Feb 21, 2014 4 min read

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

The U.S.-backed Syrian peace talks collapsed in a heap without ever getting started. Over two weeklong sessions, the sides couldn’t even agree on an agenda, much less utter a single constructive word about how to end the raging civil war. The diplomats didn’t even attempt to salvage the wreckage by scheduling another session.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday came word of escalating government bombing of rebel-held parts of the Syrian city of Aleppo, sending hundreds of thousands of civilians fleeing in one of the largest refugee surges of the civil war. Civilians in rebel enclaves of the city of Homs and elsewhere are being starved of food and medicine by government forces.

In other words, a terrible situation keeps getting worse.

Last week, President Barack Obama admitted that hope for a negotiated settlement is fading fast. The U.S. is now considering several options, including paying salaries to some rebel forces and providing more intelligence and transportation to them, The New York Times reports.

Obama needs to make good on his promises. Assad won’t leave because Obama says it is time for him to go. He will leave when he has no other options. Right now, that moment looks to be a long way off.

Raising the nation’s debt ceiling should be routine. This allows the federal government to pay its bills – obligations substantially imposed by Congress.

But this has become not so routine. Last week, the House majority’s leadership needed the House minority to muster enough votes to accomplish even this boilerplate legislation. That so much effort was required to accomplish what should be so routine says much about the dysfunctional state of Congress these days. But in this drama, some sanity emerged. Our hope is that it lasts.

House Speaker John Boehner prevented another useless display of brinkmanship by outwardly defying his own caucus, which secretly wanted to avoid another crisis but didn’t want to take the heat for raising the debt ceiling.

And the same dynamic existed in the Senate, where Texas’ own John Cornyn joined Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to get past the 60 votes to clear a procedural hurdle to get the bill to the floor.

The GOP caucuses likely won’t admit it, but Boehner, McConnell and Cornyn all took one for their team. And helped the nation.

But here’s the biggest takeaway. Important legislation got approved in the House because the speaker allowed a floor vote. And it got approved in the Senate because a few Republicans finagled the bill onto the floor for a vote.

So, how many meaningful measures might now be law with the kind of straight-up votes that occurred here? Imagine: members of Congress running in this midterm election on accomplishment rather than obstruction.

Former High Court judge Michael Kirby’s account of the “unspeakable atrocities” being committed in the North Korean gulags deserves better than the contemptuous response it has received from China, the one country with the leverage to compel the lunatic regime in Pyongyang to behave differently.

As the report concludes, the depredations committed by the Kim dynasty have “no parallel in the contemporary world”. The depravity is reminiscent of some of the evil perpetrated by Nazi Germany and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. The accounts tell of children forced to watch the execution of their parents, starved humans being fed to dogs, the “disappearance” of entire families, inmates in camps being disposed of in pots and starvation being used as a tool of subjugation.

The UN panel’s account is the most comprehensive indictment yet of horrors that have been taking place for decades. China’s new leadership cannot escape responsibility for what is still occurring in its neighbor.