Articles
Articles
Chasing the Murderers of Ayotzinapa’s Forty-Three
Christy Thornton: Examining the disappearance of forty-three students in southern Mexico four years ago can lead to only one conclusion: culpability lies with the Mexican state. ... After all this time, and after multiple investigations, there is still no definitive explanation of what happened that night in 2014 in the small city of Iguala: Who took the students? Where were they taken? What happened to them? ... "A Massacre in Mexico" (by Anabel Hernández) presents an overwhelming case that federal government investigators working for the administration of Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto created a false narrative of local culpability and sought to close the case before an investigation could reveal the involvement of federal officials...
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Sep 17, 2018, 2:27pm
Articles
The Perfect Storm: How Climate Change and Wall Street Almost Killed Puerto Rico
Jeff Goodell: Puerto Rico has not recovered. In fact, it’s arguably as close to collapse as it has ever been. The power is on and the roads are open, but if you look closely, the entire island is held together with duct tape and baling wire. Tens of thousands of people are still living under the blue tarps that were installed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on houses that had their roofs blown off during the storm. Engineers are still discovering bridges that are in danger of collapsing, and every time it rains, new leaks are found in concrete foundations ... It’s impossible to say exactly how much climate change contributed to Maria’s 155-mph winds, but it is possible to say pumping carbon into the atmosphere makes powerful storms like Maria more likely. ... From as early as 2005, there were signs the government wasn’t going to be able to repay the loans. But the banks didn’t care: They made money on bond transaction fees, and the high interest rate on these bonds pumped up their balance sheets....
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Sep 15, 2018, 1:38pm
Articles
Maternity Care Gets a Racial Justice Focus
A. Rochaun Meadows-Fernandez: Black birth workers give mothers of color healthier, safer options for labor and recovery. ... Tangiere Jones was a 26-year-old mom-to-be when she first heard about Mamatoto Village, a nonprofit that provides birth support for underserved women in Washington, D.C. She wanted the best outcome for the birth of her daughter but faced financial barriers as a substitute teacher who was the sole earner of her household. ... Like many Black mothers, Jones was aware of the risks of “birthing while Black.” For instance, the rate of maternal mortality is more than three times as high for Black women than for White women, while the infant mortality rate for Black babies is more than twice as high as the rate for White babies ... Mamatoto aims to address the physical, mental, and emotional challenges moms-to-be face, and to assist with the economic ones....
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Sep 8, 2018, 4:02pm
Articles
Ernesto Che Guevara Medical-Cultural Brigade: In Santos Lugares… looking for Haiti
Ricardo Vaz: Santos Lugares (Argentina)is a remote village, with a population of 300 according to the last official census, and the current estimate is of around 7000 people in a 100 km radius. With no telephone lines, the radio is the main source for communication and information, and that was how people were informed about the arrival of this brigade. ... The 128-strong brigade arrived on two buses, which made the journey of more than 11 hours from the city of Córdoba ... With a large contingent of doctors who studied at Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine, the ELAM, the brigade also brought other healthcare professionals such as dentists, opticians, ophthalmologists, as well as educators from the literacy program Yo Sí Puedo (“Yes I can”), students, culture, recreation and sports professionals, communicators and journalists, and others....
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Aug 31, 2018, 2:55pm
 Articles
Hiroshima, August 6, 1945
"A bright light filled the plane," wrote Col. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb. "We turned back to look at Hiroshima. The city was hidden by that awful cloud...boiling up, mushrooming." (Previously Published)
Aug 6, 2018, 11:04am
Articles
A siege. A bomb. 48 dogs. And the black commune that would not surrender
Ed Pilkington It was 8 August 1978 and he had just emerged from the basement of the house in Philadelphia that his black revolutionary group, Move, used as a communal home. In an attempt to evict them from the property, hundreds of officers had just stormed the building, pummeling it with water cannons and gunfire, and in the maelstrom a police officer had been killed and several other first responders injured. ... Del Africa is one of the Move 9, the group of five men and four women, all African American, who were arrested 40 years ago this August during the 1978 police siege of their headquarters in Powelton Village, Philadelphia. ... In the case of Move members, their politics are a strange fusion of black power and flower power. The group that formed in the early 1970s melded the revolutionary ideology of the Black Panthers with the nature- and animal-loving communalism of 1960s hippies...
