Ashish Valentine

James Loewen, a renowned sociologist, public educator and racial justice activist, died on Thursday, Aug. 19, 2021, at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Md. He was the author of several books, including the best-seller Lies My Teacher Told Me. He was 79.

His death was confirmed by Stephen A. Berrey, a friend and professor of American culture and history at the University of Michigan. He says Loewen had been diagnosed with bladder cancer about two years ago.

President Biden threw his support behind a World Trade Organization proposal on Wednesday to waive intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines, clearing a hurdle for vaccine-strapped countries to manufacture their own vaccines even though the patents are privately held.

Sheriff deputies shot and killed Andrew Brown, Jr., in Elizabeth City, N.C., last week. One of their bodycams captured the shooting, but Superior Court Judge Jeff Foster blocked the full release of the video for at least a month.

Pasquotank County Sheriff Tommy Wooten, who oversees the deputies who killed Brown, a 42-year-old Black man, told All Things Considered that he thinks releasing the video now will help people trust law enforcement

It's no secret why poor countries don't have as many vaccines as rich countries.

"There's really just a scarcity of doses," says Kate Elder, senior vaccine policy adviser at Doctors Without Borders' Access Campaign. The question is, how do you fix it?

Two decades after effective antiretroviral drugs became widely available for HIV, African Americans still make up 43 percent of new HIV diagnoses. They've also died from COVID-19 at one and a half times the rate of white people.

Longtime activist Phill Wilson has spent four decades fighting HIV/AIDS in Black communities. Unless we learn from our successes and failures with HIV/AIDS, he said, COVID-19 will be with communities of color for a long time.

Dr. Nikhila Juvvadi, the chief clinical officer at Chicago's Loretto Hospital, administered the first coronavirus vaccine doses in the city, inoculating frontline medical workers.

But while they have priority around the country, not every eligible health care worker actually wants to get the vaccine. A recent survey by Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly a third probably or definitely would refuse vaccination.

The tools of the Internet, and a bit of public embarrassment, can go a long way in drawing attention to a cause.

Front-line workers at grocery and retail stores have used them effectively during the pandemic. Eight out of every nine American workers don't have a union to represent them in workplace disputes. So thousands of them have been flocking to the nonprofit website Coworker.org in their fight for a fairer workplace.

Heather Larson has enjoyed kayaking for several years. Before the pandemic, she'd often rent a kayak for the weekend and ride it at state parks in Illinois and nearby Wisconsin. But the Des Plaines, Ill., resident has had no luck finding one for the past three months.

Updated at 8:02 p.m. ET

Tribune Publishing, the parent company of local news outlets across the country from the Chicago Tribune to The Baltimore Sun, is closing the physical offices of five newspapers permanently.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and other major tech companies met with U.S. government officials on Wednesday to discuss their plans to counter disinformation on social media in the run-up to the November election.