Oct 2, 2015 4 min read

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

Volkswagen has a habit of bragging about the superiority of “German engineering” in its advertising campaigns.

Apparently, those who wrote the ad copy didn’t realize just how good engineering could be. For at least seven model years, according to a recent bombshell delivered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the German carmaker has been engineering diesel-powered cars whose computerized controls were so sophisticated that they could turn on emissions controls during government tests and off for regular driving.

This was no innocent screw-up. This was an intentional fraud designed to skirt by U.S. emissions standards and allow Volkswagen to lie to its American customers that the carmaker figured out how to produce a diesel engine that gave great fuel mileage and was still environmentally friendly.

It’s going to take a while for Volkswagen to recover the trust it forfeited through its calculated dishonesty. Whatever business you are in, whether it’s making cars or publishing newspapers, the public’s trust is your most vital commodity. The public will tolerate unintentional mistakes. What it won’t tolerate is an orchestrated, planned, premeditated act of deceit.

As their dueling addresses to the U.N. this week made clear, President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin see the crisis in Syria in radically different ways. For Obama, Bashar Assad is a tyrant whose brutal repression of peaceful protesters led to a humanitarian catastrophe and who forfeited his right to rule. But Putin cast Assad as an indispensable ally in the fight against Islamic State.

Even so, there is enough potential common ground to justify the administration’s decision to pursue cooperation with Russia, both in combating Islamic State and in advancing a political settlement of the Syrian civil war.

More difficult will be winning Russian support for a political settlement in Syria. Despite the praise Putin offered at the United Nations for the “valiant” regime in Damascus, Russia might be willing to support a peace agreement in which Assad would eventually step down or at least agree to share power with opponents. The U.S. is right to explore that possibility.

For Obama’s GOP critics, this frustrating state of affairs is the result of the administration’s failure to pursue a more muscular policy both in Syria and in its relations with Russia. We remain unconvinced the U.S. could have turned the tide in Syria by arming Assad’s “moderate” opponents, a problematic strategy that became even riskier with the rise of Islamic State. Nor was it realistic to believe the U.S. could exclude Russia from discussions about Syria’s future.

Drug overdose deaths in Ohio skyrocketed again in 2014, and the glum news shows no signs of stopping. The culprit behind the 18 percent increase in drug overdose deaths over the prior year is heroin, but also a newer opioid – the painkiller fentanyl, or more specifically an illegal, synthetically manufactured version being smuggled into the state.

We have to scratch our heads, though, when we read about the puzzling measures like the one taken by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently. The FDA, despite its regulatory might, reversed a rule on the use of OxyContin for pediatric patients ages 11-16. The opioid previously was banned for this age group, but the FDA made an exception for patients receiving round-the-clock care and whose pain was not alleviated by any other painkillers.

As the federal government and states began to crack down on pain pills and flawed prescription practices, opioid addicts – who come from all walks of life – sought out heroin to fill the void.

It’s becoming more and more clear big pharmaceutical companies and the agency that approves the narcotics they manufacture may be just as culpable for this surge in drug overdose deaths as the average street dealer peddling these drugs into all corners of society.