With the “Build Back Better” legislation stalled in the Senate, President Joe Biden is now considering smaller bills that include important parts of the plan, such as one proposal to spend $110 billion to make pre-kindergarten available to all 3- and 4-year-olds. Helping children to overcome limitations based on their family finances or backgrounds is an appealing idea. Recent evidence, however, raises serious questions about whether more preschool improves kids’ lives over the long term.

“Freaking miracle.” That’s how health journalist Helen Branswell recently described the vaccines that have saved millions of lives in the coronavirus pandemic. The vaccines, offered to the U.S. population, have proved to be 90 percent effective against infection. Ready within a year of the outbreak, they have proved to be safe. And they are widely available and free. There is no parallel in modern times.

Think back to late June 2021, when there was containment of the American COVID-19 pandemic with fewer than 12,000 new cases a day and a total of 15,000 patients in the hospital. There was a declaration of independence from the virus on July 4, just as the delta variant was starting its exponential growth. A major surge ensued, which was followed by yet another one with the omicron variant, peaking with nearly 160,000 people hospitalized and almost 2,700 deaths per day — the most deaths since vaccinations became widely available.

In America, spring doesn’t truly begin until the first pitch on opening day. Unfortunately, the Major League Baseball lockout threatens to prolong winter. With players and owners struggling to reach a new collective bargaining agreement, a delayed start to the season seems likely.

The Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA) is 809 words in 10 long and confusing sentences describing how Congress is meant to certify the election of a U.S. president. It needs amending.

Mexico is experiencing one of the deadliest periods on record for journalists, with five killed so far this year. But instead of addressing these dangers, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador devoted much of his regular news conference on Friday to attacking one of the country’s most prominent media figures, Carlos Loret de Mola.

Vice President Kamala Harris has been widely criticized for her assessment that “our democracy” presented one of the biggest threats to national security. Perhaps the vice president was more correct than the critics are giving her credit for, but the threat she identified (state laws with the proffered goal of ballot integrity) does nothing to address another insidious harm to democracy demonstrated over the last 20 years.

Never mind those 10 years of Donald Trump’s financial statements, says the longtime accountant to the former president and past, present and future chiseler. The documents purporting to show Trump’s great wealth are, according to the firm which prepared them, themselves worthless. Oh, and please find another bookkeeper.

Stability remains a rare commodity in the Middle East. That’s all the more reason to welcome modest signs of rapprochement between Israeli and Palestinian leaders — and for both sides to build on them.

In weighing threats to our democracy, it’s hard to imagine one greater than political operatives spying on a sitting president and feeding the information to a compliant Justice Department with the goal of destroying him.

Journalism is so fundamental to the workings of a democracy that the founders made freedom of the press first in the Bill of Rights. But this industry, so vital to an educated citizenry, is being financially undermined by two monoliths that have taken the content generated by newspapers, TV, radio and others and used it to reap massive profits while refusing to provide any compensation.

While our attention drifted elsewhere in the four years since a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School killed 17 people, Manuel Oliver recaptured it, starkly reminding us that the pain of losing a child does not ease.

A family member became seriously ill last year. After some initial tests, a malignancy was diagnosed. Surgery was scheduled, followed by chemotherapy. Everything proceeded mostly as planned, with no medical hiccups. We are both well-educated, with backgrounds in medicine, health economics and risk analysis, which should have prepared us to maneuver the requirements of our health insurance provider and ensure that copays and pre-authorizations were handled as necessary.

The Super Bowl of hypocrisy is well under way, with fans and social media leading the charge downfield.

Can you think of a promotional slogan that exceeds this one in persuasive power, especially for people who are already inclined to accept its implications: “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”?

Under the shadow of growing tensions with Beijing, the U.S. House of Representatives has approved a bill that would help the United States remain economically competitive with China. It will now need to be reconciled with similar legislation that passed the Senate last year.

The Trump administration was great for business — if your business happened to be running private detention centers for migrants. Although deportations under the previous president were more sluggish than he might have liked, the number of asylum seekers who languished in for-profit prisons soared before the pandemic.

The disruptions to children’s schooling over the past two years have caused millions of American parents to come to an unexpected revelation: They are not as good at math as they had hoped. Nothing exposes your lack of ability with numbers like trying to teach your own child about fractions. But there is an upside: We now have more direct experience and understanding that can help improve the nation’s math literacy.

While the world waits and waits to see whether Donald Trump will seek the presidency again, it is worth looking back at one of the enduring puzzles of his time in office: why he failed to achieve some of his key goals on immigration even when the opportunity to win seemed to be handed to him.

It has become clear in recent days that former President Donald Trump mishandled official presidential documents to an astonishing and possibly illegal extent while in office. Multiple sources now indicate that after winning the presidency with a campaign in which he savaged Hillary Clinton for her mishandling of official emails, Trump improperly stored possibly classified material at Mar-a-Lago, tore up other documents that staffers then had to tape back together, and even clogged White House toilets by trying to flush documents — putting an absurdly literal new twist on the old Nixonian phrase “White House plumbers.”