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Women's March organizers are encouraging students, teachers and their allies to walk out of schools on March 14 to protest gun violence.

They're demanding that Congress take legislative action on gun control in the wake of last week's deadly school shooting in Florida instead of merely tweeting their thoughts and prayers.

"Students and staff have the right to teach and learn in an environment free from the worry of being gunned down in their classrooms or on their way home from school," reads the group's statement. "Parents have the right to send their kids to school in the mornings and see them home alive at the end of the day."

WASHINGTON – The fight over Texas Republican lawmakers' attempts to rewrite election laws reached a fever pitch over the Memorial Day weekend. 

In response, Abbott announced the bill will be added to a special session agenda. "Election Integrity & Bail Reform were emergency items for this legislative session. They STILL must pass," he wrote on Twitter. "Legislators will be expected to have worked out the details when they arrive at the Capitol for the special session."

Texas Democrats called for Congress to pass national legislation that would protect the right to vote. "We did our part to stop SB 7. Now we need Congress to do their part by passing HR 1 and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act," tweeted state Rep. Erin Zwiener, D-Driftwood.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says he intends to withhold paychecks to state lawmakers after House Democrats staged a walkout to block voting restrictions proposed by their Republican counterparts.

A large group of Democrats walked out of the House chamber in Austin late Sunday, so there was no quorum and that prevented a final vote on the proposal

The bill, which had appeared poised for passage, would cut back polling hours, reduce access to mail-in voting and give more authority to partisan poll watchers.

Tuesday marks the beginning of Pride Month, and LGBTQ groups say they plan on drawing attention this year to the anti-transgender bills making their way through state legislatures across the country.

GOP-backed measures targeting transgender people have picked up steam in recent months, ranging from bills banning transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports to legislation prohibiting gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.

By HRC's tally, 250 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year, including at least 35 blocking transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming care.

Members of a prestigious research unit at Google have sent a letter to the company's chief executive demanding that ousted artificial intelligence researcher Timnit Gebru be reinstated.

Gebru, who studies the ethics of AI and was one of the only Black research scientists at Google, says she was unexpectedly fired after a dispute over an academic paper and months of speaking out about the need for more women and people of color at the tech giant.

"Offering Timnit her position back at a higher level would go a long way to help re-establish trust and rebuild our team environment,"

The Democrats are a class party; it’s just that the class in question is not the one we think it is. It’s not working people, you know, middle class. It’s the professional class. It’s people with advanced degrees. They use that phrase themselves, all the time: the professional class.

What is the professional class?The advanced degrees is an important part of it. Having a college education is obviously essential to it. These are careers based on educational achievement. There’s the sort of core professions going back to the 19th century like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, but nowadays there’s many, many, many more and it’s a part of the population that’s expanded. It’s a much larger group of people now than it was 50 or 60 years ago thanks to the post-industrial economy. You know math Ph.Ds that would write calculations on Wall Street for derivative securities or like biochemists who work in pharmaceutical companies. There’s hundreds of these occupations now, thousands of them. It’s a much larger part of the population now than it used to be. But it still tends to be very prosperous people

there’s basically two hierarchies in America. One is the hierarchy of money and big business and that’s really where the Republicans are at: the one percent, the Koch brothers, that sort of thing.

Despite threats of a walkout or even schism over the issue of gay marriage, the archbishops of the Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest body of churches, managed to keep their church intact after a week of tense meetings that ended with a symbolic washing of one another’s feet.

In interviews, the American archbishop said his church would not reverse its decision to bless same-sex marriages, and the Canadian archbishop said his church would proceed with a vote this summer to consider approving same-sex marriages.

The Most Rev. Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, said at a news conference on Friday that it was necessary to impose “consequences” on the Episcopal Church for breaking with church doctrine that marriage is only between a man and a woman. He also acknowledged that the move would send a painful message to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people.

In a coastal town in Washington, climate change has a high school junior worried about the floods that keep deluging his school. A 17-year-old from Texas says global warming scares him so much he can’t even think about it.

But across the country, teens are channeling their anxieties into activism. “Fear,” says Maryland 16-year-old Madeline Graham, an organizer of a student protest planned for this week, “is a commodity we don’t have time for if we’re going to win the fight.”

Roughly 1 in 4 have participated in a walkout, attended a rally or written to a public official to express their views on global warming — remarkable levels of activism for a group that has not yet reached voting age.

