The prospect of Abdul Fattah al-Sisi becoming Egypt's President offers, at the minimum, the virtue of clarity. The Egyptian military, which on Monday "mandated" its Chief of Staff to stand for President, has never actually been out of power in the Land of the Pharaohs. Al-Sisi became its public face only on July 3 last year, the day the career soldier stepped before a microphone and announced the removal of the only freely elected government in the nation's thousands-year-old history.

The ecstatic cheers that greeted the announcement spoke volumes about Egypt's disenchantment with the clannish and tin-eared Muslim Brotherhood administration that al-Sisi sent packing. The adulation also demonstrated the comfort level of many ordinary Egyptians for being ruled by men in uniform. In many countries where a military coup has taken place, the etiquette calls for a firm suggestion that the top brass, having performed a distasteful but necessary duty, leave the field of politics and "go back to their barracks." In Egypt, the cry being heard after al-Sisi's nomination was: "The military and the people are one hand."

I want to apologize for this space being blank for quite some time. I actually spent the bulk of the last two days on a long blog post about the "Dr. V." story in Grantland. But then I got all the way to the end, and realized I was completely wrong about the entire thing.

So, I spiked my own piece. Now I've been in Talk Radio-style "This is totally dead air, Barry" territory for about two weeks. I could swear I saw a cobweb when I logged on this morning.

So thank God for Neel Kashkari, and the news that this goofball footnote caricature of the bailout era has decided to run for Governor of California. Never in history has there been an easier subject for a blog post.

If you don't remember Kashkari's name, you might be excused - he was actually better known, in his 15 minutes of fame five years ago, as "The 35 year-old dingbat from Goldman someone put in charge of handing out $700 billion bailout dollars."

Now you remember. That guy! Neel Kashkari when he first entered the world of politics was a line item, usually the last entry in a list of ex-Goldman employees handed prominent government and/or regulatory positions, as in, ". . . and, lastly, Neel Kashkari, the heretofore unknown Goldman banker put in charge of the TARP bailout program . . ."

Kashkari was not just a former Goldman banker handed a high government post - he was a former Goldman banker handed a high government post by a former Goldman banker, in this case former Goldman CEO and then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson.

Seeking to match a desire to make money with his environmental instincts, Louis Redshaw, a former electricity trader, met with five top investment banks to propose trading carbon dioxide. Only one, Barclays Capital, was interested in his proposition.

Three years later, the situation has turned around entirely, and carbon experts like Redshaw, 34, are among the rising stars in the City of London financial district. Managing emissions is one of the fastest-growing segments in financial services, and companies are scrambling for talent. Their goal: a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion, but which could grow to $1 trillion within a decade.

"Carbon will be the world's biggest commodity market, and it could become the world's biggest market overall," said Redshaw, the head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital. But he said that in his current job, unlike some of his previous ones, including a stint as a British power trader at Enron, "I don't have to compromise on anything when I get out of bed in the morning."

If greed is suddenly good for the environment, then the seedbed for this vast new financial experiment is London. A report released Tuesday by International Financial Services London, a company promoting British-based financial services, said that British companies were the leading global investors in carbon projects and that more carbon was traded in London than in any other city.

The gunman who killed 12 people in last year's rampage at Washington's Navy Yard convinced Veterans Affairs doctors before the shootings that he had no mental health issues despite disturbing problems and encounters with police during the same period, according to a review by The Associated Press of his confidential medical files.

Just weeks before the shootings, a doctor searching for the source of the gunman's insomnia noted that the patient worked for the Defense Department but wrote hauntingly "no problem there."

The AP obtained more than 100 pages of treatment and disability claims evaluation records for Aaron Alexis, spanning more than two years. They show Alexis complaining of minor physical ailments, including foot and knee injuries, slight hearing loss and later insomnia, but resolutely denying any mental health issues. He directly denied suffering from stress or depression or having suicidal or homicidal thoughts when the VA's medical team asked him about it just three weeks before the shootings, even though he privately wrote during the same period that he was being afflicted by ultra-low frequency radio waves for months.

The dichotomy between Alexis' apparently even-keeled interactions with his doctors and the torment he was experiencing outside the hospitals is the center of debate about whether the Veterans Affairs Department could have better recognized the need to intervene in his life with mental health care before the shootings.

Egypt will hold a presidential vote before electing parliament, President Adly Mansour said on Sunday, reneging on a roadmap and increasing the likelihood that army chief General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi will be elected as head of state within months.

Parliamentary elections were supposed to happen first under the timetable agreed after the army deposed Islamist President Mohamed Mursi in July following mass protests against his rule.

