As a shootout followed by a manhunt paralyzed Boston on Friday, Americans saw on live television how potent even modest terrorist plots can be. Though the facts are still coming in, it appeared that two brothers, perhaps with accomplices, may have carried out Monday’s deadly bombings at the Boston Marathon ...

The pointless kerfuffle in Charlotte over whether the Democratic Party platform would contain a reference to Jerusalem obscured the fact that the Obama administration and the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu continue to have a real and dangerous difference of opinion. The issue is not the location of Israel’s capital ...

Ostensible justification for a spate of Republican-sponsored voter ID laws — which would require voters to present government-issued photo ID at the polls — has been the threat of voter fraud, specifically, in-person voter impersonation. It has seemed likely, given the absence of evidence of such crimes, that the threat ...

It’s a measure of how low the budget debate in Washington has sunk that President Obama’s advocacy of grossly inadequate revenue increases now stands as an outpost of responsibility. Income-tax rate reductions that Congress enacted in 2001, 2003 and 2010 are scheduled to expire at the end of this year. ...

The aftermath of a national tragedy generally elicits two responses. The first is the expression of collective grief, a crucial element of the healing process. The second is the question, quintessentially if not uniquely American, of what can be done to prevent such events. Katrina launched a debate about hurricane ...

William Raspberry, who died Tuesday at the age of 76, demonstrated that civility and principle can co-exist, that passion doesn’t preclude compromise and that people can hold on to their convictions without insisting that anyone who disagrees is evil. His way of stating his opinions with an understanding that they ...

One of the great medical advances of the last century, the invention of antibiotics, is at risk of being lost. Increasingly, microbes are becoming untreatable. Margaret Chan, director general of the World Health Organization, warned in March of a dystopian future without these drugs. “A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, ...

The freak summer storm that laid waste to much of the mid-Atlantic on Friday night left chaos in its howling wake — and a mess of questions about the region’s capacity to cope with the unexpected. In Northern Virginia, where Verizon handles most 911 calls, emergency phone service simply did ...

The residents of Middleborough, Mass., have had enough. In a state with a storied history of Puritan-inspired prohibitions, they voted 183-50 in a town meeting last week to approve a proposal that would, among other things, impose a $20 fine on public profanity, First Amendment be damned. In a town ...

Thirty years ago today, on June 8, 1982, President Ronald Reagan delivered an address to the British Parliament that stands as one of the greatest of his presidency and a milestone in the final years of the Cold War. At a time when the Soviet Union seemed to be a ...

NATO’s “victory” in Libya, senior U.S. officials recently wrote, was a “model intervention,” a “teachable moment.” “The first lesson is that NATO is uniquely positioned to respond quickly and effectively to international crises,” the U.S. ambassador to NATO, Ivo H. Daalder, and NATO’s supreme allied commander, Adm. James G. Stavridis, ...

According to Rep. Daniel Webster, R-Fla., it is “intrusive,” “an inappropriate use of taxpayer dollars,” “unconstitutional,” and “the very picture of what’s wrong in D.C.” What manner of predatory government prompted Mr. Webster — supported by nearly all House Republicans — to issue such categorical condemnation? That intolerable federal boondoggle ...

Now DC is the subject, but it’s not unique. This is happenin’ round the country and it makes me freak. I wonder how things could get so out of control, and how hearts can turn so very cold. Set to the percussive rhythms of the go-go genre he pioneered, those ...

The formation by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of a new coalition comprising a parliamentary supermajority prompted hawks to conclude that he was laying the groundwork for a military strike against Iran. Doves speculated that the new cabinet was well positioned to reopen peace talks with Palestinians. In reality both ...

“The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.” So wrote Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia, the landmark case declaring unconstitutional the anti-miscegenation laws on the books ...

Next week, the Senate is set to spend considerable time figuring out how to pay for renewing an old campaign gimmick — keeping interest rates for certain federally backed student loans extra low at 3.4 percent. Doing so would be expensive; it would cost the government $6 billion to extend ...

One of the significant reforms in the health care law was to put private Medicare plans on a more equal footing with the traditional government program. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act altered the payment structure in which the private plans, known as Medicare Advantage, were essentially overpaid in ...