In the wake of a Burmese military coup, Joe Biden is considering reinstating sanctions on Burma that his own Asia policy czar repealed. 
By Mark Hosenball, David Shepardson
CNN on Tuesday featured a Quincy Institute fellow known for making spurious claims about American Jews and the state of Israel. 
New data from the Department of Education show that several top-tier universities, including Yale and Cornell, failed to report more than $3 billion in foreign gifts and funds—many of which come from anti-American regimes such as China and Qatar.
Elliott Abrams, an experienced pro-freedom diplomat and future Washington Free Beacon Man of the Year contender, will take over as U.S. special envoy to Iran following the resignation of Brian Hook on Thursday, the 75th anniversary of the successful nuclear strike on the enemy port of Hiroshima.
Senator Chris Murphy (D., Conn.) admitted Tuesday that he secretly met with Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at an international security conference. 
Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg refused to say whether he supports current levels of military aid to Israel or keeping troops in Afghanistan, two of the many important foreign policy questions he dodged in a New York Times survey. 
A spokesman for the Charles Koch Institute said Wednesday that accusations a new think tank supported by Koch is harboring anti-Semites are “absurd” and “grossly mischaracterize the positions” of the organization. But he declined to defend the statements of affiliated scholars questioning the loyalty of American Jews, suggesting that some of them comprise a “fifth column” inside the United States, and promoting a conspiracy theory that Israel conducted a “false-flag” chemical attack on Syrian civilians. 
Launched in early December, the Quincy Institute entered the fray to a cavalcade of press from outlets including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico. While much ink has been spilled on the organization’s financial backers and its attempts to chart a new direction in U.S. foreign policy, less attention has been paid to whether it has managed to distance itself from the anti-Semitic bigotry that was intertwined with the America First Committee, of which Koch’s father, Fred Koch, was a prominent member, and that dogged the most extreme parts of the Bush-era antiwar movement. 
Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) on Thursday discussed a new bill that would discourage foreign leaders from taking Americans hostage.
