Portside

Anti-vaxxers, your children don’t catch measles and then take it home like a jar of fireflies to enjoy alone or with a few close friends. Instead, they may unwittingly spread it to babies, people with certain medical issues, and a small percentage of the people who have done all they can to try to protect themselves but in whom the vaccine doesn’t work.

Airline food service workers on January 29 launched a nationwide campaign for affordable health care by holding demonstrations and other actions in cities across the US.

"The senators who voted in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline know they don't have the votes to override President Obama's veto, so ultimately this was a symbolic vote for them - a testament to their loyalty to dirty money over rational public policy," said Kyle Ash of Greenpeace.

Syriza will not easily sweep the policies of austerity aside, but there is a palpable feeling on the continent that a tide is turning. The victory of Greece's left-wing Syriza Party was, on one hand, a beacon for indebted countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Ireland. It is also a gauntlet for Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, and the "troika" - the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund.

The Black Lives Matter movement and other such responses to the tragic nexus of murders last year are the twenty-first century versions of the civil rights and black power movements, so I hoped that Selma would provide critical context for my children. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is extremely painful to watch. Young African Americans, including my own children, are reluctant to dig deeper into that era because it is simply too difficult.

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If ILWU members don’t figure out how to use their ship-side strength to bolster unionization across the logistics industry, they will see their power erode, as shippers and terminal operators continue to shift work off the docks and away from the waterfront. The ILWU’s members, with their rich history, deserve as much from their union. They still have time to avoid the fate of once-strong unions like the UAW.

The European bankers who imposed austerity on Greece chose to believe in the confidence fairy — that is, that the job-destroying effects of spending cuts would be more than made up for by a surge in private-sector optimism. While pretending to be hardheaded and realistic, they were peddling an economic fantasy. And the Greek people have been paying the price for those elite delusions.

The assumption in German Chancellor Angela Merkel's entourage before Sunday's Greek election was that Tsipras, the charismatic leader of the far-left Syriza party, would eke out a narrow victory and shift quickly from confrontation to compromise mode. Instead, after cruising to victory and clinching a fast-track coalition deal with the right-wing Independent Greeks party, he has signalled in his first days in office that he has no intention of backing down.

Last year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board concluded, "We can manage our technology, or become victims of it. The choice is ours, and the [Doomsday] Clock is ticking." This year, the board moved the Doomsday Clock to three minutes to midnight and added, "The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon."