Spring

Facing elections in Venezuela’s new normal, opposition asks: Do we want in?

Since April, Venezuela’s opposition coalition seemed to be gaining the kind of support and momentum it was long criticized for lacking. Its calls for peaceful protests and boycotts were met by a broad, consistent turnout, and an unofficial referendum it organized in July led more than 7 million Venezuelans at home and abroad to condemn the increasingly authoritarian moves of President Nicolás Maduro’s government. The coalition was making powerful promises, like plans to set up a parallel government if President Maduro moved forward with a July 30th vote to create a Constituent Assembly.

Fallout from modern protests: naming and shaming online

When hundreds of white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend in their largest public appearance in decades, it put faces to ideologies that have become increasingly high-profile over the past year. In response to the rally – which descended into violence in clashes with counter-protesters that left 19 injured and one counter-protester, Heather Heyer, dead – various online crowdsourced campaigns have been trying to publicly shame and punish individual protesters. Some observers have long-criticized such online shaming campaigns as little more than mistake-prone mob vigilantism energized by social media.

Driven from US shores, neo-Nazi website finds no haven in Russia either

Russian critics have long worried about the propensity of the country’s communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor (RKZ), to cast an overly wide net in censoring “extremist” content on the internet. “This is one of the few times when we can feel like RKZ’s intervention is totally warranted,” says Alexey Kovalev, a blogger and media critic. Recommended: Sochi, Soviets, and czars: How much do you know about Russia?

In the heartland, a David and Goliath battle over a pipeline

On Art and Helen Tanderup’s small farm, the land is something else. Helen grew up here, in the two-story farmhouse that she and her husband got when her mother passed away. “I don’t want something like this to happen to what my grandparents built up,” says Helen.