Portside

Florida Congressman questions Obama's praise for Wal-Mart: "What has Wal-Mart given the president in return?" "Even people who are employed now, many of them are not making enough money to survive," said Grayson. "And the outlet more and more for people that they see is this kind of civil disobedience, because the political system has become completely unresponsive to their genuine concerns and their physical needs."

What is behind Francois Hollande’s assertiveness on the world stage? Is the decline of the United States’ effective power on the world scene what is permitting France’s return to aggressiveness ?

The parts of the border that take the form of an actual, physical barrier are an intrusion on the landscape, an eyesore to many — and to millions, a deadly obstacle to overcome. Just as immigrant rights activists see the border as a violent social barrier, environmentalists see the border fence as an assault on the integrity of regional ecologies.

Condemning the “new tyranny” of unfettered capitalism and the “idolatry of money,” Pope Francis argues in a newly circulated apostolic exhortation that “as long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems.”

Teachers in Progressive Educators for Action (PEAC), a caucus within the teachers union, questioned the iPads as one of many quick fixes pushed onto students and teachers by advocates of one-size-fits-all approaches to learning.“This is not technology that helps my classroom,” said high school social studies teacher Rebecca Solomon.

Washington has an eagerness to extricate itself militarily from more than a decade of war in the Greater Middle East and “pivot” its strategic focus and resources more toward the Asia/Pacific and its highly complex relationships with China and key U.S. allies there.

Some have questioned whether the Tripartite Alliance between the trade union federation, the ANC and the SACP. is still relevant to Cosatu. If the government ignores everything we say, what is the point of being in alliance with the governing party? This view is short-sighted. Yes we have suffered some setbacks, just as we did with Gear. But that battle raged for years before we eventually triumphed. It will be the same now.

After meeting India's "sumangali girls," I'll never look at cute, cheap clothes the same way again.

BuzzFeed’s heroic initiative will succeed even if it merely eradicates the depressing negativity that has for so long kept literary criticism from becoming a full-fledged economic sector, like agriculture, transport and erectile dysfunction.

The book on stellar black holes needs to be rewritten.