In the end, it wasn’t one scandal or one explosive thread that led Polk County to pull the plug on social media comments. It was a slow accumulation of frustration: the false alerts that spread during emergencies, the personal insults aimed at elected officials, the threads that started with a simple question about road closures and ended in partisan warfare. On Tuesday, the Polk County Commission voted to disable comments on its social media pages, a decision that leaders said would restore the county’s ability to communicate clearly and protect residents from misinformation. Commissioner Bill Braswell had proposed the change…

At the headquarters of the Metropolis of Bessarabia in Chișinău, an encounter took place that carried more than the weight of an ordinary diplomatic appointment. It was last Friday, and two distinct worlds—the spiritual life of Orthodox Christianity and the institutional machinery of the European Union—sat down together around a table open to the future. His Eminence Metropolitan Antonie of Bessarabia received Iwona Piórko, the European Union’s Ambassador to the Republic of Moldova, with Igor Belei, social affairs adviser to the Archdiocese of Chișinău and Executive Director of the Diaconia Social Mission, also present. The setting itself was suggestive: a…