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.

Although it was not programmable in the modern sense, some have called it the first analog computer.

In the 1960s, the agency sought to fight Communism through the students’ rights movement. There’s little reason to think its tactics have changed.

If anyone can overcome the hurdles for a Latino mayoral candidate in Chicago, it's Garcia given his lifetime commitment to a multiracial coalition—not just talking the talk, but 30 years of walking the walk.

The boundary separating white Anglo upscale school districts from the burgeoning non-white and non-Anglo populations in downscale communities is fast becoming a flashpoint inside America.

Even though the four counts do not include cold blooded murder, we in West Virginia and the rest of the world know that the big man is on trial for the deaths of those men just as the nation knew that Al Capone’s trial on tax evasion was for his part in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. There will be no one in the courtroom or on the jury that doesn’t remember that morning. There is no one in Raleigh County that doesn’t know who ran Massey Energy.