Christianna Silva

With COVID-19 continuing to spread, and millions of Americans still out of work, one of the nation's most urgent problems has only grown worse: hunger.

Editor's note: NPR will be continuing this conversation about Being Black in America online and on air.

Bruce Tomlin, a 63-year-old truck driver from New Mexico, said he was never really a "gun person." Then he saw a video of three white men following and fatally shooting Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging.

Early voting via absentee ballot began in Michigan on Thursday, making 2020 the state's first presidential election in which residents can vote early with an absentee ballot without needing a reason.

After a Kentucky grand jury declined to charge any officers with the actual shooting of Breonna Taylor, protesters now want to see the court transcripts that led to this decision — and so does Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat who previously served as the state's attorney general.

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said on Sunday that she will not support nominating a successor to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court before the 2020 presidential election. The announcement makes her the second Senate Republican to publicly take that position.

Twitter and Facebook both flagged posts by President Trump on Saturday that encouraged Americans to vote by mail as early as possible and then follow up that vote by going to the polls on Election Day to check that it was counted — action that could cause unnecessarily long lines during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since it was first popularized by Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in the 1920s, fascism, and accusations of it, have been a common theme in American political discourse.

Jacob Blake, the 29-year-old Black man who was shot by police in Wisconsin last month, spoke from his hospital bed about the pain of recovery and his hope for the future in a video posted to Twitter by his attorney on Saturday.

Updated at 7:41 p.m. ET

The New York attorney general announced on Saturday that she is putting together a grand jury as part of her office's investigation into the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died of asphyxiation after being restrained by police in March.

President Trump will travel to Kenosha, Wis. on Tuesday to survey the damage from last week's protests in response to the police shooting of Jacob Blake. But the city's Democratic mayor, John Antaramian, would rather he didn't.

"Realistically, from our perspective, our preference would have been for him not to be coming at this point in time," Antaramian told NPR's Weekend Edition on Sunday. "All presidents are always welcome and campaign issues are always going on. But it would have been, I think, better had he waited to have for another time to come."

Across the country, colleges and universities are struggling to decide how to teach students in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some schools have turned to remote learning; some have attempted to reopen campus with various precautions in place. Others are trying a mix of both.

For the municipalities that are host to colleges and universities, these decisions can be costly. Whether it's curtailing the spread of the virus in their communities, or losing the typical influx of student spending that arrives each fall, these cities and towns are bracing for a challenge.

President Trump visited Louisiana and Texas on Saturday afternoon to survey damage caused by Hurricane Laura. The storm killed at least 14 people and caused as much as $12 billion in damage.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice is continuing to investigate the police shooting of Jacob Blake days after he was shot seven times in front of his three sons by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis. He was left paralyzed from the waist down.

A new show, called "Love in the Time of Corona," is a series of interwoven stories about people in quarantine trying to find love and stay connected. And the cast are actual couples, families or friends, in real life, who have been quarantining together during the pandemic.

California will be under a state of emergency this weekend, as more than 500 fires rage across the state.

Thousands of Iowans are still coping with the aftermath of a storm that pummeled the state last Monday with 100-mile-per-hour winds — a storm that flattened corn and soybean crops, damaged grain elevators and leveled banks, churches and homes.

Editor's note: NPR will be continuing this conversation about Being Black in America online and on air.

When Imani Brown, a 38-year-old from San Francisco, hit the streets to protest the recent police violence against Black Americans, she felt inspired and energized. Her parents fought for racial justice before her, so her participation felt like a part of her inheritance.

The United States has now surpassed five million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 160,000 deaths from the virus as tens of millions of Americans file for unemploym

Humans have never been particularly good at eradicating entire viruses, and COVID-19 might not be any different.

After Mississippi lawmakers voted in June to remove the Confederate battle emblem from the state's flag, they asked people to send in designs for a new flag — and received nearly 3,000 submissions.