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In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday, Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms described the shooting of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery as a “lynching.” “It’s heartbreaking that it’s 2020 and this was a lynching of an African American man,” she said, adding, “It’s part of a bigger issue that we’re having in this country.” “With the rhetoric that we hear coming out of the White House, in so many ways, I think many who are prone to being racist are given permission to do it in an overt way that we otherwise would not see in 2020.”  Two white men, Gregory McMichael and his son Travis, allegedly shot and killed Arbery on February 23 while Arbery was jogging through their...

This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published. On the last Tuesday of July, Tres Biggs stepped into the courthouse in Coffeyville, Kansas, for medical debt collection day, a monthly ritual in this quiet city of 9,000, just over the Oklahoma border. He was one of 90 people who had been summoned, sued by the local hospital, or doctors, or an ambulance service over unpaid bills. Some wore eye patches and bandages; others limped to their seats by the wood-paneled walls. Biggs, who is 41, had to take a day off...