The royal wedding is over, but the excitement around Prince Harry and the former Meghan Markle, now the Duchess of Sussex, is not. The two still have to go on their honeymoon (which is rumored to be at a resort in Canada) and there’s already baby talk bubbling up. 

But what’s really changed now that Meghan is a part of the royal family? Well, she’s got a new title, a few new addresses and a few things she can’t do now that she’s a duchess.

1. She’s got a new title. 

On the day of his wedding, Prince Harry (also known as His Royal Highness Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales) was granted the title of Duke of Sussex. And after Meghan and Harry said their “I do’s,” Rachel Meghan Markle officially became the Duchess of Sussex, aka Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Sussex. 

2. And it comes with a coat of arms. 

The Duchess of Sussex got her own coat of arms nearly a week after the wedding. Kensington Palace said that she was very involved with its design. The shield includes two references to Meghan’s home state of California: the blue of the shield symbolizes the Pacific Ocean and the golden poppies featured are the state flower. 

3. The duchess has new royal duties.

After getting engaged to Prince Harry, Meghan made it clear that she was leaving her acting career behind. Though she hasn’t formally adopted any patronages yet, Kensington Palace said that the duke and duchess have been “visiting local communities and organisations across the U.K. both publicly and privately,” since their engagement in November. The palace added that Meghan will become a patron of the Royal Foundation, an organization Harry and his brother, William, founded in 2011 to pursue philanthropic interests.

4. And a few more rules to follow. 

There are lots of traditions and certain protocols to which members of the Royal Family adhere. Now that Meghan is part of the royal family, she’ll be advised against signing autographs, taking selfies, wearing bright nail polish, taking a public political stance or showing bias, or having personal social media accounts (Meghan shut hers down in January).  

5. The former actresses’ new residence is in a palace. 

In Harry and Meghan’s engagement announcement, the palace said that the two were moving into Nottingham Cottage, on the grounds of Kensington Palace. It has two bedrooms and comes with some pretty great neighbors, as Prince William, the Duchess of Cambridge, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and little Prince Louis live in the palace itself (as well as in Anmer Hall in Norfolk, northeast of London).

There are also reports that the newlyweds are moving into Apartment 1 in the palace (which has 21 bedrooms) and possibly leasing a home next to the Beckhams in the Cotswolds.

6. Meghan is also now a member of the Church of England. 

The former actress was raised Protestant (her father is Episcopalian and her mother is Protestant, a spokeswoman for Kensington Palace previously told HuffPost). Prior to the royal wedding, though, Meghan was baptized and confirmed into the Church of England during a ceremony at St. James’s Palace in London in March.

7. But she’s not a British citizen ... yet. 

Meghan is going about getting her citizenship the traditional way and isn’t expediting the process just because she’s a involved with the royal family. Jason Knauf, Prince Harry’s communication’s secretary, told BBC that Meghan’s citizenship process could take years.

“I can also say she intends to become a U.K. citizen and will go through the process of that, which some of you may know takes a number of years,” he said in December 2017, adding that she would be “compliant with immigration requirements at all times.” 

It’s unknown if Meghan will give up her U.S. citizenship. It’s worth noting the U.S. requires its citizens to pay taxes even if they don’t live in the country. 

Royal news doesn’t stop at the wedding. Subscribe to HuffPost’s Watching the Royals newsletter for all things Windsor (and beyond). 

Serena Williams is not trying to be anyone but herself ― and it’s pretty damn awesome. 

The tennis player chatted with Harper’s Bazaar UK for the magazine’s July issue about the birth of her daughter Olympia and her upcoming HBO documentary “Being Serena.” Williams also discussed the constantbody shaming that she’s encountered since the beginning of her tennis stardom. 

“It was hard for me,” Williams said. “People would say I was born a guy, all because of my arms, or because I’m strong. I was different to Venus: she was thin and tall and beautiful, and I am strong and muscular ― and beautiful, but, you know, it was just totally different.”

When Bazaar asked Williams about a 2004 article in which a then-22-year-old Williams wrote that one of her goals was to be a size 4, the tennis player responded accordingly. 

“Oh God, I’ll never be a size 4! Why would I want to do that, and be that?” Williams said. “This is me, and this is my weapon and machine.”

Williams added that she could use the 2004 goal to remind her daughter in the future that she was able to overcome her body image struggles. 

“I love that I said that, because I can understand,” she said. “I can show Olympia that I struggled, but now I’m happy with who I am and what I am and what I look like... Olympia was born and she had my arms, and instead of being sad and fearful about what people would say about her, I was just so happy.”  

Head over to Harper’s Bazaar to read the full interview. 

If you think a doughnut is one of the most sugar-laden breakfast choices you could make, you’d be wrong.

This isn’t to say a doughnut is ever a nutritious choice. While delicious, it’s filled with empty calories and provides you with virtually none of the vitamins and nutrients that will keep you alive, whereas something like a banana is a good source of potassium, dietary fiber, vitamin C and vitamin B-6. 

But, shockingly, a banana has more sugar than a doughnut.

Now, don’t stop eating bananas just yet. But it’s important to be aware of how much sugar you’re eating. The World Health Organization recommends that only 5 percent of daily caloric intake come from sugar, and the typical American diet consists of 13 percent calories from sugar.

“Many Americans eat about five times the amount of sugar they should consume,” Natasa Janicic-Kahric, an associate professor of medicine at Georgetown University Hospital, told The Washington Post.

Besides contributing to weight gain, sugar ― whether natural or added ― has a host of negative effects on our bodies: It creates a vicious cycle of intense cravings, impairs memory and learning skills, may cause or contribute to depression and anxiety, and is a risk factor for age-related cognitive decline and dementia.

