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New Bill In Honduras Seeks To Rectify 1980s Human Rights Violations

In Honduras, family members of the victims of state violence in the 1980s have been marching for 40 years to demand justice for the disappearance and death of their loved ones. Now, there’s a chance they may see reparations. An unprecedented bill that would provide compensation for the family members of the victims is working its way through Congress. In June 1981, Bertha Oliva was three months pregnant and had only been married for four months when she witnessed the kidnapping of her husband by the country’s death squad. “I was there when they took him away from me,” she said, adding, “I am a witness to the brutality. I am a survivor of that moment.”

Texas Has ‘The Most Aggressive’ Well-Plugging Program In The US

After a century and a half of oil and gas production in the United States, the nonprofit environmental watchdog Climate Tracker published a sobering report in 2020: Some 2.6 million unplugged onshore wells lay scattered across the country. Plugging all those derelict holes, from the rocky Appalachian hill country of western Pennsylvania to the dry plains of West Texas and the tundra of Alaska, and countless points between, might cost as much as $280 billion. And that figure from the report did not include undocumented wells — the ones that have vanished from the books, if they were ever recorded in the first place.

How An Alabama Town Staved Off School Resegregation

I recently traveled to rural Wilcox County, in Alabama’s Black Belt, to understand the origins of the local “segregation academy” and how it still divides the broader community. It was the first story in our series about segregation academies, private schools that opened across the Deep South after the U.S Supreme Court released its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. White Southerners opened hundreds — perhaps thousands — of these schools, which allowed white children to flee just as Black children arrived in the public schools. Now, 70 years later, ProPublica has found that hundreds of these academies still operate. Where they do, schools often remain segregated — and as a result, so do entire communities.

Constant Killing

There are constants in this world — occurrences you can count on. Sunrises and sunsets. The tides. That, day by day, people will be born and others will die. Some of them will die in peace, but others, of course, in violence and agony. For hundreds of years, the U.S. military has been killing people. It’s been a constant of our history. Another constant has been American military personnel killing civilians, whether Native Americans, Filipinos, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, Afghans, Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis, and on and on. And there’s something else that’s gone along with those killings: a lack of accountability for them.

Organizing One Of The Largest Black Led Unions In The United States

McMaid workers, led by Irma Sherman, Doris Gould, Juanita Hill, and Mary Williamson, transformed labor organizing by successfully unionizing homecare workers in Chicago in 1984, setting the groundwork for the largest union in the Midwest, and catalyzing the organizing of a field predominately staffed by working-class Black and brown women. In Part One, the McMaid homecare workers, with their union, United Labor Unions Local 880, a small, independent union founded by ACORN, the national community organization, overcame an intense anti-union campaign by management to win a solid union election victory in January, 1984. But even more obstacles lay ahead in their fight for Justice.

Missing Links In Textbook History: Opposition To War

The inescapable fact is that war has dominated much of U.S. history. According to Freakonometrics–statistician Arthur Charpentier, the United States has been at war 93% of the years since 1776. Nevertheless, as I have noted elsewhere, most of those wars are ignored by both textbooks and media. Informed by experience as a teacher, I’m convinced that students need to study at least the most significant American wars. They need to study why and how those wars were fought, the debates that occurred at the time and why some supported war while others opposed it. Unfortunately, when a war is included in history textbooks or discussed in classes, opposition to that war is generally ignored or misrepresented.

Operation Dixie Failed 78 Years Ago

Volkswagen workers’ decisive recent union election victory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, makes them the first Southern U.S. auto workers to unionize a foreign-owned auto factory. Their success could also mark a historic turning point for generations of Southern workers seeking to improve their jobs and transform their states’ economies. There are also signs that vigorous enforcement of federal labor law and other pro-worker federal policies, bolstered by the Biden administration, are contributing to a more level playing field for workers attempting to organize in the South. But a long history of exploitation will take a strong, national labor movement to overcome.

China-Russia Joint Statement On ‘New Era’, Marks 75th Anniversary Of Relations

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin traveled to China from May 16-17, 2024, where he met with Chinese President Xi Jinping. This was the 43rd meeting between the two leaders, although it held particular significance as it marked the 75th anniversary of the relations between their countries. While in Beijing, Xi and Putin signed a lengthy joint statement, which when translated into English amounts to roughly 8000 words. The document is available in Chinese and Russian on the websites of the respective governments. As of May 25, there is no official translation of the full text in English. Only short excerpts of the statement have been reported on in the English-language media.

