Policy

On May 6th, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Education revised Title IX, releasing new guidelines for universities and K-12 schools to follow for handling cases of sexual assault and misconduct. The new guidelines focus predominantly on giving alleged perpetrators more protections;…

Congress passed the CARES Act which will send $14 billion dollars to colleges to provide emergency living expenses grants for students. However, Secretary Betsy DeVos released new criteria for who is eligible, limiting the grants to only U.S. citizens and some noncitizen. Undocumented Deferred…

Author: Sarita Lee Contributors: Meredith Steinberg and Isabella Poschl Introduction Gun violence is a global health issue that is particularly pressing in the United States. Intimate partner homicide (IPH) is a type of gun violence that can be overlooked for a multitude of reasons. Fully…

The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economy Security (CARES) Act that pass in the House of Representatives on March 27 outlines the $2 trillion stimulus bill that provides payments up to $1,200 for those who make less than a certain limit. Yet, many Americans will not make the cut due to a variety of…

Credit: Getty ImagesDuring the current COVID-19 outbreak, the EPA has decided to ease restrictions on pollution. Public health experts are concerned this decision will endanger those who are susceptible to COVID-19 by aggravating respiratory illnesses. Historically, in virus hot spots such as New…

Tech project manager and breast cancer advocate, Andrea Downing, started a closed Facebook group called BRCA Sisterhood to create a safe space for people to share information about their breast cancer experiences. Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 which affected the data of over 87…

Gun violence research has been essentially halted since 1996 due to the Dickey Amendment. In December 2019, $25 million of federal funds were approved by Congress that will be used by the Center for Disease Control and National Institute of Health for gun violence safety research. There are…

The age when people legally are allowed to file for a protective order against intimate partners, generally called civil protective order (CPOs), varies by the states within the U.S. This is especially pertinent to teens and minors. For example, 48 states allow for minors to file for CPOs, but only…

American history textbooks across the country, even with the same authors and same publishers, have different written versions of history that are sometimes extremely reflective of the country’s ideological and political divides. The book publishers have different editions of the same textbook for…

Studies are showing that increasing the minimum wage is correlated with a decrease in suicide rate in folks living at that wage level. While no hard association has been found, there are many strong links between one's wage and their mental health. They note that something as simple as a…

The LA Sanitation clean-up of homeless encampments in the Sepulveda Basin prompted many residents to scramble in search of new temporary settlements as their encampments were quickly demolished. However, some evacuees have hope that they can finally settle into a permanent residence after waiting…

According to the attorney’s general office, since Juul’s launch in 2015, youth vaping has doubled across the United States. A report states that e-cigarette use has risen 135% from 2017 to 2019 and sales directly from Juul account for 64% of the e-cigarette sales market. California is now taking…

Federally funded gun violence research by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and National Institute of Health (NIH) essentially was put to a complete stop by the Dickey Amendment when it was passed by the government in 1996. Since then, there has been gun violence research done by nonprofits and…

Many people mistake youth homelessness as living on the streets, but this is in fact not the case. Homeless youth are those living without stable housing, and commonly partake in "couch-surfing", which is jumping from couch to couch of their family and friends, but a couch is not a home. Federal…