The spectacle was almost too on the nose: Here was the nexus of women's (limited) history within the executive branch, once home to Jacqueline Kennedy's Rose Garden and Laura Bush's restored movie theater, now totally demolished. Donald Trump has made clear his wishes to put a new ballroom in the East Wing's place. But his planned additions to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue also include the installation of an Ultimate Fighting Championship octagon for America's 250th birthday celebration.
And yet, this fall, I found myself checking the balance on my Bridge Card (Michigan's version of SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) as the federal government shut down and the USDA warned that benefits for November would not be going out, affecting 1.4 million Michiganders, or about 42 million people nationwide. (That amounts to roughly 1 in 8 people.) My last deposit came on October 17 and I won't be waiting to see whether I'll eat next month.
When blind Union City resident Lisamaria Martinez sought help from the Clerk-Recorder's office staff to file paperwork for her new business in 2019, she was repeatedly denied assistance violating the Americans with Disability Act (ADA), a federal jury ruled. CRO staff members refused to assist Martinez with signing a fictitious business name form in 2019, stating that only the business owner could complete the legal paperwork, according to court documents.
Alan Artale, stepfather to Leanne Marie Hausberg, a 14-year-old biracial Native American girl, did what every American is told to do when their child goes missing. He immediately reported Hausberg's disappearance to the New York City police department. But 26 years later, speaking at the family's neighbourhood park in Brooklyn, New York, he says their response at the time felt dismissive.
Millions of pounds a month are lost by UK shops and businesses because they are not accessible to people with disabilities, according to an awareness campaign. Purple Tuesday, which says a "mindset change" is needed, is urging retailers to consider new ways of improving inclusion such as adapting sensory experiences for neurodivergent people. Some 16 million people in the UK have a disability, and 90% of disabled people found their shopping experience was affected by a lack of accessibility, according to the Business Disability Forum.
"She was humiliated and physically confronted while still inside the stall, pulling up her pants, and forced to show ID to 'prove' her sex," Victor wrote in an since-deleted Google review. "'Even after verifying she is a woman, we were both ejected from the event entirely, while shaken, crying, and publicly shamed.'"
"The problem is, [TERFs] are getting crazier and more extreme," she said. "If you admit 'trans women don't belong in women's sports,' they agree, but call you a man the whole time. If you admit, 'I understand I am a biological man, but this is how I want to live my life and talking about me like this is degrading,' they scream about free speech."
At first, the renderings looked like progress for the majority-Black town: glass-and-concrete buildings promising jobs, innovation, and a future rooted in Big Tech. But the fine print told a different story: a complex that would level 700 acres of forest, swallow nearly 2 million gallons of water a day, and draw enough electricity to power a city the size of Seattle. What officials pitched as transformation began to feel, to Simelton, like extraction.
In the early years, my leadership was marked by urgency: an attempt to right personal wrongs and push against the injustice I had witnessed. Over time, that urgency matured into collective vision. Together with our staff, board, and community, we transformed Sakhi from an organization serving mostly cisgender heterosexual women into one that welcomes all survivors of violence. We redefined our work away from "empowerment"-a word that implies survivors are powerless-and instead built around survivor power and survivor leadership.
On a sunny afternoon in Harlem, judges, political figures and community organizers gathered to present the late Franklin H. Williams with a gift for his 108th birthday: the dedication of a street corner just outside the housing complex where he spent much of his life one built in response to segregation he'd help to dismantle in his storied career as a civil rights attorney and diplomat.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to "Movement Memos," a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I'm your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today we're talking about what it takes to stay human and protect each other in fascistic times - how we build networks of care, defend our neighbors, grieve, and make space for joy. We'll be hearing from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg musician, writer, and academic.
STATEN ISLAND, NY - The Staten Island Branch of the NAACP will mark its 100th anniversary with a Freedom Fund Luncheon on Saturday, Nov. 8 at Nicotra's Ballroom in the Hilton Garden Inn. The milestone event will run from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and will honor individuals and institutions that have contributed to the borough's legacy of equity and justice over the past century. The celebration aims to recognize a century of service, leadership, and progress while looking ahead to the next 100 years.
The D.I.R.T. Festival (Dance in Revolt(ing) Times), Dance Mission Theater's socio-political dance festival, returns October 25-November 2, continuing its tradition of presenting artists whose work explicitly addresses local and global challenges. This year's theme, "Come Hell or High Water," features dance, music, and visual artists. Three different programs will be performed over two weekends at Dance Mission Theater and outdoors at the 24th Street Bart plaza.
Recently, heavily armed and masked SWAT-like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents rolled up at a Chicago-area elementary school as classes ended for the day. Their target? A mom picking up her child. The footage is heart-wrenching: A woman in a pink sweatshirt, struggling frantically, is pressed into the pavement by armed bodies as she screams, "There is no signed warrant,"while members of an army invade her car.
Nearly two million Black families in the US South have zero or negative net worth. More than half of the nation's Black population ( about 56 percent) lives in the South, including those nearly two million families with no monetary wealth. To compound the issue, this summer saw Black women nationally lose 300,000 jobs even as the US economy continues to grow.
Democracy flourishes when Black Americans advance. The evidence is clear: birthright citizenship, constitutional due process, anti-discrimination laws from education to housing to employment and equitable small business investments, are all byproducts of the systemic corrections known today as DEI. Yet, in recent years, DEI has been used as a smokescreen by cynical politicians and activists to roll back progress and consolidate power.
This is more than a legal win, it's a cultural stand. Public schools cannot bully employees into silence because they dare to express their faith or conservative values.
In 2006, as genocidal violence in Sudan's Darfur region spilled into neighbouring Chad, I spent several weeks with an Amnesty International research team travelling along the Chadian side of that troubled border, documenting the impact of a string of brutal attacks against isolated villages that had left a macabre trail of death, destruction, and fear. This part of eastern Chad is arid and barren, with rocky, hard-packed earth, shifting sands, gnarled trees, and scrappy bush.
But this might also be a problem. Not because the marchers aren't sincerethey are. Not because moral clarity doesn't matterit does. But because every protest that doesn't lead to organization might be worse than no protest at all. It gives the feeling of agency without the fact of it. It lets us post, share, and check the box marked I did something, while the machinery of power keeps humming, unbothered.
Researchers have analysed hundreds of thousands of images from places like IMDb and Google Image Search as well as the kinds of online texts used to train large language models. They found a persistent age gap between men and women when it comes to how they are shown and talked about online.
Steven Lacey Steven Lacey had gone his whole life without being the target of hate crime, until this last year, in which he has already been abused four times. The 52-year-old, from London, is physically disabled. He has a cleft hand, a missing fibula and a shortened tibia. Steven says the last 12 months have been the worst he's experienced in terms of discrimination, and he says he thinks it's not going to improve any time soon.
