Tag: Poverty

What If O.J.’s Trial Happened Now?

Among the signature images of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal of the murders of his ex-wife and her friend was the contrasting tableaus of Black people grouping in front of television screens applauding while white people watching it were shaking their heads — appalled, perplexed and even disgusted by a verdict that flew in the face of […]

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An ISIS Terror Group Draws Half Its Recruits From Tiny Tajikistan

The mother of one of the suspects in the bloody attack on a concert hall near Moscow last month wept as she talked about her son. How, she wondered, did he go from the bumpy, dirt roads of their village in Tajikistan, in Central Asia, to sitting, bruised and battered, in a Russian courtroom accused […]

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Q&A: Claire Walsh on how J-PAL’s King Climate Action Initiative tackles the twin climate and poverty crises

The King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI) is the flagship climate change program of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), which innovates, tests, and scales solutions at the nexus of climate change and poverty alleviation, together with policy partners worldwide. Claire Walsh is the associate director of policy at J-PAL Global at MIT. She […]

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The Rich Don’t Have to Take Every Tax Deduction, and They Shouldn’t

Alejandro Narváez is OK taking less. He hires only contractors who pay their workers a living wage, even if that means a larger bill. A Seattle-based dentist, he’s promoted cost-effective practices to expand dental care to the underserved, even if those practices cut into his bottom line. And when it comes to paying taxes, he […]

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Many Patients Don’t Survive End-Stage Poverty

He has an easy smile, blue eyes and a life-threatening bone infection in one arm. Grateful for treatment, he jokes with the medical intern each morning. A friend, a fellow doctor, is supervising the man’s care. We both work as internists at a public hospital in the medical safety net, a loose term for institutions […]

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WIC Food Aid Program Updates Provisions for Mothers and Children

The Agriculture Department said on Tuesday that low-income women and children eligible for a food aid program would receive more cash for purchases of fruits and vegetables, with less assistance available for milk. The final rule by the department puts the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, a federally funded program known […]

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Another Red-Blue Divide: Money to Feed Kids in the Summer

The governor was firm: Nebraska would reject the new federal money for summer meals. The state already fed a small number of children when schools closed. He would not sign on to a program to provide all families that received free or cut-rate school meals with cards to buy groceries during the summer. “I don’t […]

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Another Red-Blue Divide: Money to Feed Kids in the Summer

The governor was firm: Nebraska would reject the new federal money for summer meals. The state already fed a small number of children when schools closed. He would not sign on to a program to provide all families that received free or cut-rate school meals with cards to buy groceries during the summer. “I don’t […]

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Takeaways From the Vatican’s Document on Human Dignity

The document issued on Monday by the Vatican puts human dignity at the center of Catholic life, but in doing so, it broaches some of the most difficult and sensitive social issues, those that Pope Francis has spent his papacy avoiding. On Monday, though, his church leaned hard into them in the document, called “Infinite […]

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Gender Change and Surrogacy Are Threats to Human Dignity, Vatican Says

The Vatican on Monday issued a new document approved by Pope Francis stating that the church believes that sex-change operations, gender fluidity and surrogacy all amount to affronts to human dignity. The sex a person is born with, the document argued, was an “irrevocable gift” from God and “any sex-change intervention, as a rule, risks […]

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The Hamptons Housing Crisis Is a Matter of Life or Death for Day Laborers

Early in the evening of Dec. 30, Julio Florencio Teo Gomez, a carpenter from Guatemala City who had shifted around different living situations on Long Island for more than a decade, went looking for money he was owed for a job he had completed before the holidays. Like so many other day laborers operating in […]

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For Red State Holdouts Like Kansas, Is Expanding Medicaid Within Reach?

As lawmakers in a nearby hearing room debated last month whether to support her legislation to expand Medicaid, Gov. Laura Kelly of Kansas dared the state’s Republican House speaker to hold a vote. “If he thinks he can kill it, bring it,” Ms. Kelly, a soft-spoken moderate Democrat, said in an interview in her sprawling […]

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The States That Are Stepping Up to Take On Child Poverty

“We have a whole bunch of work ahead of us to make sure that families are able to fully access credits like the Oregon kids credit,” said Mac Innis, expressing hope that the state might eventually set up an online portal for non-filers, similar to what the federal government set up in 2021 to help […]

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India Election: What 10 Years of Modi Has Meant for the Economy

As Narendra Modi was storming to victory in the election of 2014, he said that “acchhe din aane waale hain” — good times are coming. Now as Mr. Modi stands set to secure another term as prime minister in elections starting on April 19, the value of India’s stock market has grown threefold since he […]

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In Yemen, Conflict and Hunger Stalk a Lean Ramadan

In the years before war and hunger upended daily life in Yemen, Mohammed Abdullah Yousef used to sit down after a long day of fasting during Ramadan to a rich spread of food. His family would dine on meat, falafel, beans, savory fried pastries and occasionally store-bought crème caramel. This year, the Islamic holy month […]

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An Idyll on the Shores of a Toxic Lake

There are two ways to experience the town of Bombay Beach, Calif., as a visitor: gawk at the spectacle or fall into the vortex. Thousands of tourists cruise through each year, often without getting out of their cars to see decaying art installations left over from an annual mid-March gathering of artists, photographers and documentarians […]

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Can This Forgotten Anti-Poverty Progam Be Saved?

“It feels like we’re putting families into an activity to meet a rate, not necessarily to help the family,” she said. “There has to be some other way that we measure the effectiveness of this program, outside of just, are they participating 30 hours a week.” Compared to other major anti-poverty programs, TANF serves relatively […]

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