Portside

The Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas in the occupied West Bank is intensifying its crackdown on Palestinians exercising their rights to free speech. Meanwhile politicians and activists in France are calling on their government to act on behalf of a Palestinian-French human rights defender arrested by Israel.

The current conflict is one of the many unintended consequences of the continuing Cold War and the arbitrary division of the Korean peninsula that has lasted to this day. In a military confrontation with the United States, North Korea faces a terrible choice between using its weapons first or losing them in a conventional war against a far superior power.

Chef Tom Colicchio is dropping the name of his newest Manhattan restaurant, Fowler & Wells, after learning that it has historically racist connotations. It was named for a publishing company and scientific institute that once operated in a building on the same site.The men who started the company were proponents of phrenology, a 19th-century practice used to justify slavery and beliefs in African-American inferiority.

The reality of life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe is not at all what was promised.

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.