Portside

Last week the New York Times reported the Obama Administration is considering reaffirming the Bush-era position that the ban on cruel treatment doesn't apply when the United States is operating abroad. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) demanded the Obama Administration "close the oversees torture loophole." The ACLU said the ban on torture and ill-treatment is universal and applies everywhere the U.S. is holding people in detention.

Pine trees, brought to Palestine with the establishment of the State of Israel, symbolize the varied means of “ethnic cleansing” directed at the Palestinian population. Used to cover-up the past destruction of Palestinian villages and neighborhoods, and the present displacement of Bedouins, these pine forests are now presented as Israel’s “green lungs.”

San Francisco’s famously progressive and largest public employee union is being accused by another union of contracting out jobs.

“The Common Core will never become the National Standards with National Tests that its creators wanted. It will go away like the world ends in the TS Eliot poem, the Hollow Men: ‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’”

“Kaiser has attacked its own workers and its core clients at the same time,” Local 5 Secretary-Treasurer Eric Gill says. “Union groups have been its core constituency,” but now they’re facing double-digit rate hikes in Hawaii.

The southern New Mexico mining town of Santa Rita no longer exists, even as a ghost town, except in the memories of Terry Humble and others who lived there. In September, another vestige of Santa Rita disappeared when workers at the Chino Mine voted 236-83 to decertify a 72-year-old union celebrated for its heroic struggle to improve the lives of Hispanic miners and immortalized by the 1954 movie “Salt of the Earth.”

Despite being a fundamental human right enshrined in international law, the right to strike is certainly not guaranteed for all workers. In fact, transport workers are one of the groups increasingly being excluded from the right to strike by way of outright bans or public service, essential services or minimum services requirements that severely limit that right.

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.