Portside

These regressive trends can be turned around. But that will require the mobilization of an expansive political movement, sufficiently inclusive to attract Hispanics, low-income white southerners and African-Americans.

Ghassan al-Khouly, an unemployed labourer who specialised in tiling floors, was one of the latest of an estimated 93,000 Syrians to have died since the start of the civil war in March 2011.

A refreshingly principled stand by a small country against a powerful nation engaged in what many see as the political persecution of one of its own citizens.

Kennedy went bigger than expected in Windsor, the DOMA case, by rooting his argument in equal protection and not just federalism.