Read Washington Monthly editor-in-chief Paul Glastris’s editorial on the Olympics in the Washington Post.
North Carolina is interesting right now because the Attorney General is running to defeat the governor, and the governor needs the Attorney General to appeal rulings that have gone against him in things like reinstating Jim Crow-style voter suppression laws and making it legal to discriminate against gays. Needless to say, the Attorney General is not being very helpful in that regard.
Someone (Assad? Putin?) is lobbing chlorine gas (or something toxic, anyway) out of helicopters on civilian towns in Syria.
I feel like we’ve been waiting to see an effort to liberate Mosul for a very long time. It sounds like we still a long time, yet, to wait.
It seems like a lot of Turks are convinced that the United States is responsible for the coup attempt there and the government is encouraging folks to take that view. I honestly don’t think the U.S. was behind it, but we do have the guy who is supposedly responsible for the uprising living in Pennsylvania, so unless we’re going to turn him over I don’t expect America to be too popular there for the foreseeable future.
The Japanese are concerned that North Korea is getting pretty advanced both in their missile technology and in their ability to miniaturize nuclear weapons down to a point that they can be mounted on their missiles.
Will anti-trade sentiment sink an effort by Australia and Indonesia to strike a free trade deal?
Amid persistant unrest, Mali extends its State of Emergency until April 2017.
The Pope is setting up a panel to investigate whether or not women can serve as deacons but still is not even considering whether they can serve as priests. Baby steps, I guess.
Have a pleasant evening.
