Walmart raises minimum wage by 17%
Starting in early March, store employees will make between $14 and $19 an hour. About 340,000 store employees will get a raise because of the move.
United States
This archive collects solutions-journalism stories and milestones from the United States — covering policy wins, community-led efforts, scientific advances, and social progress happening across the country. Each entry highlights what’s working and why it matters.
Biden restores protections to Alaska’s Tongass National Forest
Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is once again off-limits to logging and new road construction, after the USDA restored protections across the 17-million-acre rainforest — a landscape slightly larger than West Virginia that holds nearly half of all carbon stored in U.S. national forests. Tribal Nations in Southeast Alaska, including the Organized Village of Kake, led the years-long push to bring the safeguards back. For communities who have hunted, fished, and lived among the 800-year-old cedars and wild salmon streams for thousands of years, it’s a hard-won recognition. The victory also points to something bigger: protecting old-growth forests at scale is one of the most affordable, ready-now climate tools we have — no new technology required, just the will to leave ancient places standing.
Pfizer to sell all its drugs in 45 low-income countries at non-profit price
Pfizer’s not-for-profit pricing pledge now spans all 500 of its medicines — including chemotherapy and oral cancer treatments — across 45 of the world’s lowest-income countries. That’s a major expansion of an accord the company launched in 2022, which originally covered only patented drugs. By including off-patent medicines too, Pfizer is acknowledging that even decades-old cancer treatments often remain out of reach where generic supply chains never took hold. For patients across much of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where cancer and heart disease are rising fast, this could quietly move the floor on what’s possible. And when the world’s largest drugmaker makes a move this broad, the rest of the industry tends to notice.
Five U.S. states are repaving roads with unrecyclable plastic waste
Pilot programs are ongoing in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, California, and Hawai’i are already seeing promising results.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs extends protections to LGBTQ+ state employees and contractors
The executive order goes beyond existing laws banning employment discrimination to include factors such as sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, culture, creed, social origin, and political affiliation.
The U.S. FDA will now allow abortion pills to be sold at normal pharmacies
Although patients will still need prescriptions to get the pills, this change will drastically widen their access.
United States Military Academy at West Point to remove Confederate symbols from campus
The moves are part of a Department of Defense directive ordering the academy to address racial injustice and do away with installations that “commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy.”
New York opens its first legal recreational cannabis dispensary
New York’s first legal recreational cannabis dispensary opened with a meaningful twist: the very first retail license went to Housing Works, a nonprofit that serves people with HIV, homeless New Yorkers, and the formerly incarcerated. Revenue from the shop will flow back into those social services, turning a newly legal market into direct support for communities hit hardest by the war on drugs. New York reserved its earliest licenses for nonprofits, people with past marijuana convictions and their families, women- and minority-owned businesses, and veterans, backed by a $200 million equity fund. It’s an ambitious bet that legalization can repair harm rather than just generate profit, and other states are paying close attention.
U.S. to eliminate exorbitant cost of prison phone calls
A new U.S. law that will allow the FCC to regulate prison phone calls needs only President Biden’s signature to put an end to a largely unknown, yet famously predatory, prison practice.
University of Houston researchers create “game-changer” vaccine for deadly street drug
In a study published in Pharmaceutics, scientists tested their vaccine on 60 rats. The immunized animals could produce antibodies that stop the deadly drug’s effects.