The Cold War at BEN&JERRY'S

The activist ice cream brand decided to pull out of Israel's occupied territories, setting off a legal battle with its owner, Unilever. What happens when a company Sues itself?

- DEVIN LEONARD and DASHA AFANASIEVA

Anuradha Mittal was the kind of person large corporations tend to avoid at all costs. She’d been politically awakened as a college student in India, working as a volunteer in Bhopal, where a leak at a Union Carbine Corp. pesticide plant in 1984 killed thousands of the city’s poorest residents. She considered becoming a lawyer or a judge there but instead moved to the US, where she spent almost a decade at an organization in Oakland, California, that combated, as she once wrote, “corporate control of our food system.” In 2004 she founded the Oakland Institute, a think tank devoted to issues such as the environment and indigenous rights. She wanted her organization’s name to invoke the birthplace of the 1960s-era Black Panther Party, and its research condemned what it referred to as “land grabs” by multinational corporations in Tanzania and Sierra Leone. The Nation deemed her “an essential commentator” who could school media outlets in the destructive role often played by “free-trade absolutists, international lenders, and speculators.”