Since Mexico’s government sent the military into the streets to fight drug cartels in 2006, at least 140,000 people have been killed. Cartel leaders get arrested or killed with some regularity, and the violence escalates anyway. Canadian journalist Dawn Paley spent years asking why the standard cops-versus-cartels story never seemed to explain what she was…
Each October, journalists and human rights advocates mark the anniversary of Brad Will’s death — a killing that, years later, remains formally unresolved, its actual perpetrators never definitively identified or held accountable. A Journalist Embedded in the Movement He Covered Brad Will was a 36-year-old video journalist affiliated with the New York City Independent Media…
A small protest turned tense outside Rio de Janeiro’s military club this week, as police dispersed demonstrators with tear gas after a memorial marking 50 years since Brazil’s 1964 military coup was inaugurated at what’s widely considered the epicenter of ongoing sympathy for the country’s former dictatorship. A Coup Remembered, and Contested The demonstration came…
Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto departed for a previously scheduled trip to China this week, just days after his own attorney general announced that 43 students who disappeared more than a month ago in the state of Guerrero are now presumed dead — a decision critics say reflects a government dangerously out of step with…
More than 200 veterans and active-duty service members of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan gathered outside Washington, D.C. this week to do something few of them had ever done publicly before: testify, in their own words, about what they saw and did while deployed. Echoes of Vietnam, Four Decades Later The four-day event, called…
Two American soldiers who refused to deploy to Iraq now find themselves on opposite sides of a widening legal divide — one facing a return to the United States and near-certain court-martial, the other still fighting through Canada’s courts for the right to stay. Their diverging paths illustrate the increasingly precarious position of the hundreds…
President Obama declared the formal end of America’s combat mission in Iraq in a primetime address from the Oval Office this week, using the moment to pivot the nation’s attention — and its military resources — toward the ongoing war in Afghanistan. “Operation Iraqi Freedom is over, and the Iraqi people now have lead responsibility…
In the weeks following Israel’s three-week military offensive in Gaza, doctors treating the wounded began reporting something they said they hadn’t seen before: injuries that didn’t match the wound patterns typically caused by conventional explosives. The unusual injuries have fueled speculation that Israeli forces used a class of weapon known as DIME — Dense Inert…
After years of sustained public opposition, Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority has withdrawn its permit application for the Vía Verde natural gas pipeline, effectively halting a project that had become one of the island’s most contested environmental fights in recent memory. The utility, known by its Spanish acronym AEE, formally pulled the entire Vía Verde…
Egyptian blogger and longtime activist Wael Khalil has spent more than a decade at the center of his country’s opposition movements — and in a wide-ranging conversation, he laid out the hard questions facing activists as they weigh what comes next. Khalil, a software engineer by training, began organizing in Egypt’s anti-war and anti-globalization movements…