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.
Council Delegate Crystalyne Curley, 37, who represents Tachíí/Blue Gap, Many Farms, Nazlini, Tsélání/Cottonwood, Low Mountain, has become the first woman to head the Navajo Nation Council.
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.
Pilot programs are ongoing in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, California, and Hawai’i are already seeing promising results.
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.
Although patients will still need prescriptions to get the pills, this change will drastically widen their access.
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’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.
With $3 billion in funds from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, USPS plans to spend around $9.6 billion in upgrading its fleet and building charging stations, starting immediately with a purchase of 66,000 EVs.
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.
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.
