It was Alabama that brought the country the Voting Rights Act (VRA) because of its brutality against black citizens in places like Selma. “The Voting Rights Act is Alabama’s gift to our country,” the civil-rights lawyer Debo Adegbile once said. And it was a county in Alabama–Shelby County–that brought the 2013 challenge that gutted the VRA. As a result of that ruling, those states with the worst histories of voting discrimination, including Alabama, no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government. After the Shelby County decision, Alabama’s strict voter ID law, passed by the GOP legislature in 2011, was…

La publication par épisode de la nouvelle « Samachna » est terminée. Pourquoi avoir choisit "d’écrire "Samachna ? Parce que tout simplement je suis une femme et j’imagine l’ampleur du défi posé aux femmes Afghanes ! Ce n’est pas mince du tout. De pouvoir, sortir, apprendre, s’aventurer à risquer sa vie à chaque sortie, une fois c’est l’occupant étranger, une autre fois les gaffes du régime en place, d’autre fois la vindicte populaire sans…

ina’s announcement that it will launch a national carbon-trading market in 2017 and give $3 billion toCH developing countries to help them fight climate change underscores the sea change that six years have wrought for the world’s biggest source of carbon pollution. It also means that China, nominally a communist country, is using a capitalist approach to solve a devilish environmental problem, while the United States, the second-largest emitter, is stuck with top-down regulations and government mandates to try to achieve the same goal. Presidents Barack Obama of the United States and Xi Jinping of China announced the new measures at a…

The growing list of the ways in which climate change is reshaping life on Earth has an unusual new addition: shorter bee tongues. Over the past 40 years, warmer, drier weather has reduced flower populations in some regions of the Rocky Mountains in North America, forcing bees to work harder to find nectar. At the same time, bee tongues in those regions have got shorter, according to a study published in Science[1]. The change to the bees’ anatomy probably arose because longer-tongued bees tend to be picky eaters, dining mainly on nectar from deep flowers, says lead author Nicole Miller-Struttmann, an…

After more than one month of travels, I come back to you with thousands of faces, tears, smiles, and stories. I come back dragging behind me heavier luggage filled with old and new wounds, joys, and deep human connections from remote corners of the world that at first glance seem like foreign places, until we dig a bit deeper beneath the surface. As I open my diary, my eyes fall on the now drying heather flowers one of my new Irish friends handed me as a token of friendship and remembrance of the countryside, the wilderness, the small towns, and…