You are part of an unbroken line of heroes spanning two centuries — from the colonists who overthrew an empire, to your grandparents and parents who faced down fascism and communism, to you — men and women who fought for the same principles in Fallujah and Kandahar, and delivered justice to those who attacked us [...]
Gathered silently in the shade of a mango tree here, dozens of people patiently wait their turn to tell us about the horror that descended on their community a year ago. Shortly after drinking from the local water source, entire families started to get violently ill with diarrhea and vomiting. It was an outbreak of [...]
The US Census Bureau recently reported what most Americans already knew. Poverty is deepening. The gap between rich and poor is growing. Slippage soon into the ranks of the poor now confronts tens of millions of Americans who long thought of themselves as securely “middle class.” The reality is worse than the Census Bureau reports. [...]
Of all the Occupy Wall Street refrains, one of the most memorable is, “I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.” But, clever as it is, the quip looks to the wrong end of the life cycle: The only thing more corrupt than the legal concept of corporate personhood is the [...]
Food pantries picked over. Incomes drying up. Shelters bursting with the homeless. Job seekers spilling out the doors of employment centers. College grads moving back in with their parents. The angry and disillusioned filling the streets. Pan your camera from one coast to the other, from city to suburb to farm and back again, and [...]
Spencer Ackerman’s reports on Islamophobic training sessions at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have sent the Bureau into damage control mode. On Thursday, the FBI held a conference call with Muslim civil rights groups to apologize for the offensive training materials, which Ackerman has published over the past week. The FBI has promised a “comprehensive review of all training and reference [...]
For the breaking developments on this ongoing citizens action, please check the main hashtag for this peaceful demonstration here: http://twitter.com/#!/OccupyWallStNYC Reports are coming in fast and furious from NYC Disinfonauts about the breakup of the ongoing actions in downtown Manhattan today. Numerous advocacy and citizens’ action groups came together beginning on Saturday to protest the [...]
In July, one Haitian fell ill with cholera every minute. In August, after the “second peak” from the May/June rains receded, that rate has slowed and yet still one Haitian falls ill every two minutes. In our report, “Not Doing Enough: Unnecessary Sickness and Death from Cholera in Haiti“, we noted that funding was withdrawn [...]
On August 28, 2011, the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial will take place on the National Mall in Washington DC. Having the dedication of this memorial on the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington, is clearly a symbolic gesture—paying homage to one of the many defining moments in the great [...]
One in four California households with children reported food hardship, according to a new analysis of Gallup data released last Thursday by the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC). The report analyzed data gathered as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index project’s responses to the question: “Have there been times in the past 12 months [...]
On August 6, 1945, President Harry S Truman announced: Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British ‘Grand Slam’ which is the largest bomb [...]
After the tears have dried and the cries of outrage fallen silent, we may begin to recognise that the cinematic qualities of the Utoya Massacre were drawn from trashy horror flicks. It is a recurring theme within the Friday the 13th Screams at Elm Street genre that a serial killer must stalk a peaceful summer [...]
The NAACP has just passed a historic resolution demanding an end to the War on Drugs. The resolution comes as young Black male unemployment hovers near 50 percent and the wealth gap’s become a veritable gulf. So why is the forty-year-old “War on Drugs” public enemy number one for the nation’s oldest civil rights organization? [...]
A new study says the “big house” is the safest place to be a black man. We’ve just learned that wealth disparities among whites, blacks and Latinos have reached critical mass. We’ve finally been able to acknowledge that the war on drugs is a racially charged exercise that targets “minorities” at a rate of incarceration 13 [...]
Racial bias in our criminal justice system isn’t a binary matter, with different treatment for blacks versus whites — rather, a new study suggests that it is a sliding scale, in which severity of punishment increases proportionally as skin color becomes darker. Via the Root: Villanova researchers studied more than 12,000 cases of African-American women [...]
In the Horn of Africa, unseen as yet by the world’s television cameras, a pitiful trek of the hungry is taking place. Tens of thousands of children are walking for weeks across a desiccated landscape to reach refugee camps that are now overflowing. They are being driven there by one of the worst droughts in [...]
In August, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder — under continuous, aggressive prodding by the Obama White House — announced that three categories of individuals responsible for Bush-era torture crimes would be fully immunized from any form of criminal investigation and prosecution: (1) Bush officials who ordered the torture (Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld); (2) Bush lawyers who [...]
As almost half of humanity will face water scarcity by 2030, strategists from Israel to Central Asia prepare for strife. After droughts ravaged his parents’ farmland, Sixteen-year-old Hassain and his two-year-old sister Sareye became some of the newest refugees forced from home by water scarcity. “There was nothing to harvest,” Hassain said through an interpreter [...]
Arab activists warned on Monday that conditions attached to western aid threatened to undercut the goals of economic and social justice at the heart of the Arab spring. The Arab NGO network for Development said liberalisation of trade, investment and deregulation advocated by the US and the EU as part of their aid packages had [...]
Prisoners earning 23 cents an hour in U.S. federal prisons are manufacturing high-tech electronic components for Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missiles, launchers for TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) anti-tank missiles, and other guided missile systems. A March article by journalist and financial researcher Justin Rohrlich of World in Review is worth a closer look at [...]
