Portside

The agreement calls for an immediate 4.5% pay increase as a signing bonus and then across-the-board 3% raises annually through 2016, plus an additional 2% each year for many employees within certain longevity and pay categories, according to UC. The lower-wage workers will not have to pay any increases for some health insurance coverage.

I think we now have seen the descent of a new Cold War divide – this time not in Berlin but on Russia’s borders. Can it end there? I mean it’s already fateful – can it not get worse? I think it depends on whether the West now rises to leadership and gives Putin the guarantees he needs to back off. Now, in America there’s a different view – that he has to back off first. But that’s where we stand. -- Steven Cohen

Genetic evidence proves that Asian populations made the trek across Beringia roughly 25,000 year ago. But a recent genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA shows that these populations didn't actually make it to North America until about 15,000 years ago. Quite obviously, it shouldn't take a group of paleolithic-era humans 10,000 years to trek across a 51 mile stretch. So what happened?

The NED and its institutes continue to actively fund projects in Venezuela today. In other words, NED and its institutes are not active in Venezuela to help promote democracy, as they claim, but in fact, to act against popular democracy in an effort to restore the rule of the elite, top-down democracy.

In a once-secret 1947 Navy memo, officials discussed the “insufficiency” of ship decontamination. Radioactive ships were cleared for use, not because they were safe, the memo said, but because the Navy lacked a means to make them so.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states and local governments with a history of discrimination no longer needed to submit new voting laws for federal approval. Now, voting rights advocates are trying to put them back under oversight using the courts and Congress.