Day: October 2, 2025

As a child growing up in a Spanish-speaking, immigrant household, I had limited resources available to teach me English. My parents came to this country out of necessity in the 1980s from war-torn Nicaragua. My father worked in construction and only picked up enough English words to get by. Being a former teacher, my mother did her best to teach me to read and write in Spanish. And while my older brother picked up more of the language from playing with neighborhood kids, it wasn’t exactly enough to fully teach me. Fortunately, we had a TV set with plenty of English-language programming, including our local PBS station. 

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Through this, I watched English-language children’s shows like Sesame Street, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, and Reading Rainbow. These wonderful programs helped plant the seeds of respect, kindness, a love of learning, and the English language in my mind. But it was also bilingual programs like Saludos (featuring puppets alongside people, similar to Sesame Street) and ¿Qué Pasa, USA? (a sitcom about a Cuban-American immigrant family living in Miami) that not only taught me English, but also offered some representation of households like mine. By the time I began kindergarten, I was already fully bilingual as a result. And thanks to these shows, I felt less alone in my bilingual, bicultural existence.

My story isn’t so rare. There are countless immigrant families that have learned English thanks to the programming on their local PBS channels. Ana Regalado, a popular Mexican food content creator who goes by the handle @SaltyCocina, came to the U.S. at the age of six and says she and her sister would watch PBS throughout the day, especially when it was too hot to play outside. 

“Programs like Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, and Villa Allegre taught us basic math and English words,” says Regalado. “We did not understand at first, but I feel it was a big help.”

Marisel Salazar, author of Latin-Ish: More Than 100 Recipes Celebrating American Latino Cuisines, says she also quickly learned English thanks in part to PBS programming.

“The pacing, framework, and structure of Sesame Street, plus the adorable characters, made it very easy for me as a child to engage in learning a second language,” says Salazar.

And Paulette Erato, Founder of Latinas in Podcasting, says she doesn’t recall a time when PBS wasn’t on the TV for her and her brother. So much so, in fact, that when her mother (who spoke little English) went to check in with her kindergarten teacher to see if Paulette was getting on alright, “the teacher laughed and said I spoke English just fine and understood everything perfectly!”

Educational programming, including bilingual programming, continues to exist on PBS stations around the country. Young immigrant children are still being supported in learning English via shows like Rosie’s Rules and Maya & Miguel. In the same vein, young English-speaking children are getting to learn Spanish and embrace multiculturalism. They are the same shows I share with my own bicultural son. Sadly, our country’s leaders appear to be wholly uninterested in raising more generations of empathetic children, much less helping immigrant children and families to feel safe and welcomed in their new homeland.

Read more: What the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Shutting Down Means for PBS And NPR

In recent months, the president signed a bill cancelling a whopping $1.1 billion in funding for the Center for Public Broadcasting. In it, he claimed government funding of news media today is “outdated” and “unnecessary.” As a direct result, the CPB later announced they would need to shut down their operations. 

While PBS itself won’t shut down anytime soon, they have now lost their largest source of financial support. This loss more directly impacts the local stations that viewers turn to. Not only does PBS reach more than half of all U.S. household televisions, their stations also reach more children and families than any other children’s TV networks. 

These are households like the one I grew up in. Channels like Disney and Nickelodeon were a rare treat as I got older, but it was PBS that was always there, always available, free for all. PBS programming on my local station brought me the educational shows I needed and loved. And there’s no doubt the ripple effects of local PBS station shutdowns that will be long felt among lower-income immigrant communities. This is especially true for the young Latine children and families who are striving to learn the local language and customs of a country that’s already waging war against them.

Fortunately, there are some efforts underway to help ease the financial burden these PBS stations are now facing. Philanthropic organizations like the Knight Foundation and others are banding together for this purpose.

“While PBS as a national institution is not going away, we are deeply concerned about local access, especially in rural communities where a local station may be the only source for trusted news, emergency information, and educational programming,” says Maribel Pérez Wadsworth, President & CEO, Knight Foundation. “That access is now under threat as many stations face potential closure or severe cutbacks.”

Pérez Wadsworth says the Knight Foundation hopes the bridge fund will help stabilize the system and ensure continuity of service. She also says the foundation is still seeking additional funders who recognize what’s at stake.

