Portside

1. Barack Obama has commuted the sentence of Oscar López Rivera, a victory for the Puerto Rican independence activist who is considered to be one of the world’s longest-serving political prisoners. 2. Chelsea Manning, the US army soldier who became one of the most prominent whistleblowers in modern times when she exposed the nature of warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan is to be freed in May as a gift of outgoing president Barack Obama.

For nearly three years, the LA No More Jails Coalition has been organizing against the construction of a new women's jail in the city of Lancaster, California, which sits at the northern edge of LA County -- home to the largest jail system in the country. The fight has been a long one, and organizers continue to work to ensure that public funds are diverted away from another jail, and instead invested toward alternatives.

In an effort to highlight the rarely acknowledged gifts of the Cuban Revolution and the late Fidel Castro, "Cuban Medical Internationalism: Fidel Castro’s Legacy Lives,” takes a look at the extraordinary and unparalleled contributions that Cuban medical professionals have made around the world, and in particular during times of crisis and in countries with inadequate medical care. December 2016 a Cuban medical brigade returned from Haiti.

Are Donald Trump's selections for his cabinet and other top administration positions indicative of a man who is ready to "drain the swamp?" Is the president-elect bent on putting China on the defensive? What does he have in mind for the Middle East? And why did Barack Obama choose at this juncture -- that is, toward the end of his presidency -- to have the US abstain from a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements?

Young black men were again killed by police at a sharply higher rate than other Americans in 2016, intensifying concerns over the expected abandonment of criminal justice reform by Donald Trump’s incoming administration.

Many US historians have advanced the theory that Lincoln spoke against the war for political reasons, subsequent speeches disprove that theory as do his letters to his law partner, William Herndon. He railed against the war a second time a month after his famous “spot resolutions” over objections of the younger members of his party, and even voted for an amendment condemning the war which was tacked on to a resolution honoring war hero Zachary Taylor, who would be next

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the most influential black leaders in history. His legacy has inspired people around the world to fight for equality — but that hyper-visibility also led to the whitewashing and sanitization of his life. It's a disservice to King's memory to ignore the full scope of his beliefs and his complexity as a person. His words can teach us a lot about what it means to be an activist and advocate for social justice.

1,424 law professors from 180 different schools in 49 states (Alaska doesn't have a law school), including this writer, signed a letter to Senators Charles Grassley and Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Judiciary Committee, stating, "Nothing in Senator Sessions' public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge."

Rep. Greg Walden speaks in 2014 alongside those who said they had been negatively affected by the Affordable Care Act. Today, with Obamacare on the chopping block, Walden says he wants to see the program funded “one way or another.” “If you don’t,” he said, “the plans have the ability to cancel midyear and we said we wouldn’t pull the rug out from under people — and we shouldn’t.”

Or Is That the Least of Our Problems When It Comes to U.S.-Iranian Relations?