Portside

The former radical leader now finds himself in partnership with former adversaries as an advocate for school choice and vouchers. He says he is “a novelty, an outspoken black man and former large system school superintendent who supported a growing movement that was largely championed by conservative white people."

The attack marked an escalation of protests in the Pacific Coast state of Guerrero, where tensions have been high since scores of student teachers went missing Sept. 26 after clashing with municipal police. Those clashes left six people dead and some 20 injured. Police rounded up 43 other students, but their fate is unknown.

As Detroit seeks to leave bankruptcy behind and get back on its feet—ramping up development with construction of a light rail and a new hockey arena that will cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars—it is simultaneously bearing witness to a process that could evict up to 142,000 of its residents, many of whom are too poor to pay their property taxes.

The solution, both to America's voting access problem and to alleviating public concerns about fraud, is to establish an affirmative right to vote.

The election is being avidly watched by the right wing throughout the hemisphere, eager to see signs of ebbing of the "pink tide" that brought progressive governments into several countries of the region in the last decade and a half.

Many jobs at low wages largely responsible for a young workers death.

Historian Mark Lause discusses an intriguing slice of baseball history, including the Knights of Labor influenced fight for labor rights and against the color bar in baseball. Great even for those who don't associate spring with baseball!

Looking for another reason to worry about fracking? We're going to bubble-wrap the entire planet with the overabundance of plastic it produces.

Why the verdict? There was the obvious and unrelenting hostility of the judge, the mild-mannered demeanor displayed by Officer Bovell on the witness stand, an inclination on the part of individual jurors to take the word of uniformed authority over that of protesters. That Cecily McMillan was the victim of a brutal sexual assault and wound up being tried as the aggressor - was too disturbing a reality for the jurors to come to grips with.

The movie, Cesar Chavez, documents his life and his role in the 1965 Delano Grape Strike. An aspect of the film is the largely forgotten contributions of Filipino Americans to the farm labor movement. Since the 1920s, when Filipinos first learned to organize into unions in Hawaii, Filipinos were important leaders in organizing farmworkers to fight against unfair working conditions.