COALCOMAN, Mexico — From a desk overlooking the shady plaza of his backwater mountain town, Mayor Rafael Garcia recounts how he and other citizens finally mustered the nerve to take on the gangsters tormenting them.

“The problem started when they began messing with the population: extortion, rapes, killings,” Garcia, 42, says of the Knights Templar, the fancifully named cartel of thugs who control many of western Michoacan state’s 113 counties. “We were terrified. We are still …

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Washington, DC – Top US companies are now in negotiations to agree on new safety standards for their clothing-producing contractors in Bangladesh, after a garment factory’s collapse in Dhaka killed more than 1,100 workers in April.

The move comes after these companies, most prominently including Walmart and Gap, refused to sign on to a fire and safety standards agreement, announced weeks ago, that has received wide backing among European companies. Yet labour advocates are disparaging the …

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Israel plans to expel thousands of African refugees to an unidentified third country, according to a court document obtained Monday, in an initiative that has provoked concerns from human rights groups.

The program is an effort to confront one of Israel’s more persistent problems: What to do with some 60,000 African migrants – the majority from Eritrea and Sudan – who have illegally crossed the border into Israel from Egypt over the past eight years.

During a …

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Turkey has bought $21 million in tear gas and pepper spray – mainly from US and Brazil – over the past 12 years, Turkish media reported. The US is known for its exports of crowd control munitions to countries rocked by widespread protest.

In total, Turkey imported 62 tons of tear gas and pepper spray between 2000 and 2012, Turkish newspaper Sozcu reported.

Turkey is currently being rocked by its biggest wave of anti-government protests in years. …

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Americans are confronted daily with the violence of inequality. The rich have longer life spans, better health care, access to better educational opportunities and an abundance of food. [1] Many live in palatial homes in gated communities and wield a disproportionate amount of control and power over the major social, cultural, and political apparatuses that shape everyday life.[2] Unlike most Americans, the extravagantly rich are protected from the massive degree of violence produced by poverty, …

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Sequestration, the automatic across-the-board spending cuts that went into effect in March, by design cuts a wide array of government-funded programs. One of the areas is domestic violence funding for programs on the state and local level. At the same time that sequestration is reducing those budgets, however, victims’ need for support has been steadily increasing.

Kim Gandy, CEO of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, reports that nearly all state programs had already been …

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Some of President Barack Obama’s political appointees, including the secretary for health and human services, are using secret government email accounts they say are necessary to prevent their inboxes from being overwhelmed with unwanted messages, according to a review by the Associated Press.

The scope of using the secret accounts across government remains a mystery: most US agencies have failed to turn over lists of political appointees’ email addresses, which the AP sought under the Freedom …

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With ten days to go before Iran’s presidential election, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, and U.S. neoconservatives are on opposite sides of the regime-change question, as one might expect.

Here’s the reality of Iran’s presidential vote: there isn’t going to be any regime change, despite Khamenei’s fears and the hopes of right-wingers such as Robert Joseph, a former George W. Bush official. The next president of Iran, whoever he is, will settle into …

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Imperialism doesn’t pay. Of course, it never did for the common folk recruited to invade another country, or the natives they conquered. But still, the thought persists that occupying foreign lands—particularly as in the case of Iraq, soaked in oil as well as blood—is a winner.

True, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, with its nonexistent WMDs and virulent hostility to the religious fanatics that attacked us on 9/11, was a false target for a war on terror. …

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More than two months after ExxonMobil’s 65-year-old Pegasus pipeline burst and spewed a gusher of thick Canadian tar sands oil through Mayflower, AR, and into a marsh on Lake Conway—the state’s most popular fishing spot—residents are still complaining of health problems and are worried about poisonous impacts on wildlife and in the environment. Many locals and some scientists have little faith in the continuous rosy assurances from Exxon and the Unified Command that testing results …

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