“I think we’re always looking for common ground, and when we can agree — it’s magic,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List.

This high-minded rapprochement, alas, has not made its way into the halls of Congress. Thirty-three senators have signed onto the Pregnancy Workers Fairness Act, and 142 members of the House. They’re all Democrats.

For sure, given that the next session of Congress is going to be entirely run by Republicans.

In many quarters we encounter a general impression of weariness and aging, of a Europe which is now a ‘grandmother,’ no longer fertile and vibrant,” Pope Francis said in an address to the European Parliament last week.

“Then the European Union was hailed as a ‘beacon of civilization,’”

Indeed, in 2014, Pope Francis — a non-European pope, as many observers noted — said, “as the European Union has expanded, there has been growing mistrust on the part of citizens towards institutions considered to be aloof, engaged in laying down rules perceived as insensitive to individual peoples, if not downright harmful.”

His comments come as an American-led coalition expands military action against Islamic State strongholds in Iraq and Syria, but has so far been unable to stop its killing rampage. On Sunday, the Islamic State announced the beheading of an American, Peter Kassig.

We are not looking at a collapse of Iraqi state. We’ve turned the tide,” he said.

Iraq, however, has paid a heavy price already. Since the beginning of the year, he said, 10,000 civilians have been killed and 20,000 injured.

For the first time since the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, the Army is shrinking.

If funding cuts mandated by Congress continue, the Army could have fewer than 450,000 soldiers by 2019 — the smallest force since World War II.

Yet when Mr. Xi was asked at a news conference if he would do the same for foreign journalists, who have had a hard time obtaining permission to work in China, he displayed little patience with such concerns.

A poll last year found Congress less popular than cockroaches.

“Politics is the noblest of professions,” President Eisenhower said in 1954, and politics in the past often seemed a bright path toward improving our country. President Clinton represented a generation that regarded politics as a tool to craft a better world, and President Obama himself mobilized young voters with his gauzy message of hope. He presented himself as the politician who could break Washington’s gridlock and get things done — and we’ve seen how well that worked.

But they are turning not to politics as their lever but to social enterprise, to nonprofits, to advocacy, to business.

An Iran nuclear deal would be good for the United States, Iran and the world.

But it now appears possible that the Supreme Court may be willing to deprive millions of Americans of health care on the basis of an equally obvious typo.

Last week the court shocked many observers by saying that it was willing to hear a case claiming that the wording of one clause in the Affordable Care

He made no mention of his recent legal troubles, including the 18 hours he spent under questioning by the police and investigators in July over accusations of corruption related to the financing of his 2007 campaign.

214,000 jobs in October, while the official jobless rate dropped to 5.8 percent

a report from the payroll processor ADP this week that private sector employment increased by 230,000 jobs in October.

It would, with zigzags and pauses, after huffs and hesitations, gradually integrate with the Western world.

Modernity would do its work, breeding openness and connectedness. Autocracy and crony capitalism would yield over time (maybe even a long time, but still) to more representative government in Moscow and law-based markets.

He has opted for confrontation with the West as the basis for Russian development and the consolidation of his own power.