Author: Syndicated

Young voters made their voices heard during the recent midterms, turning out in relatively high numbers in an election that produced the first congressperson from Generation Z. But university students and voting rights advocates say voters on college campuses faced far too many difficulties trying to cast their ballots. Across the country, voting rights groups and collegiate get-out-the-vote organizers documented many cases of college students who struggled to decipher confusing voter ID requirements, waited in hours-long lines at polling places or never received their absentee ballots. In some cases, college voters were even denied federally protected provisional ballots. While...

As a young boy living in what was then Zaire, Bertine Bahige remembers watching refugees flee from the Rwandan genocide in 1994 by crossing a river that forms the two Central African nations’ border. Bahige’s harrowing refugee journey began when he was kidnapped and forced to become a child soldier when war broke out in his country, which became the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1997. He escaped at age 15 to a Mozambique refugee camp, where he lived for five years until he arrived in Baltimore in 2004 through a refugee resettlement program. Bahige, now 42, said the way...

Around two days a week, Natalee Hartwig leaves her home in Madison, Wisconsin, before her son wakes up to travel across the border into Illinois. “Luckily it’s summer,” said Hartwig, a nurse midwife at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. “For now, he can sleep in. But any getting ready that has to happen will be on my spouse.” She drives at least two hours each way, immersed in audiobooks and podcasts as she heads back and forth from a clinic in this northern Illinois suburb. She spends her days in the recovery room, caring for patients who have had abortions...

Last September, New York City was so thoroughly inundated by Hurricane Ida that some commuters waded through water up to their waists just to get in and out of the subway station. Across the country, extreme heat battered the West Coast, melting Portland’s streetcar power cables. This summer has seen similar headlines, with heatwaves warping the BART train tracks in San Francisco and sudden rainfall interrupting Northeastern commutes. These extreme weather events, which are increasing in severity and frequency due to climate change, pose a problem to the millions of Americans who rely on public transit to get to...