Portside

A training program is the central component of an effort by Unite Here Local 26, the hospitality workers’ union, to reach out to the African-American community to fill jobs that offer good wages and benefits. The initiative aims to expand the diversity of hotel workforces, increasingly dominated by immigrants, and meet the growing demand in the industry for employees who are fluent in English.

Voices of war; PR defeats journalism; Wipeout; Late Nite Whiteness; Net neutrality slowdown

The heirs to the fabled Rockefeller oil fortune withdrew their funds from fossil fuel investments on Monday, lending a symbolic boost to a $50bn divestment campaign ahead of a United Nations summit on climate change.

Veterans know from first hand experience that you cannot bomb your way to peace. More bombing will ultimately mean more division, bloodshed, recruitment for extremist organizations, and a continual cycle of violent intervention.

Our predicament is substantially obscured by the frightening enthusiasm for war among leading pundits. As Stephen F. Cohen has observed about the Ukraine–Russia crisis, the US media are simply not telling the truth about the failure of our post–Cold War policy. They demonize the opponent and never acknowledge the rational alternatives that exist. America needs an antiwar movement of truth tellers to confront and shame the propagandists.

It is the complexity of the movement—so often missing—that is my chief complaint about much movement historiography—at least that found within textbooks. The story of the Freedom Movement is a story of resistance. The “non-nonviolent” Chinn was attracted to and willing to support the nonviolent CORE because he recognized and valued that it was an organization resisting white supremacy. This is more important, more fundamental, than the weapons he often carried.

Less than a month after Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi became president of Egypt, he launched a massive cut in state subsidies causing fuel, bread and other prices to rise dramatically. The new austerity plan has provoked anger from consumers, taxi drivers and shop owners, and threatens to spread to other sectors.

In wake of new revelations regarding NSA and FBI targeting of prominent Muslim-Americans for surveillance, civil liberties organizations denounced the monitoring as "arbitrary and abusive." They called upon President Obama to prove the government surveillance of these prominent Muslim-Americans, including a political candidate and several civil rights activists, academics and lawyers, was not motivated by "racial or religious bias."

Plea for peace from Julia Chaitin, a kibbutzim who teaches in Israel, and lives near Gaza. She and some Israelis are challenging the endless hatred and violence practiced by both sides. She is joined by some Palestinians. Together they care for each other, that there is a way forward around the violence. J.J. Goldberg, writing in the Jewish Daily Forward charges that the Israeli Gaza onslaught is built on lies, and the heavier responsibility lies on Netanyahu government.

The explosion at the Tesoro refinery on the outskirts of Anacortes killed seven workers. Four years later, no one has been held publicly accountable for their deaths. Refinery owner Tesoro agreed to pay millions to families of the dead, but the company continues to fight government accusations that it willfully put its workers in harm's way.