Portside

The Portside moderators send our heartfelt thanks to our readers, for coming through in response to our annual appeal! This year our readers responded with the largest amount in contributions ever - nearly $19,000.

A new analysis, undertaken jointly by the Bicep group and the Planck group, has confirmed that the Bicep signal [of gravitational waves from the Big Bang] was mostly, if not all, stardust, and that there is no convincing evidence of the gravitational waves. No evidence of inflation.

As mayor of Chicago, Rahm has unleashed an unprecedented attack on working families, especially the poor and people of color.

The mess was codified in 1966 when restaurant and other tipped workers finally got included in the Fair Labor Standards Act. But instead of one fair wage, the law created a second tier: tipped workers who could be paid a subminimum wage.

Food movement advocates and consumers, driven to forge alternatives to industrial agribusiness, have neglected the labor economy that underpins ‘local’ food production,

The liberal way of viewing the problem rests on a misunderstanding of the origins of the police and what they were created to do.

In the first big strike of the year, 3,500 California NUHW health care workers took to the picket line at Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest health care provider (HMO). Astonishingly, the California Nurses Association (CNA-NNU), a union with a reputation as a militant fighter for nurses, a union that, along with NUHW, rejected “partnership” with Kaiser, and a union that has in fact been affiliated with NUHW for more than two years, has settled short with Kaiser.

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.