分类： society

On a Wednesday in April 2026, the family of legendary American civil rights and labor organizer Dolores Huerta confirmed the 96-year-old activist’s passing, following a decades-long career that reshaped labor rights, immigration policy, and grassroots advocacy across the United States. In a statement shared via family spokesperson Erik Olvera, Huerta’s loved ones requested privacy to grieve the unprecedented loss, noting the profound personal impact of her death.

Born in New Mexico and raised in the agricultural hub of Stockton, California, Huerta grew up in a working-class household led by her mother, who spent years employed at a local food cannery. After earning her university degree, she initially pursued a career as a teacher, before leaving the classroom to dedicate herself to grassroots worker organizing. In the 1960s and 1970s, she partnered closely with fellow labor leader Cesar Chavez to co-found the United Farm Workers (UFW) union, launching historic campaigns to secure fair wages, safer working conditions, and basic labor protections for predominantly Latino agricultural laborers. Beyond farmworker advocacy, Huerta expanded her portfolio of activism over the decades to champion women’s rights, environmental justice, voting access, and immigration reform, all while raising 11 children as a single working parent. Her most famous contribution to movement culture was coining the UFW’s iconic Spanish rallying cry “Si Se Puede!” — translated to “Yes, we can!” — a phrase that would later be adopted by social justice movements across the globe.

For years after stepping back from formal union leadership, Huerta continued her advocacy work through her namesake foundation, focusing on immigrant rights and voter mobilization efforts to lift up disenfranchised communities. She once shared her core life philosophy with supporters, stating, “I would like to be remembered as a woman who cares for fellow humans. We must use our lives to make the world a better place to live, not just to acquire things. That is what we are put on the earth for.”

Earlier in 2026, Huerta made headlines for coming forward with explosive allegations against her long-time collaborator Cesar Chavez, who died in 1993. The revelations followed a New York Times investigative report that published accounts from Huerta and two other women accusing Chavez of grooming and sexually abusing young girls involved in the farm labor movement. Huerta stated that Chavez had manipulated, pressured, and on one occasion sexually forced her during encounters in the 1960s, resulting in two secret pregnancies that she arranged to have the resulting children raised by separate adoptive families. The Chavez family released a public statement at the time expressing devastation over the accounts, while praising the three women for their courage to speak out about their experiences.

Tributes poured in from advocacy groups and political leaders across the country in the hours following Huerta’s passing. The UFW confirmed her death was caused by cancer, and shared a social media statement honoring her legacy: “Her life’s work was to empower her community to face and overcome injustices, and she has left farm workers and the entire Latino community stronger and more organised than she found it. Her commitment to civic engagement and bringing political power to disenfranchised people is a lesson we all should carry to the ballot box.” The union also highlighted her landmark policy wins, including her instrumental role in ending the exploitative Bracero Program, which brought temporary Mexican guest workers to U.S. farms under harsh, unregulated conditions, and her key contributions to negotiating the 1986 Immigration Reform Act.

María Teresa Kumar, president of prominent Latino voting advocacy group Voto Latino, hailed Huerta as a “civil rights giant” who gave “her entire life, until her final days, to championing and fighting injustice for everyone, no matter who they were or where they came from.” The bipartisan? No, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, composed of Democratic legislators from both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, noted in their official tribute that “Dolores Huerta defied definition. A national and international icon, her legacy is woven into the fabric of our history. Her fight for justice will continue to inspire generations. Rest in power, hermana.”

