Portside

Some 40,000 child-care workers across the state will receive a 15 percent raise in their new contract. The contract settlement coincided with a state budget agreement to fund 200,000 child-care slots over five years.

"It would be unconscionable for the Senate to break for recess without addressing the ongoing assaults on our democratic systems happening across the nation."

Rather than force hospitals to be up front with patients about their costs, we should strip them of the power to set them.

From Canada to Colombia, protests erupt against legacies of violence, exploitation and cultural erasure

In Why the New Deal Matters, the historian Eric Rauchway gives us his own interpretation and suggests how liberalism might rebound in the present. A Review of Why the New Deal Matters, By Eric Rauchway, Yale University Press; 2021

Will Pegasus spyware take surveillance to a new level? Also the big comics rip-off, Forbes predicts next year's social media, and more

Among this month's offerings on Netflix: several feature debuts, including Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It" and Ryan Coogler's "Fruitvale Station, Mati Diop’s "Atlantics,” and Numa Perrier’s “Jezebel.”

The variant contains a mutation thought to help the virus dodge the immune system, scientists said.

On Feb. 26, 1963, Ben Lewis, the first Black elected official from Chicago’s West Side, won what was set to be his second full term on the City Council -- perhaps next stop Congress. Two days later, Lewis was found shot to death in his ward office.

Even as slavery was being abolished in the North, it continued to flourish, since the slave system was not confined simply to below the Mason-Dixon Line. The financing of the slave trade’s illegitimate commerce was sited heavily in Manhattan.