Portside

For years, schoolchildren in New York City have been subject to overly aggressive practices by police in their schools. There are more police personnel in New York City public schools than there are on the streets of almost every major city in the United States. Amendments to the Student Safety Act will increase transparency by closing loopholes and improve public disclosure of comprehensive data on school suspensions and law enforcement activity.

The president of the NEA, the largest union in the US, is reportedly drumming up support for an endorsement of Hillary Clinton as early as next week. However, this has spurred protest from rank-and-file members who argue that a primary endorsement excludes the majority's input. Those who support Senator Bernie Sanders are planning a grassroots campaign in opposition to the what they expect will be a Clinton nod.

Anti-Syrian sentiment, along with economic hardship and a growing sense that the civil war will rage on for years to come, helps explain why many refugees are willing to risk everything by leaving Turkey and heading for Europe.

The history of racism in our country is sometimes best understood by looking at how that history unfolded locally, and in places outside the slaveholding South, as well as nationally. Fred Whitehead writes about his own experience growing up in Kansas in the 1950s and about what Brent M. S. Campney, in his new study of that state's bloody Civil War and Post-Civil War racial history, taught him.

Foreign workers are brought to the United States by outsourcing companies and copy how the employees of Toys "R" Us do their jobs. The jobs are then sent to India and the employees are given pink slips.

After being evicted at the height of the recent foreclosure crisis, a construction worker tries to reclaim his family’s home by taking a new job with the evictor. Ramin Bahrani's '99 Homes', a relatively small, tough-minded drama about pitiless people doing unprincipled things, proves to be one of the most interesting, elegantly crafted and—paradoxically, given the dark subject matter—elating films to come along in recent memory.

Modi Courts Silicon Valley; Offline; Suing for Net Neutrality; High Schoolers Produce Radio Docs; Phones vs. Out-of-Control Cops

“Strategic communications” or Stratcom, a propaganda/psy-op technique that treats information as a “soft power” weapon to wield against adversaries, is a new catch phrase in an Official Washington obsessed with the clout that comes from spinning false narratives, reports Robert Parry.

So Obama wants al-Assad to stand down as a prerequisite for effective US action against Daesh in Syria (a few air sorties and even fewer air strikes are ineffectual). Putin thinks al-Assad is key to defeating Daesh and that everyone should ally with Damascus. Putin is blind to the ways that al-Assad and his military brutality is prolonging the civil war. Backing his genocidal policies will just perpetuate that war.