Employer-sponsored health insurance is rapidly deteriorating. In 2027, premiums are expected to see their largest single-year increase in two decades, jumping 11% and closing in on a nearly five-fold increase this century. The amount workers pay for their portion today would have covered the entire premium in 2000.

This coverage will never get ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — What’s so wrong about requiring every Californian to show a government ID before they’re allowed to vote? That’s what Proposition 39 backers ask. And it’s a fair question.

Here are some valid answers:

It would make California’s already notoriously slow vote count even more pokey.

It would be an added hassle...Read more

The midterms are just a few weeks away, and polls predict that independent voters, who broke for Donald Trump in 2024, are planning on voting for Democrats by wide margins. Among Latinos, the numbers are staggering, to the point that the Republican gerrymanders in Florida and Texas may actually result in Democratic victories.

If the Democrats ...Read more

Here is a disturbing game: Try to spot the illegal immigrant.

Is it the waitress, the winning one from Bulgaria, or is it the charming emergency room doctor from Pakistan, or is it one of the Mexican men working on the housing site at the corner? Maybe it is the Haitian caregiver in your home, whom you adore and are afraid to ask if employing ...Read more

The Fulcrum is committed to nurturing the next generation of journalists. We asked Idris Mohammed, a Fall Fulcrum Fellow, to share what democracy means to him and his view of its current health.

____

Growing up in northern Nigeria has taught me that democracy is more than elections. It is also about how a country is governed every day. In my ...Read more

President Donald Trump has a loyalty problem. Actually, he has two of them.

The first concerns where his own loyalties lie. Consider these questions: Has he been loyal to the oath he took to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution? Does he respect the separation of powers and the limits on his authority as president? Does he understand that ...Read more

Is it acceptable to bring an iced coffee to a job interview?

This seemingly mundane question has somehow consumed various corners of the internet, taking over social media feeds and group chats. Bloomberg Opinion is not immune. Not since the great shorts-in-the-office firestorm of 2024 has a workplace debate lit up our team’s Slack channel ...Read more

Russian President Vladimir Putin, frustrated by his bogged-down war in Ukraine, is trying to intimidate the European nations that — given President Donald Trump’s severe cuts in aid to Kyiv — are now Ukrainians’ main military, economic and diplomatic supporters.

A few of the many examples: an explosive-laden drone found at the airport ...Read more

The U.S. deficit has reached $1.97 trillion and is on track to pass 6% of gross domestic product this fiscal year, the latest milestone in a remarkable deterioration of the federal budget. With national debt at a record $40 trillion, the feeling that the music must stop at some point has jittery market watchers zeroed in on a jittery bond market...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco got slapped down Thursday by the California Supreme Court in not one but two cases. Ouch.

First, the court told Bianco to return more than 600,000 ballots he had seized as part of an ill-conceived, conspiracy-laden “investigation” into voter fraud — making it clear it was the ...Read more

The Trump administration has been processing immigration cases at 26 Federal Plaza amid “overcrowded, squalid, and degrading” detention conditions, says Manhattan Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan, who has ordered it be permanently cleaned up and that people in custody no longer be denied access to medical care or their lawyers.

This is the exact ...Read more

Visiting mixed villages in former Yugoslavia before it careened toward its violent breakup in 1992, I spoke to neighbors who dismissed the idea of a coming war as simply unimaginable. But as each tuned in to the increasingly nationalistic TV stations of their respective Serbian or Croatian capitals, they were bombarded by commentary posing as ...Read more

Just three years after OpenAI said its models were good at grade-school math, the company announced they had solved the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem in 88 hours, something that had stumped humanity’s greatest mathematical minds since the 1930s. Project that trend forward and you see why OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman ...Read more

The ballots Californians cast, or fail to cast, this November will say more about the republic’s health than any of the 250th anniversary commemorations could.

Generation Z accounts for roughly 1 in 5 of the state’s eligible voters, yet its members register and turn out far below every older cohort: In the 2024 general election, 42.5% of ...Read more

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has raised a seemingly incongruous possibility: Perhaps Canada, 3,500 miles from Brussels, might become an “associate member” of the European Union. Prime Minister Mark Carney seems open to the idea.

Exactly what this might mean is far from clear. Whether Canada or the EU’s member ...Read more

President Donald Trump is full of thiols.

We all are, actually.

The easiest spots to find them are our hairs, however anyplace carbon, sulfur and hydrogen atoms are collectively having a party, one type of molecule they can form is a thiol. The mix and number of thiols in our system varies, depending on diet and other factors, thus the ...Read more

If you try to take a free ride on, say, public transit in New York City, you’ll get in trouble with the law. If your mode of transportation is a private jet, on the other hand, there’s a high risk you’ll be offered champagne.

Private jets are far from free, of course; the average hourly charter rate for a midsize jet is $12,730, according...Read more