Portside

Millions took to the streets to take part in May 1 demonstrations around the globe. From union rallies to protests and clashes with police, the International Labor Day events drew attention to the issues of austerity, unemployment and workers rights.

Bradley Manning is off limits at SF Gay Pride parade; Ohio air show pushed to drop Hiroshima raid reenactment; Raul Castro’s daughter denied visa to attend gay rights conference; Rape Case Solved By Anonymous in Less Than 2 Hours Despite "No Evidence"; Teamsters foil Westboro Baptist Church; Palestinian marathon tribute to Boston victims; Oscar Romero beatification; Amherst and the economists’ fuzzy math; Zuckerburg dishes out the dough for Keystone XL

The latest sweatshop disaster in Bangladesh, which claimed the lives of over 200 young women, calls into question the foundations of US globalization policies since the Clinton era. It is not enough to blame the corruption of Bangladesh factory owners, nor sufficient to suggest better training and factory codes from Walmart or the Gap. It is time to ban the US sale of garments made in Bangladesh until enforceable labor codes are imposed on that country.

Reports of the Assad regime's use of chemical weapons are part of a retold drama riddled with plot-holes

Lest anyone imagine that corporate crimes being unreported by the mainstream media and punished with a wrist slap are anything new, legendary labor reporter James Lerner's account of the GE - Krupp conspiracy trial of 1947 is an eye-opener.

So often there's an apparent conflict between jobs and the environment. There's a way to resolve our differences. Every environmental campaign should have a jobs program and every jobs program should be designed to address our climate catastrophe.

In most descriptions of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, he’s described as a “one-time boxer.” That doesn’t quite tell the story. Tsarnaev was a two-time New England Golden Gloves Heavyweight Champion. Understanding Tsarnaev’s motivations is critical. Just as we shouldn’t accept the racist argument that “culture” is the root cause of gun deaths in Chicago, we should reject the idea that Islam bears any sort of collective responsibility for Tsarnaev’s crimes.

Conspiracy theorists of the world, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. A series of related corruption stories spilling out of the financial sector, suggests the world's largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything. Moreover, it's increasingly clear that both the criminal justice system and the civil courts may be impotent to stop them, even when they do get caught working together to game the system.

According to arrest numbers obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department and crunched by a statistician, between 2005 and 2011, D.C. cops filed 30,126 marijuana offense charges. A staggering number of those—27,560, or 91 percent—were filed against African-Americans. Only 2,097 were filed against whites. Folklore contends that pot-arrest asymmetries are about Blacks smoking outside and getting their getting their pot on street corners. Recent studies contradict that.

The creation of OSHA proved to be one the greatest victory in American history for workplace health but OSHA’s ability to protect workers has severe limitations due to underfunding. The explosion at the West Fertilizer plant in Texas on April 17 that killed at least 14 people demonstrated the agency’s very real limitations. There are so few OSHA inspectors that it would take 129 years to inspect every workplace in the country at current staffing levels.