President Donald Trump has announced that the United States is withdrawing from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, citing European allies’ refusal to support the war against Iran as the breaking point in what he called [...]
The post Trump Announces U.S. Exit from NATO After ‘European Cowards’ Refuse to Join War Against Iran appeared first on The People's Voice.
This article was originally published by Truthout on Aug. 17, 2026. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.
If education is indeed the great vehicle of social and economic mobility, then higher education is no longer delivering the promise of the “American dream.” In fact, this “dream” has become a fiscal nightmare. Colleges and universities saw 9,000 job cuts and buyouts in 2025, and several college closures, mergers, and looming budget crises have already been announced in 2026. Portland State University is one of the most recent casualties, with a projected deficit of $35 million.
How did we get here?
Universities have been operating like corporations for quite some time now. Business terminologies — like return on investment (ROI), efficiency, strategic alignment, move the needle, transparency, buy-in, revenue generating, burnout, bottom line, deliverable, best practices, and others — have been normalized in strategic plans and administrative reports.
The boards of trustees and presidents running these academic corporations/factories have been boldly claiming that education is business. And just as businesses fail due to strategic missteps, poor financial decisions, and various forms of mismanagement, this “business” called higher ed is on the brink of a great collapse. This collapse has not happened overnight. It certainly did not start with the COVID-19 pandemic. It certainly did not start with blocking international students from attending U.S. universities. It certainly did not start with Donald Trump and the resurgence of McCarthyism, although the various draconian attacks on higher ed under his presidency have exacerbated the collapse.
Decades of mismanagement, fiduciary irresponsibility, a lack of shared governance and accountability, and divestment are responsible for a plethora of failures. Irrespective of these failures, university presidents and boards have been transparent about their singular mindset (at least in their visible actions). To them, growth is essential, but such growth can only take place by cutting various services and programs that are no longer deemed “essential.” Faculty and staff at many institutions have raised warning flags, insisting that universities cannot cut their way to growth. Such illusory growth will weaken programs and prevent students from truly being educated. Such short-term growth will ultimately threaten the long-term foundation of higher ed and lead to the collapse of one of the biggest arenas of 21st-century thought: the university.
There are also other reasons for this collapse. For decades, universities have overspent on real estate, building fancy residence halls, offering attractive dining services, and raising tuition for students. All of this “added value” has been accompanied by cuts to essential student services (particularly those serving the most marginalized students) and insufficient compensation for overworked faculty and staff. Recent reports by the American Association of University Professors have found that faculty salaries still have not recovered from the decreases they saw during the early COVID-19 pandemic.
While faculty salaries have declined, large investments in athletics, online courses with low completion rates, and other designer programs have drained operational costs and endowments. Decades of reduced investment in the well-being of faculty have led to widespread burnout, watered down the system of tenure and shared governance, and led to the rise of the most exploited class in higher ed: the gig hustlers called “adjuncts.” This system, which Adrianna Kezar calls The Gig Academy, has created serious inequity and contributed long-term damage to faculty morale.
The infrastructure of higher ed has been further damaged by administrative bloat, with institutions hiring consultants — like enrollment management companies — that demand hefty price tags, all while cutting essential staff and overworking the ones that remain. In 2023, Forbes reported on this “skyrocketing” bloat and warned that such exponential growth in non-instructional staff in higher ed will drive up the cost of tuition and push vulnerable institutions to the brink of financial crisis. Meanwhile, due to staff cuts, overworked and underpaid faculty and staff are being asked to meet the demands of students who are increasingly coming to them underprepared and with various issues of mental health, food insecurity, homelessness, and learning styles and disabilities requiring multiple accommodations.
But unlike corporations, there is no government backing to bail universities out of their millions of dollars in structural deficits. They are simply closing or merging, destroying the lives of faculty and staff at various ranks and causing serious educational derailments for their students. The age of “the great resignation” that we witnessed during the pandemic has been replaced by “the age of massive layoffs” in higher ed. In my own state of Oregon, sweeping academic restructuring is underway, with 36 faculty layoffs and the closure of the award-winning and nationally recognized University Studies, a general education interdisciplinary program.
Let’s face it: The greatest danger facing higher education is not the “demographic cliff” but the loss of its fundamental mission to educate students. This shift has been accompanied by the loss of public trust in higher ed to serve the public good. The greatest danger facing higher education is not in its ability or inability to provide students with “job-related skills and training,” but the increasing and crushing debt, akin to a mortgage, that students and their families will be struggling to pay for decades.
No university education should cost over $60,000 per year to deliver just an undergraduate degree, which only a handful can truly afford. And these days, some universities are charging over $90,000 per year. There is no justifiable ROI for this kind of exorbitant cost. Yet, most of us who have been in higher ed for a while now know well that the millions of dollars of structural deficits that almost every university is currently facing did not just accumulate overnight. They are a result of shifting priorities.
Universities are no longer mission-driven to create critical, thoughtful, responsible, and well-rounded citizenry to participate in democracy and serve the public good. Instead, higher ed has traded its long-term intellectual benefits for short-term market and profit-driven (sometimes predatory) programs, with the sole and narrow purpose of training a generation of students for the workforce. This focus on job training, under the umbrella of “professionalism,” may or may not even succeed given the volatility of job markets in the age of artificial intelligence. Yet the disciplines that will be necessary to combat AI, like the humanities, are routinely being devalued.
While university administrators are speculating like gamblers to gauge which revenue-generating “programs” will ultimately survive, they are reducing, cutting, or hamstringing the disciplines in the arts, humanities, and sciences that have a long and storied tradition of cultivating “critical thinking.” Yet this strategy conflicts with studies that show the liberal arts, particularly the humanities, are valuable in terms of long-term employment prospects. According to the Mellon Foundation report “Humanities Graduates Can Find a Great Job. It’s Time to Make This Fact Known”:
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports that, at latest count, 96.3 percent of terminal humanities bachelor’s degree holders between the ages of 23 and 32 were fully employed, a share that is on par with that for degree holders in the same age range across all fields. Further, the earnings of terminal bachelor’s degree holders in the humanities are comparable to those of their counterparts in the behavioral/social sciences and the life sciences, while the job satisfaction levels among humanities graduates are in line with those of degree holders in all fields.
This and other reports emphasize that students need to learn and practice deep critical thinking, problem-solving, and ethical reasoning as basic skills to enter and succeed in the job market.
In response to the closure of Hampshire College, Ken Burns, one of the school’s most celebrated alumni, hit the nail on its head: “The greatest danger that faces higher education,” Burns said, “is this transactional tendency that everything is about an exchange that ultimately is economic.” What is lost in this game is the mission that education should be “transformational.”
As bell hooks wrote in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, “The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.” These days, in the age of fascism and corporatization, any radical space is a threat, and every effort is being made to destroy those threats. Federal policies target disciplines that challenge the status quo or question power structures, like sociology, pushing for them to be eliminated from the curriculum altogether.
This transformation was underway long before the current right-wing attacks on higher education, as universities slowly eroded critical programs through the use of the terminology of “academic prioritization.” Recently, “academic prioritization” has been replaced by new terminologies of “long-term sustainability,” “strategic growth potential,” “indoctrination,” and “demand programs.”
Irrespective of these terms, the end goal is to reduce and eliminate programs, mostly in the humanities, that have created transformational spaces for generations of students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds, those who are economically disadvantaged, and first-generation students. Colleges and universities around the country have eliminated humanities majors in art, music, theater, philosophy, history, religious studies, global languages, gender and sexuality studies, and ethnic studies, citing decreased enrollments.
In April, the University of Montana eliminated its master’s degree program in English, focused on Literature and Ecocriticism, raising serious concerns about the university’s identity. “English is such a fundamental core subject within the humanities, and it’s almost like the heart of the humanities is being cut out,” said English Department Chair Louise Economides.
The University of Montana is not the only university where the “heart of the humanities” is being cut out with little to no conversation. The attack has been relentless nationally. Eric Hayot and Matt Seybold have described this crisis as “a crisis of civil society writ large.” They write:
There is no condition in which the humanities are under attack in which the whole university is not under attack. There is no condition in which the university is under attack that the whole of educational infrastructure, public and private, from pre-K up, is not under attack. And there is no condition in which education is under attack in which civil society can remain unimperiled.
Yet none of this is a surprise. While the right-wing attacks on these disciplines and departments have been relentless in recent years, faculty have been witnessing this slow collapse of the arts, humanities, and sciences for quite some time now. The market-driven model that encourages packing students into classrooms like sardines to maximize profits is not conducive to the personal attention that students need in disciplines like the arts and humanities. Many of these departments, slated to be reduced or cut, have been deliberately hamstrung by their administrations (citing low enrollment numbers), resulting in their inability to offer a robust curriculum. The overemphasis on the number of majors these disciplines have is a deliberate strategy to discredit these disciplines. If these programs are retained, they are treated as second-class departments simply serving as the “general education requirements” for the more profitable “revenue-generating” programs.
Higher ed is on the verge of collapsing because it has lost its soul. Can this soul be restored? Perhaps. But this would require a nationwide movement to restore public trust and reclaim higher education, building an academy that is not solely transactional or profit-driven but is deeply invested in serving and collaborating with its broader communities and society writ large. If we cannot do this, then we are one step closer to witnessing the weakening of our civil society and the end of our democracy.
In her 2001 masterwork Nickel and Dimed, the late Barbara Ehrenreich went undercover to report on the daily realities working people in America face trying to get by on minimum-wage. After working as a housekeeper, a nursing aide, a home cleaner, a server, and more, Ehrenreich wrote that “The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly ‘unskilled.’” It is difficult to overstate the impact that Ehrenreich’s book and body of work have had on US culture and working-class politics over the last 25 years, and the enduring relevance of her work today. In this special episode of Working People, we commemorate the anniversary of Nickel and Dimed and celebrate the life and legacy of Ehrenreich by speaking with a panel of guests who are carrying on that legacy today.
