alyaza

Target saw foot traffic fall for the eighth consecutive week, extending a losing streak that began just a few days after the company announced it would end its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program in late January.

For the week that began March 17, foot traffic fell 5.7% YoY for Target, according to data from Placer.ai. That's compared to the 7.1% it fell last week, and an average weekly decline over the last eight weeks of 6.2%.

In a March 4 earnings call, when it reported a 3.1% Q4 loss and a non-specified sales decline in February, Target executives were bullish about its Easter assortment boosting business. But if it has so far, it's not reflected in the foot-traffic data. What may have taken the spring out of the Easter Bunny's hop for Target is a 40-plus day boycott coinciding with Lent (so ending on Easter) spearheaded by Black clergy for which more than 150,000 have signed up, exceeding organizers' stated goal of 100,000.

Last year, researchers at Dublin City University released a report on a disturbing phenomenon: a surge of male supremacy videos in young men's social media feeds. It's the kind of report that should sound an alarm for parents, teachers and administrators. But as the gender divide widens and young men increasingly lean conservative amid Trump-era authoritarianism, it feels less like a future warning and more like a current diagnosis.

In the report, researchers created sock-puppet accounts — fake accounts registered as teenage boys — to determine how quickly misogynistic videos show up in users' TikTok and YouTube feeds. Alongside a control group, one group used male-coded search terms, such as "gaming" or "gym tips," while another searched for more extreme anti-feminist, male-supremacist content. The "manosphere," as it is often referred to, includes videos by Andrew and Tristan Tate, influencers who profit off the insecurities of young men. (The Tate brothers are embroiled in criminal and civil cases in Romania, Britain and the United States. They deny the allegations against them.)

It took under nine minutes for TikTok to offer troubling content to their fake 16-year-old boys, which later included explicitly anti-feminist and anti-L.G.B.T.Q. videos. Much of the content blamed women and trans people for the standing they believe men have lost in the world. More extreme content appeared within 23 minutes. Male supremacy videos intersected with reactionary right-wing punditry within two or three hours.

By the final phase of the experiment, accounts that showed even slight interest in the manosphere — for instance, accounts that watched a video all the way through — resulted in their For You feeds offering more than 78 percent alpha-male and anti-feminist content. Messages included: Feminism has gone too far, men are losing out on jobs to women and women prefer to stay at home rather than work.

Tonight, Democrats have their first chance to fight back against Donald Trump and reverse some of their party’s losses in the 2024 election — and Republicans have a shot to score a big judicial victory in a court currently controlled narrowly by liberals, and in a state that is key to the presidency and control of the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s a race everyone is watching and people are spending significant sums on. I’m talking of course about the Wisconsin Supreme Court race between liberal Susan Crawford and conservative Brad Schimel.

Odds are you have probably heard of the election from the coverage of Elon Musk’s involvement, which has included him spending $20 million in television and digital advertising as well as giving away checks for $1 million to random rally goers this weekend (which is, apparently and shockingly, not illegal). But the stakes are significant: The Wisconsin Supreme Court has recently decided cases on gerrymandering, campaign finance, and voting rights, and would have jurisdiction over a pending abortion case and important electoral cases before the 2028 presidential race. Across all parties, nearly $100 million has been spent on the race.

Prognosticators mostly expect Crawford to narrowly win the race, with room for uncertainty and a small Schimel victory. Crawford has led most of the polls conducted of the race, and the line at Split Ticket is that Republicans have an off-year turnout problem that tilts the scales against them. You can apply a similar logic from my ”dual electorates” piece and draw the conclusion that Schimel is likely to have a bad time, though a win is not impossible. The prediction market Kalshi (I know) gives Crawford an 84% chance (the markets tend to overestimate odds for losers, so her real odds might be higher than this).

Whatever the odds, what really matters is who votes, and here is how to watch the results like a nerd pro:

Florida, like other states in the South, is regularly dismissed as a “non-union” state, where decades of anti-union policies, and deep-rooted corporate and political resistance to unions have stunted and degraded the labor movement’s power.