The US Worker Cooperative Movement Turns 20

These are examples of worker co-ops in the United States in the late 20th century. While doing great work, and with a wealth of cooperative experience between them, before 2000 these somewhat isolated islands of democratic work and community care stood alone on the U.S. economic landscape, operating separately, and independent of each other. Maybe they didn’t even know that each other existed, or what they were doing to solve similar problems – especially those on opposite coasts. And most people in the U.S. knew little to nothing about worker co-ops. Regional worker co-op conferences started to help bring co-ops like these together, not just locally but regionally - with the goal to form a national network.

New Caledonia: Kanak Revolt Against French Colonialism

Recently, a high-intensity revolt has been taking place in New Caledonia: looting, destruction of businesses, armed struggle against the police (molotov cocktails, live ammunition...), prison mutiny... In any other region of France, this would be front-page news. But New Caledonia isn't just any other region of France. It's a colony, and as such it's of little interest to mainland France, so it's hard to understand what's going on there. Let's try to unravel the mystery. New Caledonia is a group of islands in Oceania. Until the 18th century, the indigenous peoples of New Caledonia lived without Western interference. This situation changed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Why Is New Caledonia On Fire?

New Caledonia’s capital city, Noumea, has endured widespread violent rioting over the past 48 hours. This crisis intensified rapidly, taking local authorities by surprise. Peaceful protests had been occurring across the country in the preceding weeks as the French National Assembly in Paris deliberated on a constitutional amendment that would increase the territory’s electoral roll. As the date for the vote grew closer, however, protests became more obstructive and by Monday night had spiralled into uncontrolled violence. Since then, countless public buildings, business locations and private dwellings have been subjected to arson.

Portugal: Fifty Years Since The Carnation Revolution

Fifty years ago, on April 25, 1974, Portugal was shaken by an earthquake. Not a geological earthquake, like the one in 1755 that razed Lisbon to the ground and killed around 50,000 people, but a political one, with only four victims. It was an uprising that would overnight bring Europe’s longest lasting fascist dictatorship tumbling down. Shortly after midnight on April 25, the popular song “Grândola Vila Moreno” (Grândola, my swarthy town) rang out over the airwaves of a private Portuguese radio station. To the nervous soldiers in their barracks listening out for it, this was the signal for them to start the engines of their tanks and armored cars and begin their revolt by rapidly taking Lisbon, the capital, and other large towns by storm.

Genocide Trial In Guatemala Brings Memories Of Israel’s Role In Killings

As the genocide trial of retired Guatemalan General Benedicto Lucas Garcia unfolds in a courtroom in Guatemala City, Indigenous Maya witnesses—some in strained voices or reduced to tears—describe the killing methods used by soldiers. A woman in a woven huipil blouse grabs her chest and inclines forward to show how her mother was shot point blank. A man who was fourteen when troops came upon his family cleaning their cornfield points to his forehead and a spot above his right ear where a soldier shot his father “in front of me.” Another woman closes her fingers like the head of an ax and brings it down on the crown of her head to show how a neighbor was killed.

Odessa Massacre 10 Years On: Neo-Nazis Drowned The City In Blood

This Thursday marked the 10th anniversary of the May 2, 2014 Odessa Trade Unions Building massacre, in which 48 anti-Maidan activists were burned alive by neo-Nazi thugs. The violence, coming soon after Kiev kicked off its ‘anti-terrorist operation’ in the Donbass, demonstrated the new regime’s readiness to drown Ukraine in blood to cling to power. The warm weather of the spring of 2014 was accompanied by the winds of revolutionary fervor across southeastern Ukraine, with activists from across Kharkov, the Donbass, Zaporozhye, Dnepropetrovsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa rising up in opposition to the Euromaidan coup in Kiev that had taken place in February.

The End Of Lean Production And What’s Ahead

For three and a half decades, lean management drove the production and movement of goods. But now logistics and manufacturing employers are shifting to a new model. To maximize our leverage, workers should understand it. Lean production, introduced in the 1980s from Japanese automakers, caught on in many U.S. industries. It was a whole bundle of techniques to maximize profit, including ratcheting up workloads and pace to the point of breakdown, and inviting workers to brainstorm ways to increase their own exploitation.
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