Portside

“In my view it is a very, very, very bad piece of legislation,” Sanders said at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials conference in Washington last week. “[W]e are taking away virtually all of the political and democratic rights of the people of Puerto Rico. We are treating them as an absolute colony.”

Waterkeeper Alliance, North Carolina Riverkeeper organizations and Environmental Working Group collaborate on unprecedented GIS initiative showing the location and waste outputs of more than 6,500 swine, cattle and poultry operations

“[Measure 1] will only drive up the price of land and rent as corporate farms expand their land base to gain ‘efficiency’ by spreading costs over more acres. This will cause farming margins to be thinner yet for all farmers and make it difficult for family farmers and especially beginning farmers to compete for land against the deep pockets of corporations.”

It compares the right-to-work law with laws passed in Southern states in the 1950s as part of the massive resistance to the U.S. Supreme Court’s desegregation orders in Brown v. Board of Education, with legislation intended to discourage membership in the NAACP — laws that were ultimately overturned in court for violating 1st and 14th Amendment rights of free expression and association.

Written and directed by Gary Ross, “The Free State of Jones” is everything that the overhyped “12 Years a Slave” and “Django Unchained” were not. It is an honest attempt to engage with the historical period it portrays even if it takes liberties with the events surrounding the rebellion of Newton Knight. As I will point out later in this article, they made for a more powerful film with a singular vision even if the truth was sacrificed.

Giant infrastructure projects like the proposed Nicaraguan Interoceanic Grand Canal threaten some of the most culturally diverse and ecologically rich regions of Latin America. Due to its enormous scale and the unprecedented power it grants to foreign capital, the proposed canal poses a serious threat not only to the environment but also to the indigenous Rama-Kriol peoples, who are mobilizing against all odds to protect their communities, land, water, and forests.

At a time when police departments around the country are being criticized for a lack of a transparency, the arrival of Legal Aid’s "cop accountability" database represents a bold attempt to systematically track officers with a history of civil rights violations and other kinds of misbehavior, and thereby force judges, prosecutors, and juries to take the officers’ past actions into consideration when adjudicating cases.

Black history museums struggle to survive; The history of lynchings revealed and mapped; Blacks in the Holocaust; David Cole on Bryan Stevenson; Resurrecting Lucy Parsons

Karen Friedman, executive vice president and policy director at the nonprofit Pension Rights Center in Washington, is highly critical of the new law while acknowledging that pension reforms are needed. “We are not saying don’t fix multiemployer [plans],” Friedman said. But an act that allows plans to cut retiree pensions is “such a departure from current law,” she said. “It’s just such a buzz saw on retiree pensions.”

"Of all the people to hurt with sanctions, punishing students and undermining educational exchanges is a particularly damaging act," said Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian-American Council.