Portside

Anchored by powerful performances from Oscar nominees Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard, Empire features unapologetically black characters operating in a mostly black world. Nielsen says 7.5 million of them are African-American.But that's where the other controversy about Empire emerges. Because some critics say the show has earned its success by trafficking in "badly written dialogue and ham-fisted stereotypes."

New report detailing status of garment worker access to child care and related issues in Los Angeles.

Guy Carawan's music became the unofficial anthems of the Civil Rights movement. For over 50 years, Guy was the music director of Highlander Center, an inter-racial training center for labor, civil rights, and environmental activists, located in rural Tennessee. Guy graduated in 1949 from Occidental College, where he majored in math, played on the basketball team, and was a member of ATO fraternity - an unusual background for someone who would become a civil rights icon!

May 7 the Women’s Court on war crimes against women during the war in the 1990ies formally started in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Women have come together from all the corners of the former-Yugoslavia to participate in the Women’s Court in Sarajevo, to demand justice for the crimes committed against them during the wars and the enduring inequalities and suffering that followed.

Claudia Krich, longtime Davis resident and retired teacher, attended a Sacramento screening of the documentary “Last Days in Vietnam” and was moved to write this essay. The documentary rekindled memories of the unique experience she and her husband Keith Brinton shared from 1973 until July of 1975,when they co-directed a civilian rehabilitation program and hosted visiting journalists and officials near My Lai. They stayed in Saigon and saw what happened April 30th.

Manning’s latest Guardian op-ed: We're citizens, not subjects. We have the right to criticize government without fear. The American public needs more access to what the government is doing in its name. That requires increasing freedom of information and transparency.

The displacement of black and Latino households was so dramatic during the recent foreclosure crisis that it should be seen as a 'mass migration event,' according to the lead author of a new Cornell University study. The study found Black and Latino neighborhoods faced home-loss rates at approximately three times that of white areas. This high rate of home-loss, along with white flight, resulted in a massive resegregation of urban America.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has appointed Ayelet Shaked Justice Minister in his fourth government. In the most extremist right-wing government in Israeli history, Shaked is perhaps the most extreme. She has openly asserted “the entire Palestinian people is the enemy” and made genocidal calls for the destruction of the Palestinian nation, “including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure.”