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Jul 31, 2018, 12:50pm
Articles
The Black Panthers still in prison After 46 years, will they ever be set free?
Ed Pilkington: Jalil Muntaqim is one of 19 black radicals, including two women, who are still imprisoned 40 or more years after they were arrested for violent acts related to the black liberation struggle. Next year the longest-serving inmate, Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald, will have been locked up for half a century. The oldest, Sundiata Acoli, is 81. ... One of the most striking aspects of their stories is the enduring passion they all express for the cause of black liberation. Their belief in the nobility of the struggle against injustice is undiluted and undulled. ... “If you understand the oppression that black people have suffered in this country, no one should have any regrets for having been identified as a revolutionary. I have no regrets about that.” (Jalil Muntaqim)
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Jul 30, 2018, 2:12pm
Articles
Reunited With Their Children, Immigrant Mothers Find Themselves in a Strange and Unforgiving Land
Debbie Nathan: When I first met Cruz she had not seen her 10-year-old daughter for 73 days. Cruz is from Honduras ... She recounted how her partner was a hit man who raped, kidnapped, and tried to kill her. The hearing officer believed her, and she had qualified to be released on bond. ... After that, she would await a full hearing in immigration court, two or three years in the future. She planned to settle with her daughter in North Carolina while she waited. ... I wanted her to tell me all about Port Isabel, of course: the schedules, the guards, the food, the dorms, the visit of Homeland Security head Kristjen Nielsen when the women were hidden from Nielsen by being removed to a faraway ball field for hours (“The worst day for me of all,” Cruz said. “It was terrible to be treated that way.”...
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Jul 28, 2018, 11:02am
Articles
Something in the Air
Eyal Press: Jessica Robertson Got Sick Working as an Inspector at a Poultry Plant. Now She’s Speaking Out to Defend Workers Exposed to Chemicals. ... Robertson believes that the source of the ailments were chemicals used at the plant — including a little-known chemical called peracetic acid, or PAA. A colorless bleaching agent with a faintly vinegary odor, PAA has been used to sterilize medical instruments in hospitals. In recent years, escalating quantities of it have also been used to remove bacteria from the carcasses of chickens and turkeys, despite concerns from industry watchdogs that breathing it may put workers at risk, especially when combined with chlorine and other chemical treatments. ... The EU has embraced an alternative model to food safety, the so-called farm-to-fork approach, which requires every link in the food-production chain to implement hygienic standards...
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Jul 19, 2018, 2:16pm
Articles
Standing Rock Activist Accused of Firing Gun Registered to FBI Informant Is Sentenced to Nearly Five Years in Prison
Will Parrish: Following an emotional hearing in Bismarck, North Dakota, this week, Oglala Lakota Sioux water protector Red Fawn Fallis was sentenced to 57 months in prison on charges stemming from her arrest while opposing the Dakota Access pipeline. ... She was accused of firing three shots from a revolver underneath her stomach after being tackled by several officers and pinned face down in a ditch alongside the highway. ... Fallis’s arrest occurred on land that would still belong to the Great Sioux Nation had the U.S. government honored the Fort Laramie treaties of 1851 and 1868. ... “They can bring thousands of guns to stolen treaty territory, and they have the audacity to charge this Native woman who is trying to protect her territory, her land, and the sanctity of her traditions with a crime of violence”...