While it’s entirely possible I would have learned English once I finally began school, I was fortunate to have PBS programming at my disposal that helped kickstart my education. The puppets on Saludos and Sesame Street offered lessons in reading, writing, and counting in English. The characters of Luis and Maria gave me a glimpse of what two happy, thriving Latinos looked like living in a neighborhood where kindness was always in high supply. And that was at a time when kids that looked like me didn’t have to worry about ICE Agents coming to take them or their families away; Immigration and Customs Enforcement was not created until 2003. 

So many of us are still so grateful to PBS for giving us a place to turn to for learning and acceptance. Continuing to offer immigrant children and families at least this one source of education and comfort is the least we can do.

Perhaps few other cities have experienced the consequences of a fracturing American consensus as sharply as Portland, Oregon. Our city has the largest perception gap between men and women (a staggering 30 points), vastly disparate coverage by news outlets favored by the political right and left, and, too often, a yawning chasm between national coverage and how we see ourselves. 

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As mayor of Portland, I see an even more intractable and frustrating gap between what the president has said and what I see every day. He has called Portland “a hellhole,” “war ravaged,” a controversial federal facility facing predominantly peaceful protests is “under siege,” and that he’ll “do a number” on our city with “Full Force.” There is no squaring these words with the Portland I see every day, a Portland of creativity and natural beauty, of kindness and compassion, and of community principles and purpose. 

To those who are most aggrieved by Portland, I would ask this: If you visited our schools, would you fund teachers or would you send troops? If you drove our bridges, would you send engineers or would you send troops? If you saw our hospitals, would you support Medicaid, or would you send troops? If you worked with our homeless, would you send outreach workers and addiction specialists or would you send troops? If you met with the daughters whose immigrant fathers were ripped away on their way to school drop-off, would you still send men in masks to further traumatize our neighborhoods?  

The federal government is retreating from its longstanding housing and economic  responsibility to cities across the nation. This has left a leadership vacuum in place of a partnership for the future of Oregon’s prosperity and freedom. Anyone willing to lend a hand to Portland has a seat at the table, including the federal government. We want them back at that table, the sooner the better.

We must recognize that the American consensus on Portland was purposefully broken, and it’s hurting our city. That perception was shattered by the 24-hour ecosystem of divisive clips, some new, most from a half decade ago, all intended to feed anger and division. This ugly ecosystem cannot build togetherness, and it cannot serve the shared interests of our nation; it can only hold us back.

Read more: Trump Sends Troops to Portland, Authorizes ‘Full Force, If Necessary’

Portland, which now faces a moment of profound fear and uncertainty, needs clear answers. What is the role of domestic peace officers, including federal agents, and what now falls under the grip of national security and the Department of War? What is the mission of this deployment, and how will we know whether it has succeeded or failed? Will that mission weigh the needs of our community as equal to national political expedience, or is the safety of our people less important than fleeting political optics?  

We do not ask, but demand to know, what the authorization of “Full Force” means to  Portlanders. As Mayor, should I tell our teachers to teach, and our workers to work, and our parents to parent like any other day, or should I tell our hospitals and morgues to prepare for the unthinkable?  

We know the National Guard troops who will come to our city. They are us, fellow Oregonians. They work in our stores and offices. They are the moms and dads and teachers we wave to in the halls of our schools. They are also the ones who come to our aid in our darkest times. They are here when wildfires rage, or floods destroy, or overseas conflicts demand their service. When these citizen soldiers answered this call, they made a solemn promise to their communities and our nation that I believe the federal administration is now dishonoring.

Portland is having a moment of clarity. We have learned that reforming our public safety system and halving our homicide rate in a single year is not enough to stop troops from coming. We have learned that focusing on our economy and caring for our most vulnerable is not enough to stop troops from coming. Perhaps most troubling of all, we have learned that avoiding national conflict, listening, de-escalating, and focusing foremost on our responsibility to our community has not stopped troops from coming.  

I cannot express the sadness and disappointment I feel when I hear the leader of our  country call for the militarization of a situation that does not exist, with murky, unknown, and potentially deadly rules, and no clear definition of success or failure. There is no military strength without moral strength, no good outcome when summoning tempers alongside uncertainty and rifles, and no margin for error in what may come next.  

