The U.S. has taken a definitive stand against slave labor. President Barack Obama signed a law Wednesday that bars the country from importing a long list of items produced by forced or slave labor.
The “prohibition on the importation of goods made with convict labor, forced labor, or indentured labor” was embedded into a broader trade enforcement bill that Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) presented last year.
A loophole in the Tariff Act of 1930 meant that these goods were still making their way into the country because of “consumptive demand” — when goods are in short supply in the U.S.
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Anadolu Agency via Getty Images About 30 percent of children in Bangladesh are laborers, according to the International Labor Organization.
Gladyes Williamson paced the halls of Congress on Wednesday, armed with a bottle of brown water and clumps of her own hair.
She’d traveled with a group from Flint, Michigan, where high lead levels have made the water irritating to the skin and unsafe to drink since 2014. Williamson trekked 14 hours on a packed bus, with no sleep, to remind Washington of what’s happening in a poor, embattled, industrial town nearly 75 miles north of Detroit.
“Not only do we feel like the Republicans hate us, but now that the Democrats don’t care either,” Williams, 62, told The Huffington Post. “We just need something tangible to make us believe that politicians care about us. The wards in Flint haven’t seen any of this federal aid, but we do all the tax paying and all the dying.”
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
A prominent advocacy group is trying to enlist basketball fans to do something about the scourge of gun violence in America.
Everytown for Gun Safety, in collaboration with the NBA, turned to top players like Steph Curry, Chris Paul, Joakim Noah and Carmelo Anthony to participate in an ad campaign against gun violence. The players joined with survivors and victims’ families in a series of short videos directed by Spike Lee.
In one of them, Curry recalls hearing about a little child who died from gun violence at age 3, the same age as his daughter Riley.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Less than 10 percent of the world’s population will be living in extreme poverty by the end of 2015, the World Bank forecast on Sunday.
The Washington-based institution’s latest projections expect the number of people who survive on $1.90 a day to drop from 12.8 percent of the human population in 2012 to 9.6 percent this year. That means 702 million people still struggle to survive.
But that’s a stunning decline from the numbers reported over the last 25 years. According to the World Bank, 37.1 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty in 1990. In 2015, that number is estimated to drop to 9.6 percent.
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World Bank
Ending Extreme Poverty and Sharing Prosperity: A Snapshot
Thousands of California inmates who have spent years in solitary confinement will move back into the general prison population as part of a lawsuit settlement with the state.
The settlement, announced Tuesday, ends the class-action suit brought on behalf of thousands of inmates who had filled the Pelican Bay State Prison isolation wing for alleged gang affiliation. Confinement in windowless, soundproof cells remains a possible punishment for prisoners who commit crimes behind bars, but it’s no longer a tool for indefinitely segregating rival gang members.
More than 500 prisoners had spent more than a decade locked in solitary at the time the lawsuit was filed in 2012, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the groups suing the state. Seventy-eight had been in the Security Housing Unit, or SHU, for more than 20 years.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
President Barack Obama this week will propose a plan to extend overtime pay to 5 million American workers who are currently excluded under federal law, according to sources.
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The president will recommend updating overtime rules so that salaried workers who earn less than roughly $50,400 per year would be guaranteed time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours in a week. Under the current rules implemented by former President George W. Bush, salaried workers must earn less than $23,660 per year in order to be automatically eligible for overtime pay.
The president announced his intention to make overtime reforms last year, but the details of the plan have been kept secret until this week. The president is expected to discuss the proposal later this week during a visit to Wisconsin. Details of the proposal were first reported by Bloomberg.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Scientists from the University of California at Irvine may have found a way to restore the youthful flexibility of the still-developing brain. In a study on mice recently published in the journal Neuron, the researchers were able to re-activate a younger neural state in an older brain.
High school student Anya Pogharian volunteers at a hospital dialysis unit where she’s gained experience with the machines that work like kidneys and filter patients’ blood. During her time there, the 17-year-old decided to try to invent a similar machine that would cost less for her senior science project.
According to CBC News, a typical dialysis machine costs 30,000 Canadian dollars (approximately 24,000 American dollars). Anya invented one for 500 Canadian dollars (approximately 400 American dollars) making it cheap enough for a patient to buy and keep at home.
Thanks to advances in 3-D printing, it’s now possible to whip up everything from pizza to prosthetics to human organs with the push of a button.
Now researchers have created a 3-D printer that works on the atomic scale, assembling complex molecules from scratch. And they say their molecule-making machine could revolutionize the drug-development process and simplify the fabrication of solar cells and other high-tech products.
A drug discovery revolution? “We’re really excited about the immediate impacts that this will have on drug discovery,” Dr. Martin D. Burke, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and one of the researchers, says in a video released by the university.
Last week, Mott Hall Bridges Academy principal Nydia Lopez took the stage in front of her 195 students and made an announcement: a school fundraiser to send the Brooklyn middle schoolers on a trip to Harvard had not only met its $100,000 goal, but had miraculously raised more than $700,000.
That number, as of Tuesday afternoon, had jumped to $1,179,873.
“The scholars of MHBA are inspiring the entire world,” Lopez said during a recent school assembly. “People have written me letters from New Zealand, England and South Africa, telling me that they care about you.”
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Vidal Chastanet, 13, told Humans of New York’s Brandon Stanton about his principal, launching a $1 million fundraiser for his school. | Humans of New York
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
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James' World 2 