"I have taken my decision to amend the roadmap for the future in that we will start by holding the presidential elections first followed by the parliamentary elections," Mansour said in a televised speech.

At least five people have suffered serious gunshot wounds in the Thai capital, Bangkok, amid anti-government clashes ahead of Sunday's election.

The violence erupted during a stand-off between supporters and opponents of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra.

The shots were fired as demonstrators blockaded a building where ballot papers are being stored, in an attempt to prevent their distribution.

Protesters want the government replaced by an unelected "people's council".

The opposition has vowed to boycott Sunday's poll, which is likely to be won by Ms Yingluck.

Saudi Arabia has sentenced a Shia Muslim to 15 years behind bars and 70 lashes for protesting against the government.

According to Saudi newspapers, a court in the capital Riyadh convicted the man on Friday for demanding Saudi troops to leave Bahrain.

The man, whose name and age were not announced, was also banned from exiting Saudi Arabia for ten years after his release. He has the right to appeal the verdict.

On March 14, 2011, troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates invaded Bahrain to assist the Bahraini regime in its crackdown on peaceful protesters.

© APMcCain encouraging the protesters in Ukraine in December 2013

Ukrainian authorities have opened a criminal probe into an alleged attempt by the opposition to take state power.

Ukraine's security service launched the investigation on Friday after newly-obtained information revealed the country's mass protests were "pre-planned."

"An investigation for an attempted takeover of power has been opened," Maxime Lenko, head of the investigations department of the Ukrainian Security Service, said.

The probe was launched after investigators examined information stored on computers confiscated from an opposition party in December.

The information on confiscated computers of the Batkivschyna party revealed that mass anti-government protests and "the use of force against protesters... to undermine the authority of the president" were "pre-planned," Lenko noted.

Two billionaire brothers who have poured their fortune into a network of charitable organisations that are dedicated to supporting Republican causes and candidates have been drawn into an unusual and very public spat with the Majority Leader of the US Senate, Harry Reid.

Senator Reid, a Democrat, provoked a new round of recriminations when, in off-the-cuff remarks on the Senate floor on Thursday, he openly accused David and Charles Koch of "actually trying to buy the country" by funding the organisations. He was speaking in support of a White House-backed plan to place new disclosure rules on the groups and limits on how far they can involve themselves in politics while retaining tax-free status.

"What they're doing is spending their ... dollars on governor's races, and on the state level and, of course, spending huge amounts of money around the country attempting to defeat Democrats both in the House and the Senate," Mr Reid said. "The Koch brothers hide all their campaign efforts. They disguise themselves with rare exception as social welfare organisations, with all these fancy names going after people who are trying to improve the country."

The comments were sufficiently irksome to the Kansas-based Koch Industries, which has enormous holdings in mining, energy and chemicals, that it offered a rare rebuke. Philip Ellender, the president of Koch Companies Public Sector, said Mr Reid's "divisive remarks were not only disrespectful and beneath the office he holds, they were indicative of what lengths he and his Democratic allies will go to eliminate and silence their political opposition".

A recent study by the Washington Post and the Centre for Responsive Politics estimated that in the 2012 election cycle some 17 different Koch-backed groups, all under charitable social welfare status, spent a combined $400m (£240m) trying to influence the outcome of the presidential race and scores of other elections across the US.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) spent approximately $900 million over the last 5 years for behavior detection officers to identify high-risk passengers but, so far, according to the General Accountability Office (GAO), only 0.59% of the passengers flagged were arrested and among those not one was charged with terrorism - zero.

In 2003, the TSA started testing its Screening of Passengers by Observation Technique (SPOT) program, which was then fully deployed in 2007. About 3,000 behavior detection officers (BDO) "had been deployed to 176 of the more than 450 TSA-regulated airports in the United States" by fiscal year 2012 (Oct. 1, 2011 - Sept. 30, 2012), according to the GAO.

Those BDO officers are trained to "identify passenger behaviors indicative of stress, fear, or deception and refer passengers" and their baggage for additional screening, reported the GAO in its Nov. 8, 2013 report, Aviation Security: TSA Should Limit Future Funding for Behavior Detection Activities.

Since 2007, the TSA has spent approximately $900 million on the SPOT program, said the GAO.

During the SPOT screening, the TSA's behavior detection officers are supposed to look for and identify "high-risk passengers based on behavioral indicators that indicate mal-intent," said the GAO. The BDOs can refer the passengers to a law enforcement officer (LEO) for further investigation. From there, if warranted, a passenger (or passengers) can be arrested.