So let’s take a look at how much sugar is in 13 common breakfast items that, while often more nutritious than a doughnut, contain more sugar than a glazed treat from Dunkin’ Donuts, which contains 260 calories and 12 grams of sugar.

(To be fair, not all doughnuts are created equal: An apple fritter from Dunkin’, for instance, has 420 calories and 24 grams of sugar.)

Here’s the rundown:

Dunkin’ Donuts Glazed Donut: 260 calories, 12g sugar

Dunkin’ Donuts Hot Coffee with Cream and Sugar, Extra Large: 320 calories, 44g sugar

Starbucks Chai Latte with 2% Milk, Tall: 240 calories, 32g sugar

Kellogg’s Raisin Bran: 190 calories, 18g sugar

Silk Vanilla Almond Milk (80): 80 calories, 13g sugar

Noosa Blueberry Yogurt: 280 calories, 31g sugar

Nature Valley Cranberry Almond Protein Granola: 210 calories, 14g sugar

Panera Cinnamon Crunch Bagel: 380 calories, 32g sugar

Liquiteria Mean Green Acai Bowl: 620 calories, 54g sugar

Jamba Juice Aloha Pineapple Smoothie, Small: 310 calories, 67g sugar

Banana: 105 calories, 14g sugar

Panera Blueberry Muffin with Fresh Blueberries: 460 calories, 40g sugar

Tropicana Original Orange Juice: 110 calories, 22g sugar

Mott’s 100% Original Apple Juice: 120 calories, 28g sugar

Now don’t go and replace all your healthy breakfast options with doughnuts, but keep these numbers in mind if you’re trying to keep track of your sugar intake. A doughnut every once in a while isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Only about half of teenagers use Facebook these days, says a new Pew Research Center study.

The study, published Thursday, showed that only 51 percent of surveyed kids age 13 to 17 said they use Facebook. In 2015 that number was 71 percent, and Facebook was the dominant social media platform.

YouTube, which wasn’t included as a social media platform in the 2015 study, is the most popular, used by 85 percent of teens polled. Instagram is used by 72 percent of teenagers, and Snapchat by 69 percent. (Teenagers polled were allowed to choose more than one platform this year, and the two surveys used slightly different methods to ask teens about their social media use.) 

The study also looked into how teens view the impact that social media has on their lives. Only 24 percent said they believe it has a “mostly negative effect” on people their age, whereas the vast majority believe it is mostly positive or has neither a positive or a negative effect.

The Pew study also showed that a significant percentage of U.S. teens play video games ― including computer, console and cellphone games ― which is not surprising. Eighty-three percent of teenage girls responded that they play video games, versus 97 percent of teenage boys.

The survey was conducted using the online NORC AmeriSpeak panel to reach 743 teenagers from March 7 to April 10. Interviews were conducted online and by telephone.

With the inclusion of YouTube and the dominance of video games in the lives of teenagers, it’s possible that gaming platforms like Twitch will play a more significant role in the next survey.

“It is clear the social media environment today revolves less around a single platform than it did three years ago,” the Pew Research Center said.

Facebook is set to kill its “trending” news section next week after four years and is testing a new breaking news feature that could replace it.

The company announced the move on Friday, saying that the trending feature wasn’t popular and accounted for less than 1.5 percent of clicks to the websites of news publishers. More problematic was the feature’s tendency to spread fake news, particularly during the 2016 presidential election, The Associated Press noted.

Facebook’s head of news products, Alex Hardiman, wrote in the announcement that the company is currently testing a breaking news label that would put the power of editorial decisions in the hands of news organizations. Previously, moderators for Facebook made the decisions.

“There are other ways for us to better invest our resources,” Hardiman told the AP.

Eighty publishers around the world currently have access to the tool, which allows them to add a label that indicates a story is “breaking.”

Facebook said it is also testing a new section called “Today In,” which displays local breaking news, and a dedicated section of Facebook Watch in the U.S. for live videos and other items exclusive to the platform.

Alicia Rodis had her first kiss on stage when she was 15. She faked her first orgasm on stage too, when she was 18 ― the same year she first appeared nude in a production.

“I never looked like an ingenue,” she said. “I developed early, so if there was a prostitute or a slutty best friend in a play who had that reputation, that’s probably who I was playing.”

As an aspiring actress, Rodis was happy to take the roles she was offered, including those that required engaging in and acting out intimate scenes with strangers. But the power dynamics between a young actress and director, paired with the potential for miscommunication between actors portraying scenes of sexual intimacy, meant she was vulnerable to misconduct.

“I had some experiences that were really wonderful, and I had some experiences that were downright dangerous,” she said. “Even if not physically dangerous, then mentally and emotionally harmful.”

Rodis eventually became a fight and stunt director based in New York, helping stage and film productions choreograph violent scenes in a way that ensured actors remained safe and unharmed.

Union standards require productions to hire fight directors to choreograph scenes of sexual violence, but Rodis wondered why similar protocols and procedures didn’t exist for staged moments of romantic sexual intimacy ― which can be clumsily executed at best and invite inappropriate behavior at worst.

“I was working on a show and I was there for a slap and a kiss,” Rodis recalled. “We choreographed the slap and it was fine, then we got to the kiss and the actors were just terrified.”

The actors asked Rodis to step in, and they went over one another’s respective boundaries and determined how physical moments should move the story forward. “After that, it looked beautiful,” she said.

Rodis was practicing intimacy direction, an emerging field in which a small group of professionals are pushing to develop standards and procedures for scenes involving physical intimacy in the wake of a public reckoning with sexual misconduct throughout the entertainment industry.