Panelists include: Deirdre English, coauthor of three books with Barbara Ehrenreich, former editor in chief of Mother Jones, and a former director of the Magazine Center at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley; Alissa Quart, editorial director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and author of seven books, most recently Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream; and Ann Larson, author of Cleanup on Aisle Five: Essential Work, Poverty Wages, and the View from Behind the Supermarket Register and a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Additional links/info:
Featured Music:
Credits:
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we’ve got a very special episode for you guys. And we’re talking about the work, life, and legacy of a very special person, the late great Barbara Ehrenreich. 25 years ago this year, Barbara published what is still to this day one of the most essential and impactful books about working class life in America ever. And the book is called Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America. And if you listen to this show, then chances are you’ve probably heard of it or you may have already read it.
But if you haven’t read it yet, and if you haven’t dug into Barbara’s incredible body of work, then frankly, I kind of envy you because you have a feast before you, a feast for your mind, your heart, and for your soul. And to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Nickel and Dimed, the Nation Magazine just published a really beautiful and vital forum with folks from around the worlds of labor and journalism testifying to the enduring power and relevance of Barbara Aaron Reich’s work today. As author and friend of the show, Alyssa Cort writes in that forum, “The first thing I discovered is that no job, no matter how lowly, is truly unskilled.” This is from Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2001 masterwork, Nickel and Dimed. I read it that year when I was 29. Eventually, Barbara became my good friend and colleague as we created a media organization, The Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and wrote and edited articles together.
To recap, for that book, Barbara went undercover, reporting as she worked as a housekeeper, nursing aide, a home cleaner, a waitress at Jerry’s and Hearthside Restaurants, and a Walmart worker all in her later 50s, wrestling with cleaning products, carrying huge diner orders, and sometimes living in motels. The book was a departure from her earlier acidly funny and sociological work, ranging from midwifery to middle-class anxiety, but for which she rarely interviewed a soul. It’s hard to underestimate the effect nickel and dimes vacuum cleaner’s eye view of what it means to work a minimum wage job in this country had on so many of us. For those blinded by America’s late 20th century comforts, Barbara’s book helped us to stop unseen low wage workers. It also showed us what anyone who has ever made a pizza or taking care of a child already knew, but had perhaps not articulated that there is no such thing as “unskilled work.” As Barbara wrote, “The working poor, as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.” And Nickel and Dimed also helped precarious creatives like me and my ilk, freelance writers, art handlers, grad students, bookstore clerks, all paid hourly and shabbily, see themselves more clearly as being on a continuum with other working people.
Now, we’ve linked to the Nation Forum commemorating Barbara Ehrenreich and the 25th anniversary of Nickel and Dimed in the show notes for this episode. And you should definitely go read it when you have some time. And it goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, that you should really, really go read Nickel and Dimed. And hopefully by the end of today’s episode, you’ll see why. There’s really so much that I want to say and could say here about Barbara Ahrenreich, but to keep it short and sweet, I’m just going to say this. I never had the honor of meeting or knowing Barbara personally, but I know that I would not be here doing the work that I do on this podcast, on the Real News Network and beyond without her. Her work has inspired generations of working class journalists and non-traditional storytellers just like me.
Her advocacy and institution building has made it more possible for people like us to have places to publish our work and for working class stories and voices to be heard. And I am so grateful to Barbara for that and to all who carry on her beautiful vital legacy today. And I am so grateful to all of our amazing guests on the show today who are doing just that. Thank you all so much for being here. Please introduce yourselves to our listeners.
Deirdre English:
I’m Deirdre English. I’ve written three feminist and class-conscious books with Barbara Ehrenreich, the former editor-in-chief of Mother Jones Magazine and a professor of journalism at the University of California Berkeley.
Alissa Quart:
I’m Alissa Quart. I created the Economic Hardship Reporting Project with Barbara. I’m a journalist and a poet. I’ve written seven books and edited one anthology. My last book was called Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. And the one before that was Squeezed: Why Our Families Can’t Afford America.
Ann Larson:
Hi, my name is Anne Larson. I’m the author of Cleanup on Aisle five: Essential Work: Poverty Wages and The View from Behind the Supermarket Register. I’m a fellow with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and Barbara Ehrenreich is one of my intellectual and journalistic heroes and mentors.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, thank you all so much for being here. It really, really is an honor to be chatting with all three of you, and all three of you are my journalistic heroes, and I think you are all living testaments of the incredible legacy of the incredible Barbara Erin Reich. And I wanted to start by asking more about that. Whether you got to know her in person or through your work, tell us and our listeners more about Barbara and what she and her work have meant to you.
Deirdre English:
I got to know Barbara because we were both on the faculty of an experimental radical college called the College at Old Westbury with a mission of social justice and a very multiracial student body and teaching staff. And we taught women’s studies courses together, some of the first back in the ’70s, and then we spent seven years writing three different books together. Perhaps the one I’ll mention is called For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Expert’s Advice to Women, which is about the impact of health and mental health professionals on creating stereotypes about women based on gender, class, and race, and helping to authorize those stereotypes to make them seem as though they were scientifically based and authoritative. So Barbara and I were really more than friends and coworkers. We were really sisters. I lived in the same house with her for periods of time.
I’m the godmother, or as she called me, the goddess mother of her two children who I am still very close to and who are remarkable testaments to Barbara’s influence too. Her kids are both extraordinary writers and activists. I’ve had a lifelong relationship with Barbara and profoundly influenced by her. She influenced. And then when I was at Mother Jones, I became her editor and she had a column. She did a cover story on one of her books, and she was a frequent advisor. And then finally with the founding, we’ll be talking about Nickel and Dimed and that whole period. But then with the founding of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, I certainly consulted with her then, and now I continue that role with Alyssa by being on the board. And so Barbara’s just had a profound lifelong impact on my thinking and my commitments. So
Maximillian Alvarez:
Deirdre, I got to ask from one editor to another, going from friend to editor is not an easy transition to make, especially when you’re editing Barbara Ehrenreich. How was that transition for you guys?
Deirdre English:
Pretty smooth because Barbara was such a great writer. It’s actually the best writers who are the easiest to edit. They get the big picture and they get back in the day when we had a paper publication before it was digital, sometimes you just have to cut for space and the professionals know how to do that. So no, no, no, we never had any arguments. But I’ll just say one more thing though. An editor should always remember that the piece belongs to the writer. So your role is to help the writer, not to impose yourself on the writer. So throw that in too.
Ann Larson:
I never met Barbara Ehrenreich, but I read Nickel and Dimed pretty soon after it came out. And I think I was the graduate student at that time, maybe my first year in graduate school. And this was 25 years ago, this was still sort of end of history type era. We just had Bill Clinton for eight years, and there was this sense that everything had worked out how it was supposed to work out. Capitalism was great. It had defeated all the other alternatives, and everybody got what they deserved in life. If you worked hard, you could succeed. And meritocracy was the name of the game. And so Nickel and Dimed just sort of punctured that myth so profoundly and so completely that it was so necessary at that time. I taught the book or portions of the book in a class I was teaching at the time as a graduate student.
And I remember being struck by how funny it was that students that I taught, we were reading these about poverty and low wages and living in motel rooms and cleaning shit out of toilets, and yet we’re all just laughing and hooting and hollering through the whole thing. And I just remember thinking, “What an amazing writer that you could write about these topics that are so dark, and yet we’re all laughing the whole way through.” I just think that’s a very rare talent that she had. And then we can talk about this a little bit more, but at that time I was a graduate student. I was planning on a career in academia. The idea of service work was not something that I worried about for myself, though I had come from a working class background. But a few years later, I found myself working in a supermarket.
And I remember thinking about nickel and dimed and seeing it differently once I’m doing the service work and a line from the book, I hadn’t read it in several years at that point, but I remembered a line from the book. I’m working behind the cash register and I’m tired and it’s weeks and weeks and I’m struggling to learn the job. And Barbara Arenak’s voice popped into my head and it said, “What you don’t necessarily realize when you’re selling your time by the hour is that what you’re actually selling is your life.” And I just thought how apt that was and how accurate it was that she’d really captured that I was now living, I was now experiencing. And so that influenced me and made me think I should write about this job because Barbara did it. She sort of forged a path for me.
Alissa Quart:
I read it when it came out in 2001, but my favorite book by far was Fear Falling. So I had been introduced to her earlier than that. I had been, like Ann, at CUNY Grad Center in English and Sociology and had been adjuncting. It was the introduction for me to what I would later call the middle precarious, this kind of precarious middle class where we were making, I don’t remember what it was, Anne, it was 2,000, $3,000 a class, and we were somehow supposed to also go to graduate school. So I started to see after I read Nickel and Dime, a continuum for the first time between my own experience as a kind of unstably middle-class person and the people around me who were serving food and taking out the garbage and making people’s beds in hotels. And I saw the connection, which I think had been purposely obfuscated by third wave Democrats, which is part of what Anne was saying also.
And I too had gotten lost in the aestheticism of the ’90s in its attitudes, in its stances. It was a very alluring decade for Generation X people who were into alternative culture. You could just lose yourself in Sleeter Kinney or something and in poetics and theory and get disconnected from the experience of class even when you yourself were living it. So what it was, it was both a reminder and a form of self-knowledge reading it because I suddenly was like, “Wow, my time here adjuncting at Kingsborough Community College where people are screaming at me and I can’t afford my rent even in the East Village is being stolen in a way.” And so I actually wound up dropping out of graduate school for better or worse as a result. And then years later, obviously I met her. I was working on a film called The Last Clinic, which is about the clinic at the Center of the Dobbs case in Mississippi, women’s health.
