Portland, Oregon, is an epicenter of the deepening opioid crisis in the United States, where a life is lost to drug use every eleven minutes. Fentanyl, a cheap and highly potent synthetic opioid up to fifty times stronger than heroin, has been responsible for the majority of overdose deaths. In 2...

Connected to China tells the stories of the people who have built cultural, educational and economic ties with China that have helped foster mutual exchange and diplomacy. People with connections to China can be found throughout the world. Among them is Madelyn Ross, one of the first American stu...

Between 1961 and 1971, the U.S. sprayed 20 million gallons of an herbicide known as Agent Orange over Vietnam. The purpose was to decimate the canopy of the native jungle and gain a military advantage over the Vietcong in the Vietnam War. After half a century, the consequences of this chemical wa...

Tiny Laos has the sad distinction of being the most bombed country in history because of an overt military intervention by the U.S. During the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration dropped more than two million tons of ordnance on Laos, more than twelve times the amount dropped on Japan in World ...

In Louisiana, a police chase ends with the death of an unarmed black man, Ronald Greene. In Mississippi, Rasheem Carter’s body is found in the woods one month after his disappearance under mysterious circumstances. Not far away from there, two men, also African American, are subjected to differen...

Microplastics, a global concern, are saturating our oceans. Over the past two decades, these tiny particles floating over the planet’s bodies of water have multiplied by several orders of magnitude. More than 14 million tons of plastics are estimated to be poured into our oceans yearly. Big Story...

Since declaring the War on Drugs fifty years ago, the US has spent billions in Colombia to fight cocaine. The result: more cocaine than ever before, and a black market that fuels corruption, and weakening states across most of Latin America. It also pushed Colombia into a decades-long armed confl...

Dozens of children in western Venezuela begin their daily journey to school before 5 a.m. But this is no ordinary school – it is located across the border in Colombia.
They live in the Guajira peninsula, facing the Caribbean Sea, a region shared by Colombia and Venezuela. The area is also home to...

Haiti is a broken state. Since the July 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise, street gangs armed with military grade weapons from the US have filled the power vacuum, taking control of 90 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and swathes of the countryside. Killing and kidnapping-for-r...

U.S. President Richard Nixon called his 1972 visit to China "the week that changed the world." But it was the secret trip taken by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger the year before that laid the foundation of the historic meeting that would see China and the United States begin to normalize bila...

In San Francisco, rampant crime, soaring costs and a broken government are driving residents into the streets -- or out of state. Big Story reports on the unraveling of America’s largest economy.

San Francisco: From the Gold Rush boom to the Silicon Valley era, California’s “city by the bay” h...

Coping With Long COVID tells the story of five patients suffering from ongoing conditions after initially being infected with the COVID-19 virus. Each has a particular set of symptoms and wide-range of continuing health problems. For the United States, the national emergency declared because of ...

National proficiency exams in the United States indicate that only 26 percent of 8th graders were proficient in math in the 2022 academic year. In the same calendar year, 36 percent of 4th graders showed proficiency in mathematics. Evidence such as this suggest that as we age, we lose some of our...

From the Galapagos Islands to the Chesapeake Bay, from the Amazon River to the Colombian jungles along the Tropical Pacific, natural wonders are plentiful in the Americas. However, the continent is presently facing an existential challenge brought about by human activity. Balance: Biodiversity in...

Even as the world inches toward its sixth mass extinction event, the first one driven by human activity, an army of conservationists and researchers is fighting to restore balance and protect the biodiversity in China, one of the largest countries on earth.

In 2021, China announced that it would...

On December 14, 2012, twenty children and six adults lost their lives to a 20-year old wielding an assault rifle against them at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The horrific death toll and the fact that it was an elementary school shocked a country that seemed to have gr...

Following the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that ousted the Taliban, Afghanistan had less than 50 miles of paved roads in the entire country. A 2,000-mile national highway network connecting major cities had been pulverized by decades of war and neglect. Confident that it would become the backbone of a ...

Native Americans are the most vulnerable minority in the United States. This episode of the series The Race Gap in the U.S. takes us to South Dakota, homeland of the Lakota people, to examine why this came to be. It was in the Dakota Territories where the «progressive» experiment with the boardin...

At the turn of this century, Hispanics became the largest minority group in the United States. This milestone, however, hasn’t changed the way members of the community are being treated by authorities. Whether it’s migrants trying to cross the border in search of a better future, or just people g...

New York City has one of the most segregated school systems in the country. This episode of The Race Gap in the U.S. takes a deep dive into the intricacies of a system that has experienced many changes and still managed to stay the same, perpetuating in the process the stark racial inequities tha...

Since the pandemic hit, attacks against Asian Americans are on the rise. The special series The Race Gap in the U.S. premieres with an episode exploring the forces behind the vicious circle of racial hatred stoked by politicians, and the very real consequences of those actions.

Correspondent G...

This year China celebrates the centennial of its political party's founding and a new vision for how to run a global superpower. 'New Endeavors' looks at how the country's priorities put into action have lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and built world-class infrastructure and technolog...

A land of desolation and scarcity, the Sub-Saharan country of Mali once known for its music has come to be known for its perpetual conflict. Once home to an internationally renowned music festival, the mystical ancient city of Timbuktu has come to be known for its extreme danger.

At one time, Ti...