The UK is sliding into a social and economic crisis, the likes of which its people have not seen for decades. Household fuel bills are on course to top £2,400 by this autumn, while the price of a grocery shop is rocketing. Meanwhile, the economy is flatlining and the average employee’s pay keeps falling behind inflation, which hit 7% in March, the highest rate since 1992. No wonder that the charities and analysts that work on poverty and inequality are issuing such dire warnings. On one projection, one in three Britons — 23.5 million people — will be unable to afford the cost of living this year.

California’s wildfire insurance crisis came knocking at my door just a few weeks ago when my long-standing insurer abruptly dumped me.

This week’s lifting of mask requirements on airplanes and, in many parts of the country, on public transportation is a major turning point in the U.S. pandemic response. From now on, it seems, avoiding or minimizing COVID-19 infection will be a personal endeavor, not a societal one.

Every April, right around Earth Day, we see stories of multinational corporations pouring millions of dollars into new technology to fix climate change.

It seems that the United States is throwing its weight behind Australia’s bid to scupper the security cooperation agreement reached between China and the Solomon Islands, with Kurt Campbell, who serves as the U.S. National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, reportedly paying a trip to the South Pacific nation this month.

According to the latest U.N. climate report, the world is on track to reach catastrophic levels of warming — more than double the 1.5 degrees Celsius target set by the Paris Agreement. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called it “a file of shame.”

In just a few short weeks, the United States is likely to reach an unfathomable milestone in terms of numbers: 1 million lives lost to the coronavirus pandemic.

If a shrewd Kremlin military analyst had drawn up a list of objectives for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the reality of this horrific misadventure is more or less the photo negative of that. Rather than a quick and decisive march to Kyiv, the Russian military has alternately been bogged down and repelled, received nothing but anger and derision from the locals, sustained heavy losses and lost a crop of high-ranking officers. Meantime, the West’s tightening vise around the Russian economy has made things increasingly hard on Vladimir Putin’s regime domestically.

For globalization to survive the war in Ukraine, the United States must do better and be better. It is unclear whether the world’s greatest democracy has the wherewithal to manage this.

One of the most dysfunctional aspects of America’s dysfunctional health care system is medical debt. Even insured patients today can find themselves saddled with crushing debt from hospital stays. It’s a problem that will only be solved when America finally joins the rest of the advanced world in creating a true universal health care system. In the meantime, the Biden administration has announced a plan that could somewhat ease the problem.

A contest for the presidency between Sen. Bernie Sanders and former President Donald Trump seems highly improbable.

The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently authorized a second booster shot of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for those age 50 and older. The recommendation follows a study out of Israel recently published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The deadline for filing federal income taxes is later than usual this year. Tax Day has been pushed back to April 18 to avoid coinciding with the District of Columbia’s Emancipation Day holiday.

President Joe Biden on Monday finally carried through on a promise to rein in “ghost guns” — guns assembled from kits that are sold without serial numbers, allowing anyone to own an untraceable weapon. Biden announced new federal requirements including that such kits have serial numbers and that background checks be conducted on those who buy them.

Luckily for my family, we get along. So when it came to deciding what to do with our farm, we agreed to form a trust to keep the land together.

In recent days, Matthew Broderick has become infected with COVID-19. So has Sarah Jessica Parker. And Daniel Craig.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now in its seventh week, shows no sign of abating. Vladimir Putin’s army has abandoned its assault on Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, but is launching a new offensive in the country’s east. Ukraine’s allies, led by the United States and Britain, have stepped up their supplies of tanks and antiaircraft weapons.

By extending the moratorium on federal student-loan payments through the end of August, the Biden administration has cheered borrowers and those advocating for across-the-board debt cancellation. Taxpayers have little such reason to celebrate.

The periodic reports of the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change are lapsing into self-parody.

Last week, the House of Representatives voted 220-204 to approve the MORE Act, which would end the federal prohibition of marijuana. While the bill certainly isn’t perfect, it’s preferable to prohibition, which is why it’s unfortunate that only one California Republican member of Congress, Rep. Tom McClintock, voted in support.