And I was the producer and the writer with the great director, Macy Crow, and I was raising money from Barbara. And I called her and it was unbelievable. I was sitting in the middle of a magazine office. She said, “Hi, Alyssa.” And she starts talking about Jane, which I believe she had firsthand experience with. And I just was like, “My God.” I mean, I fell in love, I think. I felt like I had finally found not just a mentor, but family, a mother of sorts, a spouse of sorts, a place where I belonged as a person, but also as a mind and a kind of politics, which in journalism is hard to find, let’s be frank. This is not a field filled with activists or unusual poetic people or people who are incredibly moral. And she was all those things. And also as a woman, she was incredibly generous to other women, and we can talk more about that.
I feel like she didn’t have some of the conventional gender identifications of a lot of boomer women who might see themselves as internalized masculinity and all this kind of stuff. She really was about women and about encouraging women. I mean, she had a lot of male friends and male colleagues and men in her life. But I think she wasn’t competitive and defensive in a gendered way, which really set her apart, honestly. So after this love match, I started working for her at the Economic Hardship Reporting, and she insisted we call each other co-editors, which of course was a marketing person’s nightmare. She’s like, “We have an anarchist socialist nonprofit.” I was like, “Okay, but I better not share this with our funders. Flat hierarchies.” I was like, “Okay.” But I knew also that this was the only way I could actually do this was with somebody like this.
And the idea of our organization was to fund people who were truly working class and fund people like she and I who were journalists who wanted to write entirely about income inequality and no longer had the resources. So actually, yeah, Max, you were one of the people I encountered early on.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, baby. I mean, like I said, we are all in some way or fashion living proof of Barbara’s incredible legacy, and that includes me and this show. I mean, not only would I not be doing this work, there wouldn’t be a market for this work without someone like Barbara. And on top of that, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project has sponsored episodes of the show. They’ve connected us to folks that we’ve interviewed on this show. It’s an incredible, incredible organization and legacy that you and Barbara built from the ground up. And it’s touched so many of us and helped tell so many of our stories. And I think I’m honored to be in the struggle with all of you to carry that legacy forward however we can. But I want to go backward again because I think you guys have really touched on something that is super important for folks to understand about Nickel and Dimed itself and everything in it because you can’t understand it just by reading it today.
You have to understand who we were and where we were at the time that it was published. And it was published in 2001 and written in a turn of the millennium America that feels so incredibly far away today in many respects. I mean, I was still a teenager then. I was a conservative, middle-class, dipshit, mixed race kid in Orange County in Southern California who still didn’t really know a whole lot about life and who had no idea how bad things were going to get over the next 25 years. I identify with the stories that y’all were telling because when this book came out, my family was part of the middle class in that post-Cold War boom. And then we lost our middle-class status in the post – 2008 crash Great Recession, including the house that I was raised in. And so I read the book very differently later on in life than I would have had I picked it up in 2001.
So I want to really take listeners back to that time. And I wanted to ask if you could say more about who you were then, what the country was like then, and what working in America was like then.
Deirdre English:
Barbara never bought into the boom myth. I think that certainly throughout the Reagan years, which were the 1980s, Barbara was continuously aware that wages were still stagnant for the working class. The postwar boom really ended by the ’80s, and the boom was for the business elite and corporations, and it was Reagan deregulation. And then moving forward a little bit in time, Barbara never fell in with the Clintons. And in fact, a lot of her concern with poverty came about because during Clinton’s regime, the push to eliminate welfare, welfare as we know it, and to force women mothers into jobs to justify their welfare payments, that was actually the impetus of writing nickeled and dimed. I was actually part of a group with Barbara that I think was called the Committee of 100. It was 100 feminists who were protesting Clinton-esque welfare reform, and we failed to stop it.
And then Barbara was left with the question, well, what is actually going to happen to these working women who are being pushed off welfare and into the workforce? And so if that’s supposed to be the answer, get a job. Let me go out and look and see whether you can support yourself on a low wage job. And that was the genesis of nickel and dimed. So that would be some part of my answer to your question.
Ann Larson:
I mentioned earlier this idea of the end of history and the meritocracy had went out and everything was as. We were in the best of all possible worlds and how nickel and dime sort of punctured that myth. I do think also one of the things that I remember from that period is this kind of looking back, it seems like we were all living in this myth, in this kind of dream world, and our feet weren’t really on the ground in a way. I really thought I was going to get a job in academia and be a professor. I mean, I think about that now, given my background and the fact that I went to CUNY and I studied English, and that was never going to happen. That was always a failed venture. But I believed it. I got on that path and people told me it was going to work out.
If you work hard, it’s all going to work out. And so one of the things that I think nickel and dimed does is it not only punctures the myth, and I’m talking more about Barbara’s work in general, books like Fear of Falling and Natural Causes. She wanted to see the world as it really is, not how we wish it would be. She was really a critic of delusion in all its forms. And this goes from in Bait and Switch, she talks about the myth that just by updating your personality or getting a new wardrobe is going to be the key to a new job. Or in another book that she wrote, kind of busting the myth that positive thinking can cure breast cancer. She sort of refused to succumb to that kind of thinking. She was really insistent on science, on evidence, on rational thinking.
And even in one of the last books she wrote, if not the last, she wrote about these mystical experiences that she had as a young person that sort of hinted at something supernatural beyond the realm that we live in every day. But even that didn’t change her mind about the fundamental class divide in the world and the fundamental reality that we live in. And I just find this very inspiring. To me, it’s a very kind of socialist way of thinking without. Barbara didn’t wear her socialism on her sleeve. She wasn’t out there pounding the gavel. What she showed is a way of looking at the world in a concrete and material way and an insistence that we not be diluted about how things really are. And that way of thinking, that really grounded concrete way of thinking is the foundation for political change.
Alissa Quart:
Yeah, I love that, Ann. When I think about what was going on in 2001, I mean there’d be a terrorist attack six months after Nickel and Dime came out, World Trade Center buildings falling, killing over 3,000 people. There’s the Enron scandal. There’s all those accounting crises. And Wikipedia launched that year and kind of a notion of unskilled expertise, which I think is important too, because she was really pushing in nickel and dime for rethinking what unskilled labor was. And I think the knots had a complex relationship with what skilled and unskilled labor was, especially thinking work, what had to be done by amateurs and what could be done by professionals. And I also think one of the things that was interesting about that time, not just this forcing us to see what the Democrats, the centrist Democrats were masking with the end of AFPC and so forth.
It was also a moment when people could publish these kind of books. Which is less and less common. I mean, Anne, who’s on this panel, just did. I do. A few other people do, you do Max. But I think there was a time when No Logo was a bestseller, Fast Food Nation, Michael Paulin’s early books. And these were mega sellers, as was Nickel and Dimed. There was an audience for them. And there was also a real hot critique of commercialism and a lot of these factors. I mean, my first book branded The Buying and Selling of Teenagers was in this vein. And I do see Nickel and Dimed as part of that as a kind of materialist account. The years that transpired after the Forever War would say, oh, do we have the energy to worry about the consumer economy and labor? Shouldn’t we be worried about the threat against our nation?
There was all these different enemies that have been constructed since then. But it was pretty clear in that ’90s knots period, even though it was being masked, that those were the polls. It was like this flushed consumer economy that rested on the backs of workers, that rested on the brainwashing of teenagers to buy shit, that rested on people being fed terrible meals, supersize me, and Michael Moore’s films were about that. So I think that’s part of the scene that I think of. And I also think of just the level of consumerism in that time. You can’t even imagine. It was very go-go before there was a crash.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and that’s what I remember. I mean now it’s like I tell my daughter, it’s like, yeah, that was the era of what I would call free range capitalism, where we were allowed to run around as consumers and stretch our legs a little more. We had a little more buying power. And the consumer felt like an important thing in the economy, whether you were going to a restaurant or staying at a hotel. It felt like you could still vote with your wallet as the proverb goes. That we still had some power to determine what the economy looked like and get what we could from it. We could still make enough to earn a good living. Like Ann was saying, our feet weren’t even really touching the ground. But that bubble burst for me at least after 2008. And in the years that have followed, I feel like I’ve only come to see more and more what Barbara saw back then that me and my family couldn’t.
Because when we heard about worker issues like that, we saw them as consumers. And we saw them as, well, I’m the fast food consumer going in paying for my meal, or I’m the student going to get an education. Why is it my job to care about the employee on the other side? They should be doing their job kind of thing.That was such a prevalent way of thinking in America and sure as hell in conservative, middle-class, Orange County, California. But again, that really came crashing down for me and for so many of us over the next 25 years. And frankly, reading Nickel and Dimed in the America, in the world that we’ve got here and now in 2026 is quite a trip. And I wanted to ask y’all, why do you think it is still important for folks to read Nickel and Dimed and Barbara’s work in general today?
What can her work still teach us now? Or what has it been trying to teach us for years that we still haven’t learned but really need to?
Deirdre English:
Well, the economic pain has spread. And I think that Alissa really was speaking directly to that when talking about the middle-class precariot and the fact that a middle-class way of life has become increasingly unaffordable to the working class and to large parts of the middle class. I mean, of course in America, everybody thinks they’re middle-class, so it becomes very hard to talk about class for that reason. But basically the great increase in unaffordability since first the enormous crash of 2008 that wiped out so much value and showed that all that home ownership was based on a bubble economics, and then the rise of the forever war, so absorbing so much of our economy in military spending. So we’ve just seen so many social failures during this period of time. And I just want to also mention that the rise of what you were talking about, the consumer economy is also the rise of the service economy from the worker point of view.
