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In 1999, Anthony, a 13-year-old boy who weighed 350 pounds, told his four-year-old cousin to expose herself. Anthony, now 24, swears he did not touch her. Nonetheless, her father pressed charges and Anthony was found delinquent for assault with intent to commit sexual abuse, sentenced to sex offende

Amid all the alleged threats to the world's reigning superpower, one rival is quietly, forcefully emerging: China. And the U.S. is closely scrutinizing China's intentions. On August 13, a Pentagon study expressed concern that China is expanding its military forces in ways that "could deny the abilit

Not so long ago, in a typical conniption fit, Glenn Beck blubbered to his TV audience about the loss of America's greatness. No one faklempts like Beck, and on this October evening he was very moist. He was mourning the America best represented, he thought, by several 1970s network TV ads, including

The triumph of purist ideology over compassion and science means suffering and death for organic farm animals across America. The week-old dairy calf, gangly and still, lay on a barn floor, her long-lashed eyes rolled back to expose the blue-white rim. The next morning, when I went to help my neighb

Drive across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, and you'll enter the most dangerous city in the world: Ciudad Juárez, where more than 6,000 people have been murdered since 2008, including more than 1,700 this year. Once a fast-growing laboratory for free-trade initiatives, Juárez now produces dru

"Will you join me in lowering our impact?" That was the subject line on a recent e-mail I sent out to family, friends, column readers and radio listeners asking them to join me for a week in trying to reduce our individual environmental footprint. Inspired by Colin Beaven's prophetic book "No Impact

"The money from drugs permeates many facets of economic life in Mexico—most estimates put the drug business at $50 billion per year," says Molly Molloy, who maintains an influential listserv dedicated to tracking violence in Juárez, Mexico. "What will replace it? What can replace the human desire

For the millions of Americans who do not read In These Times, labor unions have probably been relegated to the realm of the anachronistic, if not downright unpatriotic. For the much smaller number of Americans who do read In These Times, writing about the virtues of labor unions probably falls into

My brother is a high school teacher. He is not famous, and certainly not rich. After he leaves this earth, autographed photos of him will not hang in bars or restaurants; there will be no beautifully lit, high contrast black-and-white posters of him á la James Dean. But because so many of his stude

With America's public schools struggling to survive slashed budgets and unequal funding, school reform is back on the national agenda--but will the new model of market-based "reform" promote greater educational quality? Already, schools in low-income areas see abysmally low achievement levels. In ma

Teachers today feel ever more under the gun, as state fiscal crises and resentment of public servants dominate the debate over educational reform. In the world of No Child Left Behind, where "accountability" has become the new rallying cry for reformers, we are witnessing a real moment of crisis for

When President Barack Obama announced that his choice for Secretary of Education was Arne Duncan, chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, he extolled his basketball buddy as a pragmatic, successful school reformer. "He's not beholden to any one ideology," Obama said, adding that Duncan would

Out of all the famous quotations, few better describe this eerily familiar time than those attributed to George Santayana and Yogi Berra. The former, a philosopher, warned that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The latter, a baseball player, stumbled into prophecy by d

Celebrity chef Alice Waters is the world's most famous advocate of growing and eating local, organic food. In February 2010, Waters' Chez Panisse Foundation chose as its new executive director "green socialite" and liberal political activist Francesca Vietor. But Vietor's hiring created a conflict o

Right-wing media catapulted the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) into national infamy this summer with an exaggerated emphasis on a 2008 incident in which two members of the group, one with a nightstick, were videotaped standing by the door of a poll site in a predominantly black precinct in Philadelp