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Speck of Interstellar Dust Obscures Glimpse of Big Bang

Dennis OverBye The New York Times
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.

Howard Dean Targets Rahm Emanuel

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

Servers, Not Servants

Jenny Brown Labor Notes
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.

Locavore Movement Overlooks Farmworkers

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

The Origins of Modern Policing

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

California Labor’s Civil Wars Continue

Cal Winslow CounterPunch
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 BBC’s Drums of War and Meme of “Russian Aggression”

Oliver Tickell CounterPunch
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 Movement Malpractice: Relinquishing the Fight for Workplace Health and Safety

Garrett Brown New Labor Forum
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.

Chemical Company’s War on an Environmental Whistleblower

Lindsay Abrams Salon
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.

U.S. Trade Deal Will Devastate Poor Peoples' Access to Medicines

Medicins Sans Frontieres /Doctors Without Borders Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF)
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.