And that was a big shift in the working class because it was largely women who got those service jobs, as Anne has written about so brilliantly in her book about grocery store work. I mean, obviously there are men working in grocery stores too, but the “opportunities for women that are often blamed on feminism,” like that feminists encourage women to go into the workforce. Well, no, economics forced women into the workforce. Feminism tried to make circumstances better for them. I don’t think we’ve succeeded. But Barbara was just very aware in nickel and dime, those are all jobs of women workers in the service economy. And so that was really burgeoning while the kind of extractive industries were all being outsourced and technology was coming in and absorbing a lot of those kinds of jobs. So Barbara was just so aware of the shifts in demographics and economic policy and economic reality so that she always saw under the surface of what people thought was going on to what was really going on.
Alissa Quart:
I sometimes see her as sort of like an ultra violet light, like forensic dusting where we can see things that we wouldn’t otherwise see. I love what you just said. That was so smart, Deirdre, and about the consumer economy being a service economy being female. And when we’ve been assigning Looking at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a lot of the pieces we assigned were people who have taken low wage work writing about what it’s like inside of that, including Anne, but also Joseph Williams, Danelle Alexander, Daryl Wellington, a bunch of other people. And that to me was part of what Barbara also wanted to do towards the end of her life was she didn’t want to just be the sort of co-pastoral woman underground, my man Godfrey, I’m going to go into the supermarket in a mask and become the worker. It was like she wanted to hire the person who had actually been that, who was a writer and a reporter and an active mind who could name and wasn’t doing it as a stunt.
And I think that to me, that was part of the understanding of the line between journalist and practitioner that started to expand in the knots when experts in amateur started to blend a little more. Publications like The Global Post started assigned to local reporters rather than to have white dudes fly in to cover shit. And I think she was doing the domestic version of that. Let’s not have people parachute in. Let’s have people write from their own place. And I followed that to the letter. I mean, I just thought it was really important. And also having people who could think critically. Anne here is such a great mind and you really are. And she can interpret a lot of the things that she was experiencing structurally. And that’s another thing that Barbara was really interested in.
Ann Larson:
Just wanted to note that one of the things I’m thinking about hearing this conversation is that Barbara was a baby boomer. And I don’t know, that seems important. Somehow we have this whole, hey boomer where we make fun of the boomers, God love them.
Deirdre English:
Okay, boomer.
Ann Larson:
Right, that they’re just like these clueless. And there’s some truth to it. They grew up in this time where there was more opportunity and you get education and it’s going to work out for you. And there was room for upward mobility in a lot of cases thanks to government investment and public goods. And we all know what the French call the tant glory is, these 30 years after World War II when working class was making gains. And so for Barbara to be in that generation and yet recognize all the things that people on this panel are talking about and just see through that mythology and to see, as Deirdre put it, what was under the surface, I think we should pause on how extraordinary that is. I mean, I think one of the reasons that was the case is because she had working class roots herself.
I grew up in Montana and I believe her dad was a minor. But then her dad, if I’m remembering correctly, ended up becoming an executive. He advanced in his career and ended up leaving the mines and became something of a professional. And so she got to see this upper mobility, this transformation. But it wasn’t just that she had a really good memory for that period of her life when she’d been working class, but she really just, she saw welfare being cut. As Alyssa mentioned, she saw what was happening to aid to families with dependent children. She saw free trade agreements sending jobs overseas and that expanding the service economy that she wrote about. And so it wasn’t just a good memory, although that was part of it. She just never lost her talent for recognizing the way the material world was the foundation for what was happening in people’s lives.
And in terms of what’s changed, I mean, I think there’s no better example of what stayed the same than the minimum wage has been stuck at 725 since 2009 or something like this. I mean, this is something out of just the dystopian universe that we have not raised the minimum wage since 2009. And I just think Barbara saw that this was the way things were going. And she was able to see not only through this and of the mythology that we’ve described, but even in her own generation, in which so many people had a different experience, and even in her own experience, her own family kind of crawled out of the working class. She still stayed true to her vision and to herself. And I think that’s very rare.
Deirdre English:
We baby boomers, we came of age in the ’60s and there was a vast movement to be a part of. And Barbara and I were both very much a part of it. The anti-war movement where I really came of age in my college days doing that and worked on two documentaries about the anti-war movement, about anti-war Vietnam, and working with Vietnam vets. And then the women’s movement that Barbara and I both really kind of shared our journey into that world and into what was missing in the women’s movement and what was missing in the labor movement, which was a lack of feminist consciousness and on the left. So all of those, there was this big thing, the movement, and we felt very much a part of it, supported by it, buoyed by it, but also the productive arguments that happened within it. And so Barbara wasn’t a lone figure, she was a standout figure, but I think she always felt part of a much larger community and with multifaceted elements in it from the labor movement, from the women’s movement, and many others.
Alissa Quart:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s important to note, like you just said, she didn’t see a different distinction between advocacy and journalism, like that thick line that we’ve been taught in J schools for decades, the voice of God and NPR and neutrality and all the major newspapers. She thought it was really important to bring the movements into writing. And that I hope is also another part of her legacy. And honestly, I mean, look at the DSA. I mean, she was the first co-chair with Michael Harrington. So it’s not just what she’s done as a writer or what she’s done institutionally, it’s politically. And I think that is also a legacy within journalism to not forget politics on that level.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I think that’s all beautifully and powerfully put. And it really reminds me of Barbara and the rare writers and people who see and fight and write the way that she did, have taught me ever since. Like y’all said, you don’t necessarily need to see the world through socialist goggles, but once you stop seeing them through the kind of capitalist goggles that are welded to our eyes from birth, then you start seeing things how they really are and you become a socialist real quick. So that’s what it was for me is I was so conditioned for so long to see the country I lived in a certain way. And it was a massive financial crash that taught me otherwise. It was our government bailing out the banks and big corporations while families like mine fell through the drain that taught me that. It was working on a warehouse and factory floors with people I had been taught to say were dumb and deserved to be in those jobs because they couldn’t do anything else.
And here I was with a degree from the University of Chicago doing the exact same job in 2010. I mean, life taught me a lot of what capitalism and America tried to keep from me for many years. And Barbara taught me a lot more about that. And I was so grateful when I kind of lost that innocence, that American innocence of realizing the world and the country that I actually did live in, instead of believing I lived in the fiction that had been presented to me. I was so grateful to have a book like Nickel and Dimed to help guide me from that point to a greater consciousness and to more answers and to more hope about what can be done about this for families like mine, for people like me, for the hundreds of people and workers that I’ve interviewed on this show over the years, their families.
I’m so, so grateful to Barbara, to Nickel and Dimed for all that they have helped provide me in my long sort of recovery from the hangover of the capitalist fiction that I and my family had lived under for the first half of my life. And I wanted to sort of turn that into our final question here because I could talk to y’all for hours, but I know I have to let you go soon. And I wanted us to sort of finish by talking about the legacy of Barbara Ahrenreich herself and of course her work, including Nickel and Dimed, whose 25th anniversary we are celebrating this year. And so I want to frame the question this way. We now have the benefit of hindsight to see in our past what we frankly could not see coming in the future that lay before us 25 years ago.
With our life experience and with all the lessons that Barbara Ehrenreich has taught us, what wisdom can we offer through the gift of foresight to ourselves today with everything that we’re facing and to our descendants 25 years from now?
Deirdre English:
Well, I mean, I would say Barbara actually foresaw herself the advent of AI on middle-class jobs. And she actually very presciently wrote in an essay in Time Magazine that I haven’t read since it came out, but it struck me so much at the time that maybe the middle class was soon going to be facing the downward mobility that the working class was experiencing. And that when the robots came, when technology came for writing jobs, journalism jobs, teaching jobs, white collar jobs, the way it was already coming for so many working class jobs, definitely factory jobs, that maybe the middle class would wake up and understand their commonality, which Alyssa has been speaking to and which Alyssa is very alive to talking about the precariot. Maybe they would begin to understand that the bosses were not their friends and that the scraps that they were getting from the owner’s table were getting less and less and that they would begin to experience a sense of unity and class consciousness and fighting spirit.
And so that’s happening. It’s going to accelerate. And one hopes that what will also accelerate is what Barbara called for, which is that unity and oppositional spirit.
Alissa Quart:
Yeah, I’m hoping for this unity. And I’ve been talking to people about how they’re affording America. I wrote a book called Squeeze Why Of Families Can’t Afford America almost 10 years ago now. And I’ve been returning to some of those topics because it seems very of the moment, the middle precarious. And what startles me is people saying things like middle-class people, people who earn six figures saying things like, “I don’t feel like America likes me.” And just that emotionalism of that, I feel like that is where this kind of emotional politics is going to start, where people feel like they’re part of a gradient, a range of class positions that are being kept down by people who are manufacturing insecurity for really the 99%. And that concept is no longer just pablem, but it’s something that people actually live and vote by and connect to each other around.
Ann Larson:
I’ll just end by, I really want to emphasize something Deirdre just said, which strikes me as really important about movements. I think just one generation after Barbara as a Gen Xer, I didn’t feel like I was part of a movement. It was like all individuals who were working hard and trying to make it work in the professional class or whatever. And I think what Barbara would want us to do is rebuild these movements that used to serve as a foundation for social action, for thinking, for camaraderie, for solidarity. I’m also the co-founder of an organization called the Debt Collective that is trying to organize the debtors to bring some sense of community and collective strength to people that are drowning in debt. It’s why I’m so proud to be part of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project where I think the organization publishes people that are writing as part of movements, that they see journalism, like Alyssa just said, is not just something that you should be objective and talk about facts, but as part of a movement building work.
