My kids and I began reading banned books together when they were just learning sight words. Snuggled with my kids on the couch, I’d read aloud from a slim paperback volume of the “Captain Underpants” series. My son, 6, and my daughter, 4, followed along by looking at the images.

We giggled through the antics of fourth graders George and ...Read more

After weeks of reverses, Russia's army is still losing ground in the battlefields of Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin's response, characteristically, has been to escalate on other fronts.

Putin expanded the military draft, announcing a call-up of 300,000 reservists and prompting an exodus of Russian men to neighboring countries.

On Friday, ...Read more

As the Supreme Court begins its new term, it’s clear that the court’s majority is determined to move the law much further to the right. The last term ended with the court overruling Roe v. Wade, dramatically expanding gun rights, rejecting the separation of church and state, and limiting the power of administrative agencies.

About half the ...Read more

When Gov. Ron DeSantis referred to a “biblical storm surge,” he was assessing Hurricane Ian’s damage and, unknowingly, prophesying what’s to come in future years and decades in Florida.

Ian displayed many of the characteristics scientists say climate change will bring — and already has brought — to hurricanes because of warmer ocean...Read more

The warning signs had abounded: The suspect had already been probed by federal prosecutors, who were so concerned that they referred him to the FBI. Multiple descriptions had painted him as callous and openly racist, a pattern that culminated with a killing Tuesday for which he and his brother have been arrested.

We’re not talking about a ...Read more

Those left jobless by Hurricane Ian, mainly the thousands of people who worked in the tourism industry in Sanibel, Fort Myers and Naples and Pine Island, are about to learn whether the state’s improved unemployment website will handle the load more effectively than it did during the COVID-19 pandemic. It better. These hurricane-stunned ...Read more

First, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Donald Trump appointee, granted the former president’s request for a “special master” to review documents he took from the White House, a baffling decision derided by legal experts across the political spectrum. Worse, Cannon ruled that the FBI couldn’t have access to classified documents, ...Read more

What makes troubled and deeply disturbed teenage boys like Nikolas Cruz so enamored by Nazi symbols and prone to racial and gender hate?

As the Parkland shooter’s sentencing trial uncovers chilling details about his life, including a history of skinning lizards alive as a child, jurors on Tuesday got a further glance at his troubled mind. ...Read more

The predictable pile-on has begun.

With the recent release of their separate books on Donald Trump, reporters Maggie Haberman (New York Times) and the spousal team of Peter Baker and Susan Glasser (New York Times, New Yorker) are being savaged on social media, especially in the anti-Trump Twitterverse, for allegedly sitting on information ...Read more

I am a proud undocumented medical student attending the UCLA School of Medicine — a reality that still seems like a dream. It is a reality because of the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, or DACA. However, the DACA program and its beneficiaries remain in jeopardy as the policy could be ended by a court ruling any day now. If ...Read more

ST. LOUIS — When Barbara Sheinbein, 64, went to vote in the April election her friend drove her to the polls. Her friend went inside the polling location in St. Louis County and told a worker that Sheinbein wanted to use an accessible voting machine because she is blind. She can’t read a printed ballot.

“We have a little issue,” the ...Read more

On Sept. 18, nearly five years to the day of Hurricane Maria, the force of Hurricane Fiona and a fragile power grid plunged Puerto Rico into a frightening yet familiar darkness. From low-lying to mountainous regions, flooding and landslides battered vulnerable communities, and with it, resurfaced painful memories of Hurricane Maria.

More than a...Read more

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy last month unveiled the Commitment to America, a summary of the agenda for what he hopes will be a new Republican majority in 2023. The policy goals it outlines are a mix of traditional Republican positions (pro-life, pro-gun, pro-military spending) and relatively new priorities, such as promising to “...Read more

“You chose a good time to come back,” the Waitrose cashier said ironically when I told her this was my first week living in the U.K. since 1990. And that was before the Queen died and the pound collapsed to a record low.

Between the cost of living crisis, communal riots in Leicester and politically inspired market turmoil, it must seem ...Read more

December 2019, my husband submitted his final student loan payment. From the moment we got married and started attacking those student loans as a team, it took us 18 months to pay off $51,234.51. Of that debt, $34,134.51 were federal loans and $17,100 were private. There is not one part of me that begrudges the millions of Americans who are on ...Read more

BALTIMORE — During a recent campaign event in Harford County, Maryland, a woman asked Heather Mizeur, the 1st District Democratic candidate for Congress, about keeping guns away from dangerous people.

While she agreed with Mizeur that more could be done legislatively to ensure public safety in legal gun purchases, the woman expressed dismay ...Read more

Mammoth Hurricane Ian has broken our hearts and stolen the stuff that paradisaical dreams are made of in our weary Florida.

Its powerful Category 4 winds stirred up storm surge taller than people, ending lives and uprooting more than trees and concrete on beloved old Florida islands.

Deadly Ian has isolated Sanibel and Captiva, severing the ...Read more

The threat of climate change conjures certain scenes: Smoke billowing from a forest aflame. Smothering heat clinging to the distorted asphalt of a densely packed street. Glaciers breaking off into a rising sea. Another scenario should be equally terrifying but is harder to envision: a virus leaving the animal that has played blind host for an ...Read more

Crimes like this don’t often happen on land. A 10-minute slow-motion slaughter captured by a cellphone camera shows a group of unarmed men at sea, flailing in the water, shot and killed one by one, after which the culprits pose for celebratory selfies. The only thing more shocking than the footage was the government inaction that followed.

...Read more

The world has watched in shock, outrage and disbelief, as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin brazenly invaded his sovereign neighbor Ukraine — in a full-speed-ahead aggression that ended up with Putin cornering himself and entrapping much of the world in the mess he single-handedly created.

Then he made his godawful situation much worse by ...Read more