Breaking News

Opinion

Skin scratch testing reveals a false-positive peanut allergy

Columns

DEAR DR. ROACH: I recently underwent skin scratch testing for food allergies. I was shocked that among the positive findings was peanuts. I have eaten peanuts all of my life (I’m 55) and have never had any type of reaction to peanuts. I was given an EpiPen and was told to avoid peanuts. The same skin testing results were confirmed by a second allergist. I’m afraid that avoiding peanuts will sensitize me to them when I feel that I’m currently desensitized. I do have chronic inflammation and rheumatoid arthritis, so I don’t want to ingest something that may cause an ...

Dear Annie: Resetting a pandemic friendship

Columns

Dear Annie: My neighbor and I became friendly during the pandemic. We’d pick up things for each other at the grocery store, help water each other’s plants, chat on our porches in the evening. Somewhere along the way, she decided we were much closer than I did. Now she’ll drop by unannounced and even text things like, “I miss you, haven’t seen you today!” if I don’t respond quickly. This type of thing was fine when we were all locked at home, but we’re not living in a pandemic anymore. I’m too busy to entertain her all the time. She’s a really nice woman, but ...

What the end of Viktor Orban means for the New Right

Columns

Viktor Orban, the proudly “illiberal” prime minister of Hungary, beloved by various New Right nationalists and MAGA American intellectuals, was crushed at the polls this weekend. Over the last decade or so, Hungary became for the New Right what Sweden or Cuba were to the Old Left. For generations, various American leftists loved to cite the Cuban model as better than ours when it came to healthcare, or education. Some would even make wild claims about freedom under Fidel Castro’s dictatorship. Susan Sontag famously proclaimed in 1969 that no Cuban writer “has been or is in jail ...

Little kids, big government

Columns

Child care got expensive — more than $13,000 per child, per year. So many people want government to pay for it. My state just agreed. New York will fund free child care. Yay! But wait ... what government does isn’t free. Taxpayers pay. And taxpayers pay more because “government rules have unintended consequences,” says Carrie Lukas of the Independent Women’s Forum. Washington, D.C. day care teachers must have a degree in Early Childhood Education. That can take two years and cost $22,000. “Of course you’re going to have to pay a lot more,” says Lukas in my ...

Pope vs. president is a fight everyone loses

Columns

President Trump and Pope Leo are in a war of words right now — when they should be allies, not enemies. Both want peace, but the president intends to get it by winning a war against Iran, while the pope thinks the war isn’t worth fighting. “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon,” Trump said Sunday on his Truth social-media network, in a post blasting the pontiff as “weak on crime and terrible for foreign policy.” With midterm elections just seven months away, Catholic voters suddenly find themselves in the crossfire between the ...

Dear Annie: How to handle in-laws hurling insults

Columns

Dear Annie: I have been married for 12 years to a good man whom I love very much, but I dread nearly every holiday, birthday dinner and casual Sunday visit with his family. On the surface, my in-laws are charming, polished and the sort of people everyone else describes as “so nice.” But behind that polished exterior is a steady drip of cutting remarks aimed almost entirely at me. My mother-in-law has a talent for delivering insults with a smile. She will look at a meal I brought and say, “Well, that’s certainly ... rustic,” or ask whether I am “still doing that little job ...