As the clock ticks down to a critical midnight deadline on 28 October 2025, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation (OLG) is issuing a final public appeal to the unknown holder of a winning Lotto Max ticket worth C$40 million (£21.4 million), warning that the life-changing sum will be permanently forfeited if no rightful claimant steps forward before the cutoff. The jackpot-winning slip was purchased exactly one year prior at a retail outlet in Grey County, Ontario, a scenic tourist region that encompasses popular destinations including the Blue Mountains and the city of Owen Sound. OLG officials note that a large share of ticket buyers in the area are out-of-town visitors, who may have stowed the ticket in a pocket, luggage or personal belongings and completely forgotten to verify its status after returning home. Media relations coordinator for OLG, Tony Bitonti, emphasized in a statement to CTV News that the most disheartening detail of the ongoing search is that the winning ticket has never been scanned either via the official OLG mobile app or at any authorized retail lottery terminal across the province. The official winning number sequence for the unclaimed jackpot is 06, 14, 17, 19, 26, 43, 45, with a designated Bonus Number of 27. OLG representatives have urged all local residents and recent visitors to Grey County to conduct a thorough search of common storage spots for forgotten tickets, including jacket pockets, handbags, backpacks, wallets, and vehicle glove compartments. If the deadline passes without a valid claim, the full C$40 million sum will be reallocated to fund future prize pools for provincial lottery games. This is not the first time a massive Ontario Lotto Max prize has gone unclaimed: in June 2022, a C$70 million jackpot won by a ticket sold in Scarborough lapsed permanently, even after more than 2,700 members of the public reached out to OLG to inquire about the unclaimed prize with no valid claimant ever coming forward. Data from Atlantic Lottery, a separate provincial government-run lottery operator, shows that roughly 1% of all lottery prizes across Canada go unclaimed in a typical year, the vast majority of which are small, low-value sums. The urgent appeal for the C$40 million unclaimed jackpot comes on the heels of a separate historic lottery win in Alberta last week, where a lucky resident claimed the largest single lottery prize in Canadian history, a C$90 million sum, and has not yet chosen to reveal their identity publicly.

Three New York-based brothers, two of whom built high-flying careers as luxury real estate brokers serving A-list celebrity clients, have each been handed a 30-year prison sentence after being convicted in March on multiple counts of drugging and raping dozens of women over a 15-year span of predatory abuse. Tal Alexander, 40, and 39-year-old twin siblings Oren and Alon Alexander, leveraged their immense wealth, exclusive social connections, and access to lavish properties in Manhattan, Miami, and global vacation hotspots to lure vulnerable women under false pretenses of glamorous parties, high-end travel, and professional opportunities, before slipping incapacitating substances into their drinks and carrying out violent, non-consensual sexual assaults.
Presiding over the Tuesday sentencing hearing in a New York federal court, Judge Valerie Caproni did not mince words as she addressed the three men ahead of delivering the ruling. “Your conduct was monstrous,” she stated, emphasizing that their decades-long campaign of abuse had inflicted irreversible, life-shattering harm on the dozens of survivors targeted by the trio. The hearing opened with impact statements from 12 victims, including one survivor who had not testified during the five-week criminal trial, who shared harrowing accounts of the long-term psychological trauma inflicted by the brothers’ attacks. Many of the survivors directly called on the court to impose the maximum possible penalty of life imprisonment for each of the three defendants.
One survivor, Maya Miller, testified that the 2014 rape at the hands of Tal Alexander had completely erased her sense of personal safety, leaving her with a permanent, gaping void. “I carry a quiet funeral within me for the person I might’ve become if this never happened to me,” she told the court through tears. A second survivor, who used the pseudonym Isa Brooks to protect her privacy, recalled that she was just 16 years old when Tal and Alon Alexander assaulted her, leaving her with a permanent inability to trust her own judgment and sense of safety. A third woman shared that when she attempted to come forward with her allegations against Tal Alexander, he retaliated with explicit threats, telling her he knew the exact location of her sister’s workplace to intimidate her into silence.
Lead prosecutor Elizabeth Espinosa argued fiercely that the three brothers deserved the maximum statutory sentence, noting that the body of evidence presented during the trial painted a “truly devastating picture” of calculated, premeditated abuse that stretched back years before the 2008 start of the documented criminal charges. “For years, they honed their methods of luring women with the promise of luxury,” Espinosa told the court, adding that the trio remained “completely unmoved by the path of suffering they left behind them.” Throughout the entirety of the survivors’ testimonies, the three Alexander brothers showed almost no visible emotion, staring straight ahead or quietly conferring with their legal teams, who later stated they had advised their clients not to make eye contact with the survivors to avoid any potential misinterpretation of their actions.
The defense team, who had pushed for a far lighter 15-year prison sentence, argued in their submissions that the three men were now devoted fathers whose young families would face severe hardship if they were handed lengthy prison terms. When given the opportunity to address the court directly, all three brothers continued to publicly profess their complete innocence, refusing to acknowledge any harm they had caused. Tal Alexander claimed the trio had simply embraced a “work-hard, play-hard mentality,” and offered only a vague, non-apology, saying he recognized his past behavior had “hurt people’s feelings.” Their refusal to take accountability drew a sharp rebuke from Judge Caproni, who questioned how any individual who never admitted to the harm they inflicted could possibly be rehabilitated. “How can someone who never acknowledged the wrongs they did be rehabilitated?” she asked the court, before announcing the final ruling: each brother would serve a 30-year sentence for the core sexual assault charges, alongside a concurrent 20-year sentence for additional related offenses, resulting in a total 30-year prison term for all three men.
During the earlier five-week trial, 11 women testified that many of them were minors at the time of their assaults, detailing how the brothers would shower them with expensive gifts, fly them to exclusive destinations including Aspen and the Bahamas, drug their drinks, and violently physically restrain them while ignoring their screams and explicit demands to stop. The defense had argued throughout the proceedings that all sexual encounters were fully consensual, framing the brothers as nothing more than serial womanizers rather than violent sexual predators. Tal and Oren Alexander built their multi-million dollar fortune selling ultra-luxury properties across New York and Miami while working for prominent national real estate firm Douglas Elliman, with a client roster that included A-list celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan, Kim Kardashian, and Kanye West, before launching their own independent New York-based brokerage, Official, in 2022. Alon Alexander, meanwhile, was employed at the family-owned private security firm Kent Security. As the judge read out their final 30-year sentences, all three men remained stoic, staring straight ahead without any visible reaction to the ruling.

