Portside

After years of brutal austerity, collapsing economies, widespread unemployment and shredding of the social welfare net, Italians said "basta!" "Enough!"

With the Dow Jones industrial average flirting with a record high, the split between American workers and the companies that employ them is widening and could worsen in the next few months as federal budget cuts take hold.

Both Trumka and Communications Workers (CWA) President Larry Cohen, who heads the federation’s organizing committee, said on Tuesday that the goal was not just gaining new members or better contracts, important as they may be. Rather, Cohen said, labor would try to “connect the dots” among causes—such as immigrant rights, worker rights, campaign and voting reform—to build a mass movement for a strong democracy at work and in the public arena.

Recent events have begun to cause labor activists to seriously consider if a hamstrung NLRB, and emboldened employers, could potentially inspire some unions to push the limits of labor law to try alternative means that are outside the law or if they can and should borrow the strategies used by the NAACP and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to expand civil rights.

Obama needs to do something that doesn't come easily to him. He needs to demolish the previous terms of debate, some of them partly of his own making - he needs to disavow earlier mistaken policies that he embraced. Otherwise he will preside over the worst eight-year economic record of any Democratic president, and the steepest rate of decline in social spending. He will leave an economy even more unequal than he inherited. He needs to find the audacity to restore hope

A study, published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine, is now shaking up the field of cardiovascular medicine , infusing it with optimism This is a watershed moment in the field of nutrition, medical experts say. For the first time, researchers have shown that a diet can have an effect as powerful as drugs in preventing what really matters to patients — heart attacks, and strokes and deaths from cardiovascular disease.

Attacks against unknown militants reportedly may account for the majority of drone strikes. So what signatures does the U.S. look for and how much evidence is needed to justify a strike?

The movement for women’s suffrage had begun in 1848 in Seneca Falls, but the suffrage parade of 1913 was undoubtedly its turning point. Feminists today face many daunting challenges, but it’s inspiring to recognize that at a time when our foremothers confronted even more formidable obstacles, they responded with great courage, ingenuity, and even joy. One hundred years later, their example still burns bright.

Ken Loach's new film, Spirit of '45

Shadows from the past, sadly evoked by events of the present, from Afghanistan and Gaza to Syria and Mal