Russian police detained hundreds of demonstrators in Moscow this week, as opposition activists staged unauthorized protests against their government’s military intervention in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. A Fast-Moving Crisis The protests came immediately on the heels of a formal vote by Russia’s Federation Council authorizing President Vladimir Putin to deploy Russian armed forces in Ukraine —…
The Senate has moved Trade Promotion Authority one step closer to becoming law this week, but as the fight over so-called “fast track” trade legislation shifts to the House of Representatives, opponents are increasingly pointing to a recent World Trade Organization ruling on meat labeling as a warning of what’s really at stake. A Canary…
Zimbabwean police fired tear gas and deployed batons against demonstrators gathered outside the finance ministry this week, the latest in an escalating series of crackdowns on protests over President Robert Mugabe’s handling of a deepening economic crisis. A Fight Over Bond Notes Hundreds of activists converged outside the office of Zimbabwe’s finance minister, demanding the…
In the closing weeks of the Obama administration, supporters of imprisoned Native American rights activist Leonard Peltier have found an unexpected new ally: the very federal prosecutor whose office secured his conviction four decades ago. A Prosecutor’s Change of Heart James H. Reynolds, the former U.S. attorney for Iowa who oversaw the government’s prosecution and…
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…
French voters head to the polls this weekend for the first round of what’s being called the country’s most unpredictable presidential election in decades — a contest unfolding under heightened security just days after a gunman opened fire on police along Paris’s famed Champs-Élysées, killing one officer. An Eleven-Candidate Field, and a System Under Strain…
A controversial experiment to mine the ocean floor for gold and copper is inching closer to reality off the coast of Papua New Guinea, even as the coastal communities who would live alongside it say they’ve been kept almost entirely in the dark about what the project actually involves — and are now weighing legal…
Across rural India, women have quietly become the country’s primary farmers — even as the legal and financial systems governing agriculture continue to treat them as if they weren’t there at all. Farming Without Land Titles The shift is driven largely by migration. As men increasingly leave agricultural work behind for jobs in India’s growing…
In a Los Angeles classroom, mostly freshman actors are rehearsing a scene few teenagers should ever need to practice: what to do when immigration agents show up. Members of a student theater group called Colores Unidos are performing videotaped skits playing both ICE agents and terrified immigrants, preparing themselves and their community for a wave…
Indigenous marchers converged on Quito this week, capping weeks of mobilization against Ecuador’s newly passed water law — legislation that Indigenous organizations argue prioritizes mining companies’ access to water over the rights of the communities who have depended on those same water sources for generations. A Law Years in the Making, Passed Over Objection The…