Portside

 Identifying the myriad problems is easy. More difficult—and more important—is to resist seeing them as “general chaos.” We need to avoid the facile explanation provided to me by Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes: “These things happen when you host an Olympics in the developing world.” Instead, we need to understand that Rio’s “state of public calamity” is an extreme version of what happens when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) comes a-calling.

The bottom line is that both platforms are bad policy. If the GOP platform were followed, it would produce policies resulting in disaster, not only for Palestinians and US interests in the Middle East, but for Israel, as well. On the other hand, if the Democrat’s platform were followed, it would result in continuing the region’s depressing and dangerous downward spiral of oppression and violence.

Cuba has successfully held off the Zika epidemic and in the process all but eliminated Dengue fever and other mosquito-carried illnesses, Cuba state-run media has reported.

Update about Chelsea Manning and one of her recent blogs.

The government insists that the oil giant should pay Ecuador reparations for thousands of oil spills in the Amazon rain forest.

A thick strand in the history of U.S. policing is rooted back in the slave patrols of the 19th century.

The biographies of icons frequently fall into one of two categories. On the one hand they may be laudatory, in some cases turning the subject into a saint. At the opposite end, they can tend towards tell-all pieces, in some cases aiming to tear down the subject.

According to our best theories of physics, the universe is a fixed block where time only appears to pass. Yet a number of physicists hope to replace this “block universe” with a physical theory of time.

Truus Menger-Oversteegen was part of a generation that sacrificed everything to fight Nazism and build a better world.

Although it has been more than 60 years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision establishing that separate schools for white students and black students are not equal, schools in the U.S. remain very economically and racially segregated.