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Fox News Channel, tinkering for the first time in eight years with its popular early evening lineup, is replacing its 5 p.m. news broadcast, “The Big Story,” with an election-theme program for the foreseeable future. The network confirmed this week that “America’s Election HQ,” a program that displaced “The Big Story” temporarily last month, would continue indefinitely.

Ten years ago, in November 1997, 50 Swiss tourists rose early to visit the Valley of the Kings across the Nile from Luxor in Egypt. Suddenly from the hills came a group of Islamists. They shot, disembowelled and decapitated the tourists. It was just one of the many forerunners of 9/11 in 2001 in New York, 7/7 in 2005 in London or 11/M as the Spanish call the train bombings in Madrid in 2004. Today, as the killing in the name of extremist political Islamist ideology increases in tempo and intelligence agencies struggle to disarm those promised a passage to...

Senator Lieberman gave one important speech yesterday at Johns Hopkins University's Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, tracing the history of the foreign policy of the Democratic Party. "Confronted by the totalitarian threats first of fascism and then of communism, Democrats under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy forged a foreign policy that was simultaneously principled, internationalist, and tough-minded," he said. Back then, the Democrats were "a party that understood that a progressive society must be ready and willing to use its military power in defense of its progressive ideals, in order to ensure that...

The sub-prime mortgage mess which a few months ago we were assured would cause no more than a ripple in the economy because so many of the potentially bad loans had been securitized and the risk was spread and ... what's the official financial term for "blah, blah, blah?"

Somewhere in the Hamptons a high-roller is cursing his cleaning lady and shaking his fists at the lawn guys. The American poor, who are usually tactful enough to remain invisible to the multi-millionaire class, suddenly leaped onto the scene and started smashing the global financial system. Incredibly enough, this may be the first case in history in which the downtrodden manage to bring down an unfair economic system without going to the trouble of a revolution.

Karl Rove dreamed of creating a "permanent Republican majority." But as President Bush's longtime adviser exits the Washington scene, the political landscape he helped chart is already shifting beneath his feet: The era of conservative values -- a tight-fisted approach toward government aid to the poor, traditional positions on social issues and a belief in a muscular foreign policy -- that emerged in the 1990s is coming to a close.

When Omid Safi of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was asked recently by AP Press to comment on the Pew poll of American Muslims, which found that about a quarter of those between the ages of 18 and 29 approved of suicide bombings against civilians in at least some cases, he replied: “Given what’s happened in Iraq and Palestine, I would be shocked if there wasn’t discontent.” He expressed no outrage against the death of innocents, no blanket condemnation of a death-loving ideology. And, in academe at least, there was no reaction to Safi’s attempt to justify the...

Consider three criminal cases. No. 1: Christopher Newsom and his girlfriend, Channon Christian, both students at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, were carjacked while on a dinner date in January, repeatedly raped (both of them), tortured, and killed. His burned body was found near a railroad track. Hers was stuffed into a trash can. Five suspects have been charged. The crimes were interracial. No. 2: Three white Duke lacrosse players were accused in March 2006 of beating, kicking, choking, and gang-raping an African-American stripper, while pelting her with racial epithets, during a team party. No. 3: Sam Hays bumped...

NEW YORK -- Three weeks after I wrote that I thought John Edwards might be going someplace in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, I found out where he was heading: to the barber shop. The candidate, who has been looking pretty and pretty impressive in defining "Two Americas" -- one for the rich and privileged, a lesser place for everyone else -- came up with a wonderful device to show us all what he meant. His campaign spending reports, required by the Federal Election Commission, revealed that he has been paying $400 for haircuts by a Beverly Hills...

WASHINGTON, March 2: Members of the US Senate have urged the Bush administration to launch military strikes at alleged Al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan, prompting the Pakistani envoy in Washington to warn that such an attitude could bring down the present set-up in Islamabad. Senior Pentagon officials added fuel to the fire by claiming that their troops have already targeted Taliban and Al Qaeda sites inside Pakistan and that they have an agreement that allows them to do so. Senator Carl Levin, Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the panel would press the Defence and State departments...

