Workers across the country joined in largest-ever strike to hit the fast food industry in the fight for higher wages. They hope to capture the attention of 2016 candidates by striking one year from Election Day.

Hundreds of protesters marched in downtown Brooklyn early on Tuesday, blocking traffic and carrying banners that demand that elected leaders implement a $15 an hour minimum wage and union rights.

In addition to New York City, workers began a walkout of their jobs starting at 6 a.m. in cities Chicago, Atlanta and Kansas City, among others.

The re-enserfment of Western peoples is taking place on several levels. One about which I have been writing for more than a decade comes from the offshoring of jobs. Americans, for example, have a shrinking participation in the production of the goods and services that are marketed to them.

On another level we are experiencing the financialization of the Western economy about which Michael Hudson is the leading expert (Killing The Host). Financialization is the process of removing any public presence in the economy and converting the economic surplus into interest payments to the financial sector.

These two developments deprive people of economic prospects. A third development deprives them of political rights. The Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic Partnerships eliminate political sovereignty and turn governance over to global corporations.

These so called "trade partnerships" have nothing to do with trade. These agreements negotiated in secrecy grant immunity to corporations from the laws of the countries in which they do business. This is achieved by declaring any interference by existing and prospective laws and regulations on corporate profits as restraints on trade for which corporations can sue and fine "sovereign" governments. For example, the ban in France and other counries on GMO products would be negated by the Trans-Atlantic Partnership. Democracy is simply replaced by corporate rule.

At least 23 people have been killed by shelling in the Syrian city of Latakia. Another 65 were injured, RIA Novosti reported citing a source in local police.

"Twenty-three people have been killed and at least 65 hospitalized with injuries of varying degrees," the police source said.

RT's Lizzie Phelan reports from Syria that the attack took place in a very densely-populated part of Latakia.

"All of the reports so far are suggesting that all of those killed and injured are civilians," she said.

The missiles that struck the city were most likely fired from Grad multiple-launch rocket system, Phelan added.

"Initial reports suggest that the attack was carried out by the Al-Qaeda branch, Al-Nusra Front," Phelan said.

"Consider the reality of today's job market. We have a massive skills gap. Even with record unemployment, millions of skilled jobs are unfilled because no one is trained or willing to do them. Meanwhile unemployment among college graduates is at an all-time high, and the majority of those graduates with jobs are not even working in their field of study. Plus, they owe a trillion dollars in student loans. A trillion! And still, we push a four-year college degree as the best way for the most people to find a successful career?" -Mike Rowe

For better or for worse, what we do for a living often defines us. It's one of the first questions we ask people when we meet them for the first time. It's where we will end up spending 90,000 hours of our life, over the course of 40-some years. Unfortunately, most people count themselves as unhappy with their work (by two to one worldwide!). Pop culture endlessly makes fun of the drone-like office employee, and yet that's where most of us are.

The campus coup d'etat was over.

After two top University of Missouri system officials announced their resignations Monday following allegations that they had not sufficiently addressed racial issues on campus, students danced on the quad where activists had set up a tent city. The football team announced that it was ending its strike and would resume practicing for this weekend's football game.

At an outdoor amphitheater, hundreds of students chanted in the sun, "I ... am ... a ... revolutionary!" Social media users around the world joined in, tweeting more than 100,000 times about the day's protest. The uprising was partly a ripple effect from last year's protests in Ferguson, Mo. Missouri again proved itself a cauldron for black radicalism, with students pairing bold physical protests with a social media megaphone to demand a renewed focus on racial inequality from their university administration.

"The frustration and anger that I see is clear, real, and I don't doubt it for a second," said university President Tim Wolfe as he resigned Monday morning at a meeting of the system's governing body, the Board of Curators. "I take full responsibility for this frustration and I take full responsibility for the inaction that has occurred," said Wolfe, a businessman who took charge of Missouri's public university system in 2012. "Use my resignation to heal and start talking again."

Tens of thousands of Germans are demanding that authorities ban a PEGIDA demonstration in Dresden on Monday, the anniversary of the so-called Kristallnacht 1938 anti-Jewish pogrom under Adolf Hitler.

In an online petition posted on Change.org, activists say it is unacceptable for local authorities to let the far-right, anti-immigrant PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the Occident) rally on the anniversary of this notorious date in German history.

