Portside

Historian Mark Solomon looks at the prospects for a new socialist left.

Alleging unpaid wages and repeated retaliation, McDonald’s workers in central Pennsylvania launched a surprise strike at 11 this morning. The strikers are student guest workers from Latin America and Asia, brought to the United States under the controversial J-1 cultural exchange visa program. Their employer is one of the thousands of McDonald’s franchisees with whom the company contracts to run its ubiquitous stores.

Labor Arts celebrates Women's History Month with an exhibit on women firefighters in New York City.

Faced with a vote to remove her, the city's first woman leader vows to battle on

Arkansas adopted what is by far the country’s most restrictive ban on abortion on Wednesday — at 12 weeks of pregnancy, when a fetal heartbeat can typically be detected by abdominal ultrasound.

After the last presidential ballot - which Chávez won with the same percentage he did his first election yet with a greatly expanded electorate - even his opponents have admitted, despairingly, that a majority of Venezuelans liked, if not adored, the man.

On Friday at midnight, the sequester kicked in, triggering $85 billion in deep, dumb budget cuts that sent “nonessential personnel”— such as air traffic controllers — packing.

The Oscars - stories in the news and not, behind the headlines, what the mainstream media missed; Brooklyn’s racist and gay-hating Assemblyman Dov Hilkind parties in blackface; how to deal with a homophobic preacher