Opinion

No one knows whether last weekend’s Wagner Group uprising means the end of President Vladimir Putin’s control of Russia, just as no one knew before the last few weeks of 1999 that Putin would replace Boris Yeltsin and become Russia’s leader for the next quarter-century.

Experts will advise you never to eat meat with cream sauce at a buffet; always to lock your car even when just dashing into the 7-Eleven for two minutes; and never to read national polls in the year before an election.

Dear Annie: My best friend lives on the opposite coast from me. We’re both women, and we share everything with each other, the good and the bad.

The Former President’s Bloody Rhetoric Undermines His Defense of Sentencing Reform Donald Trump can’t seem todecidewhetherhewantsto execute drug dealers or free them from prison. The former president’s debate with himself reflects a broader clash between Republicans who think tougher criminal penalties are always better and Republicans who understand that justice requires proportionality.

Dear Annie: I am engaged to a very loving man who is quite the lone wolf. Former issues in his past kept him at arm’s length (at best) with his family. His children communicate with him when they need something or see him when he makes the trip to them, but they do not visit us. When I came into his life, I was thanked for bringing him back into his extended family’s life by some, and by others, I was told they loved his ex-wife like family and I was not welcome.

Stockton Rush, 61, the late Titan submersible explorer, was an American character who stepped straight out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel.

With one year since the Dobbs decision, in which the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, how should we be thinking, as a nation, about this crucial issue? Commentary in the press is conveying that Dobbs was an unpopular decision and that it has strengthened sentiment in the country for legal abortion.

Maybe Social Security Is Just Another Tax We Pay I’ve received a lot of emails recently from readers trying to calculate how much they paid in Social Security taxes over the years and then wanting to compare that to what they will get out of the system in return. More often than not, they are trying to prove that Social Security is a rotten deal.

Dear Annie: I have had a friend for many years, a person who got me through some pretty rough times many years ago. Now she is the one going through a rough time. Ten months ago, she lost a grandson to a fentanyl overdose. We live about three hours apart. At the beginning, she just let everyone know that her grandson had died and gave no details. I felt it was intrusive to ask how he had died since she didn’t offer. I figured she’d share the details when she was ready. I sent sympathy cards and notes of encouragement. When I tried calling, however, I would leave messages and get no return call. Finally, about a month ago, she answered when I called. And I was able to get the details of her grandson’s death.

Samuel Huntington got Ukraine wrong. That’s what a casual reader of “The Clash of Civilizations?” -- published in Foreign Affairs 30 years ago this summer -- might think.