Over the years, the Bachelet family has stayed on good terms with the Matthei family. But the Bachelet campaign doesn’t mind reminding the voters who was on which side in the 1970s. Spokesman Álvaro Elizalde stresses that the campaign is about the issues–education reform and a new constitution. But he still brings up Michelle Bachelet’s record during the dictatorship. Like her father, she was also tortured.

"To pay, to not to pay?" That is the question many have been asking about student athletes. As the records for professional athlete salaries begin to soar, and as more and more reports of multimillion dollar deals being made within the NCAA every year, the question that usually arises is, “Why aren’t the college athletes seeing any of this money?” NCAA President Mark Emmert stated in the Wall Street Journal in January of 2012 that paying student athletes is “a terrible idea.”

Of the 60.6 million people who spoke a language other than English at home in 2011, almost two-thirds (37.6 million) spoke Spanish. This places the U.S. as the fifth-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world –not the second one, as it is usually said— after Mexico (117 million), Spain (47.2 million), Colombia (47 million) and Argentina (41 million). The information, taken from the American Community Survey, includes nation, states and metropolitan areas.

Their sentiments echoed the findings of a poll released last week that shows that an overwhelming majority of Californians want the state to act now to address global warming instead of waiting for the economy to improve – with the strongest support voiced by Latinos, African Americans and Asians. The Public Policy Institute of California survey found that nearly two-thirds of whites felt that way, while 88 percent of Latinos, 83 percent of blacks, and 78 percent of Asians held that view.

About 40 leaders of immigration reform advocacy organizations were arrested Thursday on Capitol Hill. The group was there as part of a protest aimed at pressuring the House GOP into passing an immigration reform bill with a pathway to citizenship. Taking a page from young undocumented immigrants, or Dreamers, nine of whom were arrested along the Arizona border last week, the veteran activists blocked traffic along a street adjacent to the Capitol while chanting a slogan popular among Dreamers: “Undocumented, unafraid!”

The ghetto birds, the cop choppers, ”the largest ... airborne law enforcement operation in the world.”  No, do not mistake these nouns and adjectives for descriptions of a regimental-sized air element of a first-world military tasked with destroying enablers and instruments of international  terror.  This litany does, however, provide many with a common slang for the Los Angeles Police Department’s presence above the labrynthine sprawl of the city it “protects and serves.”

While U.S. media heap praise on Secretary of State John Kerry for his efforts at restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, more critical still are recent developments across the region. Four factors, specifically, have proven decisive in enticing the two sides to the negotiating table. The real question now is whether an agreement can be reached before the window of opportunity closes again. Surprisingly, a new round of negotiations began Monday in Washington D.C. after a three-year hiatus. 

One might shrug off the sweeping voting restrictions approved last week in North Carolina as typical of a Southern state under Republican control. But look again: Unlike many of its neighbors, the Tar Heel State had been well down the path of progressivism for several years before the GOP shut it down during this year's legislative session. Indeed, North Carolina had broken away from its regional neighbors by expanding access to the polls, which helped increase minority-voter turnout. A strong and steady flow of newcomers to the state brought more open-minded political views to bear on local elections. 

More than 12 million people were arrested in America in 2011. Most of them were charged with a crime and many were poor, qualifying for a public defender. The American Council of Chief Defenders suggests that each public defender handle no more than 400 misdemeanors or 150 felonies per year; many carry caseloads two to three times those guidelines, and some much more than that. There are simply far, far more poor people needing lawyers than there are public lawyers to represent them. Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright, adequate counsel for poor Americans is far from guaranteed.

When Texas' Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott gloated on Twitter just hours after the Supreme Court hobbled the Voting Rights Act that "Eric Holder can no longer deny Voter ID in Texas," he had to know that the Obama administration would respond. Attorney General Holder delivered the counterpunch on Thursday, targeting Texas, the political poster child for voter suppression, in a new strategy to protect minorities under the remaining parts of the landmark law.