Equity & Justice

Pope Francis is hoping to give the Vatican Secret Archive an image makeover by changing the name of the ancient collection to something less mysterious.

Francis declared that the collection, which dates back centuries and contains millions of documents, will now be known as the Vatican Apostolic Archive.

The new name is a better reflection of the archive's "service to the church and the world of culture," the pontiff said.

It's that time of year: Leaves are falling, temperatures are dropping, families are heading out to the pumpkin patch and that one neighbor is preparing to hand out raisins to kids who'd much, much rather have candy. All is well — at least until our social media feeds are flooded with the annual onslaught of racial Halloween faux pas.

Roman Catholic bishops gathered at the Vatican on Saturday proposed allowing married deacons from a region of the Amazon to become ordained priests in order to help address a clergy shortage in the region.

One afternoon last month, Serikjan Bilash went to the watchdog organization he co-founded in Almaty, Kazakhstan, to celebrate the opening of its new office.

Since its founding in 2017, the organization, Atajurt Eriktileri, has publicized thousands of accounts of ethnic Kazakhs who are among the primarily Muslim minorities rounded up in detention centers in Xinjiang, China.

President Trump said on Friday that he knows what it's like to be treated unfairly, comparing his own experience with an impeachment inquiry in Congress to inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system.

Trump was speaking at the Second Step Presidential Justice Forum held at the historically black Benedict College in South Carolina. The forum also featured Democrats vying for the presidential nomination, and was focused on the future of criminal justice policies.

Call them “accidental heroes.”

Through the years, ordinary people have stepped all the way up to the Supreme Court to defend our right to speak freely.

The producers behind the new WAMU podcast, “Unprecedented,” have tracked down the main players in cases that helped us fill in the Constitutional gaps left by the Founding Fathers.

Nobody knows exactly how many fighting roosters there are in Puerto Rico. The breeders who raise them for cockfights say at least half a million. Two hundred and fifty of those live in neatly lined cages in José Torres' backyard in the mountain town of Utuado, and should the police show up to take them when cockfighting is banned at the end of this year, he has no plans to give them up.

The dispatch call from the Concord, N.H., police department is brief. A woman returning to her truck spotted a man underneath. She confronted him. The man fled. Now the woman wants a police officer to make sure her truck is OK.

"Here we go," mutters Officer Brian Cregg as he steps on the gas. In less than three minutes, he's driving across the back of a Walmart parking lot, looking for a man on the run.

October marks the start of a new flu season, with a rise in likely cases already showing up in Louisiana and other spots, federal statistics show.

The advice from federal health officials remains clear and consistent: Get the flu vaccine as soon as possible, especially if you're pregnant or have asthma or another underlying condition that makes you more likely to catch a bad case.

Black applicants to a prestigious research grant program at the National Institutes of Health are awarded funding at a significantly lower rate than their white peers. The NIH has been intensively investigating this funding gap since a 2011 report revealed the extent of the problem, looking for underlying mechanisms to use as opportunities for corrective intervention.

Maybe you're a college freshman, emailing all of your professors before the semester starts to tell them how absolutely thrilled you are to be in their class. Or perhaps you're a world leader expressing how totally great your international trade talks are about to go.

In Richmond, Va., Garrison Coward and a campaign volunteer approach their first home, making the rounds in a mostly white neighborhood called Windsor Farms, where the sidewalks are made of brick and streets are named after English universities.

"Mr. Smallfield," the volunteer cues Coward, reading from an app on his phone.

The Illinois Human Rights Commission, in the first case of its kind in the state, ordered a Chicago area school district to give a transgender student access to a communal boys’ restroom.

In 2015, the Komarek School in suburban North Riverside refused to let a now-12-year-old use the communal boys’ restroom, forcing him to use the male staff members’ bathroom.

The Human Rights commission ruled that was discrimination based on gender-related identity.

The very day President Trump was sworn in — Jan. 20, 2017 — he signed an executive order instructing administration officials "to waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay" implementing parts of the Affordable Care Act, while Congress got ready to repeal and replace President Obama's signature health law.