Intimacy directors or choreographers are hired to facilitate scenes for the stage and screen involving physical touch, from moments of sexual tension to scenes featuring nudity and simulated sex and even familial intimacy. In many cases, an intimacy director’s most important role is their most passive: They are the person in the room whose job it is to discuss and understand an actors comfort with various aspects and types of touch in scenes of physical intimacy. 

If an actor or director deviates from the predetermined choreography, an intimacy director can intervene, relieving performers themselves of the fraught responsibility to confront one another about a drifting hand, or to challenge a director pushing for more contact or nudity than previously agreed upon.

Tonia Sina of Oklahoma City developed intimacy direction as a discipline in a graduate thesis 15 years ago. She’d found that for a director to simply ask performers to do what they feel ― to touch one another however they are moved to ― “led to a lot of mishandling and really horrible situations to be put in as a young actress,” she said.  

In 2016, Sina and Rodis founded Intimacy Directors International with Siobhan Richardson, an actor and fight director in Canada. Claire Warden, who’s based in New York, joined later. They’d all found that choreographing intimate moments could prevent the type of ambiguity and miscommunication that can give way to misconduct.

All four women said they had either experienced inappropriate behavior themselves on sets or witnessed mishandling of scenes involving physical touch. 

“I’ve been in the situation myself, where you’re thinking, ‘That hand seems to be drifting, but should I say something?’ It’s difficult to bring that kind of thing up,” Warden told HuffPost. “Even if you do, even if you are brave enough to say, ‘Hey, you put your hand on my butt,’ they’ll say, ‘Oh, I was just in the moment, I was really feeling it,’ which is how a lot of abuse can be covered up.”

By founding an official association of professionals, Richardson, Sina, Rodis and Warden hope to standardize protocols and procedures and further develop the discipline at a moment when awareness of sexual misconduct on the stage and screen is at an all-time high. 

“When you have a profession where people have to touch each other at their job, there need to be rules around that,” Sina said.

After revelations of film producer Harvey Weinstein’s history of abuse and as the Times Up and Me Too movements rippled through the industry more broadly, more people who make films have been open to hiring a specialized professional to work out sex scenes with performers. 

But Sina said it was President Donald Trump’s election ― amid allegations that he had sexually assaulted multiple women ― that “really made our phone ring off the hook.”

“It made people more aware that they maybe in the past have overstepped some lines, and that they need re-examine the way they’re approaching their work,” she said.

The theater world had begun to confront the potential for abuse in 2016. That year, an exposé revealed that Chicago’s Profiles Theater, which for decades was lauded for its raw, edgy performances involving nudity and sexually explicit content, had permitted rampant sexual abuse and violence on its stage. Violent acts that audience members assumed were choreographed to avoid physical harm were, instead, on-stage beatings and sexual assaults.

Profiles Theater closed permanently in 2016.

“Every actor I have spoken to about this, and I’ve spoken to hundreds, male or female or gender fluid, has a story being in a moment of intimacy and having a negative experience, ranging from uncomfortable to traumatizing,” Warden said.

She added that unease with talking about sex, and what it ought to look like, often means directors fail to set the terms for intimate scenes.

“A large amount of it is just from discomfort with having a conversation and not quite knowing how to handle it, and just saying, ‘Great, just grab her there and put that there,’” she said. “That, in any other situation, is sexual assault.” 

But there are other reasons why directors might avoid discussing the mechanics of an intimate scene before it is filmed or performed. Most commonly, they may not want to dampen the actors’ authentic response to intimate touch with choreographed passion.

Intimacy directors say the opposite is typically true: Without clear direction, actors are left to fumble through scenes with no knowledge of each other’s boundaries, or more practically, how the moment should contribute to the story being told.

“Stage sex is nothing like real sex. It’s fake. It has to be taught, and it has to be choreographed separately,” Sina said. “There shouldn’t be any grey area.”

Any grey area that results from failing to set the terms beforehand creates “a huge capacity for the possibility of harassment” Rodis said, especially if one actor’s “authentic response” crosses their stage partner’s boundaries, or if a director makes a spontaneous change that goes beyond the terms of someone’s nudity rider.

“The power dynamic is so strong in these situations. You’re on a time crunch. There’s so much money involved ― it’s tough to advocate for yourself,” Rodis said.  

Richardson said she believes that choreographing intimate scenes gives her and performers the tools to address spontaneous variations objectively. 

Intimacy directors also train in mental health first aid in order to pick up on actors’ physical signs of discomfort or unease, and intervene before lines are crossed even further. Warden told HuffPost that fight scenes and those involving intimate, physical touch can be uniquely similar in their psychological impact on those performing them.

“Our psyches have an enormously difficult time differentiating between real and staged violence, even if no contact is made. It’s the same with this. It becomes real in the moment,” she said, comparing intimacy direction to the precautions taken to avoid physical injury in cases of staged fighting.

“You have equipment you work with so you don’t get hurt,” Warden said. “When you’re doing a fall, you ask for a mat. We don’t want to break the actor. Well, we don’t want to break the actor emotionally or psychologically either.”

She added, “I liken it to a jungle gym. If you build a really solid jungle gym and you know where all the bars are you, you can really leap because you know there’s something there to catch.”

Intimacy directors are currently more common in theatre than in film, though Rodis and Sina said they’ve been brought in to consult on network shows and feature movies in recent months. Sina said Intimacy Directors International is currently working with the Screen Actors Guild to standardize techniques and practices developed to prevent blurred lines and outright assault on film sets. 

Rodis said directors appear more open to intimacy directors ― relieved to outsource the boundary-setting and tough conversations about consent to a specialized professional. She still encounters some discomfort with the idea, and emphasized that the role of intimacy directors is to improve conditions for the future, using the past to learn rather than incriminate.

