jumbo hotdog

Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ignore their boss’s calls, messages, and emails after their shift ends, in the most significant overhaul of Mexican labor law in a generation.

In its current state, the amendment still does not guarantee 2 days of rest (only one). Notably, it increases maximum possible overtime hours from 9 (paid double) to a whopping 12 (paid double) plus 4 (paid triple). With the workweek now 8 hours shorter, employers are incentivized to make use of these 7 additional overtime hours to compensate.

Additionally, the amendment allows an employment contract to define a "flexible" workday. This would allow, for example, a weekly schedule of three workdays lasting 12 hours each (the maximum). Previously, the maximum was 11 hours (8 ordinary, 3 overtime). This could also allow for schedules where certain time windows or activities are excluded from the work day, and thus from the employer's legal responsibilities.

Back in 2025, the CPM had already criticized the reform for being the result of a "dialogue" between all involved parties - excluding workers. In February, unions had already made the above criticisms, and the National Front for 40 Hours had denounced the government's last-minute cancelation of an audience, deceptive claims about supposed consensus, and general rejection of any dialogue.

Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ignore their boss’s calls, messages, and emails after their shift ends, in the most significant overhaul of Mexican labor law in a generation.

Mexico amends its constitution to cut the maximum workweek from 48 to 40 hours by 2030 and gives 13.5 million workers the legal right to ignore their boss’s calls, messages, and emails after their shift ends, in the most significant overhaul of Mexican labor law in a generation.

Hospitality, Rape and Consent in Vampire Popular Culture: Letting the Wrong One In (Palgrave Gothic), edited by David Baker, Stephanie Green and Agnieszka Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska, softcover edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020 (2017). Cover image by Máryas Nágy/EyeEm/Getty Images, info: palgrave.com.

This unique study explores the vampire as host and guest, captor and hostage: a perfect lover and force of seductive predation. From Dracula and Carmilla, to True Blood and The Originals, the figure of the vampire embodies taboos and desires about hospitality, rape and consent. The first section welcomes the reader into ominous spaces of home, examining the vampire through concepts of hospitality and power, the metaphor of threshold, and the blurred boundaries between visitation, invasion and confinement. Section two reflects upon the historical development of vampire narratives and the monster as oppressed, alienated Other. Section three discusses cultural anxieties of youth, (im)maturity, childhood agency, abuse and the age of consent. The final section addresses vampire as intimate partner, mapping boundaries between invitation, passion and coercion. With its fresh insight into vampire genre, this book will appeal to academics, students and general public alike.

Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capitalism

Tony Norfield, The City

For revolution we need revolutionaries, but revolutionary literature can wait, for only when revolutionaries start writing can there be revolutionary literature. So to my mind it is revolution which plays a big part in literature. The literature of a revolutionary period is different from that of ordinary times for, in a revolution, literature changes too. But only great revolutions can effect this change, not small ones which do not count as revolutions.

In 1970, Sri Lanka severed diplomatic relations with Israel under pressure from Arab states. Yet about a year after the outbreak of Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war, an Israeli Interests Section was opened in 1984 at the U.S. Embassy in Colombo.

Files from Israel’s Foreign Ministry from the mid-1980s concerning relations with Sri Lanka – recently partially opened to the public in the Israel State Archives – confirm information that had surfaced in the press over the years and reveal new details.

According to a review prepared on December 11, 1987, by Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Sri Lanka initially agreed to the establishment of the Interests Section in 1984 because it wanted Israel to “assist in solving the Tamil terrorism problem.” By 1988, Israel had sold the country military equipment worth $30 million.

In a cable sent on December 8, 1985, the director of the Foreign Ministry’s Asia Department wrote that Israel had sold Sri Lanka six Dvora-class fast patrol boats for $10 million. In another cable dated June 20, 1986, the head of the Israeli Interests Section in Colombo, Haim Divon, noted that Israel had also sold Mini-Uzi submachine guns “for considerable sums.” In a cable dated June 15, 1987, Divon reported that Israel had also sold Sri Lanka electronic fences, communications equipment, machine guns, and ammunition.

Israel trained the personal bodyguards of President Junius Richard Jayewardene. In a cable sent on Aug. 18, 1986, Divon wrote: “Last week we conducted a shooting course for about 30 members of the president’s security unit.” He added that the training lasted four days and received praise.

