Portside

The Washington football team's name is a dictionary-defined slur—and now the federal Patent and Trademark Office has been ordered to cancel its trademark registration.

The flag may be wiped from state grounds and license plates, but its ideals live on in the GOP agenda

A new BBC documentary tells how a trove of documents lays bare the names of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners, including relatives of Gladstone and Orwell

With a bipartisan consensus in Congress, President Obama seeks an overhaul of the nation’s crowded, costly prison system.

A highly invasive procedure, which involves drilling holes in the skull and inserting electrodes deep inside the brain allowing a pacemaker-style device to deliver pulses of electricity to specific neural regions has failed to show any effectiveness in treating depression despite claims by the media and some prominent scientists.

Who's to blame for thousands of work-related deaths and illnesses each year? Big Business, Congress, the White House and federal agencies. Decades of concerted efforts to weaken the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s authority have jammed the regulatory gears to the point that they hardly turn. Most of the agency’s exposure limits are more than 40 years old, and tens of thousands of chemicals, including many known to be hazardous, have no limits at all.

Mozambique has decriminalized homosexuality, making it one of a few African countries where same-sex relationships are legal. The revised penal code, which went into force July 1st, drops a colonial-era clause outlawing so-called "vices against nature". While there were no prosecutions under that clause, gay rights activists say this change is important, coming at a time when a number of African countries are introducing new draconian laws against homosexuals.

There is indeed a story embedded in the controversial emails of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that goes beyond Republican claims of “cover-up” and Democratic dismissals of the matter as nothing more than election year politics. And that story is deeply damning of American and French actions in the Libyan civil war, from secretly funding the revolt against Muammar Gaddafi, to the willingness to use journalism as a cover for covert action.

Anti-abortion extremism, which has created fear among providers that something violent can happen to them at any time, is domestic terrorism, according to the authors of the new book, “Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism.” Yet, anti-abortion terrorism has been almost completely absent from the renewed national conversation about domestic terrorism spurred by last month’s church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.

The Marin County poet Francesca Bell approaches the abuse of children from their own perspective, as sacrilege, based on published testimonies.