Portside

The British Broadcasting Corporation’s endless trumpeting of the threat of “Russian aggression” gives one cause to fear we are being softened up for war. The anti-Russian propaganda by the BBC and other news outlets, including what they consciously don’t tell us, is all at the service of the world’s most powerful military and propaganda regime. But, there is recent evidence the essential sanity and peacefulness of ordinary people and families can still prevail.

Labor officials in California have passively watched Democratic Governor Jerry Brown put California's state workplace health and safety agency-Cal/OSHA on a starvation diet. The agency has less enforcement resources than under Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, but state labor officials appear to have employed a strategy of maintaining access and friendly relations with Brown and his appointees at all costs, relinquishing the fight for workplace safety.

Salon reporter Lindsay Abrams speaks with biologist Tyrone Hayes, subject of a new mini-documentary, and the director, Jonathan Demme. Agrochemical giant Syngenta has followed Hayes, besmirched his reputation, and threatened him and his family’s well being for revealing the potential health dangers of one of our most commonly used herbicides.

Many countries and treatment providers like MSF rely on affordable quality generic medicines to treat life-threatening diseases. But the U.S.-led Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) would make it much harder for generic companies to produce cheaper drugs that are vital to people’s health. The TPP would give pharmaceutical companies longer monopolies over brand name drugs and the ability to charge high prices for critical drugs for longer periods of time.

Despite serious threats to their safety, more than 200 female migrant domestic laborers in Lebanon gathered January 25th to form the first trade union in the Arab world for domestic workers. Lebanese laws deny foreign workers the right to form their own unions, so the new union is aimed at all domestic workers irrespective of nationality. According to the United Nations, the Arab World is home to some 30 million migrant workers.

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In the 75 years since novelist John Steinbeck published his masterpiece about the Okie migration, the towering Ma Joad has faded from archetype to anachronism. Ever since Steinbeck published his opus on the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants in 1939, readers have warmed to Ma as a paragon of folksy integrity - "an unforgettably vigorous figure, like Mother Courage without the corruption or rapacity," - and, more recently, praised her as a feminist icon...

Imprisoned Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan was released from Rikers Island on Wednesday morning, July 2nd, after serving 58 days. She spoke publicly at a 1pm press conference outside the jail's outer gates on Hazen Street.

Walter Dean Myers was lauded for his work, which often centered on young black people struggling in tough environments. Myers, a best-selling children's book author whose crystalline prose often depicted the gritty lives of young people, died on Tuesday in Manhattan.

Even without repealing Abood, today’s court decision is plenty catastrophic. It will put financial limits on unions’ campaigns to organize two of the fastest-growing categories of American workers—those who care for the elderly and the sick, and those who care for small children