In the news today: Senate Republicans aren’t budging from their vow to shut down the federal government—again—rather than voting with Democrats to keep it open. With the fall of Roe v. Wade in Texas, women in that state are now facing hours-long drives to out-of-state clinics.

Until this week, the most outrageous thing I’ve seen in my 29 years as a political junkie was the religious right’s four-year campaign to bully the American people into bowing down to Donald Trump. In hindsight, I got a foreshadowing of this when I spent the first six months of my freshman year at the University of North Carolina in the belly of the religious right beast.

by Bareerah Zafar

This story was originally published at Prism.

Pro-choice organizations across Texas are working to provide residents with access to free emergency contraception and other reproductive health needs in the wake of the state’s near-total ban on abortion.

We’re experiencing a global pandemic. Teachers, staff, and students who are back to in-person classrooms are trying their best to return to a degree of normal life and education while still being mindful of a potentially deadly virus. We know that countless parents have already protested mask requirements, and some, in fact, have even become physically violent over them.

When I see the Caribbean mentioned in U.S. headlines, it is most often brought up in passing in weather forecasts about storms forming in the Atlantic Ocean and heading towards the mainland U.S., or when there is a natural disaster, like the recent earthquake in Haiti, or last spring’s eruption of the La Soufriere volcano on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.