And to me, this is, I think, a real key to. We can’t think of individuals. You can do your best as an individualism, but there’s a limit there unless you have a movement behind you, unless you have a culture that supports the kind of thinking and work that Barbara did and that we should all be trying to do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us today. I want to thank our guests, the great Deirdre English, Alissa Quart, and Ann Larson. I also want to thank the Nation Magazine and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project for all the vital work that they do and for helping us put this special episode together. Go check them out, subscribe and support them using the links that we provided in the show notes. And of course, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next time for another episode of Working People. And in the meantime, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network, where we do grassroots reporting that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Check us out across our YouTube channel, our different podcast feeds, our website, and our social media pages, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today.
I promise you guys, it really does make a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and rest in power, Barbara Ehrenreich. Solidarity forever.
At current pace, DEQ program would need 99 years to investigate all the sites of old landfills that pose health risk, NC audit reports.
Lags in NC landfill site investigations by underfunded DEQ program pose risk to public health, audit says is a story from Carolina Public Press, an award-winning independent newsroom. Our breakthrough journalism shines a light on the critical overlooked and under-reported issues facing North Carolina’s more than 11 million residents. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
When victims of organized migrant clan violence arrive at emergency rooms in Berlin, the impact extends far beyond the trauma bays. According to Felix Wolf (a pseudonym), a veteran emergency nurse with a decade of experience in a Berlin hospital, treating wounded clan members subjects medical staff to high-pressure security lockdowns, escalating street-level intimidation, and systemic stress.
According to Wolf, who spoke with Welt newspaper, violent incidents involving knives and firearms are becoming routine occurrences that frequently bypass official crime statistics.
“We are increasingly dealing with injuries from shootings and stabbings in the clinics,” Wolf said. “Not all cases become public or end up in the crime statistics, because especially in cases of simple stab wounds, the police are not always called in. We have such cases several times a week.”
The official data already shows a sharp rise in violence not only in Berlin but across all of Germany. Berlin, in particular, has been hard hit by a wave of violent gang warfare, which has seen a record high number of shootings in 2025. Reports indicate that the number of shootings has only intensified in 2026.
Wolf noted a trend toward younger offenders who demonstrate intentional lethality in their attacks: “Not only is the quantity increasing, but also the quality: especially among knife attackers, the perpetrators are getting younger and younger. I often treat 15- or 16-year-olds who know exactly where to aim in order to cause the greatest possible damage.”
The violence does not end on the streets either but often extends into the hospitals. When gunshot or stabbing victims arrive – often unannounced or brought in directly by associates – hospital protocol demands rapid security measures to secure the facility. To reduce the risk of retaliation or targeted harassment if a clan member patient dies, hospital staff adjust their daily routines and assignment distributions:
“This leaves us in nursing with great uncertainty: To what extent can we rely on support when we have to defend ourselves? Up until now, we’ve always been lucky that nothing worse has happened. But perhaps you remember the camera footage from New Year’s Eve when a nurse was knocked unconscious in another hospital? That happens too,” Wolf warned. “I haven’t worn a name tag in the emergency room for years because I don’t want to be identifiable. We take precautions: If two Arab boys need to be cared for, I don’t send in two girls, but at least one man. I also try to keep colleagues with Jewish surnames out of such a case.”
When a gunshot victim from a clan arrives at the hospital, police are immediately informed, according to Wolf, “In most cases, the injured come on foot or are dragged literally by a relative. As soon as certain surnames are mentioned, we’ll call the police.”
The police response often involves large-scale deployments to prevent secondary conflicts on hospital grounds.
“Thankfully, the officers have always arrived faster than the relatives in our country so far. Then 15 to 20 team cars with hundreds of them roll up, and all you hear for five to ten minutes are sirens,” Wolf said. “Everything will be sealed off, not just the hospital grounds, but entire streets up to the nearest subway station. That’s quite impressive. They screen in advance exactly who could drive in where, stop cars and conduct identity checks.”
During these incidents, emergency room operations are regularly halted.
“The injured person is usually already lying with us, accompanied by the two or three guys who brought him here. Then the police arrive and determine the personal details, photograph and confiscate evidence. The procedure often takes several hours – during that time the emergency room is temporarily closed. New emergency patients cannot be admitted during this time.”
In other words, not only have these criminal migrant gangs turned the streets of Berlin into the Wild West, but due to security precautions involved in such cases, entire emergency rooms are shut down, leaving patients unable to enter and receive treatment in their own city.
When family members start arriving, it often means the trouble is only beginning. Wolf described up to 40 family members arriving in some cases, often organized through Telegram channels, where they “want to show a presence in an often aggressive way.”
“In these circles, it is common for mothers and women to shout loudly and dramatically. This high noise level is a stress factor for staff and also for patients. In the clinic, this can still be managed to some extent; at the deployment site, it is significantly more difficult,” said Wolf.
The medical outcome of a patient can dictate the level of immediate danger faced by hospital workers and first responders.
“Thank God no clan member has ever died here. This might sound harsh, but we are always happy when the injured person dies on site and not here,” Wolf stated. “The stress that officers have to put themselves through in such a case is enormous: Because normally no one from the rival clan is there anymore, the police officers and emergency services are then attacked.”
Due to security budget limitations across clinics, staff must rely primarily on municipal police protection while implementing their own personal safety protocols.
“We must rely on the police. Money for one’s own security services isn’t very easy. I know clinics where you’re happy if even one security guard is on site at night,” Wolf observed. “Fortunately, the Berlin police are well-positioned and not hesitant. It is appalling under what conditions the police officers have to cope with such situations – and how, in the following days, individual images are repeatedly taken out of context and used against them.”
Wolf also addresses a German society rapidly trying to adapt to expanding violence, in which the victims are being taught to deal with being a victim, instead of perpetrators, often violent, being held accountable for their actions.
Wolf expressed skepticism toward institutional de-escalation courses, arguing they misplace responsibility onto healthcare workers: “Many clinics offer self-defense or de-escalation training. But I’m not a big fan of that. Many courses attempt to professionalize dangerous situations in such a way that a kind of perpetrator-victim reversal takes place. Why should I adapt to a situation that stems from the fact that the other person hasn’t learned how to behave decently?”
The crisis goes even deeper, threatening the entire health system by contributing to medical staff burnout, which is likely costing lives. The combination of workplace stress and safety concerns has led to high turnover rates among emergency care personnel, with many leaving the field within five to six years.
“Brutalization is a societal issue,” Wolf stated, saying that the amount of time staff are sticking around is dropping to five or six years at the most, with most moving on to other fields
“To a certain extent, this is due to a political failure: the authorities and the health system are being let down. But this brutalization is also a societal question.”
Wolf highlighted the difficulty of discussing specific patient demographics without facing public criticism or accusations of bias:
“Anyone who addresses such topics and clearly identifies the clientele that causes them will immediately get a dressing-down. ‘That’s not how you should say it; that’s too generalizing’, it then says. That may be true – but we simply do not have these difficulties with other groups of people. The fact that we cannot address this is a problem. I constantly get accusations of racism. Colleagues in the medical field and also in the police force understand what I mean. However, in certain Berlin circles, this issue is considered socially unacceptable.”
He claimed that voting for the AfD is not the answer, since he claims the AfD was especially opposed to the medical field during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Responding to political narratives, Wolf rejected the idea that voting for far-right parties like the AfD provides a solution, citing past hostility toward healthcare workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“During the pandemic, these very people declared us fair game,” he said.
An exhaustive search was conducted and there is no evidence any AfD member ever called for attacks on medical staff. There was criticism of the way the medical establishment handled the Covid-19 crisis, but there is no evidence there were any efforts to unleash violence on medical staff.
Wolf also stated that not all migrants can be blamed for attacks on medical staff, claiming that AfD members “are welcome to ask themselves if they would want to come and clean in our hospital for that kind of pay. Therefore, I do not want to turn our problems with clan members into a general migration debate.”
Certainly, across the country, there are AfD voters and members in cleaning jobs. In fact, AfD has the largest share of low-income and working-class voters of any party in Germany.
The post ‘If two Arab boys need to be taken care of, I’m not sending in two girls’ – Hospital staff under threat in Germany due to mass immigration appeared first on Remix News.
Following a trial, a 29-year-old Palestinian has been convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old girl on a bus in the French city of Toulouse. The girl, named Clara to protect her identity, openly sobbed in court while sitting next to her mother.
On June 18, the young girl was riding the L11 bus in the city when the Palestinian migrant, Ahmed, sat next to her. Ahmed spoke in court through a translator, claiming he thought he saw the teenager give “a sign” to him that she wanted to get to know him. Ahmed said he was attracted to Clara “at first sight.”
After Ahmed got on the bus, he went to sit next to the victim, at which point he began to rub her shoulders before he grabbed her transport card, which she had been holding between her legs, according to French news outlet La Depeche. He then grabbed her thighs before moving his hands to her chest. The Palestinian was then arrested after a criminal complaint.
In court, after recounting that he was attracted to Clara, he apologized for his sexual assault in criminal court, saying: “I thought carefully. I would like to apologize. I have trouble behaving around girls. That day, I was elsewhere, I behaved badly.”
“Do you realize that she is traumatized?” the judge responded.
Ahmed fled Gaza and arrived in France in March 2025. He said he has had a difficult existence in France living on the street and in squats. He also says he has been actively consuming cocaine and alcohol “to suffer less psychologically.”
He was then given taxpayer-funded social support and offered accommodations in Cugnaux.
Ahmed told the court that he experienced war and violence during his childhood and adolescence.
The court found Ahmed guilty and sentenced him to six months in prison with continued detention. He is also being banned from French territory for two years and is no longer allowed to participate in any activity involving minors. He will also be a registered sex offender.
A civil case may also rule on further damages related to the 15-year-old girl he targeted.
