People who think that Donald Trump’s influence on the Republican Party has been mostly malign are always looking for signs that it is fading.

As of last week, more than 200 million Americans had been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, constituting around 60% of the population. It’s an important milestone, but so is the milestone of the nation’s 800,000th coronavirus death this week. With a new variant on the rise and a sizable minority of the country still holding out against the vaccines, infection rates continue to rise. What the U.S. is seeing now is what doctors are calling “an epidemic of the unvaccinated.” And it’s creating what psychologists call “pandemic fatigue” throughout society.

With inflation now rising faster than at any time in the last four decades, economists are debating which group suffers more from inflation, the poor or the rich. This kind of economywide question is not easy to answer, especially when rates of inflation have been so low in recent times and hard data are scarce. Nor is it obvious how exactly to compare the losses to the poor to the losses to wealthier groups. Nonetheless, the arguments suggest that the poor are likely to take a beating.

It’s no secret that social media is taking a toll on teenagers, especially girls. Filters and photo editing create the facade of a seemingly perfect life and put an emphasis on unrealistic beauty standards and constant comparison. This often leads to decreased self-esteem and to body image concerns.

Regardless of what you think about abortion rights, Texas’ poorly crafted abortion law is about to unleash a slew of unintended constitutional consequences across the country.

Rep. Devin Nunes announced last week that he’s resigning at the end of the month to go to work for former President Donald Trump. In a way, the decision isn’t surprising. But it does tell us a fair amount about the House, the Republican Party and, perhaps, Trump himself.

The United States is closing in on a heartbreaking COVID-19 milestone. Nearly 800,000 American lives have been lost in the pandemic.

It’s not often that the end of something means you spend even more money on it, but U.S. defense spending has long defied most rational parameters. With the United States formally out of wars for the first time in about two decades, the Pentagon’s budget increased 5% over last year to a staggering $768 billion in the annual National Defense Authorization Act alone, with an additional $10 billion in non-NDAA defense spending. The package was passed by the House and is expected to pass the Senate.

With a vote of 19-8, workers at a Starbucks in Buffalo have officially become the first U.S. employees in the global coffee shop behemoth to form a union. The victory must have been all the sweeter after federal labor officials permitted three locations to vote separately, rejecting the company’s effort to force all 20 cafes around Buffalo to hold a single vote.

The U.S. Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, is setting out to remove the word “squaw” from the names of all federal lands. On Nov. 19, she issued an executive order declaring that word to be derogatory and created a task force to find replacement names for geographic features on federal lands bearing the term.

It was easy to see that COVID-19 represented a crisis of huge proportions prompting extraordinary measures to protect public health.

Six months after it moved to formally terminate the program, the Biden administration is set to restart the Migrant Protection Protocols, also known as Remain in Mexico, a Stephen Miller-championed border policy that forces vulnerable migrants to wait in northern Mexico as their U.S. asylum cases move forward (or, more frequently, get stuck in the gears of a rusted bureaucracy). Biden officials emphasize that they’re doing so due to a federal court injunction, which is true, but they can’t wash their hands of some strange decisions made in resurrecting this damaging program.

The availability of COVID-19 vaccines earlier this year allowed for the partial reboot of life as usual during the pandemic. But the omicron variant — and its delta predecessor — have come along to remind us that COVID-19, like your Uncle Ted at the holidays, is here to stay for an undetermined while longer.

Last week’s school shooting in Oxford, Michigan, that left four students dead was, sadly, not terribly surprising. There were six U.S. school shootings in the month of November alone. Some school shootings, like the horrific one at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February of 2018, which left 17 dead, get widespread attention. While others, like the one at Marshall County High School near Benton, Kentucky, where 16 people were shot just three weeks earlier (only two of whom died), are mere footnotes in our unhappy mass shooting history.

Scientists don’t yet know where the new coronavirus strain dubbed omicron first developed, or even whether it was incubated in humans or animals. Still, two things are clear. The yawning gap in vaccinations between rich and poor countries only increases the risk of more such variants emerging. And bridging that divide will require focusing on demand as much as supply.

A few years ago, it would have drawn jokes and scorn. But given the continuing mystery over what, exactly, U.S. military pilots are seeing in the skies, a congressional proposal to create an “Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office” — an office to investigate what used to be called UFOs — makes sense.

On Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, Aiko Yoshinaga, a 17-year-old Los Angeles High School student, was headed home from a party with classmates when she heard a shocking radio report: Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. Even at her young age, Aiko immediately realized that with a U.S. declaration of war against Japan, her Japanese immigrant parents, legally precluded from becoming naturalized citizens, would not just be considered aliens — they would be enemy aliens.

Prosecutors in the recent Michigan school shooting by a 15-year-old student that left four dead also have filed manslaughter charges against the shooter’s parents, whose gun he used. This should become standard practice for school shooting cases when the young shooters are only armed because of their parents’ carelessness.

Not even the most strident defender of abortion rights would call the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision a model of elegant jurisprudence. But as six conservatives on the Supreme Court itch to strike it down — on the grounds that women’s bodily autonomy during pregnancy, at least until a fetus is thought to be viable outside the womb, is not rooted in any language of the Constitution — an inconvenient truth shouts back: They have no better dividing line to offer than viability.

Some centrist Democrats in Congress are pushing for a suspension of the gasoline tax, on the federal and state levels, and it’s not hard to see why: Many of them face tough odds for re-election next year, and rising fuel costs affect every one of their constituents. From both a political and economic standpoint, the plan has some appeal.