Iowa

Joe Biden's Cabinet has embedded backgrounds in environmental issues throughout its ranks. Faith-based organizations say these prior records raise optimism about the federal response to climate change.

Dozens of rural hospitals have succumbed to financial strain in recent years. That trend has only been accelerating during the pandemic — just as COVID-19 infection rates have begun to spike in rural areas.

Latino men — like men of other groups — have supported Trump more than Hispanic women, and in some cases, in contrast to members of their own families. 

Less than two weeks before the presidential election, a new poll indicated President Donald Trump has lost the so-called "Catholic vote" and that his nomination of a Catholic to the Supreme Court, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, did nothing to change that equation.

The Supreme Court denied the appeals of two federal death-row inmates in late September. On Sept. 22, it denied an appeal to postpone the execution of William LeCroy, who had argued that his execution should be postponed to allow his longtime lead attorney to attend. The attorney has leukemia and is vulnerable to COVID-19, so could not be present for health reasons during the pandemic.

Just hours before the sixth federal execution took place this year, and two days before the next one was scheduled, two U.S. bishops' committee chairmen called on the government to end this practice.

Book review: Jack is a beautiful if improbable biracial love story, full of joy and sadness, but complicated from the start by its setting in Southern cities in the days of Jim Crow.

From the historic heat wave and wildfires in the West, to the massive derecho that tore through the middle of the nation, to the record-breaking pace of this year's hurricane season, the unprecedented and concurrent extreme conditions resemble the chaotic climate future scientists have been warning us about for decades — only it's happening right now.