This is far from the only incident in Toulouse. Last year, Remix News reported on a 54-year-old Senegalese migrant who committed serial sexual assaults on the city’s bus lines over the course of three years, with the man targeting multiple women at different times.
In 2025, Remix News reported that sexual assaults on French public transport had risen 86 percent over the preceding ten years.
The post ‘I have trouble behaving around girls’ – Palestinian migrant convicted for sexually assaulting 15-year-old French girl on a bus appeared first on Remix News.
French authorities have launched a murder investigation after an agricultural worker discovered the partially charred, naked body of a woman in a vineyard last week near Nîmes. While official identification remains pending, the victim is believed to be 29-year-old Sonia Bellina, a popular social media influencer who went missing on Aug. 10.
Bellina, who lived between Paris and Nîmes, built a following of nearly 380,000 users across two TikTok accounts and 13,000 followers on Instagram.
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) August 18, 2026
"She ran into the wrong guy at the wrong time. I never thought this would happen to our family, to us. Especially since she was a sunny, kind… pic.twitter.com/WHBAq7GMNt
The Nîmes public prosecutor’s office opened the homicide inquiry following the Aug. 12 discovery in Saint-Gilles, located roughly 12 miles outside Nîmes. The investigation has been assigned to the Gard gendarmerie group and the Nîmes gendarmerie research section.
Speaking to reporters, a woman identifying herself as the victim’s older sister, Mia, said Bellina vanished after leaving for a date the night before the body was found, according to French news outlet Le Dauphine.
“She told us she was going out one evening, she never came back,” Mia said, adding that her sister was scheduled to meet someone she had been seeing. “She ran into the wrong guy at the wrong time.”
La jeune influenceuse gardoise, Sonia Bellina disparue le 10 août, retrouvée carbonisée à Saint-Gilles le 12 août. Sa famille, convaincue de son identité, dénonce le harcèlement en ligne et les commentaires haineux qui persistent même après sa mort.#SoniaBellina #meurtre… https://t.co/UPEklp591x pic.twitter.com/Bjqcy8OkKY
— Kamelia (@Elissamaiss) August 18, 2026
Family members have pushed back against online speculation regarding Bellina’s personal life and background, pleading for privacy as the investigation unfolds.
No arrests have been announced, and French authorities have not officially named a suspect in the ongoing investigation. The family is pleading for witnesses or people with information about the murder to come forward.
The Nîmes prosecutor’s office assigned a dedicated criminal task force of up to 40 gendarmes to comb the vineyards for microscopic forensic evidence and map out her final movements.
The post France: Body of young TikTok influencer found burned and naked in a vineyard near Nimes appeared first on Remix News.
A total of 620 drones were launched at the Moscow region last night, with Russian air defense forces claiming to have shot down 180 of them during an intense overnight attack. The massive attack underlines a growing reality: Russian President Vladimir Putin had said at the beginning of the war that any attacks on Russian soil would be a “red line.” Now, there are daily attacks ravaging the country, with Ukraine striking critical energy structures, residential buildings, and major logistics warehouses.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported on the attacks on Tuesday, Aug. 18, noting that due to the scale of drone launches, it was one of the largest Ukrainian airstrikes aimed at the region since the war began. The TASS news outlet claimed it was the largest.
— NOELREPORTS
The mayor noted that emergency services were actively deployed to sites where debris fell, though he did not provide immediate specifics regarding overall damage or fatalities.
In the Moscow region, falling debris damaged a logistics facility belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest online retailer, causing a localized fire. This follows Ukraine’s efforts to successfully strike Wildberries logistics hubs across the nation.
To put the Wildberries attacks in context, some figures put the company at 8.5 percent of Russia’s GDP. The company is often called the “Amazon of Russia,” employing 270,000 people and accounting for half of the country’s e-commerce sales. Ukraine has been systematically destroying Wildberries warehouses across the country with near impunity. It would be the equivalent of an enemy state destroying the largest Amazon warehouses in the United States, which would likely spark a consumer panic and send product inflation soaring.
In addition, Russia’s oil refineries and critical energy infrastructure are now being dismantled by Ukrainian drone strikes, threatening a major financial resource for Moscow and leading to fuel rationing across the country.
In late 2024, Russia updated its formal nuclear doctrine to state that a massive conventional attack backed by a nuclear power could trigger a nuclear response. As evidenced by massive missile and drone strikes against Russian territory using NATO weapons like British Storm Shadow missiles, it appears those threats were entirely empty. This stance has dramatically reduced Putin’s leverage and could lead Ukraine to further step up its attacks on Russian targets.
Casualties were also reported in connection with Ukraine’s latest attack. Regional authorities reported that at least three people were injured across the surrounding district, including a 10-year-old girl. The aerial operation also extended to Russian-occupied Crimea, where local officials reported power outages affecting southern, northwestern, and eastern sectors of the peninsula.
Pro-Ukraine X account Nexta published some of the footage of the attacks
Overnight, Russian strikes hit Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, killing at least 10 people and injuring others, illustrating the intensifying cycle of long-range aerial exchanges.
This latest assault follows an earlier surge on Sunday, Aug. 16, when Moscow claimed to have intercepted more than 800 drones nationwide in what was previously cited as the war’s largest aerial assault to date. News agency Reuters pointed out that details regarding total drone counts and intercepted targets originate from Russian state sources and have not been independently verified.
The surge in long-range drone deployments reflects a growing wave of Ukrainian retaliatory strikes targeting economic hubs, energy networks, and logistics nodes deeper inside Russian territory.
Now in its fifth year, Russia’s invasion has developed into the largest armed conflict on the European continent since 1945. The duration of active hostilities has officially surpassed the timeframe of the Red Army’s engagement in World War II, known historically in Russia as the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945.
The post What ‘red lines?’ Ukraine launches massive drone attack against Moscow as drone strike intensity reaches record high appeared first on Remix News.
Per trent’anni ci hanno spiegato che i soldi non ci sono. Che il vincolo è esterno, tecnico, indiscutibile. Che l’unica politica economica possibile è la contabilità. Oggi l’ordine monetario nato a Bretton Woods si sta sfilacciando: le banche centrali comprano oro, gli scambi si spostano su valute locali, il dollaro non è più un destino. E l’Italia sta a guardare, ma siccome siamo in vista delle elezioni, parliamo di cosa dovrebbe fare il prossimo governo in termini di politiche economiche, di contrasto alla deindusstrializzaione e all’inflazione. Il dollaro potrebbe non essere più un destino incontrastabile. Ne parliamo con Nino Galloni, economista, saggista. Intervista a cura di Jeff Hoffman
IN QUESTA PUNTATA Quali suggerimenti al governo che verrà? Statonote, sovranità monetaria, moneta fiscale De-dollarizzazione e mondo post-angloamericano: quanto è reale, quanto è retorica Federico Caffè, Enrico Mattei, Aldo Moro, Bettino Craxi – un unico filo
I LIBRI DI NINO GALLONI Il superamento del capitalismo. Il mondo post-angloamericano. Oltre l’economia della moneta a debito, Arianna Editrice, 2025 (postfazione di Roberta Lasi) Economia quantistica, irrazionalità e coscienza, Byoblu, 2022 La rivolta delle coscienze. Siamo troppi, inutili e dannosi?, Byoblu, 2022 Il grande mutuo. Le ragioni profonde della prossima crisi finanziaria, Editori Riuniti, 2007 La moneta copernicana (con Marco Della Luna), Nexus Edizioni, 2008
SOSTIENI CASA DEL SOLE TV Casa del Sole TV è un progetto di giornalismo indipendente autofinanziato. Per donazioni: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: La Casa del Sole Edizioni Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV Membership YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@CasadelSoleTVChannel Analista Multipolare €5/mese Inviato della Verità €15/mese Architetto del Futuro €25/mese
I LIBRI DI MARGHERITA FURLAN BRICS Scacco Matto (disponibile in italiano, inglese, russo)
SEGUI CASA DEL SOLE TV YouTube: @CasadelSoleTVChannel Sito web: https://casadelsole.tv/
CASA DEL SOLE TV — Informazione libera e indipendente Il nostro lavoro è possibile solo grazie al vostro sostegno. Casa del Sole TV non ha editori forti né finanziamenti pubblici: siamo sostenuti da voi, il nostro pubblico. Se credi nel valore di un’informazione che non tace, aiutaci a continuare.
Dona tramite bonifico bancario: IBAN: IT63P0326822300052392596590 Intestato a: LA CASA DEL SOLE EDIZIONI Causale: Donazione Casa del Sole TV
Dona tramite PayPal: paypal.me/casadelsoletv
Sostegno ricorrente: casadelsole.tv/sostienici Anche un piccolo contributo fa la differenza. Grazie di cuore!
L'articolo Statonote e spazi di sovranità proviene da Casa del Sole TV.
by Carlo Domenico Cristofori
UPDATE ON AUGUST, 19, 2026
Before the fear caused by the 7.4 magnitude earthquake in Colombia had even subsided, an unusual sight in the sky this time caused panic.
The sky turning intense shades of red and orange during sunset hours raised concerns of a new tremor in some areas, while experts stated that the sight was a natural atmospheric event.
Residents of the Colombian city of Galeras witnessed an unusual natural phenomenon when the sky suddenly turned a bright red color.
This event occurred in the northern part of the country, in the Sucre department, in the La Sabana subregion, on August, 16, a few year later the latest earthquake in Colombia of low intensity 4.2 that haven’t caused damage due to its depthness.
Locals were surprised and concerned about what surrounded them. Footage of the red sky quickly spread on social media, sparking active discussion.
