Portside

Free Speech vs Democracy?; Nothin’ but net (neutrality); Prez’s morning advisors; New low in race-splaining; Hearing voices; Those darn Trump voters

Compact genomes and tiny cells gave flowering plants an edge over competing flora. This discovery hints at a broader evolutionary principle.

2018 Women's March in Cartoons

In 2015, the call-blocking app YouMail estimated that close to a billion robo-calls were being placed every month. Two years later, that number has leapt to 2.5 billion. At best, these calls annoy. At worst, they defraud. By far, they constitute the top consumer complaint received by the FTC.

Lucy Parsons's life was rife with contradictions. But her commitment to workers' emancipation was never in doubt.

Although he has not yet imposed any explicit cuts, on January 11, the Trump administration took another step toward undercutting these essential social programs: It issued guidance allowing states to impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries. This staggering and unprecedented change in health-care policy is expected to adversely affect millions of people in the United States, particularly those with disabilities.

The absence of institutional memory when it comes to dealing with communal conflict is glaring. After independence and partition, while report after report of officially appointed judicial commissions has analyzed and indicted certain discernible trends behind escalating violence and pogroms, the formal judiciary and courts appear not to have internalized these findings and recommendations. The very fact that a significant part of the 1998-Justice B.N.

Dr. King and Ella Baker were the two primary leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in its first couple of years of existence, between 1958 and 1960. King was the heart, soul and speaking voice of SCLC; Baker was the Executive Secretary. Baker was a public speaker too, but she was primarily the behind-the-scenes, get-things-done, relationship-building person.

On January 11 of this year, the eve of the anniversary, Donald Trump reportedly described Haiti to a group of lawmakers in the White House as a “shithole country.” At about the same time, his immigration agents in New York were detaining the popular Trinidadian-born activist Ravi Ragbir, the executive director of the faith-based New York Sanctuary Coalition. A week earlier they had detained another of the organization’s activists, the Haitian-born Jean Montrevil.

It’s easy to forget that California is a state with the death penalty on its books, and it’s not hard to see why. The state has not executed anyone in 12 years as January 2018. Nevertheless, California has sentenced nearly 1,000 people to death since the current system was adopted in 1978. There have been 13 executions in that time, and we currently house more people under sentences of death than any other jurisdiction in the Western Hemisphere.