The nation’s highest court Monday heard oral arguments in challenges to Florida and Texas laws in which state governments seek to force social media companies to let more people say more things on their platforms — in other words, to behave less like publishers and more like free-for-all public squares.

One would expect the 2024 GOP front-runner, former President Donald Trump, to be rallying voters. Instead, he’s railing against a ruling in his civil fraud trial that resulted in a $355 million fine, a three-year ban from running companies in New York (including his own), as well as $4 million fines and similar two-year bans against his sons Donald Jr. and Eric.

“What are you doing, Alabama?” Neil Young sang. The question must be asked again and at the top of the nation’s lungs, as abortion fundamentalism has just resulted in a ruling by the state’s top court that, in the name of protecting life, shows patent disrespect for families and the children they seek to bring into the world.

For the first time since 1972, NASA landed a craft on the surface of the Moon in February 2024. But the agency didn’t do it alone – instead, it partnered with commercial companies. Thanks to new technologies and public-private partnerships, the scientific projects brought to the Moon on this craft and on future missions like it will open up new realms of scientific possibility.

Saturday marks the two-year anniversary of Russian despot Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, after Moscow’s military forces took control of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014. When he launched his “special military operation” in 2022, Putin expected his tanks to roll into Kyiv within days, a proof of concept for his vision of a reconstituted Soviet Union.

In the battered streets of Gaza, the air is thick with despair. Families, stripped of their livelihoods due to the conflict, now plead for the most basic needs. Aid workers offer one of the few lifelines left for these families, but now they too are getting caught in the crossfire. The protection of these workers goes beyond safeguarding lives; it is directly tied to the delivery and fair distribution of vital supplies among a starving population.

Six months ago, we suggested that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s Stormy Daniels hush money criminal case against Donald Trump take a backseat to the federal and Georgia state election subversion cases and the federal pilfered document case.

Over the weekend Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio went to the Munich Security Conference to play an unpopular part — a spokesperson, at a gathering of the Western foreign policy establishment, for the populist critique of American support for Ukraine’s war effort.

In ordering defendant Donald Trump to pay New York State more than a third of a billion dollars, Manhattan state Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron cited exact figures of how much Trump was improperly enriched by his cheating and lying.

If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention.

At 47 years old, Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny had spent more than a decade relentlessly fighting corruption in Russia before he died on Friday while serving a politically-motivated 19-year sentence at a penal colony. President Joe Biden is correct to blame Navalny’s death on Vladimir Putin.

Primary season is fully underway and the election year is heating up. Then again, do campaigns ever really stop nowadays? There was a time when election years stood out as what Washington talking heads referred to as “crazy season”: politicians making wild promises, we ordinary people egging them on, and outcomes settled in strange, unpredictable ways. Some of us fretted that election-season promises, if they came true, would involve someone else paying the bill. Others didn’t realize or care.

The federal government had supposedly made it much easier to apply for college financial aid. Except there was a glitch and students could not access the new online tool they needed. Applications were delayed by months and the numbers of students seeking aid plunged.

Negotiations designed to secure the release of hostages taken during the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack on Israel “were productive and serious,” CNN reported last week.

I, like so many Americans, loved watching Luke Combs, a 33-year-old white country singer, join Tracy Chapman, a 59-year-old gay and Black artist, in singing her 1989 hit “Fast Car” at the Grammys.

For anyone upset with President Joe Biden’s approach to how Israel is pursuing Hamas in the war that Hamas began with the Oct. 7 pogrom (and there are plenty in his own party’s left saying Biden is too inured to the terrible suffering of Gazans), what is their alternative? Donald Trump? Do those critics think that Trump cares anything at all about Palestinian lives? Is Trump going to be tougher than Biden on Trump’s pal Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu?