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By Ruth Steiner, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Florida Congress now has control over what kind of commute… good, bad, awful, that workers returning to offices in the United States will have. President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan, released in March 2021, includes US$85 billion for city transit agencies to improve their systems by purchasing new buses and train cars and maintaining subway stations and tracks. If passed in Congress, the dollars would explicitly build on the relief already provided to cities in last year’s American Rescue Plan, according to the White House. That coronavirus relief...

By Mark Wilson, Professor, Urban & Regional Planning, School of Planning, Design and Construction, Michigan State University The Summer Olympics, postponed in 2020 by a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, is scheduled to begin on July 23, 2021, in Tokyo. Even though surfing and four other sports will debut at these games, the locals are not exactly thrilled. According to a recent poll, some 83% of the Japanese public wants the Olympics canceled, and protests are frequent. Amid a coronavirus surge that’s left the country short on hospital space and slow on carrying out vaccinations, an association representing...

Wisconsin Republicans have drafted bills that would limit how race and racism are taught in K-12 and University of Wisconsin System schools across the state. The proposals follow a national trend of GOP legislators advancing bills on the state and national level that they say are aimed at protecting students from harmful and divisive lessons about racism. Opponents argue the proposals will have a chilling effect on important teaching about systemic racism in the United States. Under one of the bills, teachers at public and independent charter schools in Wisconsin would be barred from teaching “that one race or...

In the United States, the right-wing voter suppression efforts reached a level not seen since the era of segregation, when white supremacists in the South had passed laws to deny Black Americans the right to vote and threatened everyone who dared to resist with violence. The nation is now divided between people who want a multiracial democracy in which every American is allowed and encouraged to vote and those who yearn for an anti-democratic system in which an extremist white minority has unchecked control over everyone else. The latter group is represented by the Republican Party, which is brazenly...

Millions of jobless workers in Republican-led states across the U.S. are growing increasingly worried that they soon will not be able to afford rent, medicine, and other basic necessities as GOP governors rush to cut off pandemic-related unemployment benefits, a widely condemned attack on struggling people that the Biden administration insists it is powerless to stop. At least 22 Republican governors  so far have moved to withdraw from a federal program that boosted regular unemployment checks by $300 per week to help jobless people weather the ongoing economic crisis. Of those Republican-led states, 19 are also ending their participation in...