Leila Fadel

Soon after being discharged from the hospital for treatment for COVID-19, President Trump tweeted the slur "Chinese virus" to refer to the coronavirus, something he's often repeated during the pandemic.

It's the latest example of Trump's alarming language that critics charge is xenophobic, discriminatory and even white supremacist. While Trump denies those labels, he has increasingly returned to the issue of race in the runup to the November election.

Composer Ted Hearne is known for tackling big social themes through his music. His modern classical works have put a spotlight on issues of race and justice, inequality, natural disasters and other social issues.

His latest work, a collaboration with the poet and musician Saul Williams, is called Place. It's 19 songs or movements combining jazz, indie rock, modern classical, electronica and spoken word — and it's described as a "rumination on gentrification."

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

In Minneapolis, Majdi Wadi was a celebrated businessman. Three generations of his Palestinian American family run the Holy Land brand, a multi-million-dollar enterprise with restaurants, a grocery store, a bakery and a hummus factory. It's become well known locally and nationally after the Wadi family was featured on local television programs and on the Food Channel's Diners, Drive-ins and Dives for bringing a "little piece of the Middle East to the Midwest."

Like the elements that she discovered — polonium and radium — Marie Curie was "unruly," says actor Rosamund Pike. Pike plays the famous scientist in the new biopic Radioactive.

The film, streaming on Amazon Prime, is about the power of science and how it can be harnessed in both positive and destructive ways. Curie's discoveries led to medical breakthroughs, but they were also weaponized — into bombs and poison.