https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cAQxcnE1sTM
"This goes beyond a mere inconvenience," said Dr. Michael Warren, chief medical and health officer for the March of Dimes. "We know that those women who live in maternity care deserts are more likely to have bad outcomes when it comes to their pregnancies."
More than 20,000 babies die before their first birthday every year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And about 600 women a year don't survive pregnancy-related complications.
The risks are heightened for women of color, according to the most recent maternal mortality data from the March of Dimes and the CDC. Rates of maternal death are significantly higher for Indigenous and Black women than for white women…
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/11/nx-s1-5678523/maternity-desert-birth-midwife-black-moms-babies
A new analysis of Black voters in the south indicates that Republican attempts to dilute their political power is driving them to the polls in larger numbers and shifting their counties further left.
After the supreme court effectively gutted section 2 of the Voting Rights Act protections in late April, Republican legislatures across the south rapidly pushed to disenfranchise Black voters by redrawing congressional maps. Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Alabama all immediately worked to pass new maps, while the Mississippi governor has said that he wants legislators to redraw maps before the upcoming midterm elections...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/30/black-voters-south-republican-maps
But Greece is not as far from Africa as the North American continent is, and the modern construct of race, a pseudoscientific product of the Atlantic slave trade, would not be invented until thousands of years after Homer. Black people are depicted in Greek art. Egypt, Libya, and “Aethiopia” are frequently referenced in ancient writings. As the Black classics scholar Frank Snowden Jr. wrote in the 1970s, at least one of the characters in The Odyssey, Eurybates, is specifically described as “black-skinned and woolly-haired.” As the Stanford classics professor Sarah Derbew notes in her book Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity, Black people are referenced in plays by Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. They also appear in the writings of Hesiod and Herodotus. One of the lost epic poems is The Aethiopis, in which Memnon, the Aethiopian king and an ally to Troy, plays a major role.
Black people were not as uncommon in the ancient Mediterranean world as Nolan’s critics seem to imagine. But even if they had been, color-blind casting makes sense as an artistic choice for portraying the classics precisely because race as it exists today did not exist when The Odyssey was written. And no contemporary actor can actually claim the same descent as Helen, who hatched from a swan’s egg…
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/odyssey-race/688058/
The Magnolia Mother’s Trust is the first to target low-income families led by Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/10/guaranteed-income-black-single-moms-mississippi .
“The Department of Justice cannot continue to stand by while Black lives are taken. The DoJ has a fundamental responsibility to support, protect, and defend the US Constitution, and that Constitution includes the rights, the safety, and the futures of Black Americans.
“When officers fail to deliver equal protection under the law, the federal government must step in with its investigative authority. We will not allow the names of Darius Chappell and Tyrin Johnson to be overlooked.”…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/10/naacp-memphis-safe-taskforce
Black has a limited track record in emerging markets, according to public records. His New York-based private equity firm, Fortinbras Enterprises, opened an outpost in the United Arab Emirates in 2024, where Black helped open a branch of his family’s office the same year. (His father, Leon, was the subject of a Senate investigation into his dealings with Epstein at the time.)
“He is not qualified to do this, for sure,” a former DFC director said of Black. “It does make you wonder, you know – why is he in that role?”…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/03/ben-black-investment-trump-epstein
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/02/supreme-court-alabama-map
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/20/mississippi-voting-rights-rally
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/16/alabama-black-voting-rights-protest