Afederal appeals court tapped the brakes Friday on President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program.

Too often, we forget that fights about what we shouldn’t read are also battles over what we should read. And that every time someone attempts to ban Toni Morrison or Ta-Nehisi Coates, they’re also trying to corral our kids back to Hawthorne and Hemingway, Dante and Dickens.

The active-shooter scene this time wasn’t from a school in a faraway town like Uvalde, Texas, but rather right down the street at the Central Visual and Performing Arts dual high school complex right across the street from Tower Grove Park. The scenes of ambulance gurneys carting away victims and panicked students and adults running for cover brought home, once again, the painful reality of life in America today: Lawmakers continue doing their best to ensure that as many people as possible have access to guns, leaving teachers and children to deal with the aftermath when those guns fall into the wrong hands.

No matter what happens in the upcoming midterm elections, Congress should act before the end of this year to safeguard the nation from any more Trump-style attempts to overthrow the will of the voters.

Even though special master Ken Feinberg, who was in charge of the first federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, distributed $6 billion to the estates of those killed on 9/11 — an average of more than $2 million to the nearly 3,000 victims — the House of Representatives passed its new Fairness for 9/11 Families Act to allow additional claims for the deaths inflicted by the terrorists and set aside $2.7 billion for them.

Unconstitutional acts don’t become constitutional because you like the results. That’s why Congress, not the president, needs to give legal status to illegal immigrants brought here as children.

How much longer will Los Angeles City Council members Kevin de León and Gil Cedillo try to hang on to their jobs?

The alliance between big business and the Republican Party, one of the oldest in U.S. politics, is unusually frayed these days. The question is whether there will be a complete unraveling.

Like a lot of fans of Ye — the artist formerly known as Kanye West — I went from just hearing his music to listening to him when I heard his 2004 quasi-spiritual opus “Jesus Walks.” I became curious about his next interview, his next project, his take on who I should be listening to, because once I heard that Arc Choir sample at the beginning of “Walks,” I was in. To date, Ye has sold more than 160 million records, won 24 Grammys and built a fashion/media empire that’s pushed his net worth north of $2 billion.

Despite weeks of brutal repression, ordinary Iranians of all ages and all sections of society, and from all regions, continue their mass protests, calling for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule. Their message is unmistakable. The Iranian Revolution has failed. The regime it spawned is doomed. The only question left for history to answer is: When will it fall?

As the weather gets colder, Americans hunker down for a third winter marred by COVID-19 — a virus everyone would gladly erase from our memories. But we can’t, because the bug is still taking about 400 American lives per day. Annualized, that works out to more than Alzheimer’s or diabetes and about triple the total killed by influenza and pneumonia combined.

In reverse Robin Hood stories across the nation, the rich are stealing from the poor. In the process, they’re revealing a social safety net that’s been cut to shreds by “welfare reform.”

The final Jan. 6 insurrection committee hearing last Thursday presented what, in any other historical context, would have been a series of major bombshells.