Portside

El Faro was an overaged ship -- and the problem with old ships is that they are about as safe as old trucks. Commercial truckers don't drive 40-year old vehicles on their routes.

The Man Booker prize, given annually for best English language novel published in the United Kingdom, was awarded this week to Marlon James, for his novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. He is the first writer from Jamaica to win the prize. The novel is a tale of 1970s-1980s Jamaica, CIA plots, and violence. It is "a story about Jamaica that doesn’t only take place in Jamaica," says Kei Miller, who reviewed the novel late last year.

Journalists working for Al Jazeera America (AJAM) voted to be represented by the The NewsGuild of New York.

Sicario proceeds from one nail-biting scene to the next making it increasingly clear that this is a story about the merger of the tactics of the war on terror with the war on drugs, and it makes that merger look frankly terrifying -- a grisly bomb blast, bodies hung from a bridge in Juarez that seem intended to remind us of U.S. contractors in Fallujah and a secret mission to Mexico that is essentially an extraordinary rendition, with all the imagery to match.

Analysis: With $15 minimum wage campaign gaining political traction, the labor coalition Alliance for a Just Society says workers need more for a living wage

There is growing interest in the food world for pre-reservation Native American traditions and reviving the culinary landscapes of Native American microregions around the country.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement was settled last week. Next up: The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which will create the largest "free trade" zone in the world. Organizers say 250,000 people took part in an anti-TTIP protest in Berlin on Saturday.

In a landmark decision, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that dues checkoff must be continued after contract expiration.

Even as mainstream outlets start to pay more attention to Latino viewers and with new frontiers popping up on cable, things are changing as rapidly on television for the Hispanic audience as they are for everyone else. What seems to be a new constant, however, is that the focus on this market is certainly going to grow.

Now with Gov. Malloy proposing anti-union, anti-faculty contract language and pushing the need for public employee concessions as a way to balance the budget – a budget Malloy promised would not need new taxes, cuts or concessions – Connecticut’s public employees are getting a taste of what they feared most.