Portside

Barack Obama, the president who publicly swore his second oath of office on the Bibles of Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., used his inaugural address to chart an arc of history from the liberation movements of the sixteenth president’s time through the civil rights movements of a century later to the day on which hundreds of thousands of Americans packed the National Mall to cheer for the promise of an emboldened presidency.

As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what workers can say online.

Bad Karma at Hyatt Regency San Francisco

Polls suggest that on 22 January, Israel's Jewish majority will elect the most right-wing Knesset in Israel's history, returning prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power in a coalition packed with ultra-nationalists. For Israel's Palestinian citizens, comprising nearly a fifth of the total population, the dilemma has been how to respond to this all- but- inevitable outcome.

Quotes of the Day and Toons of the Day for the week January 13 - 19, 2013

The Arab democratic uprisings were world-historic, yet their outcome remains uncertain. It is premature to conclude that the rise of the Islamists is necessarily a permanent feature of the politics of these countries. There are, however, certain points to note as we reflect on the results of these uprisings and the road forward.

Why are the French once again firing into a continent? First, France has major investments in Niger and Mali. At bottom, this is about Francs (or Euros, as it may be). Some 75 percent of France's energy needs come from nuclear power, and a cheap source is its old colonial empire in the region (that besides Mali and Niger included Senegal, Mauritania, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, Chad, Algeria, and the Central African Republic).

U.S. citizens suffer from poorer health than nearly all other industrialised countries, according to the first comprehensive government analysis on the subject, released Wednesday. Of 17 high-income countries looked at by a committee of experts sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, the United States is at or near the bottom in at least nine indicators.

Huge banks must be restructured and their access to the safety net scaled back, Mr. Fisher said, because neither regulators nor market participants have proved effective in monitoring risks at these institutions.

The consequences for the mentally ill of the gun control push are not yet fully clear, as the full content of the president’s executive actions have yet to be released. And advocates will watch closely as congressional deliberations unfold over the vast parts of gun control that the president can’t do alone. But for now, it appears things are moving forward with some distance between proactive plans to improve mental health care and those to prevent mass murder.