Cambridge, Mass. - In the less than two weeks since a devastating collapse at a Bangladeshi garment factory on April 24, over 650 workers have been confirmed dead with many more still missing and the death toll is still expected to rise.

Following the loss of life that allegedly resulted from a management decision to ignore structural faults in the building, picketers targeted the Gap outlet at 15 Brattle St. in Harvard Square on Saturday to call on the company – a major purchaser of garments from Bangladesh – to sign a safety agreement in the country.

Cambridge, Mass. - Harvard student activists, frustrated by recent talks with university trustees, are escalating their campaign to get the school to ditch its fossil fuel company investments.

About 100 students, alums and faculty held a rally outside the Harvard president’s office Thursday, delivering 1,300 petition signatures and pouncing on a comment one trustee made that activists found particularly distressing.

Divest Harvard is part of a national movement that seeks to attack fossil fuel companies by stigmatizing their stock, similar to previous campaigns against apartheid and the tobacco industry.

Cambridge, Mass. - Over 400 workers, activists and community leaders converged upon the Le Meridien Cambridge-MIT Hotel last Thursday to renew their call for hotel workers to be allowed a fair process to decide on unionization.

The protest, part of national week of action spanning both coasts, marked the latest event in a fight that has been going on for over a year.

“(The majority of the workers at Le Meridien Hotel) presented a petition and said they wanted a fair process to form a union, free of harassment, intimidation and threats,” said Brian Lang, President of Local 26 Unite Here, a Boston-based hospitality workers union. “Since then, the workers have been organizing support ... The support has only grown.”

Cambridge, Mass. - The free software movement—based on the idea that computer programs should be available for anyone to use or modify—is in some ways at the top of its game, and in others facing its most difficult challenges.

For example, free programs like Firefox and mostly free Android are highly popular. And collaborative software projects are tackling serious, global issues like improving health care in developing countries. But activists are still struggling to gain broad support, and to stay relevant in the face of increasingly proprietary devices.

These advances and obstacles were the subject of LibrePlanet 2013, an annual conference put on by the Free Software Foundation, a leading organization working to protect the freedom of computer users.

Cambridge, Mass. - Members of the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW) have been working without a new contract since the end of June 2012 as negotiations with the university have gotten nowhere. The unions says that wage increases offered by the university are not enough to maintain decent living standards given the cost of living, health care, and local rental markets. Harvard meanwhile says its offers are based on current labor market conditions, its proposals are above inflation rates, and that finances are suffering due to the Great Recession. The union held a rally on Harvard's main campus on Thursday to highlight the issue.

Cambridge, Mass. - Labor activists, Harvard University employees, and friends and family rallied today in Cambridge to protest the laying off of three University Financial Services workers, citing apparent discrimination.

The emergency rally was held with just a day of notice, after Darlene Tate, a Harvard staffer with more than 25 years of experience in accounts payable, was informed Thursday she was being laid off shortly after returning from disability leave.

Tate is the third employee in the department to be laid off in the past six months. All three are people of color, over 40, and two have history with disabilities, according to the statement released by Geoff Carens, a library assistant at Harvard's Lamont Library and union representative with Harvard Union Clerical and Technical Workers/AFSCME Local 3650. Activists are calling for the immediate reinstatement of Tate and the other two employees involved, noting that all Caucasian employees in their unit are keeping their jobs.

Cambridge, Mass. - With climate change policy deadlocked, there’s a rapidly growing movement on campuses nationwide to convince universities to yank their investments in fossil fuel companies.

And at Harvard—where the nation’s largest, $30.7 billion endowment makes it the top target—student activists are seeing what they hope are signs that the administration might budge on the issue.

The university this month agreed to meet with students about the endowment’s investments in fossil fuel companies, and separately announced it would create an alternative university fund dedicated to socially responsible investments. The administration has made it clear that it still has a “strong presumption against divestment,” but after two successful student referendums pushing for responsible investment, student leaders are hoping there’s a crack in the door.

Cambridge, MA - Over 20 human rights advocates attended a Harvest Co-op board of directors meeting last Monday to push the Harvest board to reconsider their decision to stop a proposed membership referendum from moving forward to a vote. The referendum in question proposed removing the Sabra and Tribe hummus brands from the co-op's store shelves - on the grounds that both brands were owned by Israeli companies complicit in that nation's human rights violations against Palestinians. The board called the meeting after co-op members in the Boston Hummus Campaign pushed for more discussion on the referendum - which failed to meet the requirements of Harvest's bylaws that a referendum can only be called with the support of 10 percent of the active co-op membership. Advocates had filed 481 member signatures (plus over 500 signatures from non-member co-op shoppers) in support of the referendum by the required date earlier this year, but the board then indicated that over a hundred of those members were inactive. Bringing the final tally of signatures under the required minimum number of active members.

Cambridge, MA - Over 20 Harvard employees and supporters held a demonstration outside Harvard University's 90 Mt. Auburn St. facility on Wednesday against proposed "voluntary and involuntary staff reductions" at the Harvard University Library- while a meeting on restructuring the labor force at the library was being led by HU Library Executive Director Helen Shenton inside.

Cambridge, Mass. - Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges addressed a rally of 75 Occupy Harvard protestors and supporters on Monday near the Science Center at Harvard University - just outside Harvard Yard, which has been locked down to the public and press since the Occupy Harvard movement was launched on November 9th.