THE CHAIR OF the Metro board of directors announced Tuesday the launch of an independent review into the handling of an unsuccessful development venture on Florida Avenue NW, about which we have written several recent editorials. It is a welcome move but late. We point that out not to be churlish but because the failure to investigate sooner raises questions about District and Metro processes.

IN THE FALL of 2010, the Obama administration acknowledged a shocking truth: From 1946 through 1948, officials working in Guatemala for the U.S. Public Health Service conducted tests on some 5,100 unwitting individuals and deliberately infected at least 1,300 with sexually transmitted diseases. None of the victims — who included prisoners, soldiers, the mentally ill and commercial sex workers — consented to this barbaric treatment. At least 83 people died, and many suffered permanent damage.

THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION and other Western governments have rightly lambasted Russia and China for blocking action by the U.N. Security Council on Syria. The government of Vladi­mir Putin is particularly culpable for propping up the regime of Bashar al-Assad: In addition to vetoing a Security Council resolution, it has been supplying Damascus with weapons. In contrast, though it suffered a diplomatic defeat, the United States will ultimately reap the benefit of siding with the Syrian people. As President Obama said in a searing statement Saturday, by rejecting the regime and its criminal brutality “we stand for principles that include universal rights for all people and just political and economic reform.”

A NEW STUDY of the District’s public schools has the teachers union bristling about jobs, defenders of traditional schools fearing further gains for charter schools and some neighborhoods worrying their schools will close. Getting short shrift are the 14,236 children in the 46 schools where learning is judged so abysmal that projections show little or no improvement over the next five years. At the current rate of improvement, it will be 2045 before 75 percent of D.C. students are at grade level in math and 2075 before they are at grade level in reading. That’s unacceptable, and it is why we hope the information gleaned from this analysis will lead to new solutions.