“We are in this cultural shift where we all have to look at our own actions and what we have done in the past. It is very uncomfortable and scary to look back at another thing you worked on and think, ‘I’m not sure if I handled that right,’” she said.

“Now is about taking the opportunity of the cultural shift to look at the mirror and look at our past and say: ‘I didn’t know, but now I can educate myself and work better.’”

An earlier version of this story misspelled Siobhan Richardson’s first name. 

Nathan Larson, a 37-year-old accountant from Charlottesville, Virginia, is running for Congress as an independent candidate in his native state. He is also a pedophile, as he admitted to HuffPost on Thursday, who has bragged in website posts about raping his late ex-wife.

In a phone call, Larson confirmed that he created the now-defunct websites suiped.org and incelocalypse.today ― chat rooms that served as gathering places for pedophiles and violence-minded misogynists like himself. HuffPost contacted Larson after confirming that his campaign website shared an IP address with these forums, among others. His sites were terminated by their domain host on Tuesday.

On the phone, he was open about his pedophilia and seemingly unfazed about his long odds of attaining government office.

“A lot of people are tired of political correctness and being constrained by it,” he said. “People prefer when there’s an outsider who doesn’t have anything to lose and is willing to say what’s on a lot of people’s minds.”

When asked whether he’s a pedophile or just writes about pedophilia, he said, “It’s a mix of both. When people go over the top there’s a grain of truth to what they say.”

Asked whether there was a “grain of truth” in his essay about father-daughter incest and another about raping his ex-wife repeatedly, he said yes, offering that plenty of women have rape fantasies. 

According to Larson’s campaign manifesto, his platform as a “quasi-neoreactionary libertarian” candidate includes protecting gun ownership rights, establishing free trade and protecting “benevolent white supremacy,” as well as legalizing incestuous marriage and child pornography.

In the manifesto, Larson called Nazi leader Adolf Hitler a “white supremacist hero.” He urged Congress to repeal the Violence Against Women Act, adding, “We need to switch to a system that classifies women as property, initially of their fathers and later of their husbands.” He also showed sympathy for men who identify as involuntary celibates, or incels, suggesting it is unfair that they “are forced to pay taxes for schools, welfare, and other support for other men’s children.”

Using the pseudonyms Leucosticte and Lysander, Larson frequently participated in conversations on his own message boards, he confirmed to HuffPost.

As Lysander on suiped.org, a forum for “suicidal pedophiles,” Larson wrote numerous posts endorsing child rape and other forms of sexual abuse.

“Why doesn’t every pedo just focus on making money so they can get a pedo-wife and then either impregnate her with some fucktoys or adopt some fucktoys?” he wrote on the platform in October. “That would accommodate both those who are and aren’t into incest. And of course, the adoption process lets you pick a boy or a girl.”

Larson has a 3-year-old daughter who lives with relatives. He told HuffPost that he relinquished his parental rights during a custody battle. His ex-wife got a court-ordered restraining order against him in 2015 before she died by suicide.He has since remarried, he says, and is now living in Catlett, Virginia.

Larson used the moniker “Leucosticte” on incelocalypse.today ― a forum for incels who are pedophiles that was removed this week after the website Babe contacted the domain host. There, he identified as a “hebephilic rapist,” noting that he’s not a typical incel because he’d had sex by raping his ex-wife.

According to the site, which HuffPost viewed before it was taken down, “incelocalypse” refers to “the day we make the jailbaits our rape-slaves.” (The term “jailbait” is slang for a person who is under the legal age of consent for sex.)

HuffPost did not view any posts explicitly stating that he has engaged in sexual activity with minors, although he repeatedly expressed a desire to have sex with infants and children, including his own daughter. In the phone call, Larson said that the word “pedophile” is “vague” and “just a label,” adding that it’s “normal” for men to be attracted to underage women. He said he did not commit any crimes.

In a 3,300-word essay on incelocalypse.today, titled “Here’s How to Psyche Yourself Up to Feel Entitled to Rape,” Larson tells other members: “Don’t forget: feminism is the problem, and rape is the solution.” On the platform, he also advocated for father-daughter marriage, killing women and raping virgins.

Larson is less worried about his run for Congress than about his sites coming down. He told HuffPost that the termination of his websites is an affront to his freedom of speech and that he’s going to try to get them hosted elsewhere. Not that it’ll matter ― there are still plenty of forums where incels and other such communities can congregate. The removal of Larson’s sites caused an uproar on incels.me, a separate, much larger forum for incels.

Larson’s political ambitions span more than a decade. He first ran for Congress in Virginia’s 1st District in 2008 on what he described as an “anarcho-capitalist” platform. That same year, he sent a letter to the Secret Service threatening to kill the president, which landed him in federal prison for 14 months and barred him from seeking public office.

But in 2016, then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (D) restored voting and other civil rights to thousands of felons, allowing Larson to campaign yet again. In 2017 he ran in Virginia’s House of Delegates District 31 and secured less than 2 percent of the vote. Now he is gunning for a seat in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District.

Until it was pulled down, Larson’s site Nathania.org, a wiki page with details about his latest candidacy, featured posts titled “A Man Should Be Allowed to Choke His Wife to Death as Punishment for Cutting Her Hair Short Without Permission, or Other Acts of Gross Insubordination,” “Advantages of Father-Daughter Incest” and “The Justifiability of an Incel’s Kidnapping a Girl and Keeping Her as His Rape-Slave for Sex and Babymaking.” Wiki pages can be edited by other people, but Larson confirmed he wrote these posts as well as several other disturbing entries.

