El Chapo's trial continues this week, brimming with sordid tales of kingpins and cartels. But what the media spectacle can't justify is a failing “war on drugs” that has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
More than three decades since dictator Alfredo Stroessner was forced from office, his Partido Colorado still runs Paraguay. Its leader Horacio Cartes fuses mafia and political power — and is stepping up his authoritarian control.
The new season of Noah Hawley’s Fargo moves the action to 1950 Kansas City. It looks at Midwestern history and culture with raucous humor, wild plotting, and a rogues' gallery of American oddballs in the best tradition of Mark Twain.
Joe Biden’s string of primary victories highlights a central paradox of his career: he has secured the loyalty of African American voters while working nonstop to let them down.
Body cameras and more training aren't enough. We need to divert funding for police into funding for human needs.
Trump’s First Step Act has been lauded by everyone from criminal justice reform organizations to Van Jones as an important blow against the carceral state. It’s not — and it does far more harm for the incarcerated than good.
When politicians threaten police power, police often take matters into their own hands, frequently causing social chaos by refusing to perform basic duties. That’s likely to occur in Chicago. In fact, it might be happening already.
How an unholy alliance between American intelligence, Cuban exiles, and organized crime tried to bring about counter-revolution in Cuba.
Chicago is attempting to model resistance to Donald Trump’s looming authoritarian military occupation of its streets.
Shifting police budgets to social programs was the key demand after the George Floyd protests. Progressives in Richmond, California, have actually done it. Two organizers explain how.
Political elites built the carceral state — and not just white ones.
Legalization has wrested control of sports betting from organized crime. But with few federal regulations in place and almost no public education on the newly sanctioned activity, many working-class people are now falling prey to another group of predators.
During the Cold War, the US trained cops in more than fifty countries to suppress dissent. This “police professionalization” helped produce death squads in countries like El Salvador and mass incarceration in the United States.
In the aftermath of the El Paso shooting, some are pushing to expand the FBI's powers. That's a huge mistake: a domestic terrorism law would almost certainly be used to silence left-wing dissent.
In a staggering display of cruelty, South African police laid siege to an illegal gold mine near Johannesburg, leaving at least 78 workers dead by mid-January. Informal miners are the shadow of an exploitative mining industry — one inextricable from apartheid.
The results of last night’s Chicago mayor election were stunning: former Chicago Teachers Union organizer Brandon Johnson advanced to an April runoff against neoliberal architect Paul Vallas — pitting working-class power against austerity.
A bill pushed by Britain's Tory government will pave the way for security and law enforcement agents to commit crimes with no risk of being prosecuted. The move follows revelations of appalling police abuses against environmental, anti-racist, and trade union activists — yet Keir Starmer's Labour Party has abstained rather than opposed the bill.
The first installment of reporting based on the Pentagon Papers was published half a century ago today in the New York Times. Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg risked life imprisonment to expose the lies and brutality that the US war on Vietnam was based on.
Facing a close race in New York’s gubernatorial contest, Democrats are doubling down on elite feminism. But at a time when many voters feel beleaguered by crime and inflation, you-go-girl pep rallies won’t stem the rightward trend.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has been rightly criticized for letting the New York Police Department run wild with brutality in the recent racial justice protests. But he's not the only “progressive” in New York bowing to the boys in blue — the city council, supposedly to de Blasio’s left, has long been under the NYPD’s thumb, too.