A choice. Education board. ACA enrollment. Abortion pill. Poll watchers. New tariffs.

By Sherman Smith | editor-in-chief

By Tim Storey and Sue Urahn

Like two sides of a coin imprinted with the nation’s motto, “e pluribus unum” — out of many, one — America’s political factions are cast in opposition, but they are intrinsically bound together as parts of a larger whole.

From the beginning, the United States has aspired to build a more perfect union. When our founders convened the Constitutional Convention in 1787, they disagreed about the structure of government, the balance of power and the protection of individual versus collective rights. But when they debated — and they often did, with great conviction and intensity — they honed their arguments on what they thought was best for the entire country, guided by the shared vision of a new nation established on the ideals of individual freedom, equality and opportunity.

Today, that shared commitment to America’s founding creed is under strain.

TOPEKA — Candidates running for a southeast Kansas State Board of Education seat differ on whether social issues belong in classroom conversations.

While Democrat Heather Guernsey and Republican Destry Brown agree social issues should be discussed in school, Republican candidate Renee Slinkard disagreed.

TOPEKA — A new dashboard tracks the number of Kansans enrolled in health insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplace, offering data for legislators and others to understand the effects of policy changes, a health organization said.

The Kansas Health Institute designed the dashboard to create an easy way for people to access data and see how federal and state changes to marketplace health insurance affects enrollment, said analyst Kaci Cink.

A federal judge in Virginia ruled Thursday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration did not sufficiently justify restrictions imposed in 2023 on a drug used to terminate early pregnancies, adding another layer of complexity to a string of legal cases with opposing goals that could affect future abortion access.

The lawsuit was filed in 2023 by abortion providers in Kansas, Montana and Virginia to challenge the restrictions as excessive, unwarranted and inconsistent with other legal requirements.

WASHINGTON — Political party poll watchers are showing up more and more, usually outside polling places.

They have a different mission than the nonpartisan election observers long regarded as bulwarks of credibility, and there’s concern that voters will be confused who’s there to influence them and who’s there to protect them.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump reignited his tariff agenda Friday by imposing new import taxes on products from dozens of top U.S. trading partners, immediately replacing temporary global tariffs he levied after the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a major blow to his sweeping “Liberation Day” duties.

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