Outside the Beltway

An old woman with no painting skills was allowed to restore an old painting. Oddly, it didn’t turn out very well.

A columnist for The Guardian says she wishes her mother had aborted her.

Eight of Cameroon’s 37 Olympians are “missing.”

Disseting the Romney visit to the UK and musing about the state of GOP foreign policy views.

Understanding the state of the GOP field requires recognizing that President Obama is actually pretty moderate.

R.I.P.

Time Magazine has chosen “The Protester” as its Person Of The Year. Let the outrage ensue.

There’s a little historical revisionism going on on the right.

From Europe, a case of regulation gone nuts.

From across the pond, an observation that the way we pick Presidents isn’t really that bad after all.

It’s time for another round of speculation about Iran and its nuclear program.

Our good friend Hamid Karzai, contemplating a war between the United States and our good allies Pakistan, says that he would of course fight with Pakistan.

Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire is being rocked by a second scandal, this one a scheme to inflate the circulation figures of the Wall Street Journal.

Last night’s speech at the Reagan Library did nothing to stop people from speculating about Chris Christie’s Presidential plans.

After months of fits and starts, it appears anti-Gaddafi forces are on the verge of victory.

It pays to read a scientific study before commenting on it.

Lost in the hubbub of S&P downgrading the US bond rating is news that the Italian government has the ratings agencies under criminal investigation.

A disastrous day for American troops in Afghanistan.

WSJ has a blistering editorial seeking to put the NewsCorp hacking scandal in perspective.

Real news reporting has never paid for itself. But the days of it being subsidized by the local car dealer are rapidly ending.

Our good ally Pakistan has publicly ordered us to leave a base used for “covert” CIA drone attacks.

Did a deal between the U.S. and Pakistan during the infancy of the war against al Qaeda play a role in the raid against Osama bin Laden?

One can almost hear the pitter-patter of American boots in the distance.

Nuclear power remains far safer than coal. The awful events in Fukushima must not spook governments outlawing atomic energy.

The uneasy coalition that coalesced around action in Libya will be strained by decisions to come.

America is about to enter a third war in the Muslim world with no clear idea of the end game.

Philippa Thomas has a fascinating take on how she broke the news of (now former) State Department P.J. Crowley’s condemnation of the Obama administration’s treatment of Bradley Manning.

A new site will identify news articles based on press releases rather than journalism.

It turns out the Iraq War was indeed based, in part at least, on a lie.

Bernie Sanders took to the floor of the Senate yesterday to rail against President Obama’s tax cut deal. It was history in the making, but it’s not clear that it actually accomplished anything.

Has WikiLeaks changed journalism forever?

WikiLeaks’ reveals that DynCorp, a government contractor, provided drugs and child sex slaves to Afghan police–and the State Department helped cover it up.

The Obama administration is banning hundreds of thousands of federal employees from calling up the WikiLeaks site on government computers because the leaked material is still formally regarded as classified.

The Feds famously got notorious mobster Al Capone on tax evasion charges. Will WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be done in by sex crimes?