Portside

A new political action committee has formed to influence the outcome of Los Angeles school board races, filling a gap created when a group of civic leaders, which includes former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, decided to sit out next month's key upcoming election. The new organization, Great Public Schools Los Angeles Political Action Committee, joins other outside groups involved in the campaign to replace Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte, who died in December.

There will be a mail-in vote for union representation from July 21 to Aug. 4 for teachers at the "I Can" charter school in Northeastern Ohio. The American Federation of Teachers plans to file Unfair Labor Practice Charges for alleged retaliation against nine teachers whose contracts were not renewed. Teachers are concerned over class sizes as large as 40, and special needs students not having their needs met. Click the link at the bottom to watch the video.

How Chicago's school choice system is tracking kids into separate high schools based on achievement (and race).

We can tell, for sure, from video images and even photographs that the Iron Dome system is not working very well at all. It hits a targeted missile maybe 5 percent of the time—could be even lower. ... Meanwhile, the Israeli government presents Iron Dome's performance as part of a sophisticated public relations effort.

Almost a decade of bruising debate has led to the absence of any serious policy alternative and paralysis over the way forward

There is no doubt that an unhealthy diet and sedentary lifestyle are the two chief drivers of the obesity epidemic, but many researchers are confident that they will eventually hit on specific brown fat–based treatments, although most admit that such interventions most likely are 10 years away at least.

The outsourcing of public services to private go-getters has concentrated wealth the whole world over. The best answer to that concentration? That just may be new forms of public ownership.

Veteran labor activist and labor reporter, Steve Early, looks at the growing number of third party candidates and the growing support they are receiving from the labor movement. He pays particular attention to the long history of successful third party candidates in the State of Vermont.

Smoking is on course to kill up to 1 billion worldwide this century, most in poor nations. Uruguay, which has highest proportion of smokers in Latin America, is locked in what Uruguayan President Jose Mujica calls a "fight for life" with the Philip Morris conglomerate to reduce the toll smoking is having on his people. Lung cancer is the leading killer of men in Uruguay, and if trends continue, it will soon be the leading killer of women as well.

The U.S. and its Western allies have turned a blind eye to Saudi Arabia's longstanding and substantial support for the most extreme elements of the Sunni opposition in both Syria and Iraq. Support from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States has fueled the rise of the Islamist State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), fostered anti-Shia extremism, and encouraged the suppression of the moderate Sunni opposition to the al-Maliki and al-Assad regimes .