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.
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.
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.
After years of growth in defense spending following the attacks of 9/11, and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military’s budget is being cut back. Yet the question of whether and how to cut military spending remains hotly debated in Washington. Aging infrastructure, changing strategic needs, and rapidly rising personnel costs are all competing for the attention of budget planners at the Pentagon, in Congress, and at the White House.
Jennifer L. Strong 