POSTED ON JULY, 7, 2026
Days after twin earthquakes struck Venezuela, leaving thousands dead and causing widespread devastation across parts of the south American country, residents in the capital Caracas witnessed the sky turning an eerie blood red.
Videos quickly spread over social media, showing a burning crimson sky as the sun sank below the horizon, bathing the city in a red glow.
Now let’s try to analyze the possible causes from a natural, scientific, and metaphysical perspective.
It would be a mistake, in fact, to ignore potentially supernatural or geoengineered phenomena simply because we persist in confining these areas to a corner where science, unfortunately, still lacks certain and empirically unequivocal answers.
It’s important to note that a video published by the New York Post showed the sky changing in color from deep red to purple, just like the multi-colored auroras triggered by the HARRP station often used by US Pentagon for geoengineering military tests.
«Scientists say there is a much more simple explanation for the vivid sunset. Known locally as a ‘candilazo’, it occurs when the sun’s light travels through a thicker layer of the atmosphere, scattering blue and violet wavelengths and allowing the red and orange hues to dominate the sky» the bristish newspaper The Independent wrote.
This is called Rayleigh scattering, and it is enhanced when there are more particles in the atmosphere, such as dust, smoke, or moisture. Saharan dust can often cause this to happen when it is carried on the wind across the Atlantic to this part of the world, further intensifying the colour of the sunsets in northern South America.
However, geophysicists say there is no scientific evidence linking red sunsets with seismic activity, and science is torn over whether earthquake lights, or EQL, are even real.
But the same scientists quoted by the mainstream newspaper – it should be noted – cannot even explain why there were 93 earthquakes in a single week in the Pacific Ring of Fire (and not only)
“Geophysicists differ on the extent to which they think that individual reports of unusual lighting near the time and epicenter of an earthquake actually represent EQL,” The U.S. Geological Survey states on its website. “Some doubt that any of the reports constitute solid evidence for EQL, whereas others think that at least some reports plausibly correspond to EQL.”
Therefore, despite the online speculation, the dramatic sky over Caracas is simply a natural event and not linked to the earthquakes, which were caused by the grinding movement along the boundary between the Caribbean and South American tectonic plates.
Social media users questioned if the colored sky was linked to the deadly earthquake that had recently struck the region.
The timing sparked theories ranging from mysterious ‘earthquake lights’ to biblical signs, as many likened it to Joel 2:30-31, which describes the ‘Day of the Lord’, which is a time of God’s coming judgment and power, Daily Mail pointed out.
‘And I will show wonders in the heavens and on the earth, blood and fire and columns of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes,’read the verses.
The prophecies about earthquakes in the “end times” announced in the Book of Revelation are also mentioned in the Gospel of St. Luke (21, 10-11):
«Then he (Jesus – ed) said to them: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven”.
And more (Luke, 21, 26-28):
“There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. When these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
But there is another explanation that could instead be related to an anthropogenic geoengineering action as was foreseen and announced by Fidel Castro regarding a possible US military attack through the use of geomagnetic bombardment of the HAARP station in Alaska.
According to the Cuban revolutionary, the infamous structure used for the electromagnetic alteration of the ionosphere in order to cause artificial northern lights – the acronym HAARP stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program – could also be capable of causing earthquakes, as also claimed by various scientists who do not deserve mention as they have not published certified studies.
But it is absolutely certain that the HAARP station is capable of producing dazzling auroras, producing sky colors that vary from green to red and purple depending on the intensity of the radio frequency (as we detailed in a previous investigation, see image below).
Therefore, even if Castro’s conspiracy theory about an earthquake caused by geoengineering in Venezuela is accepted as possible, a phenomenon of strange, intense blood-red illumination of the sky would be entirely consistent with a geomagnetic bombardment.
It’s important to note that a video published by the New York Post showed the sky changing in color from deep red to purple, just like the multi-colored auroras triggered by the HARRP station.
This color variation certainly isn’t evidence of a dangerous geoengineering operation, but it’s certainly a very serious clue that shouldn’t be underestimated.
DAZZLING AURORAS DEBUNKED! Artificially Caused by HAARP & US NSF. Not by a Solar Storm as CNN Told
It should be remembered that in 2019, the Trump administration used electromagnetic attacks to sabotage Venezuela’s electricity gridin a vain attempt to cause a coup against President Nicolas Maduro.
And Maduro himself was arrested in a raid by US military special forces using directed-energy weapons and bombs, currently prohibited under conventional law.
For the sake of completeness, we’ve listed three different hypotheses regarding Venezuela’s strange red skies. Choose which one you think is most plausible.
Carlo Domenico Cristofori – OSINT investigative journalist
MAIN SOURCES
GOSPA NEWS – HAARP & CLIMATE GEOENGINEERING DOSSIER
THE INDEPENDENT – Dramatic pictures show red skies over Caracas days after deadly earthquake
RELATED POSTS
Quatro bombeiros voluntários de Arouca ficaram feridos esta quarta-feira na sequência do despiste do veículo de combate a incêndios em que seguiam, numa zona onde lavra um fogo desde segunda-feira.
O acidente ocorreu perto do incêndio de Arouca, numa zona de difícil acesso na localidade de Pedrógão. Segundo Ricardo Fradique, do Comando Sub-Regional de Emergência e Proteção Civil da Região de Aveiro, à agência Lusa, desconhece-se ainda a gravidade dos ferimentos dos quatro operacionais, uma vez que as equipas de socorro permanecem no local.
O alerta para o despiste do veículo dos Bombeiros Voluntários de Arouca foi dado às 03:52. No local estiveram em operações de socorro 15 operacionais apoiados por seis veículos.
Se gostou do que leu e ainda não é seguidor, siga a nossa página para ver mais conteúdos!
Por: Dino Frazão
19 de Agosto de 2026
© 2026 Os Monhacas. Todos os direitos reservados.
Este é um projeto independente de criação de conteúdos.
Se gostou do que leu e ainda não é seguidor, siga a nossa página para ver mais conteúdos!
O conteúdo Quatro bombeiros de Arouca feridos em despiste do veículo de combate a incêndios aparece primeiro em OS MONHACAS.
A Ministra da Cultura, Juventude e Desporto, Margarida Balseiro Lopes, esteve na segunda-feira, dia 17 de agosto, em Altura, para ficar a conhecer de perto os programas juvenis “Férias 5.0”, “Jovens pelo Ambiente” e “Férias Ativas” e os seus respetivos resultados, apoiados pelo Ministério e promovidos por associação de jovens e Município.
Na sede da associação juvenil Young Link, na antiga Escola Primária de Altura, a ministra esteve próxima dos jovens e ficou a saber mais acerca do programa “Férias 5.0”, que faz parte das “Férias Ativas de Verão” do Município de Castro Marim.
As “Férias 5.0” são uma aposta ganha deste programa, que junta as crianças, os jovens e a tecnologia, em parceria com o Instituto Português do Desporto e Juventude e a associação Young Link, pretendendo integrar as áreas prioritárias tecnológico-científicas, com o objetivo de oferecer uma experiência geracional às crianças e jovens entre os 6 e os 10 anos, em vertente tecnológica de ocupação de tempos livres.
Esta iniciativa aborda temáticas como robótica, programação, inteligência artificial e comunicação digital, além de atividades alternativas como visitas e jogos.
No mesmo local, a Ministra da Cultura, Juventude e Desporto interagiu com os participantes do programa “Jovens pelo Ambiente”, que convida os mais novos a trabalharem no sentido crítico e a participarem ativamente na valorização do espaço público e preservação ambiental, através de atividades como a limpeza urbana ou a salinicultura, tendo entregado os seus certificados.
Margarida Balseiro Lopes assistiu ainda a uma aula de folclore com participantes das “Férias Ativas de Verão” do Município de Castro Marim, promovida pela Associação Cultural Amendoeiras em Flor, que promove as tradições do território junto dos mais novos.
Na antiga Escola Primária de Altura, foi ainda demonstrada outra atividade das “Férias Ativas de Verão” do Município de Castro Marim, que consistia na pintura de um mural, com a assinatura dos jovens do concelho.
Esta visita contou ainda com a participação do presidente do Instituto Português do Desporto e Juventude, Ricardo Gonçalves, do vice-presidente, Paulo Santos, e ainda do diretor regional, Ricardo Pinto.
No próximo dia 28 de agosto, pelas 22:30, no Largo Sebastião Martins Mestre (Paços do Concelho), o Município de Olhão e o Artelier? – Teatro de Rua apresentam o espetáculo de videomapping intitulado “200 anos em movimento”.
Integrado no programa comemorativo do Bicentenário da Câmara Municipal de Olhão, o espetáculo assinala uma data particularmente significativa: 28 de agosto de 1826, dia a que corresponde a primeira ata que integra o acervo do Arquivo Municipal e que marca o arranque formal do funcionamento da estrutura camarária olhanense.
Ao longo de cerca de 70 minutos, “200 anos em movimento” propõe uma viagem pela história da Câmara Municipal de Olhão, revisitando acontecimentos, protagonistas e momentos marcantes dos seus dois séculos de existência. Através de uma linguagem contemporânea e de uma abordagem site-specific, o espetáculo recorre à tecnologia para projetar sobre os Paços do Concelho uma nova leitura da história e da identidade olhanenses.
A proposta artística vai, contudo, além da componente audiovisual. O espetáculo integra também uma dimensão de teatro participativo, colocando em interação, ao vivo, atores profissionais com elementos de diferentes núcleos e projetos teatrais não profissionalizados do concelho: a Universidade Sénior, o Grupo de Teatro Sénior de Olhão, o AlmaMonca, novo projeto teatral sediado em Moncarapacho, e jovens ligados à Casa Municipal da Juventude Hugo Charrão.