In “Let’s Define What Rape Is,” a 3,000-word essay posted on Nathania.org as well as other incel sites, Larson wrote: “Women are objects, to be taken care of by men like any other property, and for powerful men to insert themselves into as it pleases them, and as they believe will be in women’s own interests. In most cases, their interests are aligned, as long as the man is strong. Female sex-slaves actually get a much better deal than animals, because in most cases, they are allowed to reproduce, unlike animals raised for meat or companionship.”

When asked what his constituents would think about his pedophiliac writings, he said, “People are open-minded.”

He continued, “A lot of people who disagreed with someone like Trump … might vote for them anyway just because the establishment doesn’t like them.”

If you or someone you know needs help, call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also text HOME to 741-741 for free, 24-hour support from the Crisis Text Line. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of resources. For help with sexual violence, visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.

Naomi Campbell is the definition of a fashion legend. 

The supermodel, who celebrated her 48th birthday on May 22, has been dominating catwalks with her fierce signature strut since the 1980s. She’s walked in fashion shows for designers ranging from Chanel to Dior to Alaia to Versace, appeared on plenty of magazine covers ― she was the first black model to appear on the covers of French Vogue and Time ― and starred in countless campaigns.

And while she’s had a few questionable moments ― like that cell phone throwing situation in 2007 ― Campbell’s success in the industry has no doubt helped pave the way for fellow black models such as Jourdan Dunn, Chanel Iman and Winnie Harlow, among others. She’s also used her influence for good, supporting a number of charities and causes she believes in.  

On Monday, Campbell will receive the Fashion Icon award at a Council of Fashion Designers of America ceremony, an accolade that is definitely well-deserved. As a tribute, we’re taking a look back at some of the supermodel’s best runway moments ― proof that she’s always been a catwalk queen: 

NEW YORK ― Carley Perez, a 26-year-old New Yorker who started working in the health care industry right after she graduated from high school, isn’t afraid of the intimate moments that home care workers must share with patients.

“I have changed adult diapers. Cleaned penises. You have to expect nudity,” Perez told HuffPost recently, talking at a crowded cafe near Manhattan’s Union Square on a rare day off. She emphasized that she enjoyed her work caring for adults with developmental disabilities and started volunteering to help kids with autism back when she was in high school.

But one of Perez’s male patients took that personal relationship too far.

She was supposed to help him navigate the tasks of daily life ― cooking, cleaning, shopping for food ― and to be there just in case. But last year, over the course of several months, he repeatedly made crude sexual comments, exposed himself and even masturbated in front of Perez in his Brooklyn studio apartment, according to a sexual harassment lawsuit she filed Friday. The suit, brought in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, is directed against her former employer, a nonprofit health care organization called the Center for Family Support.

The man was 6 feet, 5 inches tall and weighed 300 pounds. In the lawsuit, he’s identified only as “T.” He’d hold his penis in his hand and say things to Perez such as “I know you like it,” according to the suit.

“I did not feel safe,” Perez told HuffPost, her eyes wide with the memory of what happened.

Even during this Me Too moment, stories about women like Perez are rarely told. Bold-faced names and companies typically grab headlines. Low-income women don’t always have the time for hashtags.

When asked if she’s been following the news on sexual harassment lately, Perez, who shares custody of her 8-year-old daughter with her former husband, shakes her head.

Before she had her daughter, Perez hoped she could pursue a degree in nursing, following in the footsteps of her mother. But when T was allegedly harassing her last year, Perez was barely getting by, earning around $13 an hour, hoping for 40 hours a week and burdened by an unreliable schedule.

Although she still wanted to pursue an advanced degree, she said, “It’s hard to work full time and go to school full time.”

Paid About $13,800 A Year

Perez was working in a rapidly expanding industry. As the baby boom generation grows older, home care workers are increasingly in demand. Personal care aides and home health aides make up the country’s second and third fastest-growing occupations, according to a 2014 report from the Paraprofessional Healthcare Institute, a national organization that trains such workers and their employers.

More than half of these workers are women of color and one quarter are immigrants, the PHI report said. One out of five are single mothers.

Home care workers typically earn about $13,800 a year, according to a 2017 report from PHI. One in four live below the poverty line.

All of which is to say this is a vulnerable group of workers, often shouldering the triple burden of racism, sexism and near-poverty wages.

“Home care workers come into the workplace with various markers of powerlessness,” said Emily Martin, a vice president at the National Women’s Law Center. “No one is going to believe her if she says anything.”

And lawyers aren’t lining up to represent them.

Still, Perez did not hesitate to complain about T. She repeatedly told her supervisor about the situation.

CFS said it “vehemently denies” all of Perez’s allegations.

Alone At Night With The Patient

After complaining many times, Perez said she was transferred to a different patient in the same building where T lived. But then, over Memorial Day weekend last year, Perez’s supervisor sent her back to T’s apartment to cover a midnight shift.

The sexual harassment escalated into something more frightening.

After she arrived, T turned off all the lights, switched on the TV, sat down on the couch and started masturbating underneath a blanket, according to the lawsuit.

In response, Perez told T she was going to step outside so he could have some “alone time.” She waited in the apartment lobby for a while.

When she returned, T came out of the bathroom naked, penis in hand, according to the suit. “I know you like this,” he said, walking over to Perez and putting his scrotum on her arm.

“Once his skin touched mine, I knew I couldn’t deal with this,” Perez recalled to HuffPost.

She told T to get dressed and she left the apartment. In the hallway, Perez frantically tried to get in touch with her supervisor, according to the suit. But it was then around 5 a.m. and he wasn’t picking up his phone or answering texts. She waited for word on what to do ― care workers aren’t supposed to just walk off the job.

About an hour passed with no response and Perez decided to leave. Hours later, she was able to get in touch with a manager and told her what had happened.

