Portside

Lexi Rizzo, Starbucks Buffalo shift supervisor for seven years at one of the first stores to unionize, says company claims she was fired for tardiness.

Mel King, the longtime political activist and former state representative from the South End who in 1983 became the first Black person to reach a Boston mayoral general election, died Tuesday morning in his South End home. He was 94.

That so many states have been passing such legislation that forbids considering environment, society, and governance implications of financial investments is anything but a fluke.

Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated 55 years ago today while in Memphis standing in solidarity with striking sanitation workers. His life and radical words stand as a beacon of hope, urging us to keep fighting for economic and racial justice.

Activists known as “salts” have been a key to recent successful organizing campaigns. And they say they’re just getting started.

Iranian American screen polymath Payman Maadi (who made such an impact in films such as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) is Samad, a cop waging an apparently unwinnable war on drugs in the Iranian capital. Having rounded up a vast community of addicts living and dying within a hellscape of giant concrete pipes, Samad and his deputy, Hamid (Houman Kiai), treat their captives like cattle, stripping and humiliating them, herding them from one overcrowded prison space to the next.

Authoritarianism vs public media, and other fights for the right to know

"Several American labor unions reacted angrily to the Senate’s vote July 25 to take yet another crack at dismantling Obamacare. AFSCME President Lee Saunders called the vote “morally indefensible,” while Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers said it was “cruel and heartless.”

For the credibility of the left, we have to mark out our own turf in this upheaval. We have to independently offer our own priorities on what’s wrong with Trump.

This new book highlights the technology at the heart of what reviewer Jill Leovy calls "surveillance-driven policing," and the heightened dangers this new set of law enforcement tools pose to democracy.