Despite steady gains in hiring, a falling unemployment rate and other signs of an improving economy, take-home pay for many American workers has effectively fallen since the economic recovery began in 2009, according to a new study by an advocacy group that is to be released on Thursday.
Author: WHES
The surging ranks of America’s ultrapoor
By one dismal measure, America is joining the likes of Third World countries.
The number of U.S. residents who are struggling to survive on just $2 a day has more than doubled since 1996, placing 1.5 million households and 3 million children in this desperate economic situation. That’s according to “$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America,” a book from publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt that will be released on Sept. 1.
As tragedies shock Europe, a bigger refugee crisis looms in the Middle East
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The Pacific Coast Farm-Worker Rebellion: From Baja California to Washington state, indigenous farm workers are standing up for their rights
A burned-out concrete blockhouse—the former police station—squats on one side of the only divided street in Vicente Guerrero, half a mile from Baja California’s transpeninsular highway. Just across the street lies the barrio of Nuevo (New) San Juan Copala, one of the first settlements of migrant farm workers here in the San Quintín Valley, named after their hometown in Oaxaca.
Frank E. Petersen, first black general in the Marines, dies at 83
Frank E. Petersen Jr., who suffered bruising racial indignities as a military enlistee in the 1950s and was even arrested at an officers’ club on suspicion of impersonating a lieutenant, but who endured to become the first black aviator and the first black general in the Marine Corps, died on Tuesday at his home in Stevensville, Md., near Annapolis. He was 83.
Amelia Boynton Robinson, activist beaten on Selma bridge, dies at 104
Amelia Boynton Robinson, who led voting drives and ran for Congress as a civil rights activist in Alabama, and whose severe beating by police during the 1965 “Bloody Sunday” confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., shocked the nation, died Aug. 26 at a hospital in Montgomery, Ala. She was 104.
Guatemala’s corruption investigations make swift strides
GUATEMALA CITY — Just about every weekend for months, Jorge Castiglione, a 70-year-old engineer with a thinning ponytail, has gone to the Plaza de la Constitución here to support what has become a ritual in this nation: weekly protests calling for the resignation of the president and an end to political impunity.
George M. Houser, organizer of an early Freedom Ride, dies at 99
George M. Houser, a white Methodist minister who helped lead an interracial bus trip across the segregated South in 1947, an act of nonviolent resistance that years later inspired the better known Freedom Rides that stirred the civil rights movement, died Aug. 19 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 99.
Expanding web of scandal in Brazil threatens further upheaval
RIO DE JANEIRO — The charges are nothing less than sweeping: Prosecutors say that Eduardo Cunha, the speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress, took as much as $40 million in bribes for himself and his allies, plundering Petrobras, the government-controlled oil company, while laundering money through an evangelical megachurch.
Louis Stokes, Congressman from Ohio and champion of the poor, dies at 90
Louis Stokes, who as the first African-American congressman from Ohio helped focus federal attention on the nation’s poor and led a special House investigation into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., died on Tuesday at his home in a Cleveland suburb. He was 90.
