Portside

Cries of “this means war!” echoed throughout Chicago’s financial district this Tuesday as teachers demonstrated against the Board of Education ahead of union contract negotiations this summer.

Eight strangers around the globe are psychically linked after experiencing violent visions involving a woman (Daryl Hannah) unknown to any of them. The eight characters are about as diverse as you can get in terms of location, culture, race, economic situation, sexual orientation and occupation. As Lana Wachowski put it in an interview with io9 earlier this year, the show is "trying to get at the human question of how are we the same, and how are we different.

Quotas create incentive for authorities to detain more immigrants than they would otherwise need to, report says

Divestment won’t move Exxon Mobil directly — that’s impossible; the company is dug in, and someone else will simply buy the stock when it’s sold. But divestment will undercut the industry’s political power, just as happened a generation ago when the issue was South Africa.

Not only have states been generally slow to restore the cuts to public school funding that they made during the 2007-2008 economic downturn, but there are often extreme disparities between the per pupil spending in wealthy school districts and low-income districts.

Leadership and organizing cannot be simply tweeted into existence. Movement-building is forged in struggle, through people building relationships within organizations and collectives. Social media is only one part of a much larger effort . . . Group-centered leaders are at the center of many concentric circles. They strengthen the group, forge consensus and negotiate a way forward. That kind of leadership is impactful, democratic, and more radical and sustainable.

In a secret summit meeting at his Venetian Hotel, limited to only right-wing Zionist organizations and individuals that could pledge $1 million dollars, and one media outlet, the Israeli newspaper he owns, Sheldon Adelson and fellow billionaire Haim Saban launched their $50 million effort to derail university campaigns to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel (BDS). Adelson and Saban stressed their goal was to get all pro-Israel actors on campus to work together.

According to the United Nations Report on Children and Armed Conflict, the number of Palestinian children killed in the occupied territories in 2014 was the third highest of all situations monitored by the UN, following only Afghanistan and Iraq. But in response to diplomatic pressure from the U.S., UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon made the last-minute decision to leave Israel off the UN’s annual list of states and groups that gravely violate children’s rights.

A new front in the battle over retirement security for California’s public employees opened June 4 with the release of the language for a proposed ballot initiative that would virtually outlaw traditional defined-benefit pension plans for future state and municipal workers. The so-called “Voter Empowerment Act of 2016,” would effectively shift all new public employees from the various defined-benefit plans currently in place to 401(k) plans, beginning in 2019.

Speech delivered as a part of Women Cross the DMZ events at the Women's Peace Symposium on May 26, 2015, in Seoul, Korea.