More than 80 young immigrants are wrapping up a ten-week fellowship this summer, placed inside social justice and labor organizations across the country as part of a program built on a simple premise: the next generation of immigrant rights leadership should be led by immigrants themselves. Born From a Legislative Defeat The program, known as…
For a few days in mid-July, something happened on Greenland that hadn’t been recorded in more than three decades of satellite observation: nearly the entire ice sheet — from its thin coastal edges to its two-mile-thick interior — began melting at its surface, all at once. A Scientist Who Didn’t Believe His Own Data The…
The unemployment rate most Americans hear on the nightly news — 8.5 percent, as of last month — tells only part of the story. A second, far less publicized government measure paints a considerably bleaker picture: 15.6 percent, the highest that broader measure has registered since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking it in…
Two of the officials most directly implicated in poisoning an entire city’s water supply sat before Congress this week, and neither one accepted responsibility for it. “I Don’t Think Anyone at EPA Did Anything Wrong” Susan Hedman, who resigned in January as the EPA’s Region 5 administrator overseeing Michigan, told the House Oversight and Government…
California’s legislature has passed a bill ending a 78-year-old carve-out in labor law that has left farmworkers waiting longer than nearly any other category of employee to earn overtime pay — legislation that took two attempts, a failed vote, and a tense last-minute standoff to finally clear the Assembly. A Carve-Out Dating Back to 1938…
A federal program that has tracked the human toll of outsourcing and offshoring for nearly two decades is being shut down — a casualty not of policy debate, but of across-the-board budget cuts that have left statisticians scrambling to protect core operations by sacrificing others. A Program Built to Track Globalization’s Fallout The Bureau of…
Russia: Deadly Suicide Bombing in North Caucasus A suicide bomber detonated an explosives-laden truck at a police station in Nazran, the largest city in Russia’s North Caucasus region, killing at least 20 people and wounding roughly 60 others. The North Caucasus has seen recurring violence in recent years tied to separatist and Islamist insurgencies stemming…
Six months after the earthquake that killed an estimated 230,000 people and leveled much of Port-au-Prince, international relief officials are warning that Haiti’s reconstruction faces a threat almost as fundamental as the rubble itself: a landscape stripped of nearly all its forest cover, decades before the ground ever started shaking. A Country Already Running an…
Something doesn’t quite add up in this year’s economic data, and economists studying it aren’t shy about saying so. The unemployment rate has been falling — meaningfully, by nearly a full percentage point over the past year. Economic growth, by contrast, has stayed sluggish and uneven, nowhere close to the pace textbook models say should…
Behind this month’s national unemployment rate — 9.7 percent, the highest since 1983 — sits a set of numbers considerably worse for some Americans than the headline figure suggests, and a demographic pattern that would only get starker as the year wore on. The Headline Number, and What It Doesn’t Show The national rate on…