The Utah Department of Public Safety announced a major breakthrough in a decades-old cold case this week, confirming that notorious American serial killer Ted Bundy is responsible for the 1974 murder of 17-year-old Melissa Ann Smith, whose remains were first stumbled upon by local hunters more than half a century ago.
On October 27, 1974, Smith — the daughter of a local police chief — was found dead at a remote site, with clear forensic markers of sexual assault and prolonged torture documented at the time of recovery. The long-running investigation remained stalled for generations, until evidence gathered earlier this year to tie 17-year-old Laura Ann Aime, another Utah teen, to Bundy’s victim list in April provided critical cross-referencing data that allowed detectives to connect Smith’s unsolved killing to the serial offender.
Prior to his 1989 execution, Bundy only confessed to the murders of two other teenage girls in the state of Utah, but law enforcement officials have formally linked him to at least 30 confirmed homicides across the continental United States to date. During a Tuesday press conference, Utah County Sergeant Mike Reynolds confirmed that multiple additional unconfirmed Bundy-linked cold cases are still undergoing active review in the state. “With every case we close, we move one step closer to erasing the lasting, harmful memory of Ted Bundy’s reign of terror,” Reynolds stated.
Salt Lake County Sheriff Rosie Rivera emphasized that the successful resolution of Smith’s case sends a powerful message to families of all cold case victims that justice never expires. “Forensic science evolves at a rapid pace each and every day, giving investigators new tools to revisit even the oldest, most seemingly hopeless unsolved files,” Rivera noted, while also commending generations of detectives for meticulously preserving physical evidence from the Smith investigation over 52 years. She added that this long-term evidence storage practice serves as a critical model for all law enforcement agencies handling unsolved cases, even as decades pass without new leads.
Earlier this year, the director of the Utah Bureau of Forensic Services told the Salt Lake Tribune that the state currently holds 444 open unsolved death investigations, 258 of which are classified as homicides. Bundy, one of the most infamous serial killers in U.S. history, launched his multi-state murder spree in the Pacific Northwest, using a well-documented tactic of feigning physical injury or leveraging his superficial charm to gain the trust of young women in public spaces, before luring them to isolated locations to assault and kill them. He was first taken into custody in 1975 on kidnapping charges and handed a 15-year prison sentence, but pulled off two separate prison escapes in 1977 — the second of which allowed him to continue his killing spree for months before he was finally recaptured in 1978.