Portside

So the pipeline would enable a major boost to tar-sands production — and global warming. It is not only the environmental impact that is misrepresented, however. Pipeline opponents believe that potential economic gains are greatly overstated by the U.S. government and TransCanada Corporation, the company behind the Keystone XL project.

“In the 30 years I have been researching schools, New York State has consistently been one of the most segregated states in the nation--no Southern state comes close to New York,” commented CRP Co-Director Gary Orfield. “Decades of reforms ignoring this issue produced strategies that have not succeeded in making segregated schools equal."

Future of the Internet; Twitter in Turkey; Netflix & Net Neutrality; Telephone Metadata; The Web Still Needs Work

The Obama administration seems surrealistically unaware that this is a very different hemisphere than it was 15 years ago. Governments representing the majority of Latin America are now from the left. These governments emphatically reject Washington’s depiction of the recent events in Venezuela as a government trying to “repress peaceful protesters."

Natural and social scientists develop new model of how 'perfect storm' of crises could unravel global system.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, reviewed by Doug Henwood, is an enormous and ambitious study that documents the long-term reign of the 1 percent.

It is March Madness, after all, when the NCAA makes 90% of its billion-dollar budget. As the business of college football and basketball expands, and as more and more players find themselves used up and spit out with neither compensation nor education to show for their time, this is the moment to talk about the future of the so-called "student-athlete."

The BDS movement is spreading throughout the world. European pension funds are divesting from banks and companies that operate in settlements, and European markets are labeling Israeli goods made in the West Bank. Special UN Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk, called on the international community to comprehensively investigate the business activities of companies and financial institutions which profit from the settlements in Israel.

The plot begins in the bad years after 9/11 when the CIA embraced global torture in the war against terrorism. Official Washington was traumatized by the attack and looked the other way, pretending not to know what the spooks were doing. The men in black plucked various "terrorists" off the Arab Street shipping them to less squeamish countries around the world where the US agents used medieval methods for pain and punishment, techniques officially prohibited by US law.

Mississippi wants to execute a 56-year-old mentally ill woman Thursday even though no one now seems to believe that she murdered the husband who had battered and abused her for years. Mississippi wants its pound of flesh. But why from Michelle Byrom?