Portside

Tipping creates a two-tier wage system in the restaurant industry. The practice should be stopped everywhere.

July 2015 Paul Castaway was shot and killed by Denver police while holding a knife to his own throat. Police initially claimed that Castaway, a mentally ill Indigenous man, had charged them with a knife after stabbing his own mother. Surveillance footage would later contradict those claims and support the accounts of Castaway's family and other witnesses, who have maintained that Castaway menaced no one but himself with the knife in his hand.

Tea Party rebels are exposing the deep rifts between country-club elites and social-issue hard-liners.

The International Association of Fire Fighters is a small union of just under 300,000 members with political influence far beyond its size. The obvious reason for this is the respect many Americans have for firefighters, who consistently rank as some of the country’s most admired professionals. The less obvious reason is Harold A. Schaitberger, a tall, barrel-chested man with meaty hands and rheumy eyes, who has served as the union’s general president for over 15 years.

If we have to give handouts to big corporations, it seems reasonable to put some conditions on the cash. After all, we put all sorts of conditions on TANF benefits of $500 a month, it seems reasonable to ask something of the companies that get tens of millions of loan subsidies through the Ex-Im Bank. This should be a great opportunity to see where people really stand.

While teaching American studies at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, she, Linda Gordon and Susan Reverby assembled primary documents, including letters and diaries, that offered a sweeping history of women and labor. Their book, “America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present” (1976), was acquired for Random House by Toni Morrison, then a young editor there.

“It’s an enormously popular show, and up until this current season it was taking place predominantly in the Middle East/Islamic world region, and depicting that region in a very particular way that reinforces this mythological stereotype that exists in a lot of the Western world.” - Heba Amin, associate professor at the American University in Cairo

Puerto Rico is in crisis. But the crisis is not about how to pay Wall Street. It is about the impact of centuries-long economic devastation on the men, women, and children—especially children—that live in Puerto Rico. While failure to pay the banks and the vultures makes headlines in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the human misery caused by five centuries of colonialism does not.

The world’s most dangerous malaria parasite shuffles its genes in a clever attempt to avoid the immune system. A new approach has begun to reveal how the process works.

Turkish journalist Onur Erem interviews noted political commentator Tariq Ali on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Syrian policy in the aftermath of the October 10th terrorist attack which killed more than 100 peace demonstrators in Ankara. According to Ali, Erdoğan has been one of the principal supporters of the Islamic State as a new force to bring down Syrian President Assad’s regime. But Turkey and NATO’s strategy in the region is now in ruins.