They are urging city authorities to "abolish or suspend" PEGIDA's demonstration on this "historically significant day - the Reich's Kristallnacht" - when 1,400 synagogues were torched and residential areas and Jewish cemeteries were destroyed. On the next day, November 10, 1938, around 30.000 German Jews were rounded up and thrown into concentration camps, with hundreds being killed in custody.

The Spartanburg Methodist College campus in South Carolina is on lockdown Monday evening after campus police said an officer-involved shooting had occurred. A coroner has been called to the scene, according to Fox Carolina.

Campus police said a shooting occurred at Spartanburg Methodist College on Monday night.

The shooting happened around 8:30 p.m. near Powell Mill Road.

The coroner was called to the scene. SLED said a Spartanburg Methodist College officer was involved. Agents and crime scene technicians were headed to the scene.

SLED said one person was dead and another was in custody. An officer responded to a report of a car break-in. The officer encountered two people in a vehicle and attempted to detain them.

The officer fired after reported being struck by the fleeing vehicle, according to SLED.

Parents are bravely standing up to trends that restrict kids' freedom and love of learning.

America's public schools are the training ground for our next generation of engineers, doctors, artists, lawyers, and other professions that form our dynamic economy. Schools are also here to nurture our children, to allow them to grow, explore and have fun in an environment that is conducive to personal freedom.

But a troubling cultural undercurrent has been creeping into our education system, converting the educational experience into something that can range from the gratuitously stressful to downright racist and cruel, from high-stakes testing to the school-to-prison pipeline.

Parents are bravely standing up to these trends in a growing number of ways.

Breaking the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Recent events at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina have cast a spotlight on the increasing utilization of police officers in public schools for disciplinary tasks that used to be handled by teachers, administrators and parents. Protesters outside the state capitol called for the prosecution of the officer involved, and many said a wider institutional system that is over-policing schools is to blame. As budgetary pressures weigh down on schools, some districts are cutting back on these school resource officer (SRO) programs, as they are called.

Schools in Chico, Calif. canceled their SRO program for the first time in 15 years, thanks to budget shortfalls in April 2013. Sometimes police departments themselves are withdrawing.

An employee of Russia's Academy of Sciences was killed on Monday when a canister filled with a nonflammable gas known as Freon exploded, the TASS news agency reported, citing an unidentified law enforcement official.

"The incident occurred in one of the rooms in the academy building, located on Leninsky Prospekt. A tank with Freon exploded. As a result, one person died," the source said. The Moscow police press service confirmed the incident, TASS reported.

An unidentified adviser to the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences also told TASS about the explosion, claiming an employee servicing refrigeration equipment — which uses Freon gas — "made a technical error" while conducting maintenance.

A kidnapped woman's dramatic escape led police to a house of horrors in New Orleans, complete with hidden compartments, false doors and cameras behind two-way mirrors. Apartment resident Mario Perez-Roque, 56, was arrested Friday evening on charges of kidnapping one of his co-workers, a 36-year-old Cuban national he tried and failed to court.

The unnamed woman was kidnapped from her home on Martinique Avenue in New Orleans earlier that same day, and taken to Perez-Roque's rear apartment in a shotgun home, where he held her before she was able to free herself and flee. However, police believe two men were involved in the kidnapping, and are still searching for the second man.
Police say the victim worked with Perez-Roque and had turned him down when he expressed interest in dating her.

Kenner police Lt Brian McGregor described the home as a 'house of horrors'.'We found restraints. They've got false walls and everything else inside the house,' McGregor told the New Orleans Advocate. 'That's pretty much what it is, a house of horrors. Who wants to be restrained? Who wants to be tied up in somebody else's house?' On Friday, Perez-Roque came to the woman's house on Martinique Avenue and kidnapped her, bringing her back to his apartment where he gagged her, placed a bag over her head and tied her to a chair inside the apartment.

The woman told police that at one point, she heard two men whispering in Spanish about leaving the apartment. She was eventually able to free one of her hands and take the bag off her head to find that she was sitting directly across from a picture of herself. The woman then managed to take off all of the restraints and she ran out of the house.

Unfortunately one of the men saw her and started chasing her and nearly succeeded in recapturing her when a Good Samaritan intervened Gary Messina told WWL that he was driving down the street with his wife and son when he saw the man chasing the woman and knew something was wrong. 'I just jumped out of the car to try to stop the guy from pulling her back. As soon as I jumped out of the car he looked at me and he had her around the neck in a headlock and just wasn't going to let her go' Messina explained. The man eventually fled when Messina screamed that the police were on the way.