Pyrotechnics inside a crowded nightclub with one exit? What a terrible idea. A musician shot off fireworks during a concert jammed with well-to-do college kids, starting a fire, and then a stampede, that left nearly 250 people dead in a disaster politicians are bemoaning as a national tragedy.

But in Bangladesh, where seven people died in yet another fire and stampede at a locked garment factory, it was mostly considered business as usual.

Big Gun is copycatting Big Tobacco—putting guns in the hands of little kids in hopes of raising a new generation of shooters and freedom-lovers.

The president says we need to we need to nod politely and smile when rednecks try to tell us that a return to Ronald Reagan-level gun control is somehow tantamount to an assault on "freedom" and the "constitution."

The Pentagon is increasingly helping France help the Mali military help itself against Islamists who control a large patch of the Sahara desert.

Russia, as you all know, loves Syria's Bashar al-Assad, like, so goddamned much. But even Russia is now publicly bracing for a world where that Assad-sized hole in its heart goes unfulfilled.

"Hunger" is by far the first word we should think of when North Korea comes to mind (yes, followed closely by "nuclear"). But maybe be skeptical about tabloid-fanned reports of cannibalism and murder in the country's starving drought flats and forced-labor camps.

The secretive Republican billionaires who wasted millions trying to take down Barack Obama are now wasting millions trying to smear the president's nominee for secretary of defense.

Another liberal's retirement in a red/purple state—Tom Harkin in Iowa, this time—has slightly increased the GOP's long-shot odds of claiming the Senate in 2014. And ruining the president's second term.

Immigration reform, pushed by a bipartisan group of congressional types on Sunday talk shows, will include some sort of magic wand that turns "illegal" people into "legal" ones.

And their money would be the "Rand!" Detroit is about to decide whether some billionaires can rent an island park and settle a free-market, private utopia.