As Mayor, I support our community’s desire to repair our fractured portrait. I support  Portland’s long tradition of large-scale, peaceful protests. Our city has a proud track record of being at the forefront of positive social change, and the entire nation has benefited from that passion and moral clarity. 

The fight the federal administration seeks is not in our city, and I call on our national leaders to chart a course that leads to our future, and not to further fear and division.

• A millennial mom secretly worked two full-time jobs for 18 months, earning $250,000 annually,
• Burnout and return-to-office pressures led her to give up “overemployment.”
• She shared how she’s navigated financial and childcare changes — and avoided her company’s five-day in-office policy.

Editor’s note: In June 2024, Business Insider wrote about a supply-chain professional named “Lisa,” in Wisconsin, who was secretly working multiple full-time jobs. (Lisa is a pseudonym, but Business Insider has confirmed her identity.) Read our story here. In a recent interview, Lisa shared how she has adapted to life with one job and managed to maintain a similar standard of living.

Secretly working two full-time jobs was a game changer for Lisa and her family. That chapter is closed, but she’s still clinging to the lifestyle it made possible.

In 2020, Lisa was earning roughly $110,000 a year in a remote, corporate manufacturing role when she received an offer for a hybrid job that paid about $150,000. After talking it over with her husband, she landed on an unconventional solution: Take the new job — and keep the old one, too.

For 18 months, Lisa secretly worked two full-time roles, earning roughly $250,000 in 2021 and averaging 40 to 50 hours a week across both jobs. On days she had to go into the office for her hybrid role, she’d bring both laptops — which conveniently looked identical — and juggle her responsibilities from a cubicle or private room.

Lisa said the extra income has put her and her husband in a strong position to afford their three children’s college educations. It also allowed her husband to take a much-needed break from the workforce and focus on caring for their kids.

“It’s given us a financial cushion that would have been impossible otherwise,” Lisa, who’s in her 40s and lives in Wisconsin, told Business Insider last year.

However, in recent years, Lisa said return-to-office pressures and burnout made job juggling unsustainable. In 2022, she gave up her $250,000 income from two jobs for a new position as a supply chain manager with a hybrid schedule that paid $175,000 annually. Nearly two years later, Lisa faced another challenge to the lifestyle she’d grown used to: Her company announced a five-day-a-week in-office policy.

But just as she turned to job juggling in 2020, Lisa has continued to find ways to carve out a work situation that’s best for her and her family. Her first step? Finding a way to quietly skirt her company’s five-day office policy.

Lisa is among the Americans who have secretly juggled multiple full-time jobs to double their incomes. Over the past three years, Business Insider has interviewed 30 overemployed workers who’ve put their extra earnings toward things like luxurious vacations, expensive weight-loss drugs, and their children’s college tuition.

However, in recent years, job juggling has become more difficult amid a white-collar hiring slowdown and return-to-office mandates. Still, some workers have found ways to hold on to parts of their overemployed lifestyles, even as their work situations evolve.

Dodging a 5-day in-office mandate

After switching from two jobs to one in 2022, Lisa said her remaining employer encouraged office attendance, but in-person work initially remained optional due to pandemic-related concerns. She typically went in once a week — making a commute of just over an hour each way — a routine her manager was fine with.

Over time, though, in-person attendance a few days a week became expected. Then, in late 2023, the company formally announced a five-day-a-week office requirement. Lisa began thinking about finding a new job, but first, she spoke with her manager to gauge how strictly the new rules would be enforced. Her manager told her that employees could request approval to work from home one day a week, but it would require a sign-off from a higher-level manager at the company. They said they’d support her request.

But the conversation didn’t end there. Lisa said they then had an “off the record” conversation about how much remote work she could get away with. She explained how working five days a week in the office would pose challenges for her family, given her long commute and childcare responsibilities.

Lisa said her manager was understanding and told her to “be here as much as you can.” As long as she was in the office a few days a week — especially on days with key in-person meetings — they wouldn’t stand in her way.

“My manager and I have kind of worked out that if I need to work from home for whatever reason, whether it’s work or personal reasons, then that’s OK,” she said. “At the end of the day, I kind of have a hybrid schedule.”