Only about 6% of workers in Florida even have union representation, and just 5% are dues-paying union members — below the national average. But new organizing does happen here in the Sunshine State, maybe more often than you’d think.

In order to file a petition for a union election, at least 30% of workers need to sign what are known as showing-of-interest cards demonstrating their support for unionization (generally, organizers shoot for a higher percentage, in case the employer tries to water down support for the union ahead of the election). Unions can also seek certification through a voluntary recognition/card-check process, which requires showing that a majority (more than 50%) of workers support unionization.

Here’s a rundown of new organizing drives that launched last month and union election results:

After adding in-app English translations and bilingual subtitles, Xiaohongshu recently opened a Hong Kong office, and posted a role for global business development based in Hong Kong on its official LinkedIn account. The city is often the first step for Chinese companies expanding overseas. Earlier this month, it also launched a global e-commerce pilot program for mainland Chinese merchants that initially targets the U.S., Hong Kong, and Macau.

“RedNote’s pivot signals an evolution to take markets outside China seriously,” Ivy Yang, a China tech analyst and founder of consulting firm Wavelet Strategy, told Rest of World. While the company had been trying to expand overseas, the “TikTok refugee phenomenon likely made this pivot a must-have rather than simmering on the back burner.”

The unexpected surge of global users in January due to fears of a TikTok ban could provide a windfall for Xiaohongshu. But for the platform to compete with Western social media apps, it must retain these users, build cross-border e-commerce functions, and clarify its overseas business strategy, experts and business owners told Rest of World.

To net or not to net. That is (one) question currently under debate in Vermont following Gov. Phil Scott’s introduction of a suite of proposed changes to the state’s climate laws, now under consideration by the state Legislature.

Scott, a Republican, has proposed changing how the state counts greenhouse gas emissions in its official inventory—which the state’s legally binding emissions targets are based on—to include carbon sequestration by forests and farms. His proposal would also replace the state’s declining greenhouse gas emissions targets for 2025, 2030 and 2050 with a single target of achieving and thereafter remaining at “net-zero” emissions by 2035.

This proposal to switch from gross to net emissions accounting has raised serious questions because it could decelerate Vermont’s transition off fossil fuels and introduce uncertainty into the state’s calculated emissions.

To understand the impact of the proposal, one must understand how greenhouse gas emissions are currently tracked in Vermont, using what’s known as a “gross” approach. Under that accounting, only certain emissions from agriculture—such as methane from livestock—are included in the official inventory, which also includes emissions from sectors such as transportation, electricity and home-heating. Other, harder to track agricultural emissions and removals—and the entire “carbon flux” associated with forests—are not included in the official inventory, but rather as supplemental information.

It is difficult to separate the net accounting plan from the rest of Scott’s proposals. Those proposals would also remove the right of citizens to sue if the state is not taking sufficient action to meet, or has not met, one of the required emissions targets. Critics say this removes accountability, while Scott and Moore claim it removes the distraction of litigation.

Additionally, Scott has proposed changing the composition of the state’s Climate Council, an appointed mix of governmental and non-governmental experts in various aspects of climate science and policy, and reducing its authority to direct the adoption of climate policies via a Climate Action Plan. First released in 2021, the plan is set to be updated this year.

Warner Bros has completed the sale we told you about a couple weeks ago for their previously shelved Coyote Vs Acme movie.

Ketchup Entertainment today confirmed their completed deal for worldwide rights to the live-action/animated hybrid film that brings Looney Tunes character Wile E. Coyote to the big screen. We had the deal pegged in the $50M range and the film is expected to get a theatrical release in 2026.

Women’s sports bars, which somehow didn’t exist in the U.S. until before 2022, are on the rise, with a new report from NBC News estimating that their number will quadruple by the end of 2025.