<p>KARL von Clausewitz's statement in his book On War that "war is the continuation of politics by other means" has become a cliche. Like so many cliches, however, it achieved that status because it neatly encapsulates a fundamental truth.</p> <p>What we heard from President George W. Bush in his speech yesterday on a change of strategy in Iraq is a perfect reflection of the truth of what Clausewitz said. Bush's speech spoke of military strategy but it was really about politics: politics in the US and politics in Iraq.</p>

Iraq requires a military solution. That's not what the au fait class of jabbering media and pols says, as they repeat, reinforced by each other's dictums, that Iraq requires a political solution, whatever that means, but we don't find out because the analysis doesn't go much deeper than that. They just know that President George W. Bush's new plan for victory in Iraq must be a "political solution." The truth is that just about every war we've fought (except possibly the War of 1812) ended with a military solution. At least the ones we won. The Civil War didn't end...

If Winston Churchill is still loitering in the uplands of Purgatory (I have no particular information about such things), I wonder if he has had a chance to reconsider his famous dictum that, "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." Verily, it is odd that so many of my most disagreeable leftwing correspondents begin their attacks on me with this cliché, which they consider the most self-evident proposition in politics. Do they realize they are quoting Sir Winston? Surely they could find a similarly pacific line, from the many articulate pronouncements of the Rt. Hon. Neville. Yes, gentle reader,...

Cynics surely found the words of good will exchanged by the new speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the new House minority leader, John Boehner, at the opening session of the new Congress to be hypocritical and insincere. The two leaders are grizzled veteran pols, after all, who have not been known to be on close, much less candid, terms with each other over the years. But I know them both, and I believe they were speaking genuinely from the heart. The passage of power from one political party to another is an awesome thing for anyone who knows...

Every political, social and economic system ever created has sooner or later encountered a challenge that its very nature has made it incapable of meeting. The Confucian ruling system of imperial China, which lasted for more than 2,000 years, has some claim still to be the most successful in history, but because it was founded on values of stability and continuity, rather than dynamism and inventiveness, it eventually proved unable to survive in the face of Western imperial capitalism. For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable...

Suddenly, there's a new fad in discussing international affairs today, and it may be summarized as the "America is dead" school. Echoing Iran, Western - including US - analysts are claiming that recent events prove the United States is a pitiful, helpless giant. What the heck is this based on? The only two pieces of evidence seem to be the fact that the US has been unable to transform Iraq and Afghanistan into stable democracies in a brief span of time. And, one might add at the extreme limit, that it has not ended the Arab-Israeli conflict, defeated the forces...

Former President Jimmy Carter is a man of good intentions, whose tireless efforts - deeply rooted in his interpretation of his Christian duties - to promote world peace need to be recognized, even when they lead him astray. Thus, there is a tragic element in his present failure to grasp the full implications of his own positions and statements. At the root of the failure, as one might well conclude reading his new book - menacingly called Palestine Peace not Apartheid - is the honest urge to do something for the Palestinian cause. This urge then sadly translates into a...

Lofty stuff, this Texan of the Year designation. It would make sense, and it would be tempting, to afford my vote to some powerful figure who enjoyed notable success in 2006, from Gov. Rick Perry to any of the various people who engaged in noble or philanthropic pursuits, or one or more of the various Texans who have made us proud by fighting the war on terror. But with permission, I'll go a level deeper and identify a Texan who has become a lightning rod for every sentiment along the spectrum of opinion on one of the most compelling issues...

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday. The flying robot, nicknamed the "bionic hornet", would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said. It is one of several weapons being developed by scientists to combat militants, it said. Others include super gloves that would give the user the strength of a "bionic man" and miniature sensors to...

In recent months, among Republican insiders in Washington, the phrase that most applied to Montana Sen. Conrad Burns was “dead in the water.” Or “dead meat.” Or just dead. In any event, the not-too-hidden secret was that most of those insiders weren’t terribly unhappy about it. Never very popular, and singed by the Jack Abramoff scandal, Burns was an endangered Republican who didn’t have a lot of defenders. But now GOP control of the Senate appears to be hanging by a thread. And to nearly everyone’s surprise, that thread might be Conrad Burns.