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Students and teachers told U.S. House members during a Thursday hearing that their right to talk about race and LGBTQ+ issues in public schools is being silenced due to an onslaught of new state laws as well as pressure on school boards from right-wing advocates. “To be crystal clear, this is about disrupting and destroying public education,” James Whitfield, a former principal in Texas and one of the witnesses, told lawmakers.

During a 2014 symposium marking the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision, a statement from one of the plaintiffs offered what today feels like prescient insight. Many of the Virginia plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, feared integration and would have preferred separate and actually equal.

Five Republicans vying to win control of Durham’s progressive school board were soundly defeated in Tuesday’s election. Four of the five finished last in their respective races. Durham’s progressive incumbents – Natalie Beyer, Matt Sears and Bettina Umstead – won three of the five seats up grabs.

State Sen. Valerie Foushee of Orange County won the Democratic primary for the open seat in the 4th Congressional District, defeating Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam and six other candidates in a contest where the millions in independent PAC spending for Foushee became a central issue in the race.

President Joe Biden on Tuesday commemorated the victims of last weekend’s mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, and condemned the ideology that drove the killer to “carry out a murderous, racist rampage” at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

Asylum-seekers in a Mexican shelter share their stories of hope and disappointment The inner courtyard of Casa del Migrante in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, looks like a day care center. Plastic toys are scattered from one end to the other. Tiny baby clothes hang on the chain link fence, drying in the sun.

Today is primary Election Day in North Carolina. Across our state, voters will make scores of important decisions about the future of our democracy. In many places, Democrats and Republicans will select the two finalists in a host of key contests – from the United States Senate to the state legislature to the state courts. In many others, where one party or the other dominates, today’s vote will effectively decide the outcome of the election.

Stage to be set for momentous 175-day sprint to November 8 Election Day for the 2022 primary arrives tomorrow, but in North Carolina the general election campaign has already begun for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, a race that is expected to be one of the costliest and combative in state history.

After five plus years in office, it’s obvious why North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper remains one of the nation’s more popular chief executives: the man keeps trying to make government work. In a time in which so many politicians prioritize division and controversy – think of Florida’s Ron DeSantis and his absurd and destructive culture wars – Cooper keeps trying to build bridges and find common ground.

Sexual violence survivor details some of the horrors that await if the Supreme Court ends abortion rights When I was raped in 2016, one of my attackers reached inside me and pulled out my NuvaRring, an internal birth control device, and asked me what it was. When I told him, he cast it aside where it was lost until police retrieved it a couple days later.

The state is closing Raleigh's Torchlight Academy because of repeated and serious management failures, but some of its strengths and accomplishments will be lost in the process Carla Peralta cried after getting the word that Torchlight Academy is closing due to fiscal and governance concerns uncovered during a state Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) investigation.

In a red brick house on the south side of El Paso, Texas, Susana Correa sits in front of a wall of five computer monitors, the biggest filled with lists of the names of hundreds of LGBTQ asylum-seekers waiting to cross from Juárez into El Paso. To her left, one monitor features a long string of WhatsApp conversations with asylum-seekers — more than 200 messages await for her response. Sharing the screen are recorded messages from her coworkers who are interviewing people waiting in Juárez, administering COVID tests and arranging for border crossings.

North Carolina obstetricians and gynecologists are raising concerns over the burden tighter restrictions on abortion could have on women as well as the medical profession. Dr. Jonas Swartz is an assistant professor in Duke University's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and a researcher in reproductive health equity issues.

Folasewa Olatunde didn’t want to go to the dentist. But sharp pain and inflammation in her mouth told her she should. The dentist told her she needed to have a molar removed and some cavities filled. The cost: more than $3,000.

A step taken by a former chief justice 50 years ago provides the model In 1972, not long after the decision in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to determine whether the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment.

In some ways, of course, there’s nothing new or terribly surprising when large bureaucracies – be they government agencies or big corporations – are revealed to be plagued by waste and malfeasance. Humans and their institutions being as they are, flawed and prone to human foibles like incompetence, greed, sloth, overpromising, and favoritism, such revelations have been a constant in the American experience since prior to the country’s founding.