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.

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?

After one failed attempt, Republicans in the House have managed to push through the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a margin of exactly one vote, ending up 214-213 with only three upstanding Republican dissenters supporting the Constitution. So the whole sordid affair finishes in the House, and moves on to the Senate, where it should die immediately on the vine.

Since the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, gun safety advocates, national news outlets and public officials from city councils to the White House have repeated the claim that gun violence has overtaken car accidents to become the leading cause of death for school-aged children in the United States. But according to CDC data, this is only true for Black children. Even then, gun violence is more prevalent among at-risk teenagers in certain historically segregated neighborhoods.

Hawaii is a special place, and it’s the people who make it a compassionate community. We show aloha for our family, friends, neighbors and even complete strangers. All of us at one time or another, have benefited from the care of others.

After a wildly successful drinking career, I finally retired 11 years ago. I’d love to say that it was a considered decision after mature reflections and conversations with loved ones. But no. After yet another solo drinking spree, I woke up fully clothed on the cold hard tiles of my bathroom floor. Mornings like this had led to weeks of sobriety before. But this day, it felt different, and as I vowed never to self-medicate again, I knew I was done for good.

Given that Donald Trump talks trash about a range of issues, it’s tempting to discount the rant in which he suggested that as president he would encourage Russia to attack NATO allies who were “delinquent” in their financial obligations.

The glimmer of hope that Congress might pass a bipartisan border-security bill has been extinguished, at least for now. In killing immigration reforms that their party has long supported — and that are now far less likely to become law — Republicans have demonstrated their lack of interest in governing and their unfortunate fealty to Donald Trump, who would prefer to weaponize the issue on the campaign trail. Despite the failure of this compromise, the bipartisan group that spearheaded the bill shouldn’t give up. Nor can the White House wait for Congress to act. The problems at the border are too pressing — and, for President Joe Biden, too politically damaging to ignore.

For the journalism industry, 2024 is off to a brutal start.

The U.S. Supreme Court expressed proper doubt toward Colorado’s attempt to exclude Donald Trump from its presidential ballot under the 14th Amendment. Trump is indeed an anti-democratic demagogue who sought to overturn the 2020 election, before and on Jan. 6.

Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences.