Portside

Internet Blocking in Turkey, Jordan and the U.K.; Before the Elections in Iran, the US Says It's OK to Sell Them Cellphones; Internet Revolution in Cuba

More than any of the other civil rights widows, Myrlie Evers showed America her rage. She let the nation see her unfiltered emotion when two all-white juries refused to convict Medgar’s killer, during a time when black anger was not an acceptable display of emotion. She wrote a book and began it with this line: “Somewhere in Mississippi lives the man who murdered my husband.”

A human rights approach could lead the way to resolving the problems of partition and the problems of a two state solution. International human rights treaties offer states alternatives to partition. Instead, human rights conventions offer types of integration that protect the existence and identity of national linguistic, ethnic, and religious groups.

My old friend Ray Smithhart would have loved the irony of union-fighting manufacturer Nissan making a gift of $100,000 to the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute. Known in his later years as the “dean of Mississippi’s labor organizers,” Smithhart worked closely with civil rights martyr Medgar Evers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, forging a link between the labor and civil rights movements that Martin Luther King Jr. himself saw as key to the future of both.

Official Washington still glorifies George W. Bush’s “successful surge” in Iraq while ignoring the wanton slaughter inflicted on Iraqis. So, there remains a high-level desire to harshly punish Pvt. Bradley Manning for exposing the horrific truth about that and other war crimes.

This was the third night of demonstrations. The main meme - as with the flags - is "we are sons of Ataturk". That is, we are a secular republic and we are worried about the autocratic use of power by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, combined with a creeping Islamisation. However, there is another view: "We're all here," one masked woman told me. "Communists, anarchists, democrats. It's not an Ataturkist movement."

It's the nature of the shallow, consumer-driven, dream-drunken culture our society tries to impose on us that we popularly adopt terms without knowing what they mean and, more often than not, they don't mean much of anything. Such is the case with "the Cloud".

A former shipfitter at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy and a longtime labor union activist, Mr. Richardson cofounded Military Families Speak Out, an organization that mushroomed to include more than 4,000 families, along with chapters in 18 states. Mr. Richardson, who directed the Labor Extension Program at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and trained union leaders around the world, died May 4 in his Jamaica Plain home. He was 60.