Nation/World

Simge Topaloğlu was using group chats to commiserate with friends about the uncertainty of being an international student in America long before almost all of college life went remote in the spring.

As travel bans were made and modified under the Trump administration, the online rumor mill churned.

"Someone hears something through the grapevine, like: 'a friend of mine said this,' 'maybe this is going to happen,' " said Topaloğlu, who is entering her third year seeking her doctorate in psychology at Harvard University.

Updated at 9:58 p.m. ET

Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has signed an executive order on Wednesday mandating the use of face masks in public spaces. It's the latest Georgia city to test an order from Gov. Brian Kemp that bars local governments from setting their own public health policies.

"We've given a lot of thought on it, and we will be going forward with a mask ordinance in our city today," Bottoms told NPR member station WABE on Wednesday morning.

Updated at 6:44 p.m. ET

The U.S. Supreme Court has carved out a major exception to the nation's fair employment laws. In a 7-2 vote, the court ruled on Wednesday that the country's civil rights laws barring discrimination on the job do not apply to most lay teachers at religious elementary schools.

Just two days after federal officials barred international students from attending U.S. colleges that go online-only this fall, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have made their objections clear. They sued the U.S. government in federal court Wednesday, seeking to have the U.S. Immigration Customs And Enforcement policy reversed and declared unlawful.

President Trump issued a forceful call this week for America's K-12 schools to reopen full time for all children in the fall, suggesting that Democrats want to keep schools closed ahead of the November election and even threatening to cut off federal funding to schools if they don't fully reopen (something he cannot do). In this push, the administration has a powerful ally: the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Ina Park has been in a monogamous marriage for more than 15 years, but she feels like she has been having one safe sex conversation after another these days.

There was the time she and some close friends spent a few hours together without wearing masks, and she later realized she needed to ask: "Are you seeing other people?"

Or the time when she got a text from the mother of her son's friend. The mom suggested letting the boys play basketball together at her home, which led to detailed negotiations about risk tolerance, boundaries and types of protection.

Early in the new Netflix documentary Mucho Mucho Amor: The Legend Of Walter Mercado, actor Eugenio Derbez says that when he first saw Mercado, he couldn't decide whether he was looking at a man, a woman, or a sorcerer. The answer, of course, is that he was just looking at Walter Mercado.

Dana Canedy has spent her career working with the written word.

"My son calls me 'word nerd,' because I'm obsessed with words and books," she says. "I've been writing since I was 12 years old. And my mother asked me in high school, 'If you don't become a writer, what's your Plan B?' And I said 'There is no Plan B.'"

Plan A worked.

A growing number of governors and mayors are working to slow the spread of the coronavirus by requiring people to wear masks in public places.

Experts say these public health rules will reduce the risk of people getting sick. But some local police and sheriffs are refusing to enforce the rules.

"COVID-19 is not going away. In fact, it's getting worse," warned Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, when he announced his state's mask mandate ahead of the July Fourth weekend.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 prompted educator Jane Elliott to create the now-famous "blue eyes/brown eyes exercise."

As a school teacher in the small town of Riceville, Iowa, Elliott first conducted the anti-racism experiment on her all-white third-grade classroom, the day after the civil rights leader was killed.

The pandemic, a bad economy, police killings and a fight for racial equality: It's a lot of take in. For some, music has been a way to cope and try to make sense of it all and that is the premise behind the Morning Edition Song Project, in which we asked musicians to write and perform an original song about this moment.

Many of the companies and organizations getting loans from the Paycheck Protection Program – billed by the SBA as a lifeline for struggling, small companies — aren't what anyone would think of as small businesses.

Among them:

Large restaurant chains, including Applebee's, P.F. Chang's, Ruby Tuesday and TGI Fridays, got loans between $5 million and $10 million.

The Greenbrier Hotel Corporation, a luxury resort owned by West Virginia's billionaire governor James Justice, got a loan between $5 million and $10 million.

Chief Justice John Roberts was hospitalized overnight last month after a fall.

Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathleen Arberg told The Associated Press that Roberts, 65, was walking near his home on June 21 when he fell. He injured his forehead and received sutures. Roberts was kept at the hospital overnight "out of an abundance of caution."

Updated at 11:55 a.m. ET

Several Republican senators say they will not attend the Republican National Convention to renominate President Trump in Jacksonville, Fla., in August.

Not long ago, a Major League Baseball season seemed improbable, with owners and players fighting about how to restart in the middle of a pandemic.

Now, the fighting is over, at least publicly.

And the Majors are a little more than two weeks away from playing ball. If all goes well.