17th March 2026

18 senators voted in favor of Sen. Cayetano's motion to return the articles of impeachment to the House of Representatives, at lima lang ang bumoto laban dito! The Senate has voted overwhelmingly in favor of an unconstitutional motion. Sa diwang ito, higit na kinakailangan paingayin ang pagkilos bukas! June 11 Impeachment Mob 2:00PM Film Center, March to Senate Litisin, Panagutin si Sara Duterte!

2:30 PM - Assembly at Manila Film Center

The reason I haven't been posting much lately is 'cause I've been busy working on the storyboards for the new Fantasy High Webtoon!

I defo wanna talk in more detail about what the whole process has been like when I get the time, but for now I just need to holler for a sec 'cause the first few chapters have just been released and I'm rlly excited for folks to see the whole team's hard work!! Gogogo! 💖

"On a freezing cold Wednesday afternoon in eastern Kentucky, Taysha DeVaughan joined a small gathering at the foot of a reclaimed strip mine to celebrate a homecoming. “It’s a return of an ancestor,” DeVaughan said. “It’s a return of a relative.”

That relative was the land they stood on, part of a tract slated for a federal penitentiary that many in the crowd consider another injustice in a region riddled with them. The mine shut down years ago, but the site, near the town of Roxana, still bears the scars of extraction.

DeVaughan, an enrolled member of the Comanche Nation, joined some two dozen people on January 22 to celebrate the Appalachian Rekindling Project buying 63 acres within the prison’s footprint.

“What we’re here to do is to protect her and to give her a voice,” DeVaughan said. “She’s been through mountaintop removal. She’s been blown up, she’s been scraped up, she’s been hurt.”

The Appalachian Rekindling Project, which she helped found last year, wants to rewild the site with bison and native flora and fauna, open it to intertribal gatherings, and, it hopes, stop the prison.

The environmental justice organization worked with a coalition of local nonprofits, including Build Community Not Prisons and the Institute to End Mass Incarceration, to raise $160,000 to buy the plot from a family who owned the land generationally.

Retired truck driver Wayne Whitaker, who owns neighboring land and had considered purchasing it as a hunting ground, told Grist he was supportive. “There’s nothing positive we’ll get out of this prison,” he said.

The penitentiary has been a gleam in the eye of state and local officials and the Bureau of Prisons since 2006. It has always sparked sharp divisions in Roxana and beyond and was killed in 2019 after a series of lawsuits, only to be quietly resurrected in 2022. Last fall, the bureau took the final step in its approval process, clearing the way to begin buying land...

In his book Coal, Cages, Crisis, Schept noted that mine sites are considered ideal locations for prisons or a dumping ground for waste, rather than places of ecological value, as some biologists have argued. The Roxana site has been reclaimed, meaning re-vegetated with a forest that now shelters a number of rare species, including endangered bats.

Opponents argue that a prison will bring more environmental problems than jobs. Letcher County was 1 of 13 counties ravaged by catastrophic flooding in 2022, a situation exacerbated by damage strip mining caused to local watersheds. The prison slated for Roxana will exacerbate the problem.

The Bureau of Prisons estimates it will damage 6,290 feet of streams and about 2 acres of wetlands. (The agency has promised to compensate the state.)

DeVaughan said the purchase also is a step toward rectifying the dispossession that began with the forced removal and genocide of Indigenous peoples. The Cherokee, Shawnee, and Yuchi made their homes in the area before, during, and after colonization, and their thriving nations raised crops, ran businesses, and hunted bison that once roamed Appalachia.

In all the time since, coal, timber, gas, and landholding companies have at times owned almost half of the land in 80 counties stretching from West Virginia to Alabama. Several prisons sprang from deals made with coal companies, something many locals consider the continuation of this status quo.

Changing that dynamic is a priority for the Appalachian Rekindling Project, which hoped to buy more land to protect it from extractive industries and return its stewardship to Indigenous and local communities. DeVaughn said Indigenous peoples throughout the region will be welcome to use the land as a gathering place...

DeVaughan sees its work establishing a new vision of economic transition for coalfields, one that relies less on “dollars and numbers” and more on “healing and restoration” of the land and the Indigenous and other communities that live there.

She is working with some personal connections in the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations to acquire a herd of bison and plans to work with local volunteers, scientists, and students to inventory the site’s flora and fauna."