The cause of the clashes that have killed at least 23 people in Cairo since Saturday is easy to identify: It is the failure by Egypt’s military rulers to unambiguously commit themselves to a plan and a timetable for handing over power to a democratically elected government. The solution is equally...

What next, now that the congressional supercommittee has failed? Depressingly, the answer is: not much, at least in the short term. Absent some intervening, cataclysmic event, the debt-reduction can has been kicked once again — this time, until after the election. At that point, the Bush tax cuts ...

“Heroin is here, and we have never seen it like this before,” Carol Falkowski, drug abuse strategy officer for the Minnesota Department of Human Services, said in a recent front-page Pioneer Press report. That’s not cause for panic, but it is cause for notice. Before 2000, heroin was a “non-...

Penn State coach Joe Paterno is gone. So too is the university’s longtime president, Graham Spanier. The Nittany Lions are gearing up for a game this week against Ohio State, having lost Saturday’s home game against Nebraska. Students are refocusing attention on their studies. Things seem to be ...

Most Minnesota property owners’ Truth-in-Taxation statements are arriving in the mail. And this year they reflect some hard truths. Topping that “truth” list is how any “tax credit” essentially creates winners, losers and confusion. Gov. Mark Dayton and the Legislature hammered that truth ...

Imagine that a U.S. soldier is captured and subjected to waterboarding. Would Herman Cain and Rep. Michele Bachmann consider that torture? Maybe not, given their disappointing responses to a question about waterboarding posed during Saturday’s Republican debate. And if they did object to the soldi...

The dedication of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial was a beautiful and proud moment for the United States. Now Americans will begin the process of getting to know their newest monument, visiting by day and night, meditating on the words carved in stone....

The International Atomic Energy Agency has now spelled out in detail what governments around the world have known for a long time: Iran’s nuclear program has an explicit military dimension, aimed at producing a warhead that can be fitted onto one of the country’s medium-range missiles. In a 14-p...

Of all the sins of omission committed by Penn State University in its alleged mishandling of sexual assaults, perhaps the most unforgivable was the failure to find the young boy who was seen being victimized in 2002. It seemed not to occur to anyone to try to identify this child or to consider that ...

The Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in a case about the birth of a child in the Holy Land. It had nothing to do with religion but was just as fraught with controversy....