Portside

A BBC Panorama show reveals how in this conflict, like in other colonial wars, politicians surrendered power to the generals, at a deadly cost

“In South Africa, the Chief Operating Officer of Nissan sat down and listened to me,” said Witness Ndlovu, a union steward at Nissan’s South Africa South Africa Delegationplant . Ndlovu is a member of the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), the national autoworkers union in South Africa. “I am surprised and shocked,” he said, “by the fact that Nissan interferes so blatantly with the right of U.S. workers to have a voice in the workplace.”

The university campus workers joining the medical center workers in the ULP strike have also had similar concessions forced on them. Campus workers struck in 2005 and sympathy-struck in May, but this is the first time both groups have struck together. Unionized graduate students, members of UAW 2865, are sympathy-striking this time.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) joins major environmental and development groups in protest action at COP 19 in Warsaw where Governments are not acting responsibly to tackle the threat to lives, jobs and livelihoods that climate change represents.

The conflict in Washington State involves far more than a local dispute over wages and benefits. Boeing appears determined to set the bar higher in its labor relations. As is the trend in much of labor negotiations these days, the bosses have simply decided that moving forward, workers are going to have to forfeit the medical and retirement benefits their unions have previously secured.

Progressive organizing was indeed crucial to changing the filibuster, with Senators like Merkley and Udall working the inside game while the outside groups got the public riled up. Many Democratic senators—including Reid—didn’t want to do rules reform back in 2009 when the GOP began its unprecedented obstruction, and it took a lot of convincing.

If today’s extremist rhetoric sounds familiar, that’s because it is eerily, poignantly similar to the vitriol aimed squarely at John F. Kennedy during his presidency. And just like today, Texans were leading what some of them saw as a moral crusade. To find the very roots of the tea party of 2013, just go back to downtown Dallas in 1963, back to the months and weeks leading to the Kennedy assassination.

The oldest known genome of a modern human solves long-standing puzzles about the New World's genetic heritage.