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Southern Elected Officials Take Stands Against Voter ID

Facing South
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.

Fast Food Strikes Catch Fire

David Moberg In These Times
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.

Another Citizens United—but Worse

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

Media Bits & Bytes - Three Card Monte Edition

Portside
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 Faces Fresh Criticism of Factories

Hilmar Schmundt and Bernhard Zand Spiegel Online International
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.

Turkey: Uprising’s Currents Run Deep

Conn Hallinan Dispatches from the Edge
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.

Tomgram: Eduardo Galeano, Robots, Drugs, and Collateral Damage

Eduardo Galeano TomDispatch
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