Stay true to the dreams of thy youth

I'm in California enjoying the warm beach and the company of good friends, so my reading list is a bit light for the previous days.

• Guard troops to head to border states Aug. 1 - AP

  "National Guard troops will head to the U.S.-Mexico border Aug. 1 for a yearlong deployment to keep a lookout for illegal border crossers and smugglers and help in criminal investigations, federal officials said Monday. The troops will be armed, but can use their weapons only to protect themselves, Gen. Craig McKinley, chief of the National Guard Bureau said at a Pentagon news conference. The troops will undergo initial training and be fully deployed along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border by September."

• A special report on Egypt: The long wait - The Economist

• Man convicted of rape for consensual sex with woman but told her he was Jewish (English) - Ali Abunimah

  "Jail time for Arab who impersonated a Jew and raped through fraud A court sentenced a resident of East Jerusalem who lied to a young woman and told her that he was Jewish in order to have sexual relations with her to a year in a half of prison time. “Protect the public from such criminals.”"

• China Becomes World's Biggest Energy Consumer - WSJ

  "China is now the world's biggest energy consumer, knocking the U.S. off a perch it held for more than a century, according to new data from the International Energy Agency. The Paris-based agency, whose forecasts are generally regarded as bellwether indicators for the energy industry, said China devoured 2,252 million tons of oil equivalent last year, or about 4% more than the U.S., which burned through 2,170 million tons of oil equivalent. The oil-equivalent metric represents all forms of energy consumed, including crude oil, nuclear, coal, natural gas and renewable sources such as hydropower."

• Netanyahu: 'America is a thing you can move very easily' - Checkpoint Washington

  ""I know what America is," Netanyahu told a group of terror victims, apparently not knowing his words were being recorded. "America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction. They won't get in their way." Netanyahu also bragged how he undercut the peace process when he was prime minister during the Clinton administration. "They asked me before the election if I'd honor [the Oslo accords]," he said. "I said I would, but ... I'm going to interpret the accords in such a way that would allow me to put an end to this galloping forward to the '67 borders."