The steady drizzle tested the limits of the string of tarps stretched across the backyard of a Maywood home. Beneath them, dozens of boxes, overflowing with clothes, shoes and toys, lay scattered across the pavement. Each gift was destined for one of more than 50 Southern California homes whose families have been caught in the growing immigration enforcement crackdown. This was not charity bestowed from afar, but mutual aid.
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
➡️ The University of Oklahoma graduate assistant who gave a student a failing grade on an anti-transgender paper will no longer be teaching at the university, school officials have decided. We also examine the 60 Minutes CECOT story that was spiked at the last minute by CBS News editor Bari Weiss, only to be broadcast anyway on a Canadian streaming service; and we have an explainer on the infamous prison where Trump deported 252 Venezuelan refugees.
Readers weigh in, quietly, on the gun control debate, retailers are getting the stink eye for commercializing Juneteenth, and nobody's quite sure if Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee celebration was racist or not. What would reparations for slavery look like? California is getting close to an answer. All that and a surprising look at NASCAR's unlikely win in the race for inclusion. Happy Friday.
In early 2025, Southern Coalition for Social Justice filed a lawsuit in Chowan County Superior Court on behalf of five Eastern North Carolina residents alleging the Edenton Town Council and Chowan County Board of Commissioners brokered an unlawful deal to relocate the Edenton Confederate monument to the grounds of the Chowan County Courthouse in downtown Edenton. We alleged this agreement violated the North Carolina Open Meetings Law and the placement of the Confederate Monument at the courthouse would violate the North Carolina Constitution.
To survive a school shooting is traumatic enough, but to then face a nationwide racist smear campaign that falsely accuses you of being the murderer is even worse. That was the fate of Mustapha Kharbouch, a queer Palestinian student at Brown University. While mourning his fellow students, Kharbouch found himself confronting false accusations. Across social media, attempts by the university to protect his privacy were painted as proof of guilt.
The owner of a South Dakota hotel who said Native Americans were banned from the establishment was found liable for discrimination against Native Americans on Friday. A federal jury decided the owner of the Grand Gateway Hotel in Rapid City will pay tens of thousands of dollars in damages to various plaintiffs who were denied service at the hotel. The jury awarded $1 to the NDN Collective, the Indigenous advocacy group that filed the lawsuit.
While federal agents working for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) are running up on migrant workers in Home Depot parking lots, the home improvement corporation has decided to take a stand - against the migrant workers. Reporting by The Guardian reveals a cruel new initiative being rolled out to one high-traffic Home Depot location in Los Angeles' Cypress Park: high-pitched noise machines meant to shoo away day laborers.
Tarana Burke tells Marc Lamont Hill on Epstein, Trump and how widespread sexual violence is in the United States. In 2017, a reckoning over sexual violence called #MeToo swept the globe. Eight years later, has the movement done enough for survivors? And what will it take for some of the world's most powerful men accused of sexual misconduct to face consequences?
Abang Sharon arrived in Lebanon on April 24 last year, having travelled there from Cameroon. The 21-year-old had a goal in Lebanon to work and earn money so she could support her family back home. An agency organized everything for her to get to Lebanon but later on, in a video published by a migrant rights organization in early December, Sharon talks about how she was working "in a toxic family." No wages, no secure contract, no protection and always this feeling that nobody can really help her.
As we move beyond 2030, it is crucial to rethink how we measure progress and development. The current relevance of GDP [gross domestic product] as the dominant indicator of economic performance has been widely criticized for its inability to capture the full dimensions of human well-being, social equity, and environmental sustainability. Recent policy discussions and research, including the OECD's [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's] " Beyond GDP " initiatives, highlight the urgent need to develop alternative metrics.
Last month, 19 women filed a claim with the city alleging that, on May 22, sheriff's deputies ordered them to undress in front of each other, laughed at them, and filmed the proceedings with their body-worn cameras. Immediately after Mission Local first reported the allegations on Nov. 20, several members of the Board of Supervisors called for action. Criminal justice, human rights, and women's advocates rallied in front of the jail at 425 Seventh St. the following week.
Take their neighbors, classmates, and community members? Not on their watch. Moms around the country dedicated much of their year to protecting children and families in their communities from unlawful deportation. There was the group of over a dozen moms arrested while protesting outside Broadview Detention Center in Chicago. There was t he mom group who organized a "walking school bus" to get children to school safely if their parents feared being targeted by ICE.
Truth to Power is a regular series of conversations with writers about the promises and pitfalls of movements for social justice. From the roots of racial capitalism to the psychic toll of poverty, from resource wars to popular uprisings, the interviews in this column focus on how to write about the myriad causes of oppression and the organized desire for a better world.
Every week in Palo Alto, a group of women gathers outside a Tesla showroom, sporting wide-brim hats and carrying anti-billionaire signs. They call themselves the Raging Grannies: a coalition of senior women who use humor, harmony and handmade costumes to protest inequality, social injustice and the lopsided concentration of wealth in America. Every day there's something new with these big corporations, said Sherry Hagen, who goes by Granny Sherry.
As a big fan of citizen science, I have spent the past month conducting a very important experiment. While I am not quite as hardcore as the American virologist Jonas Salk, who injected the polio vaccine into himself and his family before large-scale trials, this scientific inquiry has involved some personal pain. You see, I have spent the last month trying to smile like Zohran Mamdani.
A jury has awarded $8.4 million to a former White police officer who alleged he faced discrimination and retaliation by Korean-American command staff at the La Palma Police Department. Ross Byer joined the department in May 2022 and completed his training that August with positive performance evaluations, according to court records. His performance remained satisfactory until he was reassigned that year to a different sergeant.
Our guests today are among the many Chicagoans who have shown up with courage and care over the last few months, and I am proud to have struggled alongside them. As raids expand to other cities and the Department of Homeland Security signals that Chicago may be hit even harder in the spring, these lessons feel urgent - both for our own preparation and for anyone, anywhere, who may find themselves facing what we just lived through.
"Women were turned away after traveling to see their incarcerated loved ones and barred from future visits for six months or even indefinitely - all because they were on their period," a post from the NYCLU's Instagram page reads. "This is a clear act of sex discrimination. The Department of Corrections and Community Supervision must restore these women's visitation rights and change screening procedures immediately to accommodate the basic fact that some visitors will be menstruating."
In my new research on Intuitions-at-Work Theory (IWT), I propose the problem is not that all diversity strategies are doomed to fail, but rather that business decisions involving diversity are strongly driven by intuition, and that managers have flawed intuitions about diversity -especially regarding which diversity strategies will fail and which diversity strategies will succeed. IWT, which integrates and synthesizes prior empirical findings
Photographer Janette Beckman and curator Julie Grahame have organized a one time fundraiser for the ACLU that showcases images of musicians who have recorded protest songs or are known for their activism. Forty-three photographers have donated images of 50 artists, from John Lennon to Nina Simone to Bad Bunny, and 100% of the profits will go towards the ACLU and their efforts to protect equality, freedom and rights.
Epstein's story is not really about one man's depravity. It is about a system legal, cultural, and institutional engineered to protect the powerful through silence. His crimes thrived not because they were hidden, but because the people who knew were coerced, encouraged, or more than willing to shut up. Silence was not incidental to Epstein's success. It was central to it. And in this, he was hardly unique.
Then, in 1905, the United States publicly disclosed the unratified treaties it had made with 18 California tribes. The tribes responded by building a legal and economic framework for tribal sovereignty. In 1988, the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was enacted, and small casinos sprouted on reservations in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Southern California. Similar resorts sprang up across the country, and the economic benefits have helped fuel the struggle for tribal sovereignty.
