Month: July 2021

Rising seas are threatening coastal communities around the world, which will need billions of dollars to protect themselves. It’s clear the water is coming. What’s not clear is who pays.

This tension is playing out on the shoreline of San Francisco Bay, where the wealthiest companies in the world have built their headquarters next to low-income communities of color. Both need protection, but as cities there plan massive levee projects, they’re struggling to figure out what’s fair. Will the cost fall on taxpayers or private landowners who benefit the most?

NPR climate correspondent Lauren Sommer reports from San Francisco.

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Food service workers in America have newfound bargaining power, and they’re using it — quitting jobs for better ones at record rates.

NPR’s Alina Selyukh reports on why some are leaving the restaurant industry for good.

Additional reporting this episode from NPR’s Andrea Hsu, who examined the pros and cons of one-time hiring bonuses for workers.

Follow more coverage from NPR’s special series, Where Are The Workers?

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One officer in Los Angeles used car inspections to hit on women. Three hundred miles away in the San Francisco Bay Area, another woman says an officer used police resources to harass and stalk her.

Starting over can be scary. But not for Rodrigo Amarante. After an established musical career in Brazil, he made the jump to the U.S., where his relative anonymity was a source of creative energy — and an opportunity to reinvent himself.

Amarante’s second solo album, Drama, is about rejecting traditional forms of masculinity and embracing imperfections — then releasing them as a beautiful symphony of chaos and, well, drama.

Hear Rodrigo Amarante’s live performance of the song “Tara” from his new album.

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It’s still unclear who is responsible for planning and funding the assassination of Haiti’s president Jovenel Moïse earlier this month. But violence and unrest in the country has been ramping up for months.

The United Nations says that over the last six weeks nearly 15,000 people have been forced from their homes in Port-au-Prince. NPR’s Jason Beaubien reported the story of one family who fled in early June.

Moïse’s death left a power vacuum that’s been filled by Interim Prime Minister Ariel Henry, a 71-year-old neurosurgeon. NPR International Correspondent Carrie Kahn has been tracking his attempt to rebuild the Haitian government.

And Jean Eddy Saint Paul, a professor at Brooklyn College, explains why the turmoil in Haiti has been decades in the making.

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The delta variant now makes up an estimated 83% of coronavirus cases in the U.S., a sharp increase over recent weeks. Cases are rising more rapidly in places with low rates of vaccination. Arkansas is one of those places. The state’s Republican governor, Asa Hutchinson, tells NPR what he’s doing to try to convince more people to get a shot.

Amid those localized surges and reports of breakthrough infections, NPR’s Alison Aubrey explains how to think about your own risk.

Find more NPR coverage of breakthrough infections here.

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Tens of millions of American families are beginning to receive direct cash payments as part of the expanded child tax credit, which was part of the COVID relief bill passed back in March.

Those payments top out at $3,600 a year per child — an amount experts say could lift tens of millions of children out of poverty. But the expanded credit is only scheduled to last one year. The question now is: will Democrats succeed in making it permanent?

Here’s a breakdown of what you need to know from NPR’s Andrea Hsu.

This episode contains excerpts from NPR’s daily economics podcast The Indicator. Listen and subscribe via Apple, Spotify, Google, or Pocket Casts.

Additional reporting this episode from NPR’s Cory Turner and Mara Liasson.

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Medical education must always keep up with the times. But the pandemic forcing medical students to learn virtually revealed new fault lines and opportunities to rethink the way medical professionals should learn. The medical field is grappling with which of those changes should become permanent and which ones could jeopardize the quality of healthcare.

To get a better understanding of how technology has enabled new ways of approaching medical education, NPR’s Jonaki Mehta visits Kaiser Permanente’s Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine, a school that was uniquely positioned to adapt to the conditions imposed by the pandemic since it opened during quarantine.

Elisabeth Rosenthal, editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News and a non-practicing physician, shares her concerns about the medical field leaning more heavily on telemedicine as a result of the pandemic.

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From police officer misconduct to deadly shootings, internal affairs investigations are how law enforcement agencies investigate their own and promise to hold themselves accountable. In California, those investigations were secret — that is, until a new police transparency law unsealed thousands of files.

Jodie Turner-Smith in Anne Boleyn. Mindy Kaling in Scooby Doo. Dev Patel in The Green Knight, and last year’s David Copperfield.

It seems like Hollywood gatekeepers are opening up more traditionally white parts to other performers. But as NPR film critic Bob Mondello explains, cross-cultural casting isn’t new — and it’s always raised eyebrows.

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