On March 28, 2019, Michael McFaul testified before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The hearing, "Putin’s Playbook: The Kremlin’s Use of Oligarchs, Money and Intelligence in 2016 and Beyond” included testimony by Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University.

In virtually every country, antitrust agencies and regulators characterize US tech giants as monopolists. The press now refers to them as ‘big tech’, the ‘frightful 5’, or FAANGs (for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google). Do they deserve to be vilified as monopolists regulated like public utilities or even broken up?

Toward the end of Yemen’s previous civil war involving foreign actors, in the 1960s, it became increasingly clear that Egypt – whose armed forces were propping up the republican government in Sana’a – was dropping chemical weapons on northern Yemeni villages in its attempt to end the insurgency led by the country’s deposed imam. Images of dead and dying civilians circulated in London newsrooms, reports filtered back from foreign correspondents, and shell casing recovered from the scene was sent for examination to United Nations agencies.

As the end of 2018 draws near, we look back at a busy year of podcasting at the Hoover Institution.