A few weeks ago, my husband and I drove from Illinois to Iowa to visit a friend. I was excited about my over 5 hours’ drive. Sadly, 60 minutes into the drive, my excitement fiddled out. I was bored. Field after field, as far as my eyes could see, all I saw was either corn or soybean. I also noticed that the field margins were empty-with no sight of wildflowers.
The Yakima River runs southeast from the Cascade Mountains through central Washington state to merge with the Columbia a little north of Oregon. From the small city of Yakima on down, its course broadens from a winding canyon into a wide valley bounded by austere low ridges of gray-green sagebrush and tawny grasses. In mid-April, the new leaves of the willows and cottonwoods light up the riverbanks with luminous chartreuse.
With preparations for America’s
2030 population census underway and the Census Bureau encouraging additional public
input, it’s time to seriously evaluate the continued inclusion of the race question in the U.S. population census.
A recent Justice Department
report concluded that “systemic” racial bias in the Minneapolis Police Department “made what happened to George Floyd possible.”
New research shows that Black mothers in the United States disproportionately live in counties with higher maternal vulnerability and face greater risk of preterm death for the fetus, greater risk of low birth weight for a baby, and a higher number of maternal deaths.
The US has some of the strictest laws against smoking in public, including a 1997 executive order which bans smoking in all government federal buildings.
But still, the tobacco industry and its allies do not rest, says Dr. Jarbas Barbosa, Director of the Washington-based Pan American Health Organization (PAHO).
Approximately
225 million people from around the world would like to migrate permanently to the United States. But given America’s current policies, relatively few of them will be able to do so legally.
Despite serious allegations by the US justice system that two officials of the government of Nayib Bukele reached a secret agreement with the MS-13 gang to keep the homicide rate low, the Salvadoran president seems to have escaped unscathed for now, without political costs.
Few policymakers ever claim credit for causing stagnation and recessions. Yet, they do so all the time, justifying their actions by some supposedly higher purpose.
Denial at the top of the Democratic Party about Joe Biden’s shaky footing for a re-election run in 2024 became more untenable over the weekend. As the New York Times
reported, investigators “seized more than a half-dozen documents, some of them classified, at President Biden’s residence” in Delaware.
The current notion of a “moderate Republican” is an oxymoron that helps to move the country rightward. Last week, every one of the GOP’s so-called “moderates” voted to install House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who won with the avid support of Donald Trump and got over the finish line by catering to such fascistic colleagues as Matt Gaetz and Lauren Boebert.
President Biden and leaders of 49 invited African countries and the
African Union met in Washington last month for the
U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit — a meeting that all parties hope will launch a strengthened partnership to deliver
benefits for the peoples of both the U.S. and Africa.
With 2023 underway, Democrats in office are still dodging the key fact that most of their party’s voters don’t want President Biden to run for re-election. Among prominent Democratic politicians, deference is routine while genuine enthusiasm is sparse.
Countries worldwide, and as different as India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, Ireland, Israel and Italy, are struggling with the issue of how best to balance diversity and meritocracy across disparate ethnic, racial, caste, linguistic and religious subgroups in their populations.
Given the upcoming
midterm elections in the United States and the consequences of the outcome for
domestic legislation and programs as well as the country’s
foreign policy, it’s useful and fitting to review fundamental differences between America’s two major political parties on vital demographic issues.
Vernae Gallaread aspires to teach sign language to people with disabilities and to families who cannot afford sign language lessons for their children.
For a while in 2018, the Donald Trump administration’s “family separation” policy looked like it might become the Stalingrad of his war on immigrants. It was clearly a bridge too far politically, given the global outcry it provoked. Even parts of the Republican party couldn’t stomach it. So Trump retreated strategically on family separation, and intentionally left the program so disorganized that reuniting parents and children became a still-incomplete ordeal.
The largest ever settlement in Canadian legal history, 40 billion Canadian dollars, occurred in 2022, but it didn’t come from a court – it followed a decision by the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal. In 2016 the Tribunal affirmed a complaint that the Government of Canada’s child welfare system discriminated against First Nations children. (First Nations are one of three groups of Indigenous people in Canada).
Canada and its major cities consistently appear in Top 10 lists of best places in the world to live. But delve into figures about children’s lives in the northern nation known for ice hockey heroics and you see a different picture.
Toronto resident Miranda Knight describes her abortion experience as relatively simple. After finding out she was pregnant on a Wednesday in 2017, she booked an appointment at an available clinic and got one for the following Monday. She had the procedure that day and left the clinic by noon.