What began less than two weeks ago as a protest over a 20-cent bus fare increase has become the largest wave of demonstrations Brazil has seen in two decades — and the grievances driving people into the streets now extend far beyond public transportation. From a Fare Hike to a Movement The protests trace back…
Mexican police stormed into a neighborhood of striking farmworkers in Baja California’s San Quintín Valley this week, firing rubber bullets at residents fleeing through dirt streets and beating people inside their own homes — an escalation that came as talks between strike leaders and growers remain deadlocked nearly two months into one of Mexico’s largest…
A Bahraini court ordered the release of prominent human rights defender Nabeel Rajab this week — and authorities immediately took him back into custody anyway, opening a new investigation on entirely separate charges before he could walk free. A Pattern of Arrest, Release, and Re-Arrest Rajab, president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and…
Khaled Sid Mohand vanished on a Saturday. The 40-year-old journalist — a regular contributor to French Public Radio’s France Culture, an occasional correspondent for Le Monde, and an occasional contributor to FSRN — missed his daily security check-in call to a colleague in Beirut on April 9, and hasn’t been heard from since. Now, colleagues…
California has begun rolling out condoms to inmates across its state prison system this year, the first phase of a five-year plan that will make California just the third state in the country, alongside Vermont and Mississippi, to provide condoms behind bars — even though sex between inmates remains a criminal offense under state law….
Hundreds of thousands of people marched in cities across the United States on May Day, in the largest coordinated immigrant rights mobilization the country has seen since 2006 — driven not just by the annual tradition of May 1 organizing, but by outrage over a new Arizona law that has become a lightning rod for…
Just weeks after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government approved two major tar sands pipeline projects, the Indigenous-led alliance formed specifically to block them says the approvals change nothing — the pipelines, they insist, simply will not be built. A Treaty Built for This Exact Moment The Treaty Alliance Against Tar Sands Expansion was signed…
California’s labor movement notched two significant wins within days of each other this month — a new state law targeting employers who steal wages from workers, and a Los Angeles County vote setting the region’s minimum wage on a path to $15 an hour. Going After “Deadbeat Employers” The state legislature approved SB 588, described…
California’s unemployment rate climbed to 11.9 percent in July, the state’s Department of Finance reported — running two and a half percentage points above the 9.4 percent national rate, and underscoring how much harder the recession has hit the country’s most populous state than the country as a whole. A Silver Lining Buried in a…
The U.S. economy shed 467,000 jobs in June, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week — a sharper monthly loss than economists had hoped for, and evidence that the labor market’s brief signs of stabilizing the previous month hadn’t yet translated into a durable trend. A Step Back After a Step Forward BLS Commissioner…