Karen Lewis, the fiery leader of the Chicago Teachers Union who led a strike last year and became a nationally known anti-school reform figure, has been elected to another three-year term as president. Today she will lead the first of three days of protests against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to close 54 public schools. New report issued on 59th anniversary of Brown v Board of Ed and history of disruptive actions against communities of color by Chicago Public Schools.

For all the talk of scandal regarding the IRS targeting groups named “Tea Party” or “Patriot,” it’s not hard to draw an additional lesson from the facts of the case — a pattern that follows the well-worn model of the modern political age: Benefits flow to the rich and the well-connected, with pain for the rest.

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom. And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.

"But until you can quantify and put the whole thing into a computer and simulate it and show your computer model can behave in the same way as the real one, I don't think you can say you understand it."

"We seek to honor on this fiftieth anniversary of the Birmingham Children’s Crusade the role of children and youth who were frontline soldiers in desegregating public schools and public accommodations. I hope they will inspire us to remind children and youth today that they are not citizens in waiting; they too can be transforming agents for change."

Mothers Day, unemployment, Pope Francis, climate change and more...

Can photographers be participants in the social events they document? Eighty years ago the question would have seemed irrelevant in the political upsurges of the 1930s, in both Mexico and the United States. Many photographers were political activists, and saw their work intimately connected to workers strikes, political revolution or the movements for indigenous rights. Now a book and a recent exhibition should reopen this debate.

Hospital lobbyists have tried for years to convince us all that predatory pricing policies don’t matter. But the grotesque reality tells a different story.

A 40-day strike of more than 500 dockworkers at the Port of Hong Kong ended with a settlement including a 9.8 percent wage increase - a much-needed sign that resistance to global capital is still relevant and possible. Strikers accepted the offer by a 90 percent vote. Interview with the dockworkers union Secretary Wong Yu Loy

‘We have been through some bitter experiences and we need to learn from the past.'