A year and a half into the pandemic, the long-feared specter of rationed health care — that is, the delay or denial of medical treatment to some patients who need it because there simply aren’t enough resources to go around — is perilously close to becoming reality. As unvaccinated coronavirus victims overwhelm hospitals, some states are edging toward allowing doctors to decide which patients get immediate care and which don’t. It could affect not just coronavirus patients but medical care across the board.

Remember those vaccine mandates? They might be working after all.

“Ted Lasso” is a match made in globalizer heaven. It took a U.S. media/tech platform to make an iconic show about English football, and it took English football to make Apple TV+ a legitimate global media player. Certain Brits and certain Americans might be offended by this truth, but “Ted Lasso” would not have the same global reach if it were a British production, and it would not have the same global resonance if it were about one of our homegrown U.S. sports.

Americans love rags-to-riches stories, tales of people who transcended childhood poverty to achieve adult success. Unless you’re totally oblivious to reality, however, you surely realize that such stories are the exceptions, not the rule. The disadvantages of growing up in poverty — poor nutrition, poor health care, an impoverished environment, the cognitive burden that goes along with never having enough money — can and often do hobble children for the rest of their lives.

Journey with us, if you will, all the way back to August 2019. In a budget deal passed by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump, Washington suspended the U.S. debt limit for two years — two years in which Republicans refrained from pitching a fit every time the U.S. needed to borrow more money.

Amore competent COVID-19 control plan driven by expertise, not politics, was one of President Joe Biden’s key 2020 campaign promises. But two unforced pandemic management errors raise troubling questions about whether reality matches Biden’s rhetoric eight months into his tenure.

Assertions about actions taken by Gen. Mark Milley in the final days of the Trump presidency are serious enough to merit vigorous inquiry, and possibly an investigation, by both Congress and the Justice Department.

Picture a 19-year-old gymnast, sitting on her bedroom floor, recounting in detail how her team doctor sexually abused her. She’s on the phone with two FBI agents, telling them about the time the doctor molested her in a hotel room in Tokyo. She begins to cry.

Missouri’s best-known insurrectionist, Sen. Josh Hawley, is still trying to accomplish what he could not pull off with his power-to-the-rioters raised fist on Jan 6. You’re not going to believe this, but in a Senate floor speech, he called on President Joe Biden to resign.

In a case that shows the enduring corrupt power of the U.S. gun lobby, on Sept. 9 President Joe Biden was forced to withdraw his nomination of David Chipman as director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Added to the growing list of damage the anti-vaccination/anti-mask crowd is doing to America is the recommendation of renewed travel bans in the European Union against U.S. visitors, due to spiking coronavirus cases here. Congratulations to all those anti-science “patriots” out there for turning America into a global leper.

Anew book by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa contains a singularly startling allegation. In the waning weeks of the Trump administration, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, twice called his counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng, of the People’s Liberation Army, offering assurances that the United States was not about to launch an attack against China.

As the risk of severe climate change rises, and efforts to reduce carbon emissions ramp up, serious thought must also be given to the movement of people that climate change stands to provoke. This migration looks to be disruptive, but it may also significantly affect the long-term economic consequences of climate change — and not necessarily for the worse.

Gov. Gavin Newsom faced a recall because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and he survived the recall, in part, because of his pandemic response, including his support for masking and vaccine mandates. The validation from Californians should send a powerful message that voters want leaders who embrace science and are willing to impose public health measures to bring the pandemic to an end.

English mathematician, logician and philosopher John Venn introduced the Venn diagram in the 1880s. A Venn diagram uses overlapping circles to illustrate the logical relationships between two or more sets of items. Often, Venn diagrams serve to highlight how the items are similar and different. They can also help us visualize things in new ways and afford us the opportunity to make fresh observations.

For months after the coronavirus vaccines were released, many Americans who refused to take them cited the fact that they were initially approved by federal regulators on an emergency fast-track basis rather than under the normal drug-approval process. That fear, never fully valid to begin with, should have finally been laid to rest by the recent full, formal approval of the first of the vaccines.