Berkeley Political Review

No worker is more essential than the one who makes sure the trains run on time. The men and women who operate and maintain the freight trains that travel cross country define the backbone of our nation’s economy. The union workers who maintain and operate America’s freight system are as important as the tracks on which they run on. Despite this, everyone from railroad CEOs to America’s “most pro-union” president has worked to quiet the demands of the major railroad unions.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought the world to the brink of what Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey has described as a potentially “apocalyptic” food crisis. The ongoing conflict has halted agricultural exports from Ukraine, a country long known as the breadbasket of Europe and Russia and the world’s largest exporter of wheat and fertilizers.

Sydney was a sophomore at the University of San Francisco when she took magic mushrooms for the first time. Unlike most new users of the drug, however, she was not interested in “tripping”. The warping of reality, intense visual effects, and unpredictable results seemed like too much to handle for her introduction to the world of psychedelics.

“Standardized testing is a form of eugenics,” declared a classmate in my legal studies class. We had been discussing the legacies of eugenics in the United States and how these harmful, pseudoscientific beliefs permeate our lives today.

Welp. That was over quickly. Within an hour of the polls closing at 8 PM PT on September 14, the recall race was already called for Governor Newsom. Governor Gavin Newsom’s victory was basically the same as his 2018 landslide (both 61.9%). The recall race has been estimated by Sonoma State University Professor David McCuan to have cost over $450 million, including $276 million in California taxpayer dollars, according to the California Department of Finance.

We often don’t think about why our car gets a certain amount of miles per gallon, or who tells the weatherman what to say on TV or who is actually monitoring the sea level rise and melting ice caps we constantly hear about. And that’s to be expected, just like how we might not consider who designed our cars, or who bagged our chips or why water flows from our taps. Climate and environmental scientists’ work is everywhere, but not often recognized.

A New Crisis The United States is one of the most medicated countries in the world with of the nation taking at least two prescription medications, a number that has been increasing steadily over the past decade. While prescription drugs can be a life-saving solution that helps Americans regain control over their physical and mental ailments, overprescription of unnecessary medications is no new story for the country.

The End of O’Toole Everything happened in a flash. First, a ragtag ensemble of truckers, in the early days of 2022, arrived in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, calling for an end to vaccine mandates and, in some cases, the removal of Trudeau. Erin O’Toole, then the leader of the Conservatives and hesitant in lending his support to the convoy, finally agreed to a meeting with them on January 28th, a sign that he was succumbing to increased pressure from the party.

In 2021, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele described himself as “the coolest dictator in the world” on Twitter. If Bukele limited his eccentricity to Twitter, such a declaration would cause about as much harm as Elon Musk’s memes. However, between planning to promote Bitcoin in Miami while chaos consumes his country at home and exploiting his populism to destroy El Salvador’s institutions, Nayib Bukele is anything but a harmless politician.

As the world was rocked by the tremors of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, people across the globe were awed by reports of thousands of ordinary Russian citizens protesting against their autocratic leader’s war. That they incurred considerable risk in doing so was quickly evident as protestors were arrested and beaten by police officers, and media outlets across the globe broadcast the tenacity and courage of the protesters.