National Commentary

WASHINGTON — Charles and David Koch are reportedly considering buying the Tribune Company (owners of the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and others) prompting a great Garance Franke-Ruta piece in the Atlantic on why big city newspapers’ editorial staffs invariably lean left.

Across-the-board federal spending cuts — “sequestration” — have started to impinge on air transportation. Furloughs to Federal Aviation Administration air-traffic controllers, which the Obama administration says are legally unavoidable, began Sunday, causing flight delays. On Monday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., announced that the relatively modest impact so far is just the “first taste of the pain of sequestration.”

Between Sept. 12, 2001, and last Monday, some 52 cases came to light in which the United States itself has been, or apparently has been, targeted for terrorism by Islamist extremists, whether based in the United States or abroad.

As a shootout followed by a manhunt paralyzed Boston on Friday, Americans saw on live television how potent even modest terrorist plots can be. Though the facts are still coming in, it appeared that two brothers, perhaps with accomplices, may have carried out Monday’s deadly bombings at the Boston Marathon and then forced the shutdown of the city on Friday as police worked all day to take one of them into custody. If the intention of the alleged bombers, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his 19-year-old brother, Dzhokhar, was to terrorize and disrupt, they arguably succeeded, despite what appeared to be relatively crude tactics.

The Boston Marathon bombings marked the end of any expectation Americans have of privacy in a public place. Increasingly, they have lower expectations of privacy in nonpublic places, too.

A Boston firefighter, one of many who rushed in to aid bomb victims last Monday, told a TV interviewer, "We will win. I promise you, we will win."

In pursuing current events, as in playing cards, evaluating the wider atmosphere is as important as studying the specific hand one has been dealt. Our current focus on North Korea’s alarming rhetoric, and China’s caution in efforts to rein in its problem child, is understandable. As a complement, consider developments in wider Asia.