Lisa, who typically works from the office three days a week, said one reason her manager has been accommodating is that her job involves a lot of virtual meetings, making in-person attendance less essential. As far as she knows, everyone who has formally asked to work from home one day a week has received approval, but she’s not sure if others have come to similar informal arrangements. Either way, she prefers to keep hers quiet.

“I don’t necessarily advertise what I do,” she said. “But there is a quiet understanding in our working group that flexibility is critical for us to be productive.”

Lisa said her biggest concern is that her company will start tracking how often people are working from the office — as some other companies have done — but she hasn’t heard anything about this yet.

“If they start letting people go because they’re not badging in for eight hours a day, four days a week, then yeah, I would definitely be on the list of people they could let go,” she said.

Turning to her husband for childcare while looking for a new role

Given that she’s spending more time in the office, Lisa said her husband has spent more time caring for their children, the youngest of whom is under 10. After taking a break from the workforce, he now works remotely part-time, giving him the flexibility to be there for their kids. When her husband used to work from an office, Lisa said they relied on pre- and after-school programs. But now that he works from home, he’s able to handle school drop-offs and pickups himself.

From a financial perspective, Lisa said they’ve been able to maintain their lifestyle despite his part-time hours for three main reasons. First, her husband is earning more per hour than he did in his previous full-time job, which made the transition to part-time a bit less of a sacrifice. Second, her salary has risen over the past three years — from $175,000 to $195,000 — helping to offset some of the lost income from her second job. Third, the savings boost from her job-juggling days gave them a cushion — one that has helped them absorb income changes without major cutbacks.

“I think we would be OK financially,” she said, “but we wouldn’t be great if it hadn’t been for that two-job situation.”

While working three days from the office has been manageable, Lisa said she’s applied for many jobs over the past year in the hopes of finding a role with some combination of a shorter commute, a more flexible in-office requirement, and comparable pay.

She said she interviewed for one job with an office just 15 minutes from home, but the salary was about half of what she earns now. While the shorter commute was appealing, the pay cut wasn’t worth it — and she said it’s been difficult to find other managerial roles that have the compensation and flexibility she’s looking for.

“It’s hard to find another position at this level,” she said. “There’s just fewer of them, but I’m still looking.”

• Connecting with an employer can help you be ready when the organization later has an opening.
• This approach can help you sidestep the application “cattle call,” a career coach told Business Insider.
• A warm introduction to a hiring manager can triple your shot of getting hired, LinkedIn reports.

You might call it pre-applying.

Talking with an employer before the company posts a job, not after, could help you land a role there, veteran career coach Laura Labovich told Business Insider.

She recommends that job seekers identify where they want to work, examine their network for any ties to the organization, and start building relationships inside prior to a job post even going up.

“The way to win is to not apply. Get in before they have the opening. Make connections. Become an insider,” Labovich said.

If you wait until you see a job posting before contacting an employer, she said, you might already be too late. That’s because once a role is posted, recruiters or HR staffers will often feel compelled to tell you to apply online in order to ensure all candidates get equal consideration, Labovich said.

Getting in line with everybody else can make the process seem “more like a cattle call,” she said.

‘Worth its weight in gold’

Aside from generally feeling lousy, the take-a-number approach is also rarely the best path to landing a role, as almost anyone seeking a desk job can attest.

The typical corporate job posting draws 250 applicants, Glassdoor reported in early 2025. Among those, only four to six candidates typically advance to the interview round. And, of course, only one person ultimately gets the offer letter.

Having someone who can flag your résumé to a recruiter or hiring manager and help you stand out is “worth its weight in gold” when there are so many people looking for jobs, said Rick Wargo, managing partner of the global technology practice at the recruitment firm Boyden.

“A warm introduction is always the best way to go about a job search,” he told Business Insider.

Knowing what to ask

It’s obvious that if you don’t know about a forthcoming job, you can’t make a pitch for it. What you can do is consider whether the employer has hired for the types of things you might like to do.

That’s why, Wargo said, it’s important to start networking and making connections inside key companies before you need a job.

“You don’t go to fix the roof when it’s raining,” he said.

