Portside

The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement was settled last week. Next up: The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which will create the largest "free trade" zone in the world. Organizers say 250,000 people took part in an anti-TTIP protest in Berlin on Saturday.

Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights have released an incredible new study systematically documenting growing suppression, on US campuses, of advocacy on behalf of Palestinian human rights. Describing nearly 300 incidents of such suppression in a period of a year and a half, the report describes false accusations of anti-Semitism and terrorism; baseless legal complaints and administrative disciplinary actions; firings of professors and harassment.

Analogously, we universally refer to gas drilled conventionally or fracked as "natural." True, gas found in deep rock and soil formations and biologically formed from dead animal and plant matter, is natural. Once drilled, transported, and combusted for heat and electricity, though, it is un-natural, even anti-natural, for reasons explored here.

Reflections on Prison Labor, Unions, and Whitney Benns' The Atlantic Article "American Slavery Reinvented"

FOIA documents reveal Agent Orange Dioxin, toxic dumps, fish kills on Okinawa Base. Two veterans win compensation, many more denied.

The US Department of Defense will work on compensating the families of the victims killed in a deadly American airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The strike “mistakenly” killed 22 people.

In a landmark decision, the National Labor Relations Board has ruled that dues checkoff must be continued after contract expiration.

Even as mainstream outlets start to pay more attention to Latino viewers and with new frontiers popping up on cable, things are changing as rapidly on television for the Hispanic audience as they are for everyone else. What seems to be a new constant, however, is that the focus on this market is certainly going to grow.

More than four decades after construction began in 1973, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is finally getting close to starting up the Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear reactor. While the TVA and the nuclear industry describe Watts Bar 2 as “the first new nuclear generation of the 21st Century,” in fact the TVA resuscitated a demonstrably unsafe 1960s-era ice condenser design that was abandoned decades ago by the rest of the nuclear industry.

It has never made less sense to build fossil fuel power plants.