The race between Democratic incumbent Raphael Warnock and Republican challenger Herschel Walker in Georgia may determine which party controls the U.S. Senate. It will also show how much voters care these days about character. My guess: more than the cynics say.

The world might not want to hear it, but Kim Jong Un might be right.

Is the COVID-19 pandemic over? President Biden’s answer is yes no yes no. The latest example of politically convenient pandemic schizophrenia came Thursday when the Department of Health and Human Services again extended the official public-health emergency, this time through January.

Generals are often criticized for fighting the last war. What about central bankers who seem unable to grasp the lessons of the last emergency, still less to anticipate the next one? By putting central banks in charge of the response to the current crisis, governments risk a worldwide recession precipitated by excessive rate rises.

The 104-minute speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the country’s 20th party congress reveals a leader who believes he is on a historic mission to save China’s self-described socialism in the 21st century.

As the weather gets colder, Americans hunker down for a third winter marred by COVID-19 — a virus everyone would gladly erase from our memories. But we can’t, because the bug is still taking about 400 American lives per day. Annualized, that works out to more than Alzheimer’s or diabetes and about triple the total killed by influenza and pneumonia combined.

The Jan. 6 select committee has proved beyond any doubt that Donald Trump incited and prolonged the mob violence that meant to subvert Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in a scrupulously fair election.

The news last week that former presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard was leaving the Democratic Party might not have seemed at first like a very big deal. Gabbard, after all, didn’t seek re-election to her House seat in 2020 and hadn’t played a role in party politics since her failed presidential bid. But her announcement highlights an important and growing gulf between Democrats and Republicans — and helps explain why Republicans, who may well have majorities in both chambers of Congress in January, have become a threat to democracy.

The threat could hardly be clearer: Some candidates for secretary of state deny the verified outcome of the 2020 election, raising serious questions about whether they’ll reject results – and the rule of law – if they gain office.

Unconstitutional acts don’t become constitutional because you like the results. That’s why Congress, not the president, needs to give legal status to illegal immigrants brought here as children.

It has been more than 20 years since the first state passed anti-bullying legislation. The Columbine High School massacre in 1999, in which 12 students and one teacher were fatally shot and 21 others wounded by two students who reportedly were bullied and acted as bullies, catapulted the topic of bullying to a new awareness.

It’s unfortunate that the families of Sandy Hook probably won’t actually get anything close to the nearly $1 billion that a Connecticut jury assessed Wednesday against right-wing conspiracy monger Alex Jones for his monstrous lies about the massacre that killed their children. But the historic verdict nonetheless sends a strong message to those who inhabit the sewers of profitable misinformation out there: Society has had enough.

Two hundred and thirty days after Vladimir Putin invaded his sovereign, democratic neighbor, the war in Ukraine is looking as successful from Moscow’s perspective as the decade-long Soviet slog in Afghanistan.

Many sectors are reeling from massive labor shortages — but few affect families more intimately than what is happening with child care. With lengthy waiting lists and soaring costs, the scale of the crisis is obvious. Less clear is how the country can quickly fix it.

At first, it seemed that President Joe Biden had misstated policy when he said the United States would defend Taiwan from aggression by China. The White House promptly walked back his remarks, and the potentially explosive gaffe appeared to have been resolved.

Former President Donald Trump’s strained attempt to pull the U.S. Supreme Court into his fight over classified documents has highlighted, once again, something even more outrageous: Justice Clarence Thomas’ continuing refusal to recuse himself from cases involving Trump despite the justice’s marriage to one of Trump’s most vocal, prominent and extremist followers.

How much do next month’s elections for the U.S. House and Senate really matter? If merely asking the question sounds like a betrayal of civic duty, it shouldn’t. The cliché is that the next race is always “the most important election of our lifetimes.” But some elections have more far-reaching consequences than others.

They aren’t saying it publicly, but behind the scenes, congressional Republican officials and business leaders are bracing for the nightmare scenario of a debt ceiling crisis potentially worse than the one in 2011 if the GOP retakes the House this year. That’s according to an Axios piece that pays special attention to Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., who could be in line for a key budgetary post in a Republican-led house. Smith tells the website bluntly that he thinks holding the nation’s fiscal stability hostage is a valid political strategy to force policy changes on the Biden administration.

The Biden administration’s continues to fail U.S. citizen and Oakmont resident Marc Fogel, who was convicted in Russia of possessing less than an ounce of marijuana. In June, a Russian court sentenced Fogel, 61, to 14 years’ imprisonment at a labor camp. On Wednesday, his family announced that he had been transferred from his detention center to the remote hard-labor prison.

Imagine the life you have now, with all your routines that you’ve built and the goals you’ve achieved, with one caveat: At any time, through no fault of your own and without warning, faraway people could take away not just your job but your right to have a job, throw your entire future into disarray, and potentially separate you from your family permanently. Every once in a while, the people with this absolute power over you signal that they may use it, but maybe not, dangling the ax over your head for years.