Author: Reporter

With traces of winter’s unusually heavy snow still lingering but a warm sun finally shining, farmers were out dawn to dusk in early May on their tractors, planting corn and soybeans across southwestern Minnesota fields many have owned for generations. The threat of losing these beloved family farms has become a constant worry, affecting many farmers’ mental health and raising concerns of another uptick in suicides like during the 1980s farm crisis. Much of the stress stems from being dependent on factors largely outside their control – from the increasingly unpredictable weather to growing costs of equipment to global...

Mexico has been flying migrants south away from the U.S. border for weeks and busing new arrivals away from its boundary with Guatemala to relieve pressure on its border cities. In the weeks since Washington dropped pandemic-era restrictions on seeking asylum at its border, U.S. authorities have reported a dramatic drop in illegal crossing attempts. In Mexico, officials are generally trying to keep migrants south away from that border, a strategy that could reduce crossing temporarily, but experts say is not sustainable. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reported in late May that in the weeks since the policy...

The longstanding racial gap in U.S. stroke death rates widened dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, government researchers said in April. Stroke death rates increased for both Black and White adults in 2020 and 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study. But the difference between the two groups grew about 22%, compared with the five years before the pandemic. “Any health inequity that existed before seems to have been made larger during the pandemic,” said Dr. Bart Demaerschalk, a stroke researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix who was not involved in the new study. “This...