Paul Solman: Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa is a widely heard voice on the value of immigration for the U.S. economy. We first featured him a year ago in “Man v. Machine,” a story on the automation of work and did so again on this page last fall on the threat posed by a programmable robot named Baxter.

An immigrant himself (from India), Wadhwa used to think Silicon Valley was a a paragon of open access: …

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When former prisoner Aisha Awdat talks about the experiences of Palestinian women inside Israeli prisons, she delves into the details of pain and endurance. The month of March, which saw the worst of her suffering and sexual assault at the hands of her investigator, remains deeply entrenched in her soul and memories.

Awdat cannot forget the night of March 10, 1969, when she was raped with a stick by her Israeli investigator, who violated everything …

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CAIRO, Egypt — Hundreds of Egyptian bakers blocked roads in Cairo on Tuesday in reaction to a government plan to ration bread.

They descended on the Supply Ministry to protest diesel shortages and rising fuel and flour prices, the Egypt Independent said.

Bakers are under increased pressure with rising costs and shortages while trying to survive under Egypt’s long-held policy of subsidizing bread and fuel prices.

The cheap bread is often the best and only food source for …

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“Frackademia” — shorthand for bogus science, economics and other research results paid for by the oil and gas industry and often conducted by “frackademics” with direct ties to the oil and gas industry — has struck again in California.

It comes in the form of a major University of Southern California (USC) report on the potential economic impacts of a hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) boom in California’s Monterey Shale basin that’s hot off the presses, “Powering California: …

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ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

HARTMANN: March 19th is the anniversary of when the bombing commenced in Baghdad. George W. Bush opened the gates of hell that led to the death of somewhere between 150,000 and 600,000 Iraqis, over 4,000 American soldiers, the displacement of at least 5 million Iraqis and an orgy of death squad and sectarian violence that continues to this day. I mean, here’s the really …

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“All the ingredients and factors of revolution and protest are present in Saudi Arabia. So there is no way that the protests will stop no matter what the government in Saudi Arabia will do,” said Ali al-Ahmed in a Tuesday interview with Press TV.

“We will see national or somewhat of a national protest movement in the country, I think, in the next few months maybe next weeks,” he added.

Ahmed pointed to …

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The storied Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will appear at Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center for the first time this week, but not everyone is juggling for joy.

Several animal-rights organizations are banding together to protest what they say is Ringling’s habitual and systemic mistreatment of the exotic animals in its shows, in particular Asian elephants, which are commonly used as peformance animals. The protests will kick off with a large opening-night demonstration on Wednesday …

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As Bahrain enters the third year of a crisis sparked by Arab Spring protests in 2011, the government continues to bar many human rights advocates and journalists from entering the country.

But one non-profit group is not only being welcomed into the tiny Gulf kingdom, it’s opening an office there. And it’s doing so with funding from Bahrain’s ruling monarchy.

The International Peace Institute, a New York-based think tank closely associated with the United Nations, announced last …

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Mexico City, Mexico — Some 2.2 percent of all U.S. gun sales are made to smuggling rings that take firearms to Mexico, a scale of illegal trafficking that’s “much higher than widely assumed,” an academic study released Monday found.

An average of 253,000 weapons purchased in the United States head south of the border each year, according to the study by four scholars at the University of San Diego’s Trans-Border Institute and the Igarape Institute, a …

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• White House: ‘no evidence’ rebels used chemical weapons
• Russia points finger at Syria opposition
• Attack has not been independently confirmed
• Reuters photographer: ‘The air smelled of chlorine’

Syria’s regime accused rebel fighters of firing a chemical weapon at a town in the country’s north. The regime has claimed that up to 25 people were killed in the attack but the rebels claimed only Damascus can deploy chemical weapons.

The Russian foreign ministry said it also …

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