Portside

From an interview with Mphatheleini Makaulele, an award-winning indigenous leader, farmer, and activist, and Director of Dzomo la Mupo, a community organization in rural South Africa. She is also part of the African Biodiversity Network.

Reader Comments: New Threat to Voting Rights before Supreme Court; The Portrayal of African Americans on Stage and Screen - Tonya Pinkins the Real Mother Courage; Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland and Oregon Thugs; Left Gains Ground, Can It Hold; Trump and Fascism; Readers Respond to poem about Berlin Wall - The GDR, A Different Perspective; The Real Northern Student Movement; Shostakovich; Vivian Stromberg Presente.(Sorry for length, three weeks since Tidbits last appeared)

The fate of police officers who kill often rests in the hands of the prosecutors they typically work alongside. A Guardian analysis reveals district attorneys cleared colleagues in more than 200 cases this year

Honesty may be poetry's best gift in the coming year, as these writers and others say what needs to be said about guns, anger, racism, family, and how we can think and feel more precisely and truthfully about one another.

Puerto Rican political prisoner Oscar López Rivera reminds Americans of a colonial and imperial past whose contours are still visible. Despite a stingy record for commutations and pardons, President Barack Obama could and should use his constitutional powers to commute Oscar’s punitive sentence and grant his immediate release.

Milwaukee's Turners -- founded by German refugees fleeing political repression and economic hard time in the late 1840's -- issued a statement denouncing racism and xenophobia in calls to exclude Muslim refugees from Wisconsin and called upon all Wisconsinites, including the vast majority of us who are of immigrant stock, to support humane and safe admission of our proportional share of refugees from Syria and other nations.

During the 1860's, Chinese laborers were brought in to help construct the first U.S. trans-continental railroad between the Atlantic & the Pacific coasts. They worked long hours & were underpaid, and most of the time in extreme weather conditions. Many lost their lives in this historic epic, but their contributions were buried & their history untold.

These stories illustrate the powerful social forces and corporate interests shaping healthcare policy. And they continue to inspire a healthcare justice movement that says that Obamacare is not enough and that the time has come to finish the job and make healthcare a right for everyone in America.

The transformation of police practices in this country cannot happen without a national reckoning regarding the ways both white supremacy and misogyny have shaped and continue to influence law enforcement practices in the United States.

BDS news from Brazil and South Africa!