Portside

The Chicago Teachers Union has put incredible effort into building unity—not only among its members, but also with parents and neighborhood groups.

Oscar López Rivera - AKA the Mandela of Puerto Rico - has been in a US jail for 35 years for his part in the independence struggle. He talks about renouncing violence and his dream of seeing the monarch butterfly again.

Fourteen-year-old Bresha Meadows was jailed this past summer for defending herself, her mother, and her siblings, a number of organizers and activists inserted ourselves into Bresha's story and timeline to fight for and with Bresha. She is still locked up at Trumbull County Juvenile Detention Center in Warrren, Ohio.

“The Crime of Being Married.” So read the headline that accompanied photos of Richard Loving, a Southern “white trash” construction worker, and his African-American wife Mildred... "Loving" audiences will watch Jeff Nichols’ nobly hatred-proof period romance, as it dramatises and gives due mythological prominence to a remarkable legal case which helped change America’s ugly Jim Crow race laws in the 50s and 60s.

Red face in a high place; Militarism now; Inside the militia; Hungarian ultra-right in power; LA left losses

While many people only recently may have learned of the fight against the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL), Standing Rock Sioux tribe Chairman David Archambault II has worked for two years to prevent its construction.

 The left is profoundly divided over the conflict, but we should at least agree on a set of principles to end it.

U.S. District Court Judge John Vazquez has given the party a deadline of 5:00 pm Tuesday by which time it must detail "agreements in any form between [the RNC] and the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump...regarding voter fraud, ballot security, ballot integrity, poll watching, or poll monitoring."

Senator Elizabeth Warren and Mayor Martin Walsh of Boston have correctly noted that charter schools are draining off enormous sums of money from already-underfunded public schools. But an even greater loss may be the draining-off of parents who no longer have a stake in advocating for the schools from which they’ve chosen to depart. Who will stand up for the children at the schools they've left behind?

The major issues are health coverage, pensions and work rules. Pensions rankle TWU members because theirs don't increase if a worker makes more than $50,000 a year, meaning a union member will receive no more than $30,000 a year in pension payments after retirement even if they earned more than $50,000 when they retired. By contrast, managers with Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority] have no pension caps.