A criação do espetáculo resulta de um trabalho desenvolvido ao longo dos últimos meses, que incluiu pesquisa histórica, investigação de campo junto da comunidade e releitura artística dos 200 anos de percurso da Câmara Municipal.
“200 anos em movimento” pretende, assim, transformar o espaço público num lugar de encontro entre memória, comunidade e criação artística, celebrando dois séculos de história municipal através de uma experiência dirigida a toda a população e a quem visita Olhão.
A edição de 2026 em formato especial “Vem à Vila” da Feira da Serra confirmou que a identidade de um dos maiores certames do Algarve se constrói nas pessoas, na autenticidade da Serra do Caldeirão e na capacidade de reinventar a tradição. A expressiva adesão de visitantes e a forte participação de artesãos, produtores locais, comerciantes, associações, artistas, expositores e parceiros validaram a aposta do Município num formato renovado, que levou a Feira para as ruas da vila, preservando a essência que a distingue há mais de três décadas
Durante três dias, São Brás de Alportel transformou-se num palco vivo de cultura, tradição, criatividade e convívio, onde milhares de visitantes descobriram o melhor que o concelho tem para oferecer.
A sessão inaugural contou com a presença do Secretário de Estado do Desenvolvimento Regional, Hélder Reis, do Presidente da Comissão de Coordenação e Desenvolvimento Regional do Algarve, José Apolinário, do presidente da Assembleia Municipal, Vitor Guerreiro, do Embaixador de Portugal na Argentina, Gonçalo Gomes; bem como de diversas entidades regionais e locais, testemunhando a relevância da Feira da Serra enquanto iniciativa de valorização do território, da economia local e das potencialidades do Algarve genuíno.
Mais do que um evento, a Feira voltou a afirmar-se como um espaço de encontro entre quem visita e quem faz da Serra do Caldeirão um património vivo, reforçando a sua missão de promover o território, as suas gentes e a sua identidade.
O Município de São Brás de Alportel agradece a todos os que contribuíram para o sucesso desta edição, visitantes, expositores, produtores, artesãos, comerciantes, associações, patrocinadores, entidades parceiras, artistas, trabalhadores municipais, voluntários e forças de segurança, cujo empenho tornou possível concretizar esta edição especial.
Um novo formato para responder a um momento excecional
A edição de 2026 ficou marcada pela realização da Feira da Serra nas ruas da vila, uma decisão motivada pela necessidade de reduzir significativamente o investimento municipal no evento, permitindo canalizar recursos para o Plano Municipal de recuperação da rede viária municipal, em particular da Estrada Municipal 1202, que atravessa a Serra do Caldeirão no concelho, fortemente afetada pela tempestade do final de janeiro.
Mais do que uma mudança de localização, esta opção traduziu-se numa nova forma de viver a Feira da Serra, aproximando o certame das pessoas, integrando a vila na experiência dos visitantes e criando uma maior ligação entre o evento, o espaço público, o comércio local e a comunidade.
Para a Presidente da Câmara Municipal de São Brás de Alportel, Marlene Guerreiro, esta foi “uma Feira que, mais do que nunca, nos provou que o maior património de São Brás de Alportel nunca foi um lugar, um edifício ou uma paisagem: foram, são e serão sempre as suas pessoas.”
Valorização do Comércio Local
A edição especial “A Feira da Serra Vem à Vila” reforçou igualmente a aposta na dinamização da economia local através de um conjunto de iniciativas destinadas a incentivar o comércio de proximidade e a valorizar os estabelecimentos são-brasenses.
Entre essas iniciativas destacou-se a Campanha Municipal de Vales de Compras, que colocou em sorteio vales no valor global de 480 euros, a utilizar nos estabelecimentos aderentes do concelho. Esta ação constituiu um incentivo direto às compras no comércio local, promovendo a economia circular, apoiando as famílias e contribuindo para o fortalecimento dos comerciantes que diariamente dão vida à vila e ao concelho.
Aliada à abertura dos estabelecimentos durante as noites da Feira e à sua integração na dinâmica do certame, esta iniciativa reforçou o propósito de fazer da Feira da Serra um verdadeiro motor de desenvolvimento económico, criando oportunidades para os comerciantes locais e incentivando os milhares de visitantes a regressarem ao longo do ano para descobrir a diversidade, autenticidade e qualidade da oferta comercial de São Brás de Alportel.
Três dias de tradição, cultura, inovação e animação
Ao longo dos três dias, a Feira reuniu 17 espaços temáticos, entre os quais cinco palcos, onde a gastronomia, o artesanato, os produtos locais, a sustentabilidade, a inovação, a mobilidade, a animação de rua e a música deram expressão ao melhor da Serra do Caldeirão.
O programa contou com os concertos de Luís Trigacheiro, Raya Real, A Kind of Queen – Tributo aos Queen, Remember, Super Pop, DJ Nuno Silva e Sniffy Covers Band, a par de dezenas de atuações de artistas e projetos regionais, espetáculos de dança, folclore, animação itinerante e iniciativas culturais que deram vida às ruas da vila e proporcionaram momentos de encontro e partilha para públicos de todas as idades.
A Feira da Serra voltou igualmente a demonstrar que tradição e inovação caminham lado a lado. Ao lado dos ofícios, dos sabores e dos produtos que preservam a memória da Serra, conviveram novas formas de expressão artística, espaços dedicados à sustentabilidade, à tecnologia, à mobilidade e à criatividade, revelando um certame capaz de honrar as suas raízes enquanto continua a conquistar as novas gerações e a renovar-se de edição para edição.
Talento são-brasense e juventude em destaque
A Feira da Serra voltou igualmente a afirmar-se como uma importante montra de valorização do talento são-brasense e algarvio, proporcionando oportunidades de divulgação a dezenas de artistas que marcaram presença ao longo dos vários palcos do certame.
Um dos grandes destaques foi o Palco Feira da Serra Jovem, especialmente criado para promover a revelação de novos talentos artísticos e incentivar a participação das novas gerações na vida cultural do concelho. À semelhança das edições anteriores, este espaço voltou a acolher jovens artistas da terra e da região, proporcionando, para muitos deles, a oportunidade do seu primeiro grande espetáculo perante o público, incluindo a atuação da Banda Feira da Serra 2026.
A aposta na juventude estendeu-se igualmente ao Programa de Voluntariado Jovem, que voltou a mobilizar dezenas de jovens são-brasenses para colaborar na organização da Feira. Muito mais do que um apoio à realização do evento, este programa constitui uma verdadeira escola de cidadania ativa, responsabilidade, espírito de equipa e participação cívica, reforçando o envolvimento das novas gerações num dos maiores acontecimentos do concelho e fortalecendo o sentimento de pertença e orgulho pela sua terra.
Ambienta-te: uma feira cada vez mais sustentável
Entre as novidades desta edição destacou-se o espaço Ambienta-te, criado para reforçar o compromisso da Feira da Serra com a sustentabilidade ambiental e com a promoção de estilos de vida mais responsáveis.
Em sintonia com os valores que distinguem o certame, este espaço convidou visitantes de todas as idades a descobrir, de forma lúdica e interativa, os Objetivos de Desenvolvimento Sustentável, demonstrando que pequenos gestos do quotidiano podem fazer a diferença na construção de um futuro mais sustentável.
Através de um passatempo repleto de prémios, o Ambienta-te promoveu a sensibilização ambiental de uma forma participativa e envolvente, reforçando a aposta da Feira da Serra na conciliação entre tradição, inovação e responsabilidade ambiental.
Uma feira que promove o território muito para além dos dias do evento
Uma das novidades desta edição foi a integração do comércio local são-brasense na dinâmica da Feira, mantendo os seus estabelecimentos abertos durante as noites do evento e convidando os visitantes a descobrir a diversidade, a qualidade e a autenticidade da oferta comercial da vila.
Esta aproximação permitiu reforçar um dos grandes objetivos da Feira da Serra: valorizar quem produz, quem cria, quem empreende e quem, todos os dias, contribui para a identidade e vitalidade económica do concelho. Mais do que incentivar as compras durante os dias do certame, a Feira pretende despertar o interesse de quem visita São Brás de Alportel para regressar ao longo do ano, conhecer melhor os seus artesãos, produtores, restaurantes, lojas e restantes agentes económicos, gerando um impacto que se prolonga muito para além dos dias do evento.
Ao aproximar visitantes e agentes económicos locais, a Feira da Serra reforçou a sua missão enquanto espaço de promoção do território, contribuindo para dinamizar a economia local, criar novas oportunidades e afirmar São Brás de Alportel como um destino de autenticidade, qualidade e hospitalidade.
A Feira da Serra é hoje um evento que honra as suas raízes, mas que continua a olhar para o futuro. A experiência desta edição constitui uma base sólida para continuar a aperfeiçoar o evento, ouvindo os intervenientes e introduzindo melhorias que permitam reforçar a cada edição a qualidade do certame, mantendo sempre viva a sua essência.
Para Marlene Guerreiro, “a Feira da Serra sempre soube acompanhar o seu tempo e evoluir. Sempre soube reinventar-se e dar voz a projetos de inovação e empreendedorismo da Região.
Sempre soube renascer em cada edição das mãos dos jovens que lhe dão vida!
E talvez seja precisamente essa a razão da sua longevidade: a capacidade de respeitar o legado que recebeu, enquanto constrói, com confiança, o futuro!”.
The wife of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a quiet but powerful influence over one of the world’s most hyped “safe” AI companies, once pitched Jeffrey Epstein on investing in her “free luxury porn” venture years [...]
The post Anthropic CEO’s Wife Begged Jeffrey Epstein to Invest in ‘Luxury Porn’ Venture – Long After He Was a Registered Pedophile appeared first on The People's Voice.
Login