On Tuesday, four undocumented immigrants revealed their status in front of Maricopa County Courthouse in Phoenix, and were promptly arrested, says In These Times. Inside the courthouse, county sheriff Joe Arpaio, an infamous supporter of Arizona’s controversial immigration law, SB 1070, faced charges of discrimination against Latino communities. The arrested activists released a statement condemning federal and state immigration laws, and the culture of fear they produced, beginning with “We are no longer afraid.” The action kicks off a six-week No Papers, No Fear bus tour from Arizona to the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. Along the way, activists hope to persuade other immigrants to reveal their status, and to raise awareness about immigration issues.

Twenty-four year old Natally Cruz was one of the four activists to be arrested on Tuesday. Read her inspiring blog post on why she decided to risk deportation.  

Self-determination and social equality have never been stronger in Latin America. So why has the U.S. has been quietly building up its military presence in heart of the continent?

Graphic: the gorgeous new Internet Map charts the 350,000 largest websites, their country of origin, and their traffic.

Keith Ellison and Michelle Bachman are on opposite political poles. But their side-by-side Minnesota congressional districts aren’t all that different.

Extrajudicial killing? State surveillance? A government obsession with social order? Sound like fascism? Maybe, but maybe Batman as well.  

Video: Rudyard Kipling on truth in writing.

Why we’re heading straight for a food crisis, with or without a new farm bill.

Women are outperforming men on a number of fronts. Where have all the male role models gone?

What Occupy means for street art, and why we should remember its history.

Why there’s (finally) reason for hope in Caribbean drug politics. 

Image by Bansby, licensed under Creative Commons.

Environmentalism has a very different meaning for indigenous farmers in Guatemala. Last year, hundreds of Maya Q’eqchi families were evicted from their farms in Guatemala’s Polochic Valley to make way for corn fields, says Treehugger’s Brian Merchant. But instead of hungry people, that corn is destined to feed the growing demand for ethanol and other biofuels, especially in Europe. Evictions like this one have increased dramatically since the EU announced a plan to get 10 percent of its transportation energy from biofuels, reports John Vidal of The Guardian. The farmers’ struggle to reclaim land continues, but the affair raises deeper questions about the direction we’re taking toward sustainability, says Vidal.  

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Outsourcing journalism? Why a Filipino freelancer may be behind your local news.

Forget Romney—why aren’t more people talking about John Roberts’ flip-flop on health care?

The people Obamacare won’t cover, and why Bobby Jindal isn’t helping. 

Why community-owned solar gardens solve like 10 problems at once.

That time Indiana tried to legally change Pi to 3.2.

The surprising community potential of vacant lots.

Video: a flash mob in Spain goes philharmonic (and check out the comments!).

What a local grain economy would look like, and why we need it.

Election graphic: why a person from Wyoming is three times as powerful as a person from California. And why this probably isn’t gonna change.  

The Midwestern heat wave is bad, but is it global warming?

Cyclists in Delaware score big on project funding, but Congress lags behind.

Video: some gorgeous and diverse Algerian music, in honor of 50 years of independence.  

Islamophobia in the U.S. has ignited controversy recently, but its roots go deeper than you might think. Washington has a long history of suspicion toward Islam, especially political Islam, says Edward E. Curtis IV in Religion & Politics. That suspicion reached a new level in the 1960s, when COINTELPRO mobilized the FBI against groups like the Nation of Islam that sought to connect the civil rights struggle to a larger Muslim identity. The pervasive fear of Arab Islamism is much more recent, and demonstrates just how absent Muslims remain from the public arena. Recognizing this, says Curtis, means recognizing that Islam—even political Islam—is a lot less foreign to the U.S. than many people think.

Image by Jack Liefer, licensed under Creative Commons. Editor’s note: this image is of a Guatemalan farm, though not in the Polochic Valley.