Portside

Black Twitter; NYT's editorial swamp; Micro-grants for nonprofit news; NYPD finds a use for Google glasses; Fox News: dying or undead?

The Southern Poverty Law Center has found that the J-1 Visa Exchange Visitor Program has been transformed into a source of cheap, exploitable labor for employers, undercutting U.S. workers and damaging the nation’s image abroad. Many students leave the United States disillusioned and deeply in debt.

Cecily McMillan, 25, faces up to seven years in jail after being charged with assault in the second degree, a Class D felony in New York. Police allege that McMillan elbowed an officer in the head during a protest in lower Manhattan in March 2012.

While Volkswagen has vowed not to interfere, however, outside forces have picked up the anti-union playbook and are telling workers that choosing union representation could endanger their jobs.

The Day We Fought Back: Hundreds of digital rights and privacy groups, thousands of individual Net users, in dozens of countries, have come together to protest surveillance by governments at home and abroad.

A union victory would be the beginning of an ambitious attempt by Volkswagen and the UAW to build a new model for the United States to compete globally. The election itself concludes one of the most innovative and important union-organizing drives in decades.