The darkest day of Joe Biden’s still new presidency becomes darker and even more tragic when we pause to rethink about just how and why it all happened.

I’m a respiratory therapist. With the fourth wave of the pandemic in full swing, fueled by the highly contagious delta variant, the trajectory of the patients I see, from admission to critical care, is all too familiar. When they’re vaccinated, their COVID-19 infections most likely end after Stage 1. If only that were the case for everyone.

In an ironic twist on the old Republican claim to be the protectors of “local control” in schools, Republican politicians across America are trying to prohibit school districts from mandating that students mask up against the coronavirus. And who is rising to protect the right of local districts to make that decision for themselves? None other than the Biden administration.

In the popular imagination, successful coups require the participation of the military. Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, in their latest book on the Trump presidency, “I Alone Can Fix It,” paint Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in heroic colors. During the run-up to the 2020 election, Milley, worried about a “Reichstag moment,” resolved with his colleagues to thwart whatever the former president might try.

Steps by the U.S. and other wealthy nations to provide millions of residents a third COVID-19 vaccination in coming weeks have raised tricky questions of equity. On Aug. 4, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was unacceptable that wealthy nations with 33 times the rate of vaccinations as poor nations would consider booster shots when billions of people have never gotten their first shots.

Plans are being developed to require vaccination against COVID-19 for all would-be foreign travelers to America. It’s just sensible.

By acting nobly on slavery, Abraham Lincoln once said, America could be “the last best hope of Earth.” But right now we look more like the United States of incompetence.

The rapid collapse of the Afghan government has lessons to teach us, if we will listen. Many of these are lessons we could have learned from the Vietnam War, but we did not.

Just a century ago, millions of horses roamed the American West. By 1970, after being targeted for sport and killed for pet food and fertilizer, only 17,000 were left. In response, Congress passed a law to protect them and made it a crime for anyone to harass or kill wild horses on most federal land. However, that hasn’t stopped the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) from continuing to round up tens of thousands of these horses, whose fate is often uncertain.

There is only one reason, many scientists say, why a booster shot of one of the mRNA vaccines could make sense as public health policy: Not to safeguard the vaccinated, who are still getting robust protection from their first two doses, but to protect the unvaccinated around them from COVID-19.

The unlawful traffic across the southern U.S. border is not one-way, a fact driven home by the federal lawsuit filed this month by the Mexican government against a host of U.S. gun manufacturers and distributors. It’s a somewhat brazen — and welcome — move.

Joe Biden told a nationwide TV audience Monday that the horrifying scenes in Kabul, with desperate refugees fleeing the rule of a resurgent Taliban, aren’t his fault. He also says he won’t “shrink from my share of responsibility for where we are today.” Look up “cognitive dissonance” in the dictionary.

Artificial intelligence has insinuated its way into our daily lives, whether we are aware. From opening our smartphones with facial recognition, to travel and commuting assistance, to personalizing our feeds on social media, AI is with us from dawn to dusk and beyond.

With the Delta variant surging throughout the U.S., Biden administration chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci has advocated for more testing — including for the vaccinated. More testing is essential, but how we test is important, too.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama was wrong when he blamed pundits for trying “to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states.

The past 18 months have shown that accurately counting the dead is vital for protecting the living. At the outset of the pandemic, many countries lacked adequate registration systems, and others saw their processes break down under strain. This made it harder to track the spread of COVID-19 and deal with its consequences. Even in normal times, lack of data about deaths and their causes can seriously impede efforts to protect public health. Fixing this ought to be a global priority.

The White House will soon be sending invitations to world leaders for its “Summit of Democracy,” currently scheduled for Dec. 9 and 10. It promises to be a grand and noble affair, with participants working to “build a shared foundation for global democratic renewal.”

Politically funded websites that advance a partisan agenda under the guise of publishing local news are sprouting up across California. The majority of them are operated by a shadowy entity called Metric Media, which operates 74 distinct websites across the state that masquerade as legitimate local newspapers.

Before you worry about bacon and how much it may cost when new animal welfare laws go into effect next year, let’s talk about the pigs that gave their lives for it.

In what should qualify as the least surprising story of the year, it turns out former President Donald Trump is lying to his own political donors about what he’s using their money for. The ex-president has raised tens of millions of dollars toward the stated goals of challenging the last election and helping Republicans win in the coming midterms. So far, records show, he’s instead using it largely to pay his legal bills and is sitting on the rest. Anyone of any political persuasion who continues giving money to someone with an established con-artist history can’t say they weren’t warned.