Moira Donegan

In order to be made a saint in the Catholic Church, you first have to be dead and then you have to perform two miracles. The first posthumous miracle the Vatican says Mother Teresa performed was the healing of an Indian woman named Monica Besra, whose abdominal tumour disappeared after a locket containing a picture of the nun was pressed to her stomach. The tumour was caused by tuberculosis, one of the diseases Mother Teresa had spent her life providing care for. The Vatican rushed to confirm the miracle, but Besra’s family and doctors were sceptical: ‘She took medications for nine months to a year,’ Besra’s doctor told the New York Times. Other hospital staff said that they felt pressure from Catholic authorities to say that the recovery was miraculous.

In Texas, ‘ambulatory surgical centers’ – outpatient clinics for medical procedures that don’t require an overnight stay – aren't allowed to have ceiling fans. State law requires them to have elaborate ventilation systems, the capacity to house and transmit medical gases, water coolers in all waiting areas and adequate off-street parking. There needs to be an intercom system that can function in the event of a power cut, and devices for handling ‘flammable germicide’. If the facility has more than one floor, it must have a lift, and the lift needs to be large enough to accommodate a gurney. The hallways have to be wide enough to accommodate at least one gurney, if not two, and laid out in such a way as to allow for one-way traffic of people and gurneys throughout the centre.

In July 2013, Texas passed a law known as House Bill 2, which required all abortion clinics to meet the standards of an ambulatory surgical center, and all doctors who carry out abortions to have 'active admitting privileges' at a hospital within 30 miles.

Here is what the victim remembers: she arrived at her boyfriend’s house in a Rio favela at about 1 a.m. She was alone with him there. Then, she woke up in a different house, in pain. The men – there were a crowd of them, some with guns, and she would eventually count 33 – had delegated two to hold her down. They were taking turns to rape her. When they finally let her go, she was naked and bleeding. She found some spare clothes and then walked home; they had also taken her bag. In the video that the 20-year-old suspect Michel Brasil da Silva posted to Twitter, a man stands beside the victim’s unconscious body as she stirs.