The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter point—its first increase in more than three years—and signaled that more tightening could follow. JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citi, Wells Fargo and other major banks immediately lifted their prime rate to 7 percent, making credit cards, personal loans and business borrowing more expensive. Inflation is still winning, and households will pay for it through higher monthly bills and a tougher path to new credit.

America’s lightly regulated commercial-surrogacy industry allows wealthy foreign clients to purchase pregnancies, obtain U.S. citizenship for the resulting children and exercise extraordinary control over the women carrying them. The system has enabled a Chinese billionaire to father more than 100 American-born children while agencies, lawyers and clinics profit from arrangements with few meaningful safeguards. What is sold as reproductive freedom increasingly resembles an international market in women and children.

Travelers without a REAL ID must now pay a $45 fee and submit to additional identity checks before flying, while license-plate-camera networks record billions of vehicle movements each month. Together, the systems are creating an infrastructure capable of following Americans through airports and across the country. A program sold as secure identification is becoming a national apparatus for monitoring ordinary movement.

A House bill would void nondisclosure agreements used to silence victims of sexual abuse, define grooming in federal law and use the Epstein records to expose the legal protections that shielded powerful offenders. For years, money, contracts and institutional influence kept victims isolated while the people around Epstein avoided scrutiny. Congress is now targeting the machinery that made that silence enforceable.