As filed for The World on August 31, 2015.
Jersey City is just across the water from lower Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty. About 40 percent of the town’s residents were born outside the United States, and more than half the city speaks a language other than English at home, according to the most recent census data. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that Jersey City is embracing a style of emergency medical services that, until now, has only existed abroad.
Coverage of the federal government’s crush of a ton of illegal elephant ivory in Times Square in June 2015 for NPR Newscast. Despite public displays like this one, poachers are still finding a market for illegal ivory on American streets, thanks to the US’s confusing and hard-to-enforce poaching laws. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, and a host of state governors, say they are working to close loopholes.
Anti-poaching advocates have tried all manner of ways to get people to stop purchasing illegal animal products, from celebrity ads to staged, public destruction of ivory caches. In June 2015, the US government made a very public display of crushing a ton in front of thousands of onlookers in Times Square. Yet poachers are still finding a market for illegal ivory on American streets, thanks to the US’s confusing and hard-to-enforce poaching laws.
Long feature produced for America Abroad Media in July 2015, which is distributed by PRI.
Mayors of cities from around the globe gathered in NYC for the UN Summit on Sustainable Development. Many of these leaders also signed some tough new climate goals aiming to reduce carbon pollution by at least 80%, as compared to a 1990 benchmark. That’s less than 2-tons per person. For context, each American currently produces about 18-tons.
WAMU Radio says goodbye to one of its founders and host of its longest running show, The Big Broadcast. He was 83 years old. Walker passed away a few hours after his final broadcast, and I was honored to offer this remembrance.
Walker gets a kiss from Scott at the Radio Hall of Fame ceremony honoring Walker in 2010.
There’s a new kind of power in the nation’s capital: Every time a toilet flushes in the District, or a garbage disposal runs, it’s helping power DC Water’s Blue Plains Treatment Plant. The utility’s new digester facility is creating roughly enough renewable energy from solid waste and microbes to power 10,000 homes.
Nick Balenger was a star high school athlete in Northern Virginia until a swimming accident about two and a half years ago put an end to his athletics and left him temporarily paralyzed.
Friend and colleague, the legendary bluegrass broadcaster Ray Davis, died December 3 of leukemia at the age of 81. Ray was a one-of-a-kind storyteller with a voice made for radio. Most of his stories were about the people and music he played on the air.
For decades he introduced and hung out with country music stars at concerts and festivals, including people like Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, and The Stanley Brothers.
The D.C. region is home to the hottest market for cybersecurity jobs in the nation. Cybersecurity deals with keeping information safe — everything from your recent Target purchase to the most sensitive of intelligence at the NSA. There were 23,000 postings for cybersecurity jobs here last year. That’s the largest concentration anywhere in the country, roughly double Silicon Valley and San Francisco combined.
At the time of this story, in 2006, about 3,000 non-citizens were fighting on behalf of the US in Iraq. Many did so in order to fast track their applications for US citizenship. This story was produced for The World, a co-production of The BBC, Public Radio International and WGBH Boston.
Jennifer L. Strong 