Valerie Hamilton reports on the west coast and the US-Mexico border for US and European public media. She lives in Los Angeles.
Valerie Hamilton reports on the west coast and the US-Mexico border for US and European public media. She lives in Los Angeles.
Thousands of students in Europe and elsewhere have been skipping school on Fridays to demand their governments take stronger action against climate change. Some teachers and politicians are pushing back, but the students are getting support from their elders as well.
Germany is shutting down the last of its underground coal mines next year, and the the way it's handling the end of this once-dominant industry could be a model for the US and other countries.
Even though Angela Merkel is its political leader, Germany has one of the worst gender wage gaps in Europe. But the picture is different in the East.
Even as it makes a big push into green energy and hosts big climate conferences, Germany has remained stubbornly reliant on coal for a big share of its energy. That might finally be starting to change.
The Austrian government wanted to knock down the house where Hitler was born. But the town said no, you can't stop people from remembering history. But you can try to make sure that when they do, they know what really happened.
“We love vanilla, chocolate ... but you still have that memory of what you ate back home,” says Smita Vasant, who left her corporate job to open Saffron Spot in Los Angeles.
“Reading books is a human right,” says bookseller Bijan Khalili, who runs Ketab Corporation, a Persian bookstore in Los Angeles. It started as a simple service to exiles who had fled the Iranian Revolution, leaving their books behind.
"The handwriting is already up and down the wall that we'll never have the labor force that we had before," says one farm owner from a part of California where some farms are using robots to help work the crops.
California has the largest economy in the US. It's also the state with the most immigrants. These two facts are not unrelated, but the way immigrants build that economy is complex.
The Cuban song Guantanamera has been adopted by everyone from a Japanese girl group to British football fans.
If you think it's hard to make it as a musician in the US, try Saudi Arabia. Music isn't officially illegal, but many Muslims there believe that music is forbidden — so not only are there no karaoke bars, but shredding that guitar solo might actually get you in trouble with religious police. But that doesn't mean that there are no aspiring Saudi Idols.