How the law allows police to act lawlessly

On Monday, May 25, Minneapolis police killed George Floyd. While two officers pinned the handcuffed Floyd on a city street, another fended off...

McSally: Americans can push through COVID-19

In 2009, while I was stationed in Europe with the Air Force, I decided to climb Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa with six friends. It is a beautiful and...

George Floyd: Journalists sound off on pain, frustration

I'm USA TODAY editor-in-chief Nicole Carroll, and this is The Backstory, insights into our biggest stories of the week. If you'd like to get The...

As coronavirus rages, innovators rise to help

Even in normal times, when the economy is robust and the threat of a pandemic is distant, more than 14 million American households experience food...

7 of our top opinion columns this week: ICYMI

In today's fast-paced news environment, it can be hard to keep up. For your weekend reading, we've started in-case-you-missed-it compilations of...

For black America, a long wait to breathe

Can a black person breathe in America anymore? Racism won't let us breathe. Police won't let us breathe. COVID-19 won't let us breathe. And too...

Coronavirus: My husband died in a nursing home

On Monday, April 20, 29,468 new COVID-19 cases were reported in the United States, and an estimated 1,700 people died of the disease. If recent...

Adopt minimum national police use-of-force standards

Monday’s death of George Floyd, a Minneapolis man pinned to the ground by a police officer applying a knee to his neck, underscores a disturbing...

Redefine liability rules in coronavirus era

The American economy thrives on trust. Customers normally don’t pause at each storefront, or employees at the time clock, trying to decide whether...

How COVID-19 brought back a feudalist society

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many things, but also accelerated America’s descent into a new form of feudalism. The preexisting conditions...

Trump stirs up the internet's septic problem

I never thought I’d say this, but Donald Trump is right: something must be done to regulate the power of large internet platforms like Facebook,...

Will Trump be 'played for a sucker' by Taliban?

With the May 18 announcement of a new power-sharing deal between President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan and former Chief Executive Officer Abdullah...

Our politics are awful. We need baseball. Now.

To the people negotiating the return of baseball: You cannot fail. We are desperate for the things that bind Americans together because we are...

A psychiatrist on the coronavirus front lines

Restless unease filled my body one Saturday evening in March when my phone buzzed with an urgent notification from our program director. The...

Crump: Taylor case shows self-defense doesn't apply to blacks

In America, we like to believe that the rights afforded under the Constitution and by law apply equally to everyone. But several recent,...

Trump could censor himself with executive order

As advocates for free speech, we can’t help but see a certain irony in the attack President Donald Trump is mounting on social media...

Trump executive order hits Twitter, social media

President Donald Trump’s executive order on social media has left more questions than answers on the ability of the government to regulate...

For-profit colleges stole our past 10 years

When we met in 2007, we were on our way to achieving the American dream, and we were doing it together. We were students at the now-closed Art...

Bush, McAuliffe: Training cheaper than layoffs

Drastic change is upon us as a country and as a world. We are facing unemployment levels last seen during the Great Depression, overnight tens of...

COVID-19 is no joke; it's why comedy must go on

On a spring evening in Los Angeles, a nervous comedian grabbed a microphone and struggled to riff about life during the coronavirus. “Wow, this,...

Despite pandemic, we have the right to worship

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that in America, in our church — the First Pentecostal Church of Holly Springs, Mississippi — I would...

COVID-19 likely fueling opioid deaths

As May comes to a close, COVID-19 had killed nearly 100,000 Americans so far this year. This must clearly remain the focus of public health...

I thought nurses were 'sellouts.' I was wrong.

When I was growing up, if you had asked me what I thought about nursing, I might have said it was a “sellout” profession. A sellout, to a punk...

Our view: 100,000 deaths tally how Trump failed

Yang: Rebuild economy that helps all Americans

We have all asked ourselves these past days, “When, and how, will things go back to normal?” We miss our old routines, embracing our family and...

Facebook needs a new cybersecurity approach

Six months out from election 2020, Facebook is awash with coronavirus-themed paid advertising — but the American public has been left in the...

Don't waste COVID-19 tests on those with symptoms

Universal testing in the United States may be on the way, but it is not around the corner. Acknowledging that regrettable reality means that, in...

COVID: It's time to lift nursing home restrictions

I was examining an 85-year-old patient with moderate dementia who lives in a nursing home because she is no longer able to take care of herself...

George Floyd's death is shocking but not surprising

The images are shocking, even for those of us who have been steeped for years in coverage of police brutality.  George Floyd, 46, was handcuffed...

Twitter, Trump on collision course with truth

Twitter, a service built around brevity and speed, is about to get a lot busier. After seemingly ignoring every standard it had when it came to...

Our view: New age of entrepreneurial space flight

If all goes according to plan and the weather permits, two U.S. astronauts will head to the International Space Station on Wednesday aboard a...

NASA: We’re going back to the moon, and beyond

Our nation is on the verge of launching NASA astronauts to the International Space Station on a commercial American rocket and spacecraft — a...

Coronavirus: Different kind of natural disaster

Before a speech on disaster preparedness last year, I was asked in an interview for a local cable program what threat worried me most. “Pandemics...

Enough! I'm giving up on coronavirus quarantine

I’m inherently lazy, so I hate working out. Given my druthers, I’d spend my days eating ice cream bonbons and watching episodes of "The Real...

US COVID deaths near 100K, this is not winning

When our son was very young, we used to tell him he had won at miniature golf because he had the highest score. I think of that whenever I hear...