Portside

The Greek people must be thanked for putting the need for changing the course of economic policies firmly onto the European agenda. The stakes are high. A failure in Greece will be seen as vindication of austerity as the only option. Those convinced that Europe needs to change cannot sit on the fence, but need to engage in support of the new winds of reform

We are all Roy Batty. All of our moments will be lost, like tears in rain…but weren’t they extraordinary moments?

His essays on police brutality still burn hot, but his understanding of sex, self-knowledge and power demand equal attention now. Baldwin does not say that systems of power are unimportant. He insists that liberation is also a mandate on individuality: how one separates oneself from the “habits of thought [that] reinforce and sustain the habits of power”—in essence, how one comes into his or her humanity.

... the situation in Greece quite inspiring because you have here something really very rare in any country in recent years, which is an election in which the public is making a choice that matters. The outcome is not a question of some manipulation among existing political classes, or even the evolution of a previously existing party system, which was the case in Italy. They have a clear-cut choice, and they're making it. This is what democracy should be about.

Voters reject EU austerity for radical alternative of far-left party. Upstarts fall two seats short of an overall majority. ‘Greece has turned a page,’ says 40-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras.

As of 10:30 PM EST, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, NBC News, CNN and other outlets had not published any reports. The legal precedents created as the government pursues WikiLeaks are the same legal precedents that can always be used to go after other journalists in the future. American journalists maintain their collective silence at their profession’s own peril.

GOP senators offer their own staff generous maternity leave benefits versus their present position on expanding paid leave to private workers.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) issued a Director’s Decision Friday rejecting an appeal by environmental watchdog groups to suspend operations at the nearly two dozen reactors in the United States that have the same containment system as the ill-fated Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan. Greenpeace charges the NRC is “backing off post-Fukushima fixes at reactors around the country due to fear that added regulatory costs would topple more nuclear plants."

Even as Israel is aggressively seeking to recruit French Jews to move to Israel, France is undertaking measures to stem the flow of young Muslims to the Middle East to fight with Islamist extremists in Syria and Iraq. There is much talk of restoring authority and “republican values” to the schoolroom. But French leaders need to take a hard look at their own totally incoherent foreign policy, and there is no sign as yet of that happening.

Last October, Saudi Arabia’s Special Criminal Court sentenced Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, a popular Shi’ite cleric and outspoken political dissident, to death. Now the fate of this Shi’ite cleric hangs over the Gulf like a sword of Damocles. Demonstrations demanding the death sentence be revoked have been held in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, and the United Kingdom, underscoring the international sensitivity surrounding al-Nimr’s imprisonment and death sentence.