The Food and Drug Administration faces a Thursday deadline to decide whether to allow menthol cigarettes to remain on the market. To discourage children from starting smoking and to help adults quit, it should ban them. It should also ban menthol and all other flavors except tobacco from e-cigarettes.

The U.S. Supreme Court, which in a landmark 2012 decision made it harder to send juveniles to prison for life without parole, reversed course Thursday by holding that judges may impose such a sentence without determining that the offender is “permanently incorrigible.” The 6-3 decision came in the case of Brett Jones, who was 15 when he stabbed his grandfather to death in Mississippi.

Now, of course, comes the hard part.

America’s deeply flawed health care delivery system ranks near or at the bottom when objectively compared to peers in Britain, France, Canada and Australia. Extraordinarily high per capita cost, the inaccessibility of affordable preventive care and other chronic maladies make the case for big changes here, even after Obamacare has ushered in some modest improvements.

Shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, doctors began seeing puzzling symptoms in patients that lasted well beyond the initial infection period. These COVID-19 long-haulers suffered from distressing or debilitating problems months after supposedly recovering from the disease.

Within hours of the guilty verdicts against former cop Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, police in Detroit shot and killed a man who had stabbed himself and was stabbing an officer.

When it comes to health care, the Biden administration has a clear goal: to strip away state flexibility and consolidate greater federal control — so much so that it’s willing to nullify settled agreements that the government has had with many states.

Consumers’ main federal guardian against unfair and deceptive businesses, the Federal Trade Commission, already has too few teeth when it comes to enforcing the law. On Thursday, a unanimous Supreme Court yanked another molar.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, doctors and mental health experts foresaw the cataclysmic problems the disease would cause — not just the deaths, but the rippling outward effects of so much economic pain and social isolation on Americans’ mental health and well-being.

On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered his state of the union address — extolling his country’s moral values and lashing out at the West. The same day tens of thousands of Russians demonstrated across the nation’s 11 time zones, at huge personal risk, calling for Russia’s most famous political prisoner to be freed.

During President Joe Biden’s first week in office he signed an executive order directing the federal government to, where possible, procure goods and services within the U.S. before turning abroad. Later, when he announced his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan in Pittsburgh in March, the president called for investing $100 billion in solar and other forms of renewable energy.

At 19, he already had a gun taken from him by police after his mother told them he might try to commit suicide-by-cop — to induce a police officer to shoot him. He had been committed briefly to a hospital for mental evaluation. He was questioned by the FBI. Yet this clearly unstable young man had no problem legally purchasing two assault-style rifles — weapons he used to slaughter eight people and kill himself at a FedEx facility in Indianapolis.

Has a new Cold War, this one pitting the United States against the People’s Republic of China, commenced? Rhetoric coming out of Washington, amplified by hawkish media commentary, appears to take a Second Cold War as a given, something perhaps even to be welcomed.

The little helicopter weighs only 4 pounds, and its first flight lasted a mere 30 seconds and reached an altitude of only 10 feet. But it did so on Mars. Stop and wonder about that for a moment. For the first time, humankind has achieved powered flight on another planet. A feat that would be nothing for a 10-year-old child to accomplish with a backyard drone takes on new meaning when it happens 178 million miles away on a planet with 1% of Earth’s atmosphere.

The most remarkable aspect of the gun control package President Joe Biden has unveiled is that it includes the first major federal regulation of gun violence in over 25 years. And this during a period in which the United States has generally topped the list for gun deaths among developed countries. According to the researchers at the University of Washington, our gun death rate is eight times higher than Canada’s, about 100 times higher than Britain’s, 200 times the rate of Japan.

By appointing a commission to study changes to the Supreme Court, President Joe Biden has alarmed the opponents of court-packing while disappointing the supporters.

Having won the greatest landslide before or since (98.5% of the electoral votes, all but Vermont’s and Maine’s) and carried the biggest congressional majorities ever, Franklin Roosevelt in 1937 proposed a possible expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court, whose rulings had been frustrating parts of his New Deal. Even though the GOP had shriveled down to just 88 of the House’s 435 members and but 16 of 96 senators, the court plan still fizzled out.

Why did we go to war in Afghanistan 20 years ago?

U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, has it right: The filibuster should not be eliminated. The Senate needs the filibuster as a tool to drive the two parties toward compromise on important issues as well as to give voice to the minority party.