convinced the proposal to train and equip Syrian rebels advances U.S. interests or that it would be effective in pushing back Islamic State fighters.

“I remain concerned that our weapons, our funding, and our support may end up in the hands of people who threaten the United States,” Warren said in a statement. “I do not want America to be dragged into another ground war in the Middle East.”

I was thrilled to hear that my favorite Senator, Elizabeth Warren, has finally showing signs of developing independent judgment on foreign policy matters.  Through years of hard fought battles, Elizabeth Warren learned to be skeptical of the domestic policy statements of the powers that be.  I am glad to see that she now realizes that the propagandists on domestic matters don’t just automatically become honest brokers when they speak on foreign policy.

Naked Capitalism has the article European Union Court of Justice Imposes Anti-Rasmussen Rule – Sanctions Cannot Be Imposed by Reason of Fabrication, Lies, Dissimulation.

For the second time, the EU court has ruled that sanctions are illegal if they are based on allegations which cannot stand up in court. With an irony yet to be tested in the US, the EU court has also ruled that state organizations and companies targeted by sanctions have the same human right to due process, as human beings, Russian dissidents, and Americans.

The ruling ends two years of proceedings in Luxembourg. The Iranian central bank’s case was that EU sanctions were unlawful because they were based on evidence which was in error; because they violated the EU’s obligation to give defensible reasons for its action; because the EU had violated fundamental human rights, including the protection of property, the right of defence, the right to effective judicial protection, and the right to proportionality between act and penalty.

It is nice to see that a court thinks that truth matters. I think the court goes a little far in jumping to the conclusion that because a corporation is called “a legal person” in some laws, that this automatically determines what rights a corporation has compared to what rights “an actual person” has. It is true that “a legal person” has some similarities to “an actual person”, but it is also true that there are some differences. To ignore this truth is as bad ignoring the truth (or falsity) of allegations.

Other parts of the article cast significant doubt on our stance on Russia and the Ukraine.