Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Read More

People wading in a river, in front of a destroyed house

Workers walk through the Rocky Broad River in Chimney Rock, N.C., near a home destoryed by Hurricane Helene.

Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Project 2025 would have 'catastrophic' impact on hurricane warnings

Raj Ghanekar is a student at Northwestern University and a reporter for the school’s Medill News Service.

Residents in the southeastern United States are still recovering from devastating damage brought on by back-to-back hurricanes. As federal, state and local officials continue working to deliver aid, experts say the country would be less prepared for future hurricanes if proposals included the conservative plan known as Project 2025 were to be put in place.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration houses the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center, which are vital to predicting these cyclones. But the 920-page proposal published by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, argues NOAA “should be dismantled” and includes steps to undermine its authority and position leading the country’s planning for severe weather events, such as providing official emergency warnings.

Keep ReadingShow less
People walking alongside a river

Migrants from Guatemala prepare to cross the Rio Grande, to enter the United States in February. The best way to address immigration is fix problems caused by past interventions in foreign countries.

Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

Immigration isn't a border issue – it's caused by U.S. interventions

Yates-Doerr is an associate professor anthropology at Oregon State University and the author of “Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm.” She is also a fellow with The OpEd Project.

Immigration is a hot-button topic in the presidential election, with Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump both promising to crack down hard at the border. But neither candidate is talking about a root cause of immigration: the long history of U.S. meddling, which has directly resulted in displacement. If our politicians really wanted to address immigration, they would look not at the border but at past actions of the U.S. government, which have directly produced so much of the immigration we see today.

Keep ReadingShow less
Destroyed mobile home

A mobile home destroyed by a tornado associated with Hurricane Milton is seen on Oct.12 in the Lakewood Park community of Fort Pierce, Fla.

Paul Hennesy/Anadolu via Getty Images

Disaster fatigue is a real thing. We need a cure.

Frazier is an assistant professor at the Crump College of Law at St. Thomas University and a Tarbell fellow.

Before I left for the airport to attend a conference in Washington, D.C., I double checked with my wife that she was OK with me leaving while a hurricane was brewing in the Gulf of Mexico. We had been in Miami for a little more than a year at that point, and it doesn’t take long to become acutely attentive to storms when you live in Florida. Storms nowadays form faster, hit harder and stay longer.

Ignorance of the weather is not an option. It’s tiring.

Keep ReadingShow less
Latino man sitting outside a motel room

One arm of the government defines homelessness narrowly, focusing on those living in shelters or on the streets. But another deparmtent also counts people living in doubled-up housing or motels as homeless.

Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

How conflicting definitions of homelessness fail Latino families

Arzuaga is the housing policy analyst for the Latino Policy Forum.

The majority of Latinos in the United States experiencing homelessness are invisible. They aren’t living in shelters or on the streets but are instead “doubled up” — staying temporarily with friends or family due to economic hardship. This form of homelessness is the most common, yet it remains undercounted and, therefore, under-addressed, partly due to conflicting federal definitions of homelessness.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development defines homelessness narrowly, focusing on those living in shelters or places not meant for habitation, such as the streets. This definition, while useful for some purposes, excludes many families and children who are technically homeless because they live in uncertain and sometimes dangerous housing situations but are not living on the streets. This narrow definition means that many of these “doubled up” families don’t qualify for the resources and critical housing support that HUD provides, leaving them to fend for themselves in precarious living situations.

Keep ReadingShow less