For weeks, the U.S. presidential campaign has been unfolding with truly disturbing indifference to the outside world and its dangers. That changed with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Thursday.
On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been wrestling to determine whether her (non-existent) “experience” should matter more than his (self-invented) “identity.”
On the   more

A decade ago, Columbia University geologists William Ryan and Walter Pittman proposed an arresting explanation of the story of Noah’s flood:
Eight thousand years ago, what is now the Black Sea was a freshwater lake, much smaller and much shallower than today’s inland ocean. Early farming communities grew up on the shores of this lake.
As they   more

MY NAME is David Frum, and I am a blogger. Every day I post some hundreds of words of commentary at the National Review website-often (to fulfill the clichŽ) while still wearing my pajamas. But I am also a proud, suit-wearing member of the foreign-policy community, with my very own office in a think tank   more

This is a difficult hour for the United States. ItÕs not just the strain of war. On domestic issues, too, discontent runs strong. The incomes of ordinary Americans have stagnated over the past six years. Health-care and energy costs have surged. In many cities, gang violence has surged. Over two-thirds of Americans now describe the   more

Since the 1960s, conservatives have chafed and seethed against liberal elitism.
Liberals have used their influence in the courts and government bureaucracies to win political victories they never could have won at the ballot box. Conservatives have reacted by turning to populism–to a defence of the commonsense wisdom of ordinary voters against the pretensions of know-it-alls.
Conservatives   more

America’s new intelligence estimate on Iran changes nothing–and it changes everything. Last week, the Bush administration released large portions of its latest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear program. The NIE concluded that Iran had shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003.
The NIE cautioned that there remained much to worry about. Iran   more

Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control released some rare good news in the struggle against obesity: For the first time in a generation, things are not getting worse.
One-third of all American men–and more than one-third of American women–are obese. Not just a little large, but seriously fat.
That’s more than twice as many as   more