Portside

Singer says tar sands development left Fort McMurray a 'wasteland' that is 'truly a disaster'

Thousands of protesters took to the streets across France on Tuesday for a nationwide day of industrial action to protest against controversial planned pension reforms.

Thousands of Germans opposed to government surveillance of Internet users gathered in Berlin during the weekend in the what organizers called the largest anti-spying protest of its kind.

Forty years after the bloody US-backed coup, it is Salvador Allende's vision of peace, justice and solidarity that has prevailed.

The US Department of Agriculture is hoping to expand a pilot program replacing half the USDA inspectors in meat plants with inspectors employed by the companies themselves, while speeding up production lines.

NSA vs. internet security; Obama unleashed NSA in 2011; Barrett Brown behind bars; UN defends press; Future of AM radio

How’s your 401(k) doing? Working Americans ask themselves this question — and angst about the answer — a great deal these days. Any why not? For most Americans, retirement reality has turned chillingly stark: Either you have a robust set of investments in your 401(k) or you’re facing a rocky retirement.

In a more promising departure from past practice, the AFL-CIO has allocated time for daily convention “action sessions”—numbering about fifty in all. This smorgasbord of panel discussions tilts heavily toward political topics and seems designed to give the proceedings the trendy buzz of a Netroots Nation conference. Many of these workshops showcase the federation’s new or old ties with community-based labor support groups, immigrant workers centers, among others.

“It’s a real live class war we find ourselves in as we meet here,” LA County Federation of Labor Executive Secretary-Treasurer Maria Elena Durazo told delegates from the fifty-seven unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO. Noting the corporations and Koch brothers arrayed against organized labor, Durazo paraphrased boxer Mike Tyson: “Everybody’s got a plan until I hit ‘em in the face.”

"Today there is literature coming out of Syria that we could have never even dreamed of just a few years ago," Atrash says.Rather than relying on metaphors and allegorical images, these new poems rely on literal, visceral descriptions, with a newfound emphasis on a united Syrian identity instead of religious symbols.