We are all connected.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Editor's Note

In this issue of the magazine, we turn our eyes to struggles for democracy and human rights around the globe. From the tobacco fields of Brazil, Margaret Wurth, a children's rights researcher for Human Rights Watch, reports that conditions for child laborers in that country are better than they are here in the United States.

In Egypt, Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who covered the thrilling uprising in his home country during the Arab Spring for Democracy Now!, now doggedly pursues the crackdown on his fellow journalists, in what he calls "a vicious and unprecedented assault on press freedom in Egypt over the past two years."

In Afghanistan, J. Malcolm Garcia interviews civilians who are fleeing violence and chaos, which is getting worse now after fourteen years of U.S. involvement. While the world's attention turns to Syrian refugees streaming into Europe, Garcia reminds us of another group of people fleeing war and oppression for which the United States must take some responsibility.

On a more hopeful note, Reese Erlich updates us from Iran, where reformers in the government and ordinary citizens are optimistic about better times ahead, with the lifting of sanctions now that their country has reached a nuclear accord with the United States and other nations.

Here at home, Rebecca Nathanson writes about the pro-democracy activists in Newark who are fighting for full local control of their public schools, after New Jersey became the first state to pass a law allowing state takeovers of underperforming school districts.

Governor Chris Christie, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg hatched a plan to "save" the Newark schools through the ill-considered takeover. That failed effort is the subject of a new book, The Prize: Who's in Charge of America's Schools?, by former Washington Post reporter Dale Russakoff.

"Zuckerberg intended to try this top-down model for reform in more cities," Russakoff noted in...