Portside

Al Jazeera journos jailed; NYT beats war drums; Giants behaving badly; Facebook messes with your mind; News biz renaissance; Newspaper requiem.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby Monday, allowing "closely held" businesses to claim religious rights and avoid federal healthcare regulations that require employers to include birth control in insurance plans.

The regime has repeatedly carried out artillery and air attacks on city centers, creating a humanitarian catastrophe—which is all but ignored by the US political-media establishment.

Even when change is still necessary, even when injustice still continues, there can be an upward spiral, growing from past transformations into future ones.

City puts human rights under threat with water privatization scheme.

Through workers associations, work centers, and “alt-labor” groups, millions of workers — along with part-time workers, temporary workers, and those who work for employers that have no union — are using new tactics to fight against that inequality of bargaining power. The groups are not competing with traditional unions, but rather working alongside them and in tandem.

Harris v. Quinn has set the stage for the eventual overruling of Abood; it has confused and perverted the concept of free-riders; and it has created an impossible standard for unions to meet.

Ruby and Ossie were extraordinarily generous and bold, lending their celebrity to a host of leftist causes and holding affiliations with a variety of groups including some associated with the demonized CP. They fought Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunt and supported its victims, organized to restore Paul Robeson's passport, rallied for the Rosenbergs, and Che Guevara. While the media celebrates her life as an actress, they don't acknowledge the obstacles she faced.

In the liberal political imagination, the Supreme Court is an institution that must vindicate principles rather than practice politics. As the philosopher Richard Rorty once acknowledged, liberals “turn to the judiciary as the only political institution for which we can still feel something like awe.

Keep one thing in mind: the rebellions of the past three years were led by Arab millennials, twentysomethings who have decades left to come into their own. Don’t count them out yet. They have only begun the work of transforming the region.