Elissa Miolene

The first shipment of grain to leave Ukraine’s key Black Sea ports since the Russian invasion is expected to dock this week in Lebanon, where food inflation is the highest in the world.

​Most of the employees agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity due to fears of professional reprisal — but over and over again, they spoke of the same.

A workplace marred by risk, and a culture that let safety slide to the periphery. A lack of training, and a pattern of pushback when staff members tried to put those activities in place. And a tendency to “build the plane while flying it” across the world.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, East Bay Dr. Stephanie Brown began noticing a startling trend. Many of her Black patients were getting worse, even while their oxygen measurements said the opposite.

From 2020 to 2021, 44 Afghan children were enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade. But in the academic year following, that number shot to 144. The 227% increase left the school system scrambling.

Angeline and her lawyers are tangled in a federal asylum logjam, one exacerbated by Cameroon’s criminalization of her sexuality, shifting immigration policies in the United States and an ever-climbing backlog at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Though assistance began to trickle back to Tigray late last month, the world is still scrambling to figure out who’s to blame. But for many, the answer is obvious.
 

Everyone is to blame. And that’s nothing new.

Across the world, agricultural scientists are starting to work backward. For years, they’ve seen how improved crop varieties — which take decades to produce in a lab — are rejected by the farmers who need them most.

For years, the Khans have been among thousands of California families homeschooling their children. But today, they’ve got much more company. Since the year before the pandemic shut down schools, the number of California kids being homeschooled has skyrocketed by 70% — and despite a return to in-person learning, many are not going back.

 It had been nearly a decade since the retired Salinas teacher found out her benefits package had been miscalculated — and nine years since CalSTRS, the teachers’ state retirement agency, told her that she owed them $75,000.

In a small windowless room in the basement of the British Museum sit some of the holiest relics of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church: 11 small wooden plaques called Tabots that are considered by Ethiopian Christians to
contain God's presence.

The Hofionis are among hundreds of Afghans who have arrived in the Bay Area since August. When they first landed in California, they were greeted by resettlement agencies, non-profits and the government, all of whom tried to help them do the nearly impossible: find an affordable home in one of the country’s most expensive housing markets.

For years, schools across California have been supported by parents, communities and education funds, groups which have long filled the gaps between what students need and what the state provides. Depending on the wealth of the community around those schools, those gaps might be filled tenfold or not at all — fueling a widening chasm between the haves and have-nots in California’s public schools.