“What could you have done to prevent it?” the manager asked Perez, according to the lawsuit.

Perez was shocked. “She made it seem like it was my fault,” Perez told HuffPost. “I expected compassion. Or at least some sympathy.” 

A few days later, Perez met with her supervisor and a human resources representative from CFS. She explained why she’d walked off her shift.

They fired her.

What Was She Supposed To Do?

Home care workers facing sexual harassment from patients ― or clients, in industry terminology ― are in a vastly different position from women being harassed in an office, factory or many other workplaces.

“The truth is that a home care worker is in a vulnerable situation being in a person’s home alone,” said Susan Misiorski, vice president of workforce innovations at PHI. “They are providing care and services that are personal and intimate. They might be bathing the person, assisting them with going to the bathroom.”

Clients may lack the ability to control their own behavior because of developmental disabilities or other issues like dementia or Alzheimer’s. “You can easily imagine how a person with cognitive impairment could misperceive such a situation,” Misiorski said.

The procedures for dealing with these kinds of situations should be clear-cut, Misiorski said. If a worker complains about the way they’re being treated, the employer needs to take action. The employer should officially assess the situation, interview the worker, send in a registered nurse or another expert to evaluate the client, and then make appropriate changes to the client’s care plan, said Misiorski, who was speaking generally and was not familiar with Perez’s specific situation.

For example, in a case where a male patient is being sexually aggressive to a female worker, the managing company could bring in a male caretaker instead. Or if an individual worker is afraid to be alone with a client, two people could be assigned to care for him, Misiorski said.

And of course, if the behavior of the client rises to the level of criminal conduct, that person should be reported to the authorities, she said.

None of this happened after Perez brought the problem with T to her supervisors, according to the lawsuit. “They basically shrugged it off,” she said.

At some point, she was allegedly told, “Don’t worry.” Perez said she wasn’t given any special training or instructions on how to handle T ― a best practice, according to Misiorski.

Perez said she did have training on how to deal with violent patients and how to prevent physical altercations. “None of that prepared me for what happened,” she said.

“We believe that sexual harassment of caregivers is more common than people think,” said Kristina Bas Hamilton, legislative director for the United Domestic Workers, a union representing health care workers in California.

It’s hard to know the scope of the issue for home care workers as there’s not much data on them specifically. However, we do know that workers in the industry more generally are vulnerable. Nearly 12 percent of the sexual harassment charges filed at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 2005 to 2015 were by employees in the health care and social services sector. It was No. 4 on the list, behind the food service, retail and manufacturing industries.

Hamilton, like Misiorski, emphasized that when an organization is sending out a care worker, it has an obligation to make sure that worker isn’t going into an abusive situation. Yet that’s exactly where Perez found herself on Memorial Day last year.

Disposable Workers

Perez was devastated and outraged at the unfairness of her termination, but she tried to move on and find a new job. The problem was that other agencies didn’t want to hire someone who had been fired. It was a red flag.

Potential employers automatically assumed that Perez had abused a patient, she said. “They have to be cautious.”

She burned through her savings while she looked for work and had to leave the one-bedroom apartment she rented in Brooklyn with her daughter. She closed her bank account. The money was gone.

“I was looking at shelters,” Perez said. She was able to move in with her cousin’s family in Harlem. On the days when her daughter stays with her, they face a 90-minute commute back to the little girl’s school in Brooklyn. Two trains and a bus, Perez said.

A friend helped her find a lawyer willing to take CFS to court.

“Workers in this industry are treated as if they’re disposable, not like human beings with families who need to pay rent and eat,” said attorney Daniel Bright. “What is someone in her situation supposed to do. It’s five in the morning. What did they want from her? To go back in? See if it escalated further?”

In the lawsuit, Perez argues that CFS was negligent and disregarded her safety, exposing her to sexual harassment, assault and a sexually hostile work environment.

Bright said CFS has refused to settle the case and is taking the position it did nothing wrong.

Perez is now working two part-time jobs ― cleaning office buildings and handling security for a music venue in Manhattan. She doesn’t know exactly what she hopes from her lawsuit, beyond a recognition that what happened to her “was wrong,” she said. “I want what’s fair.”

But she hasn’t given up on a future in nursing or going back to her old job. “I miss it,” she said. “I miss being in that community. Helping people. It was like my comfort zone.”

Are you a home care worker and would you like to share your story? I’d love to talk to you. Email me: emily.peck@huffpost.com 

Camila Cabello’s insanely catchy song “Havana” just broke another record.

The single, which has more than 888 million streams, is now Spotify’s most-streamed song of all time by a solo female artist, Billboard reported on Friday. The Cuban-American singer is the first solo Latina artist to hold the record.

Previously, the distinction was held by Sia’s “Cheap Thrills.”

The new record is just the latest milestone for Cabello. In January, her album became the first debut by a woman to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s 200 albums chart in three years. The same month, “Havana” also hit seven weeks at the top of Billboard’s Pop Songs radio airplay chart, which was the longest run for a solo female artist in a lead role since by Taylor Swift’s “I Knew You Were Trouble” in 2013.

But apparently not everyone expected the song to be a smash. In January ― when the song had been at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 for 21 weeks, according to Complex ― the song’s producer Frank Dukes tweeted that the song had plenty of doubters early on.

“It’s just amazing to see that people have connected to it so much,” she said on the Billboard Chart Beat podcast. “When we were making the song, even though it was really special to me, I don’t think anyone expected for this to happen.”

A small group of Google employees, in response to a company contract with a Pentagon-backed program called Maven, have discussed the idea of staging a protest at a conference in July. Employees fear that the project, which provides artificial intelligence tools to the military, could be used in fatal drone strikes.

