Portside

The U.S. Congress is fighting over how much to cut food assistance to needy families. Everyone knows that women and their children are the poorest people in America, but strangely, the faces of women have disappeared from the debate and have been absorbed into abstract “needy families.”

Media blackout hides Gitmo hunger strikes in a military bid to erode public support.

The area has seen dramatic actions by and on behalf of workers in the past few months. Activists are hoping what’s happened here has implications far beyond the Puget Sound.

Inequality across much of Europe has widened, but it is still quite modest when compared with the vast income gap in the United States.The question is whether relative equity can hold as workplace institutions that for decades protected European employees’ standard of living give way to a more lightly regulated, American-style approach, where the government hardly interferes in the job market and organized labor has little say.

Judge Declares Phone Spying a No-No; Internet of Things Coming Up Fast; Many "Things" Are Already Plugged In; Social Media Becomes a Trusted News Source; San Francisco Gets Free WiFi

Warehouse workers at a California Walmart warehouse win payment after charging abuse and fraud -- as parallel Wal-Mart supply chain battles rage on.

It should be no secret that the United States has the biggest, most efficiently organized, most effective system for recruiting child soldiers in the world. With uncharacteristic modesty, however, the Pentagon doesn’t call it that. Its term is “youth development program.”

Catering to accumulated private wealth and their mythic "free market" may have helped Mandela consolidate a more peaceful transition to South Africa's justly praised multi-racial democracy. But did he have to pay such a high price? A variety of sources discuss this important question.