Portside

Ebola evades Big Data; Underground networks in Hong Kong; PBS pouts; Streaming battles; Virtual Ponzi; Battlefield Twitter

The union election was remarkable for a couple reasons: First, because of the margin of victory, with 86 percent voting yes on 77 percent turnout. And second, because it took place in the anti-union South.

Pride, which features a cast including Bill Nighy, Imelda Staunton and Paddy Considine, tells how Ashton co-founded Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), a movement that raised tens of thousands of pounds for striking miners, the two sides finding solidarity in their enmity towards Thatcherism and shared feelings of alienation.

Wall Street really, really wanted Marina Silva to win. Too bad for Wall Street.

"There can be no question that just a handful of clinics left to offer safe, legal abortion care to all women across the vast state of Texas is a dire emergency in need of an immediate response," said Nancy Northrup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR), which is representing the health care facilities.

Inside the American Terrordome, the chorus of hysteria-purveyors, Republican and Democrat alike, nattered on, as had been true for weeks, about the "direct," not to say apocalyptic, threat the Islamic State and its caliph posed to the American way of life. The media, of course, continued to report it all with a kind of eyeball-gluing glee. The result by the time I met that woman: 71% of Americans believed ISIS had nothing short of sleeper cells in the U.S.

Philadelphia teachers and their union were surprised today when they learned that the School Reform Commission had decided to unilaterally cancel their contract.

Trying to explain rising inequality without talking about unions is like explaining why the train is late – the tracks are worn, the weather is bad – without noting that one of its engines has been sabotaged.

RAD is a second cousin to everything from privatized highways to the Affordable Care Act, which keeps the public provision and modest expansion of health insurance mostly private. It could be more cost-effective to just appropriate more direct funds to the program and keep it in the public sector, but Congress is not about to do so.

American kids are getting ready to head back to school. But the schools they’re heading back to differ dramatically by family income. Which helps explain the growing achievement gap between lower and higher-income children. Thirty years ago, the average gap on SAT-type tests between children of families in the richest 10 percent and bottom 10 percent was about 90 points on an 800-point scale. Today it’s 125 points.