Politics
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Editorial: Progressive policies let criminals slip through the cracks
Before Iryna Zarutska, there were other victims on Decarlos Brown Jr.’s rap sheet.
The man charged with stabbing the 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee to death on a Charlotte train last month had already been arrested at least 14 times in North Carolina for crimes ranging from assault and firearms possession to felony robbery and larceny dating ...Read more

Commentary: How the conviction of Brazil's former president echoes in the US
Brazil’s Supreme Court on Thursday found former President Jair Bolsonaro guilty of conspiracies related to his failed 2022 reelection bid. The court found that Bolsonaro tried to instigate a military coup and to poison his opponent, current President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Bolsonaro, the former president of Latin America’s largest ...Read more

Robin Abcarian: The killing of Charlie Kirk underm<em>i</em>nes the basis of our democracy
The killing of Charlie Kirk is a national tragedy.
It is hard to overestimate the enormity of what happened Wednesday on the campus of Utah Valley University, where a civil debate about politics taking place under sunny skies turned into a bloody horror show with what are certain to be lasting national consequences.
The immediate aftermath of ...Read more

Michael Hiltzik: Scientists always strive to be apolitical, but they can't keep politics out of their labs
There's a scene in the movie "Oppenheimer" in which Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron and head of his own lab at UC Berkeley, reacts angrily when he discovers his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer trying to recruit lab assistants to a communist-linked campus labor union.
It's one of the few scenes in this largely factual film that may ...Read more

Mark Gongloff: The US is giving away $35 billion a year to cook the planet
The price of eggs has more than doubled in the past eight years, which isn’t great, but at least you can eat eggs. The price of U.S. government subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry has also more than doubled in that time, which is far, far less great. Welfare for an industry that makes billions of dollars in profits and pollutes the climate ...Read more

Commentary: It's time to restrain AIPAC
In early August, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., openly opposed special treatment for the pro-Israel lobby under U.S. election law. Appearing on One America News Network, Greene issued a defiant response to a fundraising email from the American Israel Political Action Committee that called her use of the term “genocide” for the ...Read more

Commentary: When politicians pick voters -- Why gerrymandering is undermining democracy
The partisan fight to draw maps that determine how Americans are represented has entered a dangerous spiral. Texas is racing ahead with a mid-decade congressional redraw designed to lock in additional seats after President Donald J. Trump called upon state lawmakers to find five seats.
California’s leaders responded in kind to offset the ...Read more

Editorial: Do Gen Z men really want kids so much more than women?
Author John Gray coined the metaphor “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” in his 1992 bestselling book as a way to explain the vastly different communication styles men and women typically deploy.
New polling suggests the divide extends to politics as well.
A new NBC News Decision Desk poll found a stark partisan divide between men ...Read more

Ronald Brownstein: Red and blue states' fight is reaching a dangerous level
The cold war between red and blue states is escalating to a dangerous new level. Under the piledriver pressure of President Donald Trump’s bellicose second term, the red and blue blocs are moving from separation to confrontation.
The first stage in this unraveling has been divergence on state policy, particularly around social issues.
From ...Read more

Jackie Calmes: Democrats should force a shutdown to save the government
Democrats have to change their ways. Ideally yesterday.
The Democratic Party is the pro-government party, simply speaking, and Republicans the antigovernment party. Democrats want to make the government work for people. Trump-era Republicans might as well wear knock-offs of Melania Trump's old "I really don't care. Do U?" jacket. For three ...Read more

Kaitlyn Buss: Secretary McMahon's education agenda puts parents first
DETROIT -- U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s most radical belief is that parents should get the say in how their kids learn.
That’s part of why she is seeking to return education to the states — to the fullest extent possible without an act of Congress that eliminates the Department of Education altogether — and encouraging them ...Read more

Commentary: The promise presidency -- How Trump rewrote the rules of political accountability
In the theater of American politics, promises are political capital. Most politicians make promises cautiously, knowing that if they fail to fulfill them, they will be held accountable
But President Donald Trump has rewritten the script. He repeatedly offers sweeping vows, yet the results often don't follow; somehow, he escapes the day of ...Read more

Commentary: California can be a leader by taking menopause policy seriously
Among the many audiences Gov. Gavin Newsom has provoked lately, one cohort is particularly fired up: menopausal women. I know I felt a rush of adrenaline (or perhaps it was a hot flash?) when I saw actor Halle Berry take to Instagram to demand the governor make menopause a public policy priority.
From Hollywood to Capitol Hill, menopause ...Read more

Mary McNamara: I thought rabies was a thing of the past -- until my dog had a run-in with a rabid bat
Since I became an adult, the list of things that I feel fairly confident will never happen to me has grown with each passing year: I will never win the lottery (I don’t buy tickets) or become a famous archaeologist (dreamed but never trained), but neither will I die while skydiving (no one can make me skydive) or have to worry about rabies.
...Read more

Commentary: One year after dams were torn down, an Indigenous writer sees a healing Klamath River
Over the last two years, I have traveled repeatedly to the Klamath River near the California-Oregon border to report on the dismantling of four dams. I saw crews in excavators as they clawed at the remnants of the Copco No. 1 and Iron Gate dams. And as the giant reservoirs were drained, I saw newly planted seeds taking root in soil that had been...Read more

Editorial: Job market revisions shows BLS needs a shake-up
The Bureau of Labor Statistics appears to be auditioning for a new magic show on the Strip. Its showstopping trick is making nearly 1 million jobs disappear.
On Tuesday, the bureau announced its annual revision to yearly employment data. From April 2024 to March 2025, the economy added 911,000 fewer jobs than previously reported. That means the...Read more

Commentary: There's another way for blue states to respond to Trump. Go cold turkey on Washington
Universities, corporations, hospitals and other institutions across the country face a painful dilemma when President Donald Trump’s administration tries to force them to change long-standing practices and policies to suit the president.
Do they submit or embark on an extended court battle? The first option risks going down a road akin to ...Read more

Mark Gongloff: $1 trillion in American wages has gone up in wildfire smoke
The climate emergency has produced several on-the-nose metaphorical moments lately, such as an art museum founded by oil baron J. Paul Getty being threatened by the Palisades fire in Los Angeles in January or a superyacht’s fireworks sparking a wildfire in Greece last year. But nothing tops how more than $1 trillion in U.S. wages has gone up ...Read more

Mark Z. Barabak: 'I think it was recklessness': Harris criticizes Biden's late exit from 2024 campaign
When Kamala Harris left the White House, she was trailed by three big questions.
She's now answered two of them.
First off, the former vice president will not be running for California governor in 2026. After months of will-or-won't-she speculation, the Democrat took a pass on a race that was Harris' to lose because, plainly, her heart just ...Read more

Commentary: MAGA Supreme Court justices show their true colors by joining Trump's attack on the federal judiciary
Writing in 1788, Alexander Hamilton famously described the judiciary as “the least dangerous branch” of the federal government. He thought that it would never be in a position to do serious damage to American life because it had neither “the sword nor the purse…but merely judgment.”
President Donald Trump and his allies seem to ...Read more