One of the coolest initiatives of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is the Electronic Frontier Alliance, a network of autonomous community groups that work on local issues with support from each other and EFF: everything from getting facial recognition banned in their communities to forcing local police departments to seek public comment on new surveillance tech initiatives. Read the rest

Jorge Luis Escandón Hernández was elected mayor of Las Margaritas, Chiapas after he promised to repair city's rural roads, in a chaotic campaign that included accusations of a "brawl" with his opponent's supporters. Read the rest

Devon Cade -- a former bureaucrat who now describes himself as a "philanthropist" -- has asked a court to disqualify 30 out of the 33 other Democrats standing in the primary for the city's council elections on the grounds that the signatures on their nominating petitions were forged. Read the rest

Mexico's corrupt, failing government that covers up official mass murders by attacking journalists and dissidents with cyberweapons is locked in a stalemate with the country's horrific, mass-murdering gangs, and the Mexican people are caught in the crossfire. Read the rest

Last week, Senator Rand Paul was severely injured after an alleged assault by his neighbor, anesthesiologist/inventor Rene Boucher, who worked with Paul at a local hospital. Read the rest

After running Daniel Miller's long, excellent features about the many ways in which Disney has manipulated the local politics of Anaheim (home of Disneyland) to extract huge subsidies from the cash-strapped city, the company retaliated by barring its film critic from future press screenings of its films, a move that the company confirmed, calling the coverage "unfair." Read the rest

Across America, Sanders-inspired left-wingers -- many of the them Occupy veterans -- are contesting local elections, challenging the establishment Democratic machine as well as the GOP, and they're making enormous progress. Read the rest

Saranap is an unincorporated, loosely governed town in Contra Costa County in Northern California; it is home to a 66,000 square foot temple built by a religion called Sufism Reoriented, which has little to do with traditional Sufiism, being dedicated to the idea that an Indian man called Meher Baba was the reincarnation of Buddha and Christ and God on earth and that he will return in 700 years. Read the rest

Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine has a history of blocking his critics on social media, including Grant Stern, who runs the Photography is Not a Crime group. Read the rest