The protest, as discussed in preliminary exchanges over Google’s internal communications platform, would take place at a Google Cloud conference in San Francisco, according to messages obtained by HuffPost and an interview with an employee.

More than a dozen Google employees have resigned over the project, according to Gizmodo, and thousands of employees have signed a letter protesting it.

Now Google employees are debating showing resistance in a more active way, through a potential demonstration.  

Discussions regarding the possibility of a protest took place this week on an internal thread devoted to criticism of Maven. The thread, called “maven conscientious objectors,” includes hundreds of employees, but only a small percentage of those were active in the discussion.

The debate about staging a physical demonstration took place on Wednesday and Thursday and was started by a departing engineer. The employee called the project “the greatest ethical crises in technology of our generation” and suggested that “Maven protesters” go to the conference with the aim of “making some noise.”

The employee’s last day was Friday, but by late morning, someone from human resources had asked them to leave immediately due to their “recent statements” related to the conference. “As such, we’re going to move up your exit by a few hours and we’ve ended access, effective immediately,” the HR person wrote.

In response to the initial thread, another employee called the engineer an “agent provocateur.” Someone else said such an action would “be enough reason to fire us lot with popular support.”

The debate became heated and personal, with some employees questioning whether their colleague who originally suggested the idea of a physical protest should even belong in the “conscientious objectors” group.

But there were a few employees who supported the idea, calling the discussion “legitimate topics for this mailing list.” Another said that while they were not based in San Francisco and were thus unable to join the action, they personally thought the protest was “a good idea since it increases Google’s PR cost of getting involved in military projects.”

Representatives for Google did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment. The Intercept reported Friday afternoon that Google will not renew its contract to work on Project Maven, though the company plans to work on the project through June 2019 and has not ruled out taking on similar work in the future.

This isn’t the first round of discord from Google employees. In an April petition to Google CEO Sundar Pichaiprotesting the Pentagon contract and signed by thousands, petitioners referenced “Don’t be evil,” Google’s famous former unofficial motto, as an argument for canceling the contract.

“This contract puts Google’s reputation at risk and stands in direct opposition to our core values. Building this technology to assist the US Government in military surveillance ― and potentially lethal outcomes ― is not acceptable,” the signers of the petition wrote.

Hundreds of academics subsequently wrote a letter to Google co-founder Larry Page, as well as Pichai and other company leaders, supporting the petitioning employees.

The academics expressed concern that Project Maven will help the military become “just a short step away from authorizing autonomous drones to kill automatically, without human supervision or meaningful human control.” The letter also cited recent Cambridge Analytica scandals as demonstrating “growing public concern over allowing the tech industries to wield so much power.”

At a recent companywide meeting, Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders, reportedly responded to a question about the project and addressed some of the controversies, according to The New York Times. Brin explained that he thought it was better for the world’s militaries to be partnered with an international company like Google, rather than nationalistic defense contractors.

The employee who started the discussion about protesting Google’s involvement with Maven implied on the thread that they gave notice due to a violation of their own ethical standards.

“The time to protest is now or never,” the employee wrote.

Are you a Google employee who wants to talk about your experience with Maven? Email rebecca.klein@huffpost.com.

This story has been updated with information from The Intercept’s report.

Walk into this San Francisco restaurant and you are greeted with a wall of numbered cubbyholes with acrylic doors. Dotted around the room are tablet screens for placing orders. What you won’t find are any people serving. There’s no counter, no human to take your order or hand over the food. Instead, customers scroll through the menu of quinoa and rice bowls on the in-store screens or on a mobile app, tap in their order and wait for their name to flash on one of the cubbies, where their food will be waiting.

This is Eatsa, an automated restaurant. Well, sort of. There are still humans preparing food behind the scenes. But the company hopes to eventually automate this process too.   

The concept restaurant, while it has had recent setbacks, represents another step in the onward march of automation. To some, Eatsa is a sign of innovation, providing people with fast, smooth service without the need to speak to another person. But for others, like San Francisco Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the district the restaurant is in, “there’s a big question mark about what this means for us as a society,” she says. Not only what it means to have less human interaction but also what it will do to jobs.

Automation has been on Kim’s mind. “This is one of the biggest issues that is facing our country over the next decade,” she says. In response to her growing concerns about how it will play out in a city with one of the fastest-growing income gaps between rich and poor, she had an idea. Tax the robots and use the money to help stem inequality.

The idea of a robot tax has bubbled up over the past couple of years, thanks to the backing of some high-profile figures, proposing it as a way of trying to prevent all the benefits of automation from flowing to a tiny slice of wealthy people.

Benoît Hamon — a socialist candidate in the French presidential elections last year — made a robot tax a plank in his campaign. Perhaps the most famous advocate is Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates. He told Quartz last year, “Right now, the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

He says he believes taxing machines could slow the pace of automation, giving people a chance to retrain and giving governments time to put in place policies to protect people from intensifying inequality.

A robot tax has not been implemented anywhere. The European Parliament toyed with the idea but ultimately rejected it, concerned it would amount to a tax on progress and put the EU at a disadvantage. South Korea has probably come closest. With the aim of protecting workers, it implemented a halfway step last year by cutting a tax break available to companies investing in automation. 

In San Francisco, Kim’s suggestion is to extend the payroll tax to robots and algorithms that replace human jobs. Funds raised would be funneled into a “jobs for the future fund,” she says, which could pay for “workforce development and training for workers who have lost their jobs, such as truck drivers, retail and restaurant workers, even accountants and stockbrokers.”  

She also envisages using the tax revenue to tackle the low pay of many care sector jobs. “We do have these jobs which are very difficult to automate like child care and home support service workers that are currently jobs largely performed by older women of color.”

