Author: Reporter

Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin was on the Senate floor, but her mind was on the other side of the Capitol. The House was voting that July afternoon on Democratic legislation to protect same-sex and interracial marriages in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the federal right to an abortion. And it was suddenly winning more Republican votes than Baldwin, or anyone else, had expected. Baldwin, who became the first openly gay senator when she was elected a decade ago, said she was “overjoyed” as she saw the votes coming in. She excitedly walked over to Ohio...

Police are searching for the shooter who killed a U.S. Postal Service employee as he was delivering mail in Wisconsin. The shooting happened just before 6:00 p.m. on December 9 on the city’s north side. The Milwaukee Police Department said the 44-year-old mail carrier was pronounced dead at the scene. He had worked for the Postal Service for 18 years. Police said the Postal Service and the FBI are assisting in the investigation. Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson called the crime “alarming,” in a statement released in the eventing on December 9. “The shooting death of a Milwaukee postal worker...

Mental health advocates say there is a cruel quirk in abortion bans in several states: There are exemptions for life-threatening emergencies, but psychiatric crises do not count. It makes no sense to an Arizona mother of three who became suicidal during her fourth pregnancy and says an abortion saved her life. Or to researcher Kara Zivin, who nearly died from a suicide attempt in pregnancy and whose work suggests these crises are not uncommon. Zivin had a healthy baby, but she sympathizes with women facing mental health emergencies who believe their only option is to end a pregnancy. “People...

As more nurses leave their jobs in hospitals and health-care centers, foundations are pouring millions of dollars into efforts to ensure that more stay in the profession and get more out of the job than just the applause and pats on the back they got during the bleakest days of the pandemic. Philanthropic pledges announced this year to help nurses and the nursing profession include: A $125 million donation in February from Leonard Lauder, heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune, to the University of Pennsylvania to create a tuition-free program that eventually will train 40 nurses a year....

The COVID-19 pandemic sent Heidi Whitney’s daughter into a tailspin. Suddenly the San Diego middle schooler was sleeping all day and awake all night. When in-person classes resumed, she was so anxious at times that she begged to come home early, telling the nurse her stomach hurt. Whitney tried to keep her daughter in class. But the teen’s desperate bids to get out of school escalated. Ultimately, she was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward, failed “pretty much everything” at school and was diagnosed with depression and ADHD. As she started high school this fall, she was deemed eligible for...