Portside

Teacher unions must unite with parents, students and the community to improve our schools—to demand social justice and democracy so that we have strong public schools, healthy communities, and a vibrant democracy.

An amendment that would prohibit the Fed from interfering in state medical pot laws is still up in the air.

The big bad thing she confessed to was… ambivalence. Ambivalence about the early days of motherhood. Sideswiped by the consuming reality of parenting, she admitted that she often wanted to escape; she didn’t want to spend every round-the-clock moment with her new child; she wanted to work!

Two new imaginative state proposals are now seeking to leverage the power of the public purse against executive excess. In California, lawmakers are zeroing in on how government taxes. New legislation pending in Rhode Island targets how government spends.

According to a new white paper by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, our labyrinthine tax system is encouraging corporations to invest in creating jobs overseas, when unemployment remains doggedly high here at home, while giving US-based multinationals good reason to deprive our treasury of revenues when we should be investing in infrastructure and the American people.

The Chilean 9/11 created a community in California and around the world of Chileans that fled to escape the brutal military regimen. The Bay Area Chilean community commemorates September 11, every year with a cornucopia of cultural and art events. “This is part of our history as a community here in the Bay Area,” said Marci Valdivieso, one of the organizers.

This recent struggle that succeeded in securing a wage increase at Victoria Secret may show that the fight for better wages at fast food stores might be having a ripple effect.

Today’s American readers will find the arguments favoring Peña Nieto’s energy reform familiar. They center around the flaws of the state-run enterprise: its corruption and inefficiency, its coddling of unions, and its monopoly in the national market for consumer goods such as gasoline, which has kept prices high. But thus far, the debates have hardly touched upon the local consequences of this reform for regions that will be most affected.

Empire enjoys watching the two sides battle like caged mice, weakening each other to its advantage.

The question Congress and Mr. Obama must ask now is whether employing force to punish Mr. Assad’s use of chemical weapons is worth endangering the fragile international order that is World War II’s most significant legacy.