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Jul 13, 2018, 1:30pm
Articles
Memorial for Lynching Victims a First Step Toward Reconciliation
Angela Fichter: More than 4,000 African Americans were lynched from 1877 to 1950, giving rise to The Great Migration—as over 6 million African Americans left the South to resettle in the North and West. African Americans account for some 70 percent of recorded lynchings and nearly 80 percent of lynchings that occurred in the American South, according to the NAACP. The lynchings by White mobs instilled fear in Black communities, and that history continues to haunt African Americans today. ... It took over three years to create the $15 million project, which opened in April. With the museum drawing over 3,000 visitors a week, the city of Montgomery has already seen an economic impact since its opening ... The names of lynching victims are engraved on columns, some hanging from the ceiling, evoking Black bodies hanged from trees decades ago...
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Jul 5, 2018, 3:09pm
Articles
Going Native: Summer on the Pow Wow Trail
Mark Anthony Rolo: As I write this, pow wow season is in full bloom in most of Indian Country. It’s more than a carnival or fair. It’s a celebration of community. And, if you are up for it, the drum is calling for you, like me, to hit the pow wow trail. ... The American Indian pow wow dates back to a time that none of us remember. Tribal communities would gather in the hot summer heat in a field and form a circle. A drum, usually made of deer or buffalo skin, was set in the center. Men would gather around the drum and sing songs from the Earth. Women would stand behind the men and sing while tribal members danced around the circle. Many male dancers dressed in eagle feathers and buckskin. Women dancers wore shawls and beaded moccasins...
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Jun 30, 2018, 4:10pm
Articles
Slow Train Coming
Andrés Pertierra: On April 19, for the first time in decades, Cuba ceased to have a head of state surnamed Castro. Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez is now president. ... Cuba has also strengthened its ties to Russia and China, both important trading partners and possible strategic counterweights to the US. Russia recently agreed to export significant quantities of oil to Cuba and has served as a key source of capital for Cuban infrastructure projects, and these renewed connections leave the door open to further military and strategic agreements. ... The Cuban government has also been trying to attract foreign capital for projects ranging from hotels to the Mariel Special Development Zone (ZEDM). The government plans to turn the port of Mariel, a short drive from the west of Havana, into a major industrial hub...
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Jun 24, 2018, 2:17pm
Articles
Solar Is the Future. Donald Trump Tied a Bow on It and Gave It to China.
Jeffrey Ball: And now the Chinese are gaining on the West in the most important arena of all:innovation. ... The notion that the United States has a lock on clean-energy innovation will seem as antiquated in 10 years as the once-prevalent belief that Detroit designed the best cars. China, with its noxious smog and voracious energy appetite, has compelling reasons to innovate. And the Trump administration seems more interested in protecting coal producers than in furthering renewable-energy research. “If the US doesn’t do the R&D, then China will,” says Chase, the Bloomberg solar analyst. “In fact, China is doing it. It just means that the US will become less and less relevant to the solar industry.”...
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Jun 19, 2018, 12:30pm
Articles
What's Really Happening When Asylum-Seeking Families Are Separated?
Katy Vine: An expert on helping parents navigate the asylum process describes what she’s seeing on the ground. ... the ones that I’ve been working with are the ones that are actually being prosecuted for criminal entry, which is a pretty new thing for our country—to take first-time asylum seekers who are here seeking safe refuge, to turn around and charge them with a criminal offense. Those parents are finding themselves in adult detention centers and in a process known as expedited removal, where many are being deported. And their children, on the other hand, are put in a completely different legal structure. They are categorized as unaccompanied children and thus are being put in place in a federal agency not with the Department of Homeland Security but with Health and Human Services. And Health and Human Services has this complicated structure in place where they’re not viewed as a long-term foster care system—that’s for very limited numbers—but their general mandate is to safeguard these children in temporary shelters and then find family members with whom they can be placed. ... For all asylum seekers, you are going to be put in jail, in a detention center, and you’re going to have your children taken away from you. That’s the policy. They’re not 100 percent able to implement that because of a lot of reasons including just having enough judges on the border. And bed space. There’s a big logistical problem...
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Jun 17, 2018, 3:05pm
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