Portside

Rachel Boynton has created a film that takes an expansive, yet focused, look at how oil makes its way from deep in an ocean off the coast of Ghana to the U.S. stock exchange, and the ensuing complications. The film explores the connections between the Ghanaian company who finds the oil field, the small Texas oil company who drills, the Wall Street private equity partners who invest, and the Ghanaian government officials who manage the contracts.

The revelation that the family of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings was from Chechnya prompted new speculation about the attack as Islamic terrorism. Less discussed was the history of U.S. neocons supporting Chechen terrorists as a strategy to weaken Russia.

Nurses - 'critical new revenue for such critical needs as jobs, healthcare, education, and the international fight against HIV/AIDS and climate change.'

Pension Funds, Egypt, Inequality, Torture Crimes and more...

A team of economists at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at UMass Amherst broke a huge story this week that was promptly picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, and newspapers around the globe. The economists proved that the essential underpinning "of the intellectual edifice of austerity economics," as Paul Krugman put it, is based on sloppy methodology and spreadsheet coding errors.

Thousands take to streets to highlight pro-reform demands skirmish with security forces ahead of Formula One car race.

At least 27 human species have walked the Earth, but only our lineage survived. Our ancestors may have crossed a cerebral Rubicon that led to babies being born “early”

Daniel McGowan is now serving the last six months of his seven-year sentence for an environmentally motivated arson at a halfway house in Brooklyn. The Bureau of Prisons has retaliated against McGowan for writing constitutionally protected political blogs by placing him in a special prison unit and then after he was released, re-imprisoned him when he exercised his free speech rights by writing an article complaining about it. Kafka is twirling in his grave.

Henry Kissinger's quote recently released by Wikileaks, "the illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer," likely brought a smile to his legions of elite media, government, corporate and high society admirers. Oh that Henry! That rapier wit! That trademark insouciance! That naughtiness! It is unlikely, however, that the descendants of his more than 6 million victims in Indochina share in the amusement.

The fact that journalists assigned to cover this story could fail to remember that political violence has been part of the United States landscape for the past decade and more is testament to a narrow definition that dismisses right-wing domestic violence as not really terrorism–and to a will to believe, for partisan or psychological reasons, that George W. Bush "kept us safe" after 9/11. The reality is not so comforting.