The 428,000 net new jobs last month in the Labor Department’s Friday report is mildly encouraging since every major industry added workers. But the report also contains a warning that inflationary pressure may be starting to hurt the labor market.

With the Supreme Court moving to overturn Roe v. Wade, the availability of self-administered abortion pills is about to take center stage in the debate. Congressional Democrats need to get in front of the issue and settle numerous questions raised by so-called morning after pills. If Roe does indeed fall, red states must not be allowed to take that as carte blanche to violate the First Amendment, interfere with interstate commerce or otherwise abuse standing legal structures in their zeal to deny women control over their own bodies.

A bipartisan group of senators reportedly is close to agreement on recommending reforms to a flawed, archaic law that former President Donald Trump abused in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The Electoral Count Act of 1887 gives the vice president a ceremonial role in approving state vote counts, but it is worded vaguely enough that Trump claimed, outrageously, that it provided Vice President Mike Pence authority to unilaterally throw out Joe Biden’s victory.

The Supreme Court draft ruling overturning Roe v. Wade raises just as many arguments and counterarguments as the original ruling that Justice Samuel Alito excoriated in his opinion, leaked this week to Politico. Alito’s assertion that abortion rights don’t fall under the 14th Amendment, and that the Constitution makes no mention of abortion as a right, calls into question a wide range of other supposed rights for which no mention of any kind appears in the Constitution.

Much of the world reacted in horror at Russian atrocities in the town of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, one month ago. After the Russian army retreated, Ukrainians found the bodies of hundreds of civilians, and the full extent of the terror became known.

It’s no secret that Republican state legislatures are working overtime to alter election laws in ways to twist American democracy to their favor. Having imposed rules that make it harder to vote and to discourage those who can’t vote in person, the newest point of attack is to threaten election officials with fines and jail time.

Since someone leaked a draft of the Supreme Court’s opinion in this year’s big abortion case, two questions have emerged about the scope of conservative policy goals. Will Republicans try to ban abortion by federal statute if Roe v. Wade is overruled, or leave the issue to the states? And will the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court overturn other precedents with a family resemblance to the 1973 abortion-rights ruling?

This Mother’s Day is my first as a new mom. Now, I join the choir of women who have long voiced the challenges of balancing motherhood and a career. This challenge grew considerably during the pandemic, when women took steps back from their careers because there were fewer child care options. It lingers in a post-pandemic world where the female labor force participation rate lags behind its male counterpart and is a full percentage point lower than its pre-pandemic level.

A group of senators met last week to try to prevent anyone from stealing the 2024 presidential election or from once again inciting an armed mob to attack the Capitol. The bipartisan band, led by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), aims to update the 1887 Electoral Count Act, the archaic law that governs how Congress counts electoral votes that became a focus of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. The fate of the nation’s democracy might rest on whether these senators strike a deal, and soon: If Republicans take the House after November’s elections, a radicalized House GOP caucus will likely refuse to do anything that could be construed as hostile to Mr. Trump.

The decision by Wimbledon officials to ban top stars from Russia and Belarus from this summer’s premier grass tennis tournament is short-sighted and unfair, even if it might satisfy those who want to bring maximum pressure to bear on Russian leader Vladimir Putin for the atrocities his forces are committing in Ukraine.

America faces a serious economic and national security risk when it comes to the development and manufacturing of semiconductor chips that are integral to daily life in the modern world.

A bipartisan group of senators reportedly is close to agreement on recommending reforms to a flawed, archaic law that former President Donald Trump abused in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The Electoral Count Act of 1887 gives the vice president a ceremonial role in approving state vote counts, but it is worded vaguely enough that Trump claimed, outrageously, that it provided Vice President Mike Pence authority to unilaterally throw out Joe Biden’s victory.

The Food and Drug Administration has proposed banning menthol-flavored cigarettes, potentially beginning in 2024. It’s a tragedy that it is taking this long, but it’s never too late to save a life — or in this case, potentially hundreds of thousands of lives.

A new International Monetary Fund report suggests that the economic hiccups roiling American politics are actually being felt worldwide and probably have little or nothing to do with President Joe Biden’s leadership. Biden certainly isn’t blameless for at least a portion of the nation’s current inflationary spiral, but the monetary fund’s report makes clear that the entire world would be in economic turmoil regardless.

U.S. gross domestic product shrank 1.4% in the first quarter at the same time inflation continued to soar. For older Americans, that combination conjures memories of 1970s stagflation, a nightmarish combination of double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, soaring gasoline prices and persistently high unemployment. The entire economic mess got dumped on President Jimmy Carter’s lap after the 1976 election, even though it was neither his fault nor the fault of his predecessors, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon.

Fifty years ago, the national networks CBS, ABC and NBC dominated television screens in America and were the primary way voters obtained information: Each network, along with newspapers and radio, told its audience facts first, and all agreed on what the facts were. That meant Americans had a shared understanding of the truth — which is what led to the erosion of both Democratic and Republican public support for then-President Richard Nixon during the Watergate investigation.

The pandemic is almost over — we think. Not as a medical fact. COVID-19 will be around forever, just like the cold and the flu, but it no longer dominates our daily lives and politics. The Democrats’ mild reaction to last week’s court decision against mask mandates are among the many signs the American people are moving on.

One of the world’s most influential social media platforms will soon be under the private ownership of the world’s richest person. What could possibly go wrong? Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter has prompted speculation about how the mercurial electric car mogul might change things. Republicans are giddy about the prospect that Musk might restore “free speech” to the platform — which, of course is conservative code for allowing right-wing disinformation to flourish.

Editorial: A sensible shift away from COVID mask mandates

When President Joe Biden took office last year, he had three top foreign policy priorities: to revive NATO and other alliances that President Donald Trump had savaged, to withdraw the last American troops from Afghanistan, and to compete more effectively with a newly assertive China.