Portside

A school boycott will be painful for families, but I think it is worth a parent-led debate and discussion. The alternative is too costly. Once the public schools are gone, they are gone for good.

Over the past decade, state legislatures and governors across the South have tilted far to the right, embracing photo ID and other voting restrictions. That there are still elected officials in those states who can apply checks and balances against laws when it appears they are undermining citizens' fundamental rights is good for democracy.

'The US government will come after you, no holds barred, if you're thinking of revealing evidence of its unlawful behavior', says Amnesty - Jon Queally, staff writer

The fast food strikes are part of a broader movement by low-wage workers for higher pay and union representation that has caught fire over the past year. Targets include a range of employers, including Wal-Mart, federal subcontractors, warehouses, retail stores and car washes. This low-wage service and retail worker movement has tapped into a vein of discontent. But it has also created hopes for change through the fledgling campaign’s remarkable successes.

While national attitudes about abortion have stayed relatively the same since the 1990s, regional attitudes are shifting in opposite directions.

Citizens United was not an aberration for this Court. It emerged from a definite view about the intersection of campaigns and free speech.

Palestinians Blocked from Getting Smartphone Service; NSA Technology Simply Too Old to Search; Who Owns Your Data When You Die?; New Computing Physics Soon to Emerge from NASA-Google Partnership; GED Gets a Digital Makeover and Faces Competition

Apple might have abandoned manufacturing supplier Foxconn in the wake of a scandal over deplorable working conditions in its Chinese factories, but it seems that labor rights violations are also rife at Pegatron, its new partner.

The unrest gripping Turkey has less to do with headscarves and Islam than with politics and economics, fueled by a growing discomfort with the AKP’s policies of privatization, its push to centralize authority in the hands of the country’s executive branch, and its silencing of the media. The three are not unrelated.

Eduardo Galeano, one of the great global writers, takes us from 1916 to late tomorrow night via eight little excerpts from his new book, Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human History, reminding us of what some really newsworthy moments were like. Think of it as a kind of highlight reel from almost a century of the American way of war. Tom