An Ada County, Idaho jury has decided how Ammon Bundy, Diego Rodriguez and associated companies should be held accountable.

Ihope that at least some of my readers are too young to remember this, but in the early 1990s, many Americans — especially pundits, but also business leaders and a fair share of the general public — were obsessed with the rise of Japan. Two of the bestselling books of 1992 were Michael Crichton’s novel “Rising Sun,” about what he imagined to be the growing, sinister influence of Japanese corporations, and Lester Thurow’s “Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle Among Japan, Europe and America.” It’s easy to forget now, but I like to remind people how airport bookstores were full of paperbacks with samurai warriors on their covers, purporting to teach you the secrets of Japanese management.

Healthy skepticism of authority is a very good thing — as power should never go unchecked in a democracy. But corrosive distrust of government of, by and for the people is a very bad thing — because pervasive cynicism, the reflexive belief that those we elect and the public servants beneath them have ulterior motives, leads to disengagement and division and drift. We therefore commend, with caveats, two legislative pushes in Washington to ensure that federal officials do more to earn the trust we put in them.

Was Tuesday supposed to be a turning point for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, the moment when he emerged from behind former President Donald Trump to lead the Republican Party toward a triumphant return to the White House?

Since news leaked out this week that In-N-Out, the $3 billion hamburger empire, will next month start enforcing an outright ban against employees choosing to mask at work, don’t feel alone if your first reaction was pure confusion. Who would possibly want a return of the bitter mask battles of 2020, the shouting matches in the public square, the frightening threats to public health workers?

Those who hope to become president of the United States should not play politics with the renaming of Army bases.

Atoddler, passed out from heat exhaustion and caught on a coil of barbed wire, pushed back without assistance by armed men. Desperate people denied water on orders from above, and left to die as a deterrent to others. These aren’t scenes from some UN observer report on a warzone, but details from a Texas state trooper’s email to a supervisor, obtained by the Houston Chronicle, calling the force’s border deployment “inhumane.”

President Joe Biden met with the Israeli president at the White House on Tuesday in an effort to bolster relations between the two longtime and vital allies. But the White House must do more to tamp down the anti-Israeli sentiment that frequently bubbles up in the party’s far-left progressive wing.

If you ask Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant AI system, whether Amazon is a monopoly, it responds by saying it doesn’t know. It doesn’t take much to make it lambaste the other tech giants, but it’s silent about its own corporate parent’s misdeeds.

After a recent meeting between U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and officials in Beijing, China released a statement demanding “practical action” over the issue of sanctions. The implication was that the punitive measures – imposed by the U.S. government on hundreds of Chinese individuals and entities over the past few years – impede any alleviation of the strained relations between the two economic giants.

Talks between the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and UPS over a new contract fell apart on July 5, 2023. The union and the shipping and logistics company are blaming each other for the collapse, which occurred a few weeks after 97% of UPS’s Teamsters voted to strike if the Teamsters and UPS don’t reach an agreement by midnight on July 31.

Extreme heat has been breaking records across Europe, Asia and North America, with millions of people sweltering in heat and humidity well above “normal” for days on end.

With the costs of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine already exceeding $500 billion, some Western governments are pushing to use frozen Russian assets to pay for an eventual reconstruction. The moral case for holding Putin accountable is clear. Unilaterally diverting Russian assets to Ukraine at this stage, however, would create more problems than it would solve.

When the U.S. Supreme Court recently voted to strike down affirmative action admissions programs at colleges and universities, it turned a spotlight on another system that has slid under the radar for far too long and also advantages some students over others on factors other than merit.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tried to get under Donald Trump’s skin this week by implying on a radio talk show that the ex-president arrogantly thinks he’s entitled to the Republican nomination and that he would be short-cutting the process if he doesn’t show up on the Milwaukee debate stage next month.

After months of teetering on the edge, it seems inflation is declining steadily, to the point where the specter of mega-price jumps erasing savings and putting families at risk of destitution is fading, with the Consumer Price Index falling from 4% to 3% last month.

Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville misses few chances to tout both his career as a college football coach and his love for the military. It’s all the more reprehensible, then, that Tuberville is single-handedly blocking the Pentagon from putting its best team on the field — and harming the country’s security in the process.

In the South and Southwest, and most intensely from Southern California to South Florida, a dangerous heat wave has gripped the nation, with 104 million Americans under a heat warning advisory. Records are being broken right and left: The first full week of July was recorded as the Earth’s hottest on record, and it followed the hottest June on record. Texas has been hit especially hard, with cities recording high temperatures of 110 degrees or more. This is not some minor inconvenience, but a dangerous and deadly circumstance, with hundreds of people sick and a dozen dying in the Lone Star State from heat-related causes this summer. On Thursday, the Maryland Department of Health also reported its first heat-related casualty of the summer: a 52-year-old man in Cecil County.

Remember when Republicans would boldly stand up to any attempts to tell capitalists how to run their businesses? The GOP still claims to be the pro-business party, but you wouldn’t know it from the way many in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail are harassing corporations for the sin of responding constructively to society’s evolution on issues like climate change and LGBTQ rights.

Let’s ask a simple question: should any credible presidential candidate be allowed to commit crimes unperturbed, no matter their severity or how flagrantly, openly and unapologetically they’re committed? Should a presidential candidate be able to, in effect, shoot someone on Fifth Ave. and have that dealt with only after the election?