The US Supreme Court's upcoming decision on the Voting Rights Act could let discriminatory laws make a comback

Last week, President Obama described the sequestration situation in simple, stark terms: keep it in place and punch the middle class in the gut. Or, he suggested, soften the blow substantially by ending special tax breaks for the rich.

I was in the Swiss village of Begnins outside Geneva shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. I spent three days there with Axel von dem Bussche, a former Wehrmacht major, holder of the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for extreme battlefield bravery, three times wounded in World War II, and the last surviving member of the inner circle of German army officers who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler. 

Alexa O’Brien believes that work is the purpose of life. Right now, her life consists of bringing the government’s prosecution of Pfc. Bradley Manning to the public.

For more than a year, O’Brien has been one of a handful of journalists who have had access to the pretrial hearings of Bradley Manning, the young man accused of providing WikiLeaks with documents that revealed government wrongdoing.

The American labor movement is once again facing a most controversial issue — the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. While the KXL debate has largely centered around the environmental risks, from labor’s perspective opening up the Canadian Tar Sands is often seen as an economic, not an environmental, issue.

The Supreme Court will decide whether to strike a key part of the Voting Rights Act, which conservatives say is outdated and unfair to the South.