Portside

Just two weeks after pleading guilty in a major federal fraud case, Amgen, the world's largest biotechnology firm, scored a largely unnoticed coup on Capitol Hill: Lawmakers inserted a paragraph into the "fiscal cliff" bill that did not mention the company by name but strongly favored one of its drugs.

Father of Media Reform Turns 100; Aaron Schwartz case; New York Times dismantles environment desk; Google Wires NYC neighborhood - for free; free Internet in Tel Aviv; North Carolina bill bans community-owned cable networks; Is Broadband Internet Access a Public Utility?; Smartphone now has remote control of your life; Smartphone Users Demand More Data than Tablets; CNET Scandal - Can They be Trusted in the Future; The Atlantic's Scientology Problem; and more...

President Obama's second inaugural address struck a populist tone, but the real news for progressives came last Friday when it was announced that Obama's campaign organization would continue under a new name, Organizing for Action.

While access to abortion is still in theory a right every woman in this country enjoys, an economic chasm has yawned between the well-off and the poor.

The American war in Vietnam was a doomed modern military invasion against a popular, rural-based insurgency for independence...During the ten years (1961-1971) of aerial chemical warfare in Vietnam, U.S. planes sprayed more than twenty million gallons of herbicide defoliants, Agent Orange, the dioxin-contaminated and toxic herbicide constituted about 61 percent of the total herbicides sprayed in the war.The American war in Vietnam was a doomed modern military.

Leo Robinson was a leader of the longshore union in San Francisco. He died this week. For many of us, he was an example of what being an internationalist and a working-class activist was all about.

Bashkar Sunkara earns praise as the founding editor of the online magazine, Jacobin. Started in September 2010, and buoyed by the Occupy movement, the magazine brings left and Marxist reporting in a new way to a new generation.

In Kill Anything that Moves, Nick Turse has for the first time put together a comprehensive picture, written with mastery and dignity, of what American forces actually were doing in Vietnam. The findings disclose an almost unspeakable truth. Turse discovers that episodes of devastation, murder, massacre, rape, and torture once considered isolated atrocities were in fact the norm,...