In Brazil, they rallied online by the millions, sharing videos and spreading memes. In Serbia, they cycled across Europe and ran ultramarathons to make their voices heard.

Both movements burst into international public view last month as they became central during election campaigns to the pushback against authoritarianism. What they also offered, however, was a window into a wider phenomenon playing out across the globe, as youth-led movements reshape political landscapes.

Opponents say [Washington state] voters were persuaded at least partly because the initiative and its boosters exploited deep-seated prejudices and misunderstandings about transgender people to erode their rights.

The victories were a clear rebuke of Trump’s politics, but also a referendum on the Democratic party’s own centrism that is complicit in the violence of masked men hunting immigrants, the funding of a genocide and the denial of healthcare to citizens of the world’s wealthiest country.

…Hakeem Jeffries, who is running for speaker of the House, will not commit to holding a vote on abolishing ICE. He opposes Medicare for All. He has said he will not hold Trump accountable for the human rights violations committed, portraying it as a question of “getting even” rather than achieving justice where it was denied. Chuck Schumer, who holds similar positions, has an extraordinarily low approval rating – yet plans to run for majority leader in the Senate. Electeds are questioning whether these men should hold these roles.

But the dissent must also come from us, as it has been. We need to demand an end to the fast violence of guns on our streets trained on our neighbors, bombs dropped from the sky and the slow violence of people dying because their healthcare was denied or their food stamps were cut.

We need to organize, and mobilize, to demand the multi-racial democracy we were promised – not a playground for the rich to get richer on the time and labor and lives of the poor.

A coalition of advocacy groups are preparing to mount a legal challenge against a Washington state ballot initiative that bans transgender girls’ participation in girls’ school sports, which voters approved in last week’s midterm election and will go into effect next month.

The challenge is poised to set off a protracted legal battle over the rights of trans youth in Washington, which has functioned as a safe haven for thousands of trans people fleeing states that have enacted anti-trans laws in recent years.

If enforced, the ballot measure, Initiative 638, would be “the most extreme” trans sports ban of its kind, according to its opponents. The initiative’s official text says it would require all girls participating in school sports to “verify biological sex”, which could include confirming their “reproductive anatomy”.

The mayor of Houston on Friday said the city would limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities, heralding “a new model” of immigration enforcement after Democrats won power in Texas for the first time in decades.

Houston’s mayor, John Whitmire, said the city would go after immigrants “that pose a danger, not those that are going about their family business, work and education”.

Exposure to a new generation of allegedly “safe” plasticizers is linked to lower birth weight and fetal development complications, which could cause serious health problems later in life, a new peer-reviewed study found.

As the health risks in exposure to common phthalate plasticizers became clear over the last few decades, industry began switching to a new type of chemical, called Dinch, that it claimed was a “high safety”, nontoxic alternative. It is widely used in soft plastic food packaging in the United States and European Union, and is found in children’s toys, medical devices, some textiles, flooring and other consumer goods.

But it may not be as safe as industry has claimed, the New York University Langone Health analysis of federal US health data suggests. There is a dearth of research into Dinch health risks, though what exists points toward the chemicals being hormone disruptors that can impact kids’ development.

Mississippi’s race for the U.S. Senate remains too close to call: Democrat Scott Colom is narrowly leading Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith by nearly 2,000 votes with 96% of votes counted as of Friday morning. Donald Trump carried Mississippi by 23 points in 2024. If elected, Colom would be the first Democrat to win the state in 40 years and the first African American since 1875, during the Reconstruction era. Colom, the former district attorney for northeast Mississippi, made the issue of affordability central to his campaign. He has sharply criticized national Democrats for writing off Mississippi and failing to invest in his campaign early on.

“We are having active conversations with our partners and also evaluating what legal options are available to us. If there is an avenue, we will challenge this ballot measure in court on behalf of our members and our community and trans youth,” said Danni Askini, the group’s executive director.

She said Gender Justice League would challenge the measure, Initiative 638, based on a 2008 student privacy rights case that ruled that Washington schools requiring suspicionless urine testing of students was unconstitutional.

“We believe that the Washington constitution and the Supreme Court have been really clear that I-638 would go far beyond a random drug screening and invade all girls’ privacy,” Askini said, adding that the measure “sets a really chilling and disturbing precedent.”

There is a lot of talk on social media about how Black women voters basically saved America from the very worst of itself. They came out not only in strong numbers, but consistently voted against GOP candidates at the highest rates (between 80 and 90 percent).

Tuesday night’s explosive rout of the Republican party was supercharged by the fury of Hispanic Americans who turned out in record numbers in key battlegrounds to protest the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant assault on their communities.

“Trump went against us,” said Benny Melendez from Weslaco, Texas. “He made us the target of ICE operations, so we decided to punish him by voting against his party. That’s what happened.”

We’ve long believed that American politics would be a whole lot better if people like him – working folks who care for the land and their communities so well – were representing us.

And now he is. On Tuesday night, [regenerative farmer Jamie] Ager won the House race for North Carolina’s 11th congressional district, resoundingly flipping a Republican seat that Donald Trump won handily in 2024.

He wasn’t alone. Democrats tore into Republicans’ rural vote margins, wiping out almost half of Trump’s colossal 40-point advantage in 2024. Of the 21 most rural-populated states that held elections for US Senate, Democrats won in 10 of them, including states like Kansas, Mississippi and Iowa, all long surrendered to the Republican juggernaut.

Voters in Montana on Tuesday delivered a major blow to big moneyed interests by overwhelmingly passing a ballot initiative barring corporate cash from political campaigns in the state.

With 87% of votes counted as of Wednesday morning, Montana Constitutional Initiative 194 has ++received++ support from more than 65% of voters, with just 35% registering opposition.