Author: Reporter

With his gap-tooth smile, hip-hop routines and volunteer work for a food charity, Roosevelt White III was well known in the downtown Phoenix tent city known as “The Zone.” But like many homeless people, White suffered from diabetes and cardiovascular disease. He died unexpectedly one sweltering September day at age 36. Thousands of people like White who died in 2023 without a permanent home were memorialized in communities from Cape Cod, Massachusetts to La Crosse, Wisconsin, to Riverside, California. Established in 1990, the increasingly popular Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day is observed with prayers, candles, moments of silence and the...

Thousands of women stocked up on abortion pills just in case they needed them, new research shows, with demand peaking in the past couple years at times when it looked like the medications might become harder to get. Medication abortion accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., and typically involves two drugs: mifepristone and misoprostol. A research letter published in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at requests for these pills from people who were not pregnant and sought them through Aid Access, a European online telemedicine service that prescribes them for future and immediate use. Aid...

In a corner of their Mexico City office, activists from Catholics for the Right to Decide keep an image of the Virgin Mary close to a green scarf that reads: “Mary was consulted to be mother of God.” For these Catholic women, prayer does not conflict with their fight for abortion access nor does their devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe prevent them from supporting LGBTQ+ rights. “You might think that one cannot be a feminist and a Catholic,” said activist Cinthya Ramírez. “But being women of faith does not mean that we oppose progressivity, human rights or sexual...

Snuggling on the sofa across from the Christmas tree, Sol proudly showed off the dog her foster parents gave her for earning all A’s even though she crossed the southern U.S. border knowing very little English. “They helped me a lot,” said the 14-year-old eighth grader. Then she blushed, hid her face in Cosmo’s fur, and added in Spanish, “Oooh, I said that English!” Sol — who is from Argentina — is among tens of thousands of children who arrive in the United States without a parent, during a huge surge in immigrants that’s prompting congressional debate to change...

Almost 80 years after the Holocaust, about 245,000 Jewish survivors are still living across more than 90 countries, a new census report revealed on January 23. Nearly half of them, or 49%, are living in Israel, while 18% are in Western Europe, 16% in the United States, and 12% in countries of the former Soviet Union, according to a study by the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, also referred to as the Claims Conference. Before the publication of the demographic report, there were only vague estimates about how many Holocaust survivors are still alive. Their...