Portside

Just two weeks after pleading guilty in a major federal fraud case, Amgen, the world's largest biotechnology firm, scored a largely unnoticed coup on Capitol Hill: Lawmakers inserted a paragraph into the "fiscal cliff" bill that did not mention the company by name but strongly favored one of its drugs.

Father of Media Reform Turns 100; Aaron Schwartz case; New York Times dismantles environment desk; Google Wires NYC neighborhood - for free; free Internet in Tel Aviv; North Carolina bill bans community-owned cable networks; Is Broadband Internet Access a Public Utility?; Smartphone now has remote control of your life; Smartphone Users Demand More Data than Tablets; CNET Scandal - Can They be Trusted in the Future; The Atlantic's Scientology Problem; and more...

President Obama's second inaugural address struck a populist tone, but the real news for progressives came last Friday when it was announced that Obama's campaign organization would continue under a new name, Organizing for Action.

While access to abortion is still in theory a right every woman in this country enjoys, an economic chasm has yawned between the well-off and the poor.

The American war in Vietnam was a doomed modern military invasion against a popular, rural-based insurgency for independence...During the ten years (1961-1971) of aerial chemical warfare in Vietnam, U.S. planes sprayed more than twenty million gallons of herbicide defoliants, Agent Orange, the dioxin-contaminated and toxic herbicide constituted about 61 percent of the total herbicides sprayed in the war.The American war in Vietnam was a doomed modern military.

Leo Robinson was a leader of the longshore union in San Francisco. He died this week. For many of us, he was an example of what being an internationalist and a working-class activist was all about.