To beat the rush that often occurs when an employer lists an opening, you can contact people who might be at your level within an organization and ask questions such as, “How do you like your job?” “How do you like the organization?” and “How did you get to where you did?” said Labovich, who runs Career Strategy Group, an outplacement firm in the Washington, DC, area.

If it’s someone higher up the food chain — potentially someone who might be the hiring manager for a future job — the ask should be smaller.

“You don’t want to say, ‘I want a job,’ because if you’re getting to them early, there’s no job yet,” she said. Instead, Labovich recommends that job seekers seek advice, insight, recommendations, and referrals.

That contact can pay off: Messaging a hiring manager nearly triples your chance of getting hired, LinkedIn reports.

Ultimately, she said, making connections inside an organization is one of the best ways to navigate a hiring process that often feels “totally broken.”

That’s left many job seekers applying to as many roles as they can, even though many career coaches, including Labovich, urge that people prioritize networking instead.

“The way to apply for a job these days is to not apply for a job,” she said.

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com

The Philippines is no stranger to earthquakes—it sits on the seismically active Pacific Ring of Fire. But a temblor which struck on Tuesday, Sept. 30, became the deadliest the country has ever experienced since at least 2013.

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A 6.9-magnitude quake hit just before 10 p.m. local time (10 a.m. ET), Philippine seismologists reported, off the shore of coastal Bogo City (pop. 90,000) in the island province of Cebu in the archipelagic Southeast Asian country’s center. 

The quake’s epicenter was shallow, only some 5 km below the surface, which means its energy needed to travel less distance before hitting infrastructure. The seismic energy was strong enough to cause buildings to collapse—including a century-old church—and to leave cracks on bridges. In one affected town, the quake led to part of a sports complex collapsing on spectators of a basketball game. In Bogo City,  a village reported some 10 casualties, despite being made up of “disaster resilient homes” that housed survivors of a devastating supertyphoon back in 2013. 

A tsunami alert was issued for several Philippine regions, though that has since been lifted as of Thursday.

National disaster officials reported at least 72 people died and 294 were injured after the quake, though the official toll could increase in the coming days.

Civil defense official Bernardo Rafaelito Alejandro IV told a news conference from Manila on Wednesday that the country was “still in the golden hour of our search and rescue,” adding that there “are still many reports of people who were pinned or hit by debris.” By Thursday afternoon, the national police said all missing individuals had been accounted for.

Alejandro added that the quake was particularly deadly because it happened at night. “In the morning, we are all alert, but at night when everyone is asleep, it takes time for us to react.”

A state of calamity was issued over the province on Wednesday, and on Thursday, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. visited hard-hit areas to assess the extent of the damage.

Here’s what to know.

Battered by natural disasters

Tuesday’s quake is the deadliest the country has experienced since October 2013, when more than 200 people died in the Philippines’ central region after a 7.2-magnitude quake struck the neighboring island of Bohol.

Besides being a hotbed of seismic activity, the Philippines is also among the most climate-vulnerable countries globally, seeing more than 20 typhoons and tropical storm systems yearly.

The Cebu quake also happened after a tropical storm late last week battered Cebu and other provinces in the country’s central region. That storm separately left at least 27 people dead—many knocked down by felled trees or drowned—and cut power to cities and towns and forced thousands of people to evacuate their homes. It also increased the risk of landslides after heavy rains soaked hillsides and softened soil. 

The quake and the storm combined caused widespread power outages, affecting hospitals and first responders’ ability to attend to victims. 

Latest figures from national disaster officials show that more than 170,000 people were affected by the quake, and 20,000 have been displaced.

A ‘Big One’ in Manila?

The latest quake in the central region has raised fears of a major temblor happening in the capital Manila, which many have ominously nicknamed the “Big One.”

A fault system in the metropolitan Manila region has recorded seismic activity that could reach up to a magnitude 7.2. Such quakes in this fault system happen every 200 to 400 years, and the last recorded tremor from the area was in the 1600s.

Such a sizable quake could cause some 168,000 buildings to collapse and more than 33,000 people to die in Manila and neighboring provinces.

Alejandro said lessons from the Cebu earthquake should be applied when the “Big One” strikes the capital. “We can never be 100% prepared,” he said. “Events like this [earthquake], for us also, is one way of practice. Can you imagine if it happens in Metro Manila at night?”