Across Latin American households in the US, the steaming broth nourishes while keeping family traditions alive

When Patty Rodriguez hears the word caldo now, she thinks fondly of home. But as a child growing up in southern California, she despised eating the piping-hot soup-like meal during the summers. Rodriguez would swirl around the chunks of fish with her spoon and imagine that she was performing a magic trick where the dish disappeared. She would roll her eyes as she asked her family why they served the dish more often when it was hot outside. “This is not a hotel,” Rodriguez recalled her mother and aunts saying. “You don’t choose what you want to eat. You’re going to eat what we make.”

As an adult, Rodriguez realizes that caldo, which translates to broth in Spanish, was an inexpensive meal that could feed her Mexican American household for several days. It provided the nourishment and hydration needed during the hot summer months.

Death salons are spaces that allow free-flowing conversations about mortality and are becoming more popular around the country

In a small cream-colored room at a cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nefertiti Moor sat at the head of a semicircle. Dressed in black with her long hair in locs, she delivered instructions for the evening discussion. “It’s not death counseling or a debate,” said Moor. She invited the two women in attendance to talk freely about their cultural associations with dying and grief. Tasha Johnson, who worked in behavioral health, said that she felt desensitized after the recent deaths of several people she knew. She was grappling with “the reality that it can be anyone at any point”.

The free-flowing conversation about mortality, otherwise known as a death salon or death cafe, was unique in that it was designed for people of color. Death salons for marginalized communities are becoming more common around the country, with practitioners addressing the unique end-of-life concerns of queer, trans, or Black and brown people. Acting on a lifelong interest in how communities process grief, Moor became a death doula, a non-medical professional who provides emotional and practical support to people who are dying and to their loved ones.

Replacement of panels with version that’s sympathetic to enslavers comes amid effort by Trump to dismantle diversity initiatives

Critics say the Trump administration acted under the “cover of darkness” to replace an exhibit exploring the lives of nine enslaved people who lived at George Washington’s ​Philadelphia home with a version that is overly sympathetic to enslavers and that whitewashes the country’s origins.

The installation of new information panels followed a six-month fight between the city of Philadelphia and the Trump administration over an enslavement memorial at the President’s House, the former home of both Washington and his presidential successor John Adams.

New programs in the state work to teach high school and college students about Gullah foodways through hands-on projects

When students from Charleston county school of the arts in South Carolina entered a research institute on the African diaspora, staff greeted them with “welcome home”.

The field trip at the College of Charleston’s Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture was the culmination of a six-week English course about memoir. Students learned about the culture of Gullah Geechee people, the descendants of formerly enslaved West Africans who retained their customs, through the lens of food such as okra, red rice and beans.

Request is one of the justice department’s latest attempts to track and regulate gender-affirming care for minors

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A Texas federal prosecutor has subpoenaed NYU Langone Health (NYULH), a major hospital network in New York City, for information about minor patients who received gender-affirming care between 2020 to 2026.

The US attorney’s office in the northern district of Texas’s subpoena, which was sent on 7 May, also requested the names of medical providers and others who provided such medical treatment during that period. NYULH was one of several institutions that were issued a subpoena, according to a statement on its website.

A trailblazer in the civil rights movement and Democratic politics, Jackson championed the rights of Black, poor and working-class people with his ‘rainbow coalition’

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The Rev Jesse Jackson, the civil rights campaigner who was prominent for more than 50 years and who ran strongly for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, has died. He was 84.

“Our father was a servant leader – not only to our family, but to the oppressed, the voiceless, and the overlooked around the world,” the Jackson family said in a statement.

From Pennsylvania to Montana, the White House’s war on ‘woke’ has targeted US monuments that address topics like racism and Indigenous history

Blank spaces now exist where a series of panels about enslavement once appeared on the walls of the President’s House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The site, which honors the home of George Washington and John Adams, is a major landmark that bore artwork and informational signs for more than a decade. But on 22 January, National Park Service (NPS) workers used hand tools to pry off 34 panels to comply with a presidential executive order designed to reframe the national narrative. The panels that highlighted the lives of people enslaved by George Washington when Philadelphia was the US capital in the 1790s are now in storage.

The removal is one of several across the nation, as NPS staff aim to conform with Donald Trump’s executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” issued on 27 March 2025. Public markers, monuments and statues that the Trump administration considers disparaging to past or current Americans have been flagged at more than a dozen parks. Two exhibits at Montana’s Little Bighorn battlefield national monument that discuss Indigenous history and the Battle of the Little Bighorn have been targeted and deemed noncompliant. Additionally, signage about climate change at Muir Woods national monument in California and visitor brochures at Medgar and Myrlie Evers home national monument in Mississippi that referred to Medgar Evers’s killer as racist were also removed.

Philadelphia sheriff Rochelle Bilal’s words have become a rallying cry against Trump’s immigration crackdown

“You don’t want this smoke,” Rochelle Bilal, Philadelphia’s sheriff, warned Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during an 8 January press conference. Her words have since become a rallying cry for resistance to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. At the conference with Larry Krasner, Philadelphia’s district attorney, and city council members, Bilal spoke out against the 7 January fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. “We stand here today with all those who stand against the made-up, fake, what you can call ICE, professional law enforcement,” she said at the conference. “I don’t call them none of that. I call them made-up, fake, wannabe law enforcement. Because what they do is against not only legal law, but the moral law.”

Bilal is part of a growing body of elected officials who are speaking out against the Trump administration’s immigration policies and ICE’s alleged misconduct and aggressive enforcement tactics. As the first Black female sheriff of Philadelphia elected in 2019, Bilal has faced perhaps the most vitriol from opponents who have targeted her for her race and gender. “Race played a big [role in the] response,” Bilal told the Guardian in a conference room on her Philadelphia office floor. “The negative, nasty messages that are being received is ridiculous.” Since the video of her speech went viral, Bilal told the Guardian that death threats that she’s received have required her to increase her security detail. In a Facebook post, ICE also said that she should resign.

North Carolina home preserved to commemorate legendary musician and civil rights activist, and to serve as arts hub

It was a surreal experience for Dr Samuel Waymon, Nina Simone’s youngest sibling, to walk back into the renovated childhood home that he once shared with the singer and civil rights activist. On that day in the fall of 2025, Waymon, an 81-year-old award-winning composer, said that memories flooded back of him playing organ in the house and cooking on the potbelly stove with his mother as a child in Tryon, North Carolina. He was overjoyed to see the large tree from his youth still standing in the yard. Simone, born Eunice Waymon, lived in the 650 sq ft, three-room home with her family from 1933 to 1937.

After sitting vacant and severely decayed for more than two decades, the recently restored home is now painted white, with elements of its former self sprinkled throughout the interior. On the freshly painted mint-blue wall hangs a shadow box that encases the rust brown varnish of the original home. A small piece of the Great Depression-era linoleum sits on the restored wooden floor like an island of the past in a sea of the present.

Black and brown former employees from CBS, NBC and Teen Vogue talk about the effects of being let go

Trey Sherman was traveling to work on the New York subway when he received an email from David Reiter, a CBS News executive, about an imminent meeting on 29 October. Sherman, an associate producer of CBS Evening News Plus at the time, suspected that he would be laid off. CBS News’s parent company, Paramount, had closed a merger with the Hollywood studio Skydance in August, and planned to slash more than 2,000 jobs as part of corporate restructuring.

Sherman, who is Black, and Reiter, who is white, had an amicable conversation, according to Sherman. Reiter told Sherman that he was being laid off because his show was being eliminated, Sherman said, and that Reiter was unable to assign the team to other positions. Sherman accepted the news and the two men wished each other good luck.