Offers and demands (a slight return)

Well, that has to be a relief. Wednesday afternoon, the Middle East was "on brink." By Thursday morning, it was merely "rattled," though apparently by the same image:

A.J. Liebling would be pleased, in his way, to note that one side in this confrontation "threatens," while the other "condemns" -- or merely "vows" that it's "locked and loaded." Let's turn the microphone over to another great midcentury American commentator for today's example of the "realism-free zone": If you offer to poison your sister, why are you surprised when she threatens to poison you right back?

 

A million here, a million there ...

Yes, I'd say that at 48 kilometers, "towering" barely begins to do it justice:
 

YUMA, Ariz. — On a dirt road past rows of date trees, just feet from a dry section of Colorado River, a small construction crew is putting up a towering border wall that the government hopes will reduce — for good — the flow of immigrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border illegally.

Cicadas buzz and heavy equipment rumbles and beeps before it lowers 30-foot-tall (48-kilometer-tall) sections of fence into the dirt. “Ahí está!” — “There it is!” — a Spanish-speaking member of the crew says as the men straighten the sections into the ground. Nearby, workers pull dates from palm trees, not far from the cotton fields that cars pass on the drive to the border.

True it is that everybody's going to count the toes and forget to divide by 10 at some point; the AP isn't the first to get its zeroes and decimal points crossed up in those pesky metric conversions. The more likely sign of the apocalypse is that nothing's built into the system any longer to catch a wire blunder before publication. (The screen grab is from the AP's own site; the text from Military Times.)