This archive covers progress stories from North and Central America, spanning the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the countries of Central America. The 1,760 articles here track milestones in areas such as public health, conservation, policy, and community-led initiatives across the region. Browse to find reported evidence of what is working and why.
Fungal infections cause more than 1.5 million deaths annually and cost billions. A new vaccine from the University of Georgia could be the first clinically approved immunization to protect against them.
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.
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.
For decades researchers have been trying to develop a vaccine for the deadly respiratory disease. It looks like 2023 will be the landmark year where not only one, but possibly three different vaccines are approved.
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.
The ban will cover a range of products, including make-up, perfume, body lotion, hair-styling products, shaving foam and nail polish. It would extend to cosmetics that contain animal-tested ingredients.
In an expansion of the company’s “An Accord for a Healthier World” program, which is aimed at increasing access to innovative treatments in some of the world’s poorest countries, Pfizer said it will now offer a total of 500 products.
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.