A February report from global management consultancy Bain & Co. supports Kim’s concerns about inequality. It found that the most vulnerable in society will be hardest hit by automation. It predicted up to 25 percent of American jobs will be eliminated by the end of the 2020s — equal to 40 million workers — and depressing the wages of many more.

“Today’s level of inequality already has prompted growing public concern and debate,” the report says. “It seems reasonable to expect that at significantly higher levels, popular criticism would intensify and increase pressure for social policies to address it.” Taxing robots is one of the possible interventions mentioned in the report.

However, not everyone is in favor.

A key criticism revolves around the practicalities of implementing the tax. What counts as a robot, for example? While a factory line robot seems clearly to be replacing human workers, what about digital assistants? Or vending machines? 

“There is no such thing as an individual robot, so you would be looking at something like the value created by robots, which is a heck of a difficult thing to define,” says Len Shackleton, an editorial and research fellow at the U.K.-based Institute for Economic Affairs. 

He wrote a paper for the institute in May that set out why we shouldn’t panic about automation and artificial intelligence. The report criticizes the idea of a robot tax as “ill-judged.”

Automation offers huge benefits to society, he says, “and to try to hold this back with these kind of imagined fears — I call it a moral panic — it has all the classic things of witch hunting. ‘Let’s find the nasty capitalist and burn them at the stake.’”

In addition to the difficulties of applying the tax, Shackleton raises the point that it could not be undertaken in one country alone. “Certainly for any medium-size country like the U.K. to try to do this in isolation would actually be suicidal,” he says. “It would mean that nobody would really consider investing in this country in anything which involved producing goods because virtually anything could be classified as a robot.”

Kim is aware that it would not be a simple task to work out how to tax robots. “I don’t want to deny that there aren’t a host of definitional concerns that we need to tackle before we roll this out,” she says. That’s why she has spoken to a broad coalition of advisers, including big tech companies, to thrash out how a tax could work in practice.

“I think tech wants to be part of the solution. They don’t want to be the bad guys,” says Kim. “They don’t want to be viewed as the guys that took away everyone’s jobs.”

No one is suggesting robot tax is the sole answer to tackling the threat automation poses to inequality, but advocates say it could be a useful weapon in policymakers’ arsenal. Sergio Rebelo, a professor of finance at the Kellogg School of Management who analyzed whether taxing robots could reduce income inequality, concluded that the tax would make sense.

“We find that when robots are relatively expensive, taxing them is useful in terms of improving the distribution of income between routine workers, whose jobs can be automated, and nonroutine workers, who benefit from automation.” But once robots become cheap, it’s no longer a useful mechanism. “At that point, the best policy is to provide a basic universal income financed with income taxes,” he says. 

Of course, a robot tax is not the only or even the highest-profile idea to deal with automation and inequality. A universal basic income, which would give everyone no-strings-attached money, has support from the likes of Elon Musk and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. There’s also the idea of guaranteed jobs — $15 an hour government jobs for anyone who wants or needs one — which has the backing of prominent Democrats, including Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

But, Kim says, these are not revenue-raising schemes. “Everyone has great ideas about how to spend money, but no one is actually proposing how to raise that money.”

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While the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) has made a significant amount of money at the box office, it clearly has a lot of catching up to do when compared with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

Sure, the MCU has 19 films under its belt compared to the DCEU’s five, but the DCEU is not just behind in terms of box office gross. It’s also taken a beating from critics, with only “Wonder Woman” receiving universally positive reviews.

Evan Puschak, the host of the weekly pop culture YouTube series “The Nerdwriter,” breaks down why the DCEU can’t seem to captivate the public like the MCU does. And, as he argues, it has a lot to do with the action scenes.

An estimated 40 million Americans are living with an anxiety disorder. Not only does the condition cause physical issues (think headaches, nausea and shortness of breath), it can also lead to emotional symptoms. Anxious thoughts like, “everyone hates me,” “I’m so stupid” or “I’m not good enough” are just par for the course.

Words of encouragement and jokes certainly aren’t a cure when it comes to this type of thinking or anxiety in general, but they can help sometimes. Below are some tweets about anxiety meant to support you, make you chuckle and remind you that you’re not alone. Read through, and repeat if necessary:

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First lady Melania Trump hasn’t attended a public event for nearly a month, and now her  spokeswoman has told ABC News Sunday that she won’t be accompanying the president to the G7 meeting in Quebec — nor the planned North Korea summit in Singapore.

No reason was given.

But spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham also told CNN Sunday evening that the first lady is expected to attend a White House event Monday honoring Gold Star military families. The reception, however, will be barred to the press.

Melania Trump was last seen May 10 greeting Americans released from detention in North Korea. Speculation about her long absence includes possible tensions in the Trump marriage or a medical issue. She checked into Walter Reed Medical Center for treatment of what the White House called a benign kidney condition May 14 and didn’t leave until May 19.

Donald Trump just spent the weekend at Camp David — without her.

A tweet was posted on her Twitter account last week saying she was “feeling great” and “working hard” at the White House, but the writing style was so remarkably like her husband’s (especially the backhanded slap at the media) that many discounted it.

The first lady joined the president for his first G7 trip to Italy last year, where she joined the spouses of other G7 leaders at public events.

Leaders from the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan and the European Union are meeting Friday and Saturday for the G7 summit.

The president then plans to travel to Singapore for a June 12 summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Grisham told ABC News last Wednesday that the first lady was “doing really well.”

She’s been “involved in several internal meetings with staff ... We’ve been going over initiatives and other long-term planning for events such as the congressional picnic and Fourth of July,” Grisham said.

This story was updated with new information that the first lady is expected to attend a White House reception Monday to honor God Star military families.