For all the legitimate concerns about privacy loss, the spread of misinformation and the like, one thing mass global access to the internet has done is made it ever harder for oppressive regimes to keep things under wraps.

North Korea passed a law this month putting into effect Kim Jong Un’s decision that in case he is incapacitated by foreign hands, the country will “automatically and immediately” launch a nuclear retaliation. This arrangement makes it sound as though the North Korean nuclear arsenal is not only designed to be used by one man but exists to keep that one man in power.

Perhaps the starkest example of how dramatically Donald Trump’s fortunes have changed in just a matter of days is contained in the opening paragraph of New York Attorney General Leticia James’ financial fraud civil lawsuit against Trump and his family. Gone is any semblance of deference that Trump typically expects as a billionaire ex-president. There is no hint of acknowledgment of his claim to special privileges. Rather, Trump gets the same treatment that prosecutors afford common criminals, commanded by James to appear in court or face default judgment on more than 200 allegations of financial fraud and a $250 million fine.

The U.S. record on protecting our children is abysmal. We try them as adults. Child marriage is still happening. So is corporal punishment and child labor.

Under its new head Chris Licht, the original cable news network is making strides toward reasserting itself as a neutral news source.

Despite widespread outcry, the governors of Florida and Texas say they will continue to bus or fly more migrants to unexpected locations across the nation to raise awareness about the crisis at the border. Using vulnerable humans as pawns in a political game is morally wrong and further destabilizes an already dysfunctional immigration system.

Anew Illinois law allows high schools to teach media literacy to students in all subjects. In case skeptics are tempted to portray this as some kind of underground conspiracy to indoctrinate kids, it’s exactly the opposite. There’s no agenda here other than to arm young people with better tools to distinguish fact from fiction and to be on the lookout for deliberate misinformation.

Progressives like to point out that Americans pay more for health care yet have poorer outcomes than people in countries of similar wealth.

For residents of Massachusetts and New York communities who suddenly find themselves hosting migrants from Florida and Texas, the border crisis just got personal.

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts lamented recently that he didn’t “understand” why the court’s legitimacy has been diminished in Americans’ eyes merely because it has issued “opinions people disagree with.” If he really thinks that’s the problem, then, no, he doesn’t understand at all. Any sober assessment of the court’s behavior in the relatively brief period since Senate Republicans repeatedly rewrote the rules to stack it with conservatives yields a clear conclusion: The court is increasingly being viewed as a tool for partisan political hackery because it’s increasingly acting like one.

Russia’s imperious president, Vladimir Putin, may have just endured his worst week since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which he says was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.

Under the heading of How is this not already illegal? comes the latest effort in Congress to prohibit sitting lawmakers from trading stocks. In an era of rock-bottom public trust in the institutions of government, ending this inherently shady-looking scenario shouldn’t garner a single “no” vote.

Pfizer’s and Moderna’s bivalent boosters, which are now available to many age groups, offer protection against the original COVID-19 virus plus the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron subvariants. Is the nation ready for yet another COVID-19 vaccine shot?

The best way for the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve its legitimacy is to ignore public opinion.

A new study has upended the way researchers think about how air pollution causes lung cancer. The work cracks open a whole new way of thinking about certain cancers and how to treat and even prevent them. It also suggests environmental agencies may have good reason to impose much stricter limits on air quality.

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When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, effectively allowing Missouri and other red states to immediately outlaw abortion, many who supported that decision scoffed at warnings that same-sex marriage and even interracial marriage rights could be next. Now, as congressional Democrats and some Republicans push legislation to protect marriage at the federal level, opposition from Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and other conservatives shows that there is, in fact, a genuine threat to existing marriages.

In the year since the botched U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, tens of thousands of Afghans have been forced to suffer through another administrative disaster, this one unfolding mostly in drab D.C. office buildings via mountains of monotonous paperwork.

A multi-state settlement with electronic cigarette maker Juul might not contain an outright admission by the company that it deliberately targeted kids with advertising and candy-flavored vaping liquids as a way to get them hooked on nicotine. But the terms of the settlement make pretty clear exactly what Juul did and what kinds of damage it caused to millions of lives.

Grocery shoppers may not realize that what they put in their carts can have far-reaching consequences. Case in point: Northern and southern pigtailed macaques are considered globally threatened with decreasing populations, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature just recently reclassified southern pigtailed macaques as “endangered.” What can that possibly have to do with groceries?