Author: Reporter

Forward Through Ferguson has made its mark on its community and the St. Louis region by focusing on justice and education, racial equity, and policing reform. The Missouri nonprofit was founded in 2015 to enact the societal changes outlined in the Ferguson Commission report to address the issues that contributed to the police shooting death of Michael Brown Jr. and the riots that followed in Ferguson, Missouri. The new nonprofit and similar organizations looking to support the community saw money pour in from corporations like St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch and major philanthropic organizations ranging from the Bill & Melinda Gates...

Waiting in a long post office line with the latest shipment of “abortion aftercare kits,” Kimra Luna got a text. A woman who had taken abortion pills three weeks earlier was worried about bleeding — and disclosing the cause to a doctor. “Bleeding doesn’t mean you need to go in,” Luna responded on the encrypted messaging app Signal. “Some people bleed on and off for a month.” It was a typically busy afternoon for Luna, a doula and reproductive care activist in a state with some of the strictest abortion laws in the nation. Those laws make the work...

More than 230 million women and girls have undergone female genital mutilation, most of whom live in Africa, according to a report issued in March by the United Nations children’s agency. In the last eight years, some 30 million people have undergone the procedure, in which external genitalia are partially or fully removed, UNICEF estimated in the report, which was released on International Women’s Day. The percentage of women and girls who experience female genital mutilation is declining, UNICEF said, but it warned that efforts to eradicate the practice are too slow to keep up with fast-growing populations. “The...

On a hot summer day in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, dozens of men removed pipes, asbestos and hazardous waste while working to decontaminate a nuclear facility and prepare it for demolition. Dressed in head-to-toe coveralls and fitted with respirators, the crew members toiling in a building without power had no obvious respite from the heat. Instead, they wore armbands that recorded their heart rates, movements, and exertion levels for signs of heat stress. Stephanie Miller, a safety and health manager for a U.S. government contractor doing cleanup work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, watched a computer screen nearby. A...