SALEM — Republicans in the Oregon Senate fled the Capitol on Monday to stop Democrats’ bill to cap greenhouse gas emissions after the plan cleared a legislative budget committee earlier in the day.At Monday’s 11 a.m. Senate floor session, just one Republican showed up: Sen. Tim Knopp of Bend. Democrats waited as sergeants at arms searched Capitol offices to see if they could round up any other Republicans. But they were unable to find any, so Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, adjourned the chamber until Tuesday.

Under the state Constitution, a two-thirds majority of the Senate must be present to conduct business including voting on bills. That means Democrats, despite their supermajority, need at least two Republicans to be present. Courtney said he does not plan to ask the governor to send the state police looking for the Republicans, and Brown said without a request from Courtney she lacks the authority to do so.

“If (Senate Republicans) don’t like a bill, they need to show up and change it or show up and vote ‘no,’” Gov. Kate Brown said in a during a briefing with reporters. Instead, the senators “have chosen to take a taxpayer funded vacation … Oregonians should be outraged and I am, too.”

The battle among Texas lawmakers over a bill that would impose some of the strictest limits in the nation on voting access escalated Monday as Democrats and Republicans vowed that they would not back down over a highly charged issue that has galvanized both parties.

Despite the Democrats’ success Sunday night, Republicans control both chambers of the Legislature, and would be favored to pass a voting bill in a special session. Mr. Abbott has not said when he would reconvene the Legislature; he can do so as early as Tuesday, but may wait until late summer, when he had planned to recall lawmakers anyway to manage redistricting.

ut he said he believed the bill would ultimately pass, if not in the next special session, then in another after that. “It’s going to be heavily debated and contested,” he said. “But at the end of the day, during a special session, I think we’ll get it done.”

After killing a Republican-sponsored bill to restrict voting in the state, Democrats vowed to oppose any efforts to revive it. Republicans pledged to pass it in a special legislative session.

AUSTIN — The battle among Texas lawmakers over a bill that would impose some of the strictest limits in the nation on voting access escalated Monday as Democrats and Republicans vowed that they would not back down over a highly charged issue that has galvanized both parties.

suggested he would withhold pay from lawmakers because of their failure to pass the bill.

Democrats pulled off a dramatic, last-ditch walkout in the Texas House of Representatives on Sunday night to block one of the most restrictive voting laws in the United States from passing before a midnight deadline.

The sudden revolt torpedoed the sweeping measure known as Senate Bill 7, which would have reduced polling hours, empowered poll watchers and scaled back ways to vote in Texas, which already has some of the nation's strictest voting laws.

For Democrats, the victory may be fleeting: Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who had declared new voting laws in Texas a priority, quickly announced that he would order lawmakers back to the state Capitol for a special session. He did not, however, say when that would happen.

American society is redrawing cultural norms and protections for citizens’ rights. It shouldn’t be a shock that sports is the most visible battleground.

But as we dream of a return to normalcy, what will we now expect from the games we love? A return to the mythical notion that sports should operate at arm’s length remove from the important issues of the day?

Then he zeroed in. We both did. We agreed that sports have become society’s prime cultural battleground for every hot-button social and political issue. No matter the subject — race, religion, sexuality, patriotism, the role of the police — the sports world is more powerful than ever as a venue for the often harsh hashing out of opposing views.

Nearly three dozen former employees from Facebook’s early days on Wednesday blasted Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg’s decision not to act against incendiary posts by U.S. President Donald Trump as “cowardly” and a “betrayal” of company ideals.

The open letter, initially reported by the New York Times, deepened a crisis facing Facebook’s leadership team, who had to defend their decision at a tense all-hands meeting the day prior following an employee walkout over the issue.

The former employees, including a staffer who opened Facebook’s office in Washington, implored Zuckerberg to implement checks on speech by political leaders as it does for other users, including fact-checks and labels on harmful posts.

t feels like a gold rush,” says Timnit Gebru. “In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that.”

something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power.

As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images

hree 30-something labor activists were brought in by new UAW President Shawn Fain to remake the union into a more independent, media savvy and creative challenger to car companies.

They included a communications specialist who helped craft campaigns for Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York labor attorney who once wrote on progressive labor issues and a former reporter who later would help win major concessions from the New York Times for the NewsGuild of New York.  

The result was a sharper and more bitter collective-bargaining battle with Detroit—and one of the biggest wins in decades.