According to a recent Associated Press analysis of government data, 53.6 of bachelor’s degree-holders under the age of 25 are unemployed or underemployed. News flash: The job market is tough for everyone. It has been since before we entered college. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate in 2000 was at a 30-year low at 4 percent. We are now hovering around 8 percent, and that’s pretty positive. 

Willard Mitt Romney has emerged as the most winsome debutante of this season’s corporate cotillion, a quadrennial bash sponsored by Wall Street tycoons, right-wing entrepreneurs, K Street lobbyists, golfers, and industrial polluters. Every four years since 1928, the big bucks boys of amalgamated power rally around some beau of the ball who agrees to insist that business acumen is the paramount qualification for election to the office of president.  

Connecticut is now poised to become only the ninth state -- tenth if Washington, D.C. is counted -- to enact election-day registration, otherwise known as EDR. Bucking a national campaign toward greater restrictions, the move is expected to enhance access to the polls for first-time voters. “We want to take Connecticut in a different direction,” says Secretary of State Denise Merrill, who applauds her state’s action as a vivid contrast to the flurry of legislative activity in states across the country seeking to impose additional barriers on registration or voting. 

The extensive media coverage of Afghan women over the past few years has brought devastating stories: Gulnaz, the woman who was raped, impregnated and imprisoned for it; Sahar Gul, the young bride tortured by her husband and in-laws for refusing to become a prostitute; and the famous case of Bibi Aisha, whose husband cut off her nose. These reports, although horrifying, are a sign of mobilization -- an indication that Afghan women may finally get some justice.

The sudden death of Carlos Fuentes (1928 – 2012), Mexican novelist, social critic and man of letters, this week at the age of 83, has cast a shadow over the nation just weeks before voters here will go to the polls to elect new leaders, including the president, in national elections. Often overlooked is the fact that Carlos Fuentes played a key role in Mexico’s transition from a one-party state to a democratic one. Perhaps more than any other single Mexican, Fuentes worked to lay the intellectual foundation for Mexico becoming a functioning democracy. 

During times of economic crisis, immigrants are often the scapegoats of all problems, from crime to unemployment. Far-right parties, in particular, make attacking immigrants the core of their programs. None more so than the Greek Golden Dawn, an unabashed neo-Nazi party, which even goes so far as to enforce its election slogan “Let’s rid this country from the filth” by attacking immigrants in the streets. Anti-immigrant sentiments are rampant throughout Europe, and they are not only reserved for the far right.
 

On Sunday, May 13, Mexican police found 49 mutilated bodies, believed by some to be migrants, on a road that connects the industrial city of Monterrey with the United States border. The corpses had their hands, heads, and feet chopped off, making them difficult to identify. Drug cartels have increasingly used the public display of corpses as warning to other cartels or criminal organizations. 

San Francisco civil rights advocates who are concerned about what they call domestic spying on the city’s Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim and South Asian (AMEMSA) communities are celebrating new legislation signed into law on May 9 by Mayor Ed Lee. The S.F. Civil Rights Ordinance requires S.F. Police Department officers working with the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to be bound by local and state laws strictly governing intelligence gathering of First Amendment-protected activities like religious worship.
 

In a few weeks, Egypt will elect a president for the first time since a popular uprising that toppled a three-decade-old authoritarian regime under Hosni Mubarak. Violence is engulfing the country, claiming lives and spreading fear. Egypt’s Islamist forces, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood and their more conservative Salafist peers, are preparing for what seems to be an imminent clash, one that ostensibly takes center stage in the presidential election and will decide the fate of the secular government. 

Flirting—the penultimate romance language—is an endangered concept in 21^st-century America.  Gone are the face-to-face conversations, where exposure to body language and tone of voice permit our pheromones to chemically determine compatibility.  “People just aren’t willing to engage in public. It’s so difficult to get someone to make eye contact…” claims Jane, a 20-something New Yorker.