News stories suggesting “the Great Barrier Reef — the aquatic wonder off Australia’s coast — is in grave peril” are highly deceptive, explains Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal.

“Australian scientists have meticulously tracked the reef’s coral cover since 1986”; the data show it “began declining” in 2001, and by 2012 “had shrunk to less than half its original cover” — yet then “it rebounded spectacularly.”

“By 2021 coral cover was higher than it had been since measurements began,” and growth kept up through 2024.

Yes, “new data show that coral cover has dropped” this last year, but “large year-to-year variations are typical.”

“Cover across the entire reef is still higher than in 2021,” and “all the highest years are in the 2020s, yet we hear nothing but doom and gloom.”

“Garment-rending” about GOP redistricting ploys “misses the harm done to Democrats by the continuing concentration of their partisans in ever-less competitive districts,” warns The Liberal Patriot’s Ruy Teixeira.

The share of Dem-held House districts “that are considered competitive has declined steadily to only about a quarter of seats,” so Dem reps are “under less and less pressure to deviate from party orthodoxy and take account of sentiment outside of their highly partisan supporters.”

Plus, “today’s Democrats” are “far more liberal” than in the party’s heyday. So candidates are “far more likely to be rewarded by their voters for no-holds-barred liberalism,” leaving the party “in poor shape to course correct” as its traditional base shifts rightward.

As a result, “the more Trump overreaches, the more Democrats, ensconced in their partisan bubbles, are pressured into the most histrionic, radical, ineffective responses.”

“President Trump has extended” Vladimir Putin “incredibly generous terms” to end the Ukraine war, notes Fred Fleitz at American Greatness.

Yet Putin has “spurned him,” continuing the war and last week attending “a showy summit convened by Chinese President Xi Jinping.”

Such “recalcitrance requires a robust response” to “reaffirm America’s global leadership.”

The prez should “implement tough energy sanctions” and “sell weapons to Ukraine through NATO.”

Yes, “there are limitations on what the U.S. should do to end this war,” but Trump “deserves credit for trying to address a global threat that was seen as unsolvable” and is still tough “because of the incompetent policies of President Biden and European leaders before Trump took office.”

“Virginia’s Democratic nominee for governor, Abigail Spanberg, wants to reverse” recent gains in sending “illegal immigrants” home, charge the Washington Examiner’s editors.

She believes letting state police and jail officials help the feds enforce immigration law is a “waste of resources.”

Virginia has worked with the feds to nab more than “2,500 criminals,” whom she apparently now wants “freed to steal, rape, and murder.”

The contrast with her rival, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears, “is stark”: “My father and I had to file documents and wait to be granted permission to enter the United States,” recalls Earle-Sears, who immigrated legally from Jamaica.

“The rule of law is not negotiable — it is the foundation of our safety, our freedom, and the promise of opportunity that defines America.”

President Trump’s claim that in taking an “equity stake in Intel” the federal government “paid zero” obscures that taxpayers actually provided “$8.9 billion in subsidies with potentially more to come,” grumbles Reason’s Veronique de Rugy; Trump “simply dressed up the giveaway as an investment.”

Worse, the deal is seen as a “‘down payment’ “on a U.S. sovereign wealth fund” — a vehicle that will “inject politics into every investment decision.”

And “the temptation to steer regulation to protect” the government’s “portfolio will be overwhelming.”

The nation doesn’t “need another subsidy machine disguised as investment.”

For a better, stronger economy, do “structural reforms” that lower “regulatory barriers, restrain “spending,” and fix “entitlements.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board