Aug 2, 2013 4 min read

Excerpts from recent editorials from newspapers in the United States and abroad as compiled by the Associated Press:

Bodybuilders who take steroids to “bulk up” their muscles sometimes suffer anger and other personality problems. “Roid rage” is a label applied to the phenomenon.

Perhaps that helps explain why a disturbed Florida man, Pedro Vargas, committed a gun massacre that left seven dead, including the gunman.

Vargas, 42, had no criminal or mental record – thus it was legal for him to possess all the murder weapons he wanted. Acquaintances said he took steroids for years while he lifted weights at a Hialeah gym. He was known for screaming at his mother and having difficulty with girlfriends.

The Hialeah massacre happened the same day as a West Virginia one. Clarksburg police say Sidney Muller, 27, went to a known drug house where something went wrong and he shot four people to death – including father-and-son newspaper deliverers who happened to be passing outside.

These mass killings made headlines because of the number of victims involved. But never-ending shootings across the nation kill thousands of Americans, a few at a time, drawing little notice. More Americans die from pistol murders than from wars.

As long as timid politicians do nothing to protect Americans from gun slaughter, killings like those at Hialeah and Clarksburg will keep occurring, randomly and unstoppably.

Facing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a few days ago, Samantha Power, President Barack Obama’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, surely didn’t expect to stir up the proverbial hornet’s nest.

Power told the committee that as America’s U.N. envoy, she believed in “contesting” what she described as a “crackdown on civil society being carried out in countries like Cuba, Iran, Russia, and Venezuela.”

That was truthful, if not exactly an exercise in delicate diplomacy, and it enraged Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro, the hand-picked successor of the late Hugo Chavez, the flamboyantly anti-American socialist. He demanded an apology.

The United States needn’t overreact to Maduro’s bravado, but it needn’t apologize for Power’s accurate characterization of Venezuela.

We suspect all this will fade away. Despite the ill will generated by Chavez, the United States remains a critical trading partner for Venezuela. And the United States is a major importer of Venezuela’s major export, oil.

Maduro’s tough talk probably is no more than that. In any event, such threats shouldn’t keep American diplomats from calling out oppressive regimes, however thin-skinned they may be.

One of the most reliable indications that things are not well in an economy or a society is a rise in street trading and increased harshness in enforcing the rules that control it. When people can’t find proper jobs or can’t stand the ones that are available, they go to the streets with a barrow-load of vegetables, a swatch of scarves or a tray of cheap plastic toys.

China and Tunisia are about as different as two countries could be. Yet that has not stopped Chinese critics likening the death of a watermelon vendor in Linwu, in Hunan province, two weeks ago, to the case of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruitseller whose suicide led to the fall of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali. Deng Zhengjia was apparently beaten up by chengguan, officials whose job is to keep China’s cities free of the untidy open-air commerce other Asian countries generally tolerate.

The Chinese concern with order verges on the obsessive, but it is especially problematic when it is combined, as it is, with serious corruption, reaching to the highest levels of party and government.

The corruption experienced by the average Chinese citizen is petty compared to what goes on higher up. In that stratosphere, the corrupt police the corrupt. Who in these circumstances is the corrupt, and who the corrupter?