Equity & Justice

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 marked the United States' official entrance into World War II. It also pushed the U.S. government's legacy of anti-Asian sentiment to its most extreme.

Salt Lake City officials have announced tougher restrictions on families and friends meeting Mormon missionaries returning from abroad after many well wishers flouted official guidelines, thronging an airport parking lot over the weekend with welcome-home signs and balloons.

People with disabilities are asking the federal government to stop what they say are policies by states and hospitals that will ration care — and deny them treatment for the coronavirus.

On Monday, several disability groups filed a complaint against the state of Washington, one of the states hardest hit by the pandemic.

Churches across America have managed to get around bans on public gathering by moving their worship services online, but technology provides only partial solutions.

In addition to presiding at services, religious leaders are expected to provide counseling, lead prayer groups and minister personally to people with special needs. For many, that aspect of their work has never been more important, or more difficult, at a time when communities are struggling to contain the coronavirus.

The vast majority of states have closed public schools in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and many districts are now faced with a dilemma: how to provide remote learning to students without running afoul of civil rights and disability laws.

Pharmacy staff who prepare IV drugs inside hospitals are the latest health care workers decrying a shortage of masks as they scramble to prepare medicines for patients with diagnoses ranging from cancer to COVID-19.

Come Friday, few places will show the effects of the coronavirus more vividly than mosques across the world — not so much for what will be there, as what won't: Friday prayers have been curtailed or outright suspended in more than a dozen majority-Muslim countries across the world.

The list of countries to close mosques to mass gatherings or issue widespread bans includes Turkey and Lebanon, Iraq and Egypt, Jordan and Malaysia — along with a growing collection of others.

The spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians around the world has ordered churches to halt services and rites until the end of March. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I asked parishioners to stay home for their own safety and the safety of others.

"This trial, too, shall pass," the patriarch said in a televised statement. "The clouds will clear, and the Sun of Righteousness will eliminate the deadly effect of the virus. But our lives will have changed forever."

When Bad Bunny released his sophomore album YHLQMDLG (an acronym for Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana, or I Do Whatever I Want) on February 29, he also introduced a new word into the world: bichiyal. It's the title of one of the album's songs—a nostalgic love letter to the old school perreo of the '90s and early 2000s—featuring the veteran reggaetonero Yaviah.

Medstar Washington Hospital Center in Washington D.C. is in full-on preparation mode.

On a recent visit the staff had already marked out the parking lot — painting green rectangles to mark the places where tents are starting to be set up to screen arriving patients for COVID-19.

A months-long analysis of alleged pieces of the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls that are on display at a privately funded museum in Washington, D.C., has revealed them to be clever forgeries, according to a team of researchers examining the fragments.

The first time Judi Benson heard the unfiltered truth about race from a black person, she was 25 years old. It was 1973 and she was taking a class at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville called "Human Conflict: Black and White."

The class was radical for its time and place. In the early 1970's Jacksonville, was still raw around civil rights — new to school busing, still struggling with desegregation in its jails. It was a city divided, with violent race riots in its recent history.

Barbara C. Harris, the first woman to be ordained a bishop in the Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican Communion, died Friday in Massachusetts. She was 89.

She was elected as a suffragan, or assistant, bishop in September 1988. On Feb. 11, 1989, Harris was consecrated as a bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.

Her rise to bishop broke centuries of precedent for tens of millions of Christians in the Anglican Communion, which has members in more than 165 countries.

As the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 spreads across the United States, there are continuing concerns among hospitals, public health experts and government leaders that hospital intensive care units would be hard-pressed to handle a surge in seriously ill patients.

A key limiting factor to being able to provide good care, they say, is the number of ventilation machines — ventilators — a hospital has on hand to help the most seriously ill patients breathe.

Churches around the country are weighing whether to suspend worship services in response to the coronavirus, with their decisions dependent on their size, their proximity to an outbreak, and perhaps even their political leanings.

Abdurehim Imin Parach often looks over his shoulder when he walks around Istanbul. He worries that he is being followed, just as he was last year when two Turkish plainclothes policemen escorted him out of a restaurant in the city and told him he was under arrest.

President Trump Thursday defended his new policy that, for 30 days, will bar most travelers arriving to the U.S. from much of Europe. Trump says coronavirus cases from the continent have been seeding outbreaks in the United States. The travel ban, he says, will save American lives.