Currently, there are six women’s sports bars open in the U.S., three of which opened this past week, just in time for March Madness: 1972 Women’s Sports Pub in Austin, Texas, Title 9 Sports Grill in Phoenix, Arizona, and Set the Bar in Omaha, Nebraska. By the end of the year, there are projected to be roughly 24 women’s sports bars in total in the U.S., per NBC News. As the three bars that opened this past week prove, those establishments won’t just be limited to big cities on the coasts (although, yes, there are two bars expected to open in New York this year and two in San Francisco). They also include Columbus, Ohio, where Raise the Bar is set to open this fall; Kansas City, Missouri, where The Dub will open at some point this year; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where another bar named Title 9 is slated to open.

The landmark youth-led climate lawsuit Juliana v. United States has come to a close without ever seeing a trial. The case, filed in 2015 by Our Children’s Trust on behalf of 21 youth plaintiffs, faced 10 years of opposition from the federal government because it argued that the U.S. government violated young people’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property through its unwavering support of the fossil fuel industry. Ultimately, the Department of Justice successfully pushed back against the plaintiffs’ efforts. On March 24, the Supreme Court denied the plaintiff’s petition for review, upholding the lower court’s 2024 decision to throw out the case.

“It’s the end of the case, but it’s not the end of the movement,” said Michael Burger, the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. Burger told Prism that Juliana stood at the “forefront of a global phenomenon of youth-led climate litigation,” preceding other lawsuits based on state constitutions that would see success, including Held v. Montana and Navahine v. Hawai’i. In 2023, a Montana judge ruled that the state must consider climate impacts when permitting new fossil fuel projects, and in 2024, Hawai’i reached an agreement to decarbonize its transportation sector.

Three presidential administrations—Obama, Trump, and Biden—challenged Juliana, but never on the substance of its claims. Administrations argued that courts weren’t the place to write policy, that the government would be irreparably harmed from a trial, and that there are no explicit provisions in the U.S. Constitution that guard against impacts of climate change. Lawyers for the plaintiffs disagreed, basing the suit on what’s known as the Public Trust Doctrine, which requires that governments protect natural resources for the enjoyment and use of the public. The case sought declaratory relief from the court, which is a statement addressing the constitutionality of a policy that could then trigger policy changes from legislative bodies and federal and state agencies. A well-known example of declaratory judgment that led to broad changes is Brown v. Board of Education.

The government’s successful repudiation of Juliana raises questions about the efficacy of pursuing climate action through the judiciary, especially when the defendant is the government itself rather than corporations. But Burger told Prism that there’s much to be gleaned from Juliana.

“I think that this case has served as a model of a type of lawsuit that seeks to hold national or state governments accountable and to increase the ambition of government climate commitments by relying on legal claims and narratives grounded in youth, in climate science, in the impacts of climate change,” Burger said.

Earlier this week, Prism’s environmental justice reporter ray levy uyeda spoke with Juliana plaintiff Sahara Valentine via video call about the significance of Juliana v. United States, what they’ve learned from a decade of climate organizing in the legal realm, and what’s next.

Most Muslims in Ukraine are Crimean Tatars who are Indigenous to Crimea, the peninsula in southern Ukraine that Russia invaded and annexed in 2014. It set off the war that ramped up with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.

Many Crimean Tatars fled the peninsula. Some left the country altogether. For those who stayed in Ukraine, this Ramadan, which ends this weekend, is their fourth in wartime. Many say the circumstances have only strengthened their faith.

Tamila Tasheva, a Crimean Tatar herself, and a member of Ukraine’s parliament, was in attendance at the recent Musafir meal.

She said that life has been challenging for her community since the conflict began.

“My parents and mostly my relatives and friends, they live under occupation, and honestly speaking, we don’t speak about politics because it’s dangerous,” Tasheva said. “They live in the territory [in] fear. If you speak something openly, you could [be arrested] by occupying authorities, that’s why mostly people sit silently.”

Tasheva is a strong advocate for Crimean Tatars, and for all Ukrainian Muslims who make up 1% of Ukraine’s roughly 40 million people.

Just a few days earlier, Tasheva helped organize an iftar event attended by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy who expressed his “respect and gratitude to the Ukrainian Muslim community.”