Portside

Here's an astonishing speech by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, one of just two African-Americans to have ever served as federal judges in Mississippi. He read it to three young white men before sentencing them for the death of a 48-year-old black man named James Craig Anderson in a parking lot in Jackson, Miss., in 2011. They were part of a group that beat Anderson and then killed him by running over his body with a truck, yelling "white power" as they drove off.

Right-wing governments in Europe's periphery are terrified of a Greek success at the negotiating table. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders writes, 'If Syriza succeeds in rolling back the EU-mandated measures...It could encourage dissident political movements in other parts of Europe...'

Ai-jen Poo's 'The Age of Dignity' bridges the gap between the concrete political and practical challenges of an aging population—and the harder moral questions of how we ought to treat our elders and how we imagine our own aging and death. The book is part testimony from caregivers and recipients; part manifesto, urging us to see the new demographic reality in a positive light; and, more cautiously, part exploration of how we might do better by our senior citizens.

Through a request under South Carolina’s Freedom of Information Act, EFF found that, over the last three years, prison officials have brought more than 400 disciplinary cases for “social networking”—almost always for using Facebook. The offenses come with heavy penalties. In 16 cases, inmates were sentenced to more than a decade in what’s called disciplinary detention, with at least one inmate receiving more than 37 years in isolation.

The new Detroit renaissance does not address why the city declined in the first place. It does little to address poverty, unemployment and access to resources for the vast majority of the city’s residents. What’s worse, the gentrification of downtown Detroit contributes to greater inequality and polarisation, which are growing challenges for cities around the world.

In Chicago, many have used the energy and opening created by these ongoing protests to re-animate existing long-term anti-police violence campaigns. On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people gathered at the Chicago Temple to show our love for police torture survivors on the day after Jon Burge was released from house arrest. The gathering was billed as a people’s hearing and rally in support of a reparations ordinance currently stalled in the Chicago City Council.

There is nothing new about Republican opposition to teachers unions, but in recent years, it has become increasingly clear that some Democrats have turned against them as well. In the following post we hear from a union leader, Bob Peterson, the president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, about how he thinks teachers union must change to keep alive public education. This post first appeared in Rethinking Schools. Reprinted with permission of the author.

[I wish those who complain about 'Muslim silence' would go see this film,] both because “Timbuktu” vividly depicts the courageous resistance of ordinary Muslims, especially Muslim women, to fundamentalist tyranny and because it makes the crucial but heretical point that Islamic militants are also human beings, and more likely to be driven by human motivations like greed or lust or power than by apocalyptic zealotry.

There are two compelling reasons for a challenge in the Democratic primaries: We need a big debate about the direction of the country, and a growing populist movement would benefit from a populist challenge to Hillary. In fact, there are deep divides between the party establishment and the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. All affirm, finally, that this economy works only for the few and not the many. But after that, the differences are immense.

"Of all the people to hurt with sanctions, punishing students and undermining educational exchanges is a particularly damaging act," said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian-American Council.