CARACAS, Venezuela. It was 1:58 a.m. on Jan. 3 when a thunderous roar made the windows of my apartment in downtown Caracas shake. Are the New Year’s celebrations still going on? Is a storm coming or is it an earthquake, I wondered. Despite multiple threats from the United States against Venezuela, I couldn’t believe that bombing was possible; not like this, not now. As people say in Venezuela, “It’s one thing to call on the devil, and another to see him actually arrive.” As the missiles began to fall one…
The New York Chronicle
Overuse has created zones of “mega-drying” around the world — and caused more sea level rise than Greenland’s ice sheet. The Verde River is one of the last free-flowing rivers in Arizona, winding through what’s known as the Verde Valley before feeding into the Salt River. Agriculturally, the valley is relatively fertile, supporting crops like sweet corn, alfalfa, peaches, and pecans, as well as a small wine industry. Recently, though, residents have found that the water below their feet is drying up. Faith Kearns grew up in the area, and…
President Donald Trump appears to have upended an 85-year relationship between American farmers and the United States’ global exercise of power. But that link has been fraying since the end of the Cold War, and Trump’s moves are just another big step. During World War II, the U.S. government tied agriculture to foreign policy by using taxpayer dollars to buy food from American farmers and send it to hungry allies abroad. This agricultural diplomacy continued into the Cold War through programs such as the Marshall Plan to rebuild European agriculture,…
Several annual international climate reports released this week indicate that relentless human-caused warming continued in 2025, especially in the oceans and at the poles. For the third year in a row, Earth’s average temperature ran close to 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than the climate that sustained human civilizations as the 20th century began, before fossil-fuel pollution started damaging the atmosphere. Avoiding more than that level of warming is also the key long-term temperature goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement. Research shows that warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the baseline…
Decades of water depletion, dam building, and repression of scientists and environmentalists have driven Iran toward ecological crises that are fueling the protests rocking the country. The anti‑government protests sweeping across Iran, from major cities to rural towns, are fueled by anger over economic collapse and political repression. But beneath the headlines of currency devaluations and street clashes lies a deeper, more permanent driver of dissent: ecological calamity. Decades of ignoring scientists, persecuting activists and greenlighting corrupt development schemes have triggered a water crisis so severe that President Masoud Pezeshkian…
One year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a pattern emerges. Across dozens of executive orders, agency memos, funding decisions and enforcement changes, the administration has weakened federal civil rights law and the foundations of the country’s racially inclusive democracy. From the start, the U.S. was not built to include everyone equally. The Constitution protected and promoted slavery. Most states limited voting to white men. Congress restricted naturalized citizenship to “free white persons.” These choices were not accidents. They shaped who could belong and who could exercise political power, and they…
That spending comes even as real estate values are dropping For Detroit homeowners over 65 who overwhelmingly live on fixed incomes, unexpected costs – increases in grocery prices, rising health care premiums or an emergency repair – heighten their risk of financial instability and can even lead to them falling into poverty. I am a policy researcher at Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan. Our initiative uses action-based research, an approach that seeks to understand real-world problems and inform policy changes that could make life work better for people…
The future of many of Donald Trump’s tariffs are up in the air, with the Supreme Court expected to hand down a ruling on the administration’s global trade barriers any day now. But the question of whether a policy is legal or constitutional – which the justices are entertaining now – isn’t the same as whether it’s wise. And as a trade economist, I worry that Trump’s tariffs also pose a threat to “economic democracy” – that is, the process of decision-making that incorporates the viewpoints of everyone affected by…
The whole story of Barbra Streisand and the sturgeon began a few months ago on a Thursday when I was at my regular spot at the fish counter. A very pleasant, attractive woman ordered a pound of Nova and, before Slim, my long sharp slicing knife, and I started our journey through the salmon, she said, “I’m buying this for Barbra Streisand.” I was skeptical, so I asked her what her relationship was with Barbra. She told me her name was Christine and that she was Barbra’s editor and had…
President Donald Trump’s threat this week to stop federal funding to both so-called “sanctuary” cities and the states where they’re located was greeted with disbelief by many states and cities since the administration has fared poorly on that issue in court. “We will go to court within seconds, and we will win if he does this. It’s already proven unlawful. We’ve already won multiple times,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told ABC News7 in San Francisco on Wednesday. “Those are funds that belong to the people of Chicago, not the…