Portside

The activist and co-author of "I Am Malala: How One Girl Stood Up for Education and Changed the World" relished "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," the first book she read in the hospital when recovering from an attack by the Taliban.

Microsoft Corp. is currently sitting on almost $29.6 billion it would owe in U.S. taxes if it repatriated the $92.9 billion of earnings it is keeping offshore, according to disclosures in the company's most recent annual filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Such maneuvers -- although often legal -- threaten to signficantly reduce U.S. corporate tax receipts during an era marked by government budget deficits.

Many of the 112,000 active educators and school workers in the Michigan Education Association can now leave the union and stop paying fees under a state law that took effect last year. Other major unions, covered by multi-year contracts, won't reach the opt-out point until 2015 or later.

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A new report released by the non-profit Public Accountability Initiative is critical of the Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD), and its relationship with the oil and gas companies. The report questions whether CSSD and other environmental organizations' work with industry may cross ethical lines and serve to promote the oil and gas industry's agenda with a green "stamp of approval."

In the wake of the police killing of 18 year old Michael Brown, a black teacher in South Los Angeles describes how "death is intimately woven into the experience of being a black child in America." She says the trauma of constant death, loss and mourning shapes all of her students' lives. She argues the movement response to the "spate of police murders and beatings" must also expose the "apartheid policies and mentalities" that plague American schools.

Slow but significant progress was made in the peace talks to end the five decades of armed conflict in Colombia being held in Havana, Cuba. But, many complex problems remain in a peace process the United Nations representative termed "a unique experiment that has not been seen anywhere else." The Colombian conflict is the last civil war in Latin America, costing an estimated 220,000 lives since 1958.

The United Federation of Teachers and healthcare union SEIU 1199 were among the New York organizations that endorsed an August 23 march against police brutality in Staten Island. The march demanded justice for Eric Garner, a Staten Island resident killed while placed in a police chokehold last month.

Young volunteers spent the summer of 1964 in Mississippi, working to register African-American voters. But leaders of the movement also had a political strategy designed to chip away at the oppressive white power structure in the South, and it was put to the test at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, N.J.

By calling McDonald’s a “joint employer” with its franchisees, the General Counsel—that’s the prosecuting side of the NLRB—sided with workers, who argue the corporation exerts so much control over store operations that it should be held accountable for what happens under its Golden Arches. The General Counsel’s announcement will clear the way for local NLRB offices to hold the corporation, not just franchisees, accountable for the workplace abuses.