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By A. H osack , K. Hecht, and P. Berman Larry had no adult criminal record, so his case had started out simply enough. If nothing else had happened since the assault, Mr. Branister could have gotten the charges dropped, or maybe gotten Larry probation . Unfortunately, Larry had resisted arrest. Mr. Branister believed Larry ’s story that he had been drunk when the police knocked on his door and that he had still been able to control himself until one of the officers had insulted him. Larry...

A new foster care documentary , Breaking the Cycle , explores exactly how intertwined the foster care system is with homelessness and human trafficking. Filmmaker Arzo Yusuf captured multiple perspectives from people with close connections to the pipeline of living in foster care to becoming homeless or being sexually exploited, including a former foster youth and professionals who work with young people in foster care. Personal accounts from former foster youth speak to the circumstances...

Ten days ago, Cyclone Idai struck Zimbabwe and Mozambique, killing more than 700 people and displacing 500,000. UN officials warned that four times that many people may be displaced by the time they’ve fully accounted for the storm’s devastation . The death toll, too, will almost certainly rise; cases of cholera have now been reported, along with an increase in malaria cases . United Nations meteorologist Clare Nullis has said that Idai could rank among the worst weather-related disasters in...

There are 111,616 incarcerated women in the United States, a 7-fold increase since 1980. Some of these women are pregnant, but amid reports of women giving birth in their cells or shackled to hospital beds , prison and public health officials have no hard data on how many incarcerated women are pregnant, or on the outcomes of those pregnancies. A study published in The American Journal of Public HealthThursday changes that. The study included 57 percent of the US prison population (New York,...

California has made great strides in improving our health care system, and now more than 91 percent of our residents have health insurance. However, coverage does not guarantee health and significant racial inequities persist. For example, in California, Latinos and African Americans have twice the prevalence of type-2 diabetes and are twice as likely to die from the disease. The prevalence of asthma among American Indians and Alaska Natives is three times greater than the state average and...

For 31 years, Andy Mangels, 52, and his husband, Don Hood, 61, lived in an apartment in the Goose Hollow neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. In December, the owner of their building changed. Hood, who is a disabled veteran who had been working for 12 years as an onsite manager for the apartments, was laid off. Then their rent was raised 113 percent. Mangels said the news was more than just shocking. They were now facing displacement from a neighborhood they had called home for more than three...

On an early February morning just east of Florida’s I-75, sea fog lies low over the fields. It nearly obscures the farmworkers, ghost-like, bent over as they harvest the winter crops. Though the sun’s just coming up, they’ve been laboring for hours. “It’s cool in the early morning, but even the winters are getting warmer,” said Jeannie Economos, project coordinator with the Farmworker Association of Florida . “By the afternoon, it will be in the 80s in the sun.” Most people are unaware that...

Income inequality has soared in the United States over the past half century. Has educational inequality increased alongside, in lockstep? Of course, say public intellectuals from across the political spectrum. As Richard Rothstein of the liberal Economic Policy Institute puts it: “Incomes have become more unequally distributed in the United States in the last generation, and this inequality contributes to the academic achievement gap.” Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, citing...

The more I work with clients, the more I am aware of one of the greatest hopes we have: That our hurts will not have been in vain, that there is some way to make it matter. I know we often look to volunteering with organizations, offering our time and energy to support a particular cause, or serving in some other way that contributes to society. This practice is of great value to both the giver and the receiver. Yet what often goes unnoticed are the opportunities to serve those who are in...

Press Release March 11, 2019 AUSTIN, Texas — At the annual South by Southwest Conference, Kaiser Permanente today announced a partnership with Community Solutions to help accelerate efforts to end chronic homelessness in 15 communities (scroll down for list) within Kaiser Permanente’s national footprint. As part of the new partnership, Kaiser Permanente will provide $3 million over a three-year period to Community Solutions’ Built for Zero initiative, which uses real-time data to help local...

On the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, extreme weather and bad roads have left some residents stranded for nearly two weeks with limited food and water. PINE RIDGE, S.D. — Ella Red Cloud-Yellow Horse, marooned for days by a blizzard and then a flood, needed to get out. Supplies at her house were running low. She had come down with pneumonia. She had a chemotherapy appointment to keep. But her long driveway was blocked by mountains of mud — impassable even for an ambulance or a...

[March 20, 2019] Today, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an additional $487 million to supplement first-year funding through its State Opioid Response (SOR) grant program. The awards to states and territories are part of HHS’s Five-Point Opioid Strategy and the Trump administration’s tireless drive to combat the opioid crisis. Together with the $933 million in second-year, continuation awards to be provided under this program later this year, the total amount...