Portside

The legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent, a United Nations report stated. "Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching."

How then do we navigate between Scylla and Charybdis, between a naïve pro-Europeanism and assimilation to nationalism? The EU must be democratised or it will be discredited; it will be peaceful or it will perish. We have to dare not to break with the idea off European unity but with the neoliberal and authoritarian framework of the institutions and treaties through which this idea has been actualised.

The violence plaguing Africa remains far too invisible to most Americans and the world. Unlike the pillage of Africa in earlier periods of the slave trade and colonial rule, illicit financial transactions are most often hidden from public view. They happen through fraudulent invoicing of trade, "creative accounting" by multinational corporations, tax giveaways by African governments, and the use of shell companies based in tax havens around the world.

At some colleges and universities, it’s common for students to introduce themselves, in class or in student group meetings, by name, followed by a string of pronouns. “I’m Lizzie; she/her/hers,” for example. I decided to adopt a compromise solution for this semester: students should list their pronouns along with their names only if they were so inclined. I also said that as a class we will refer to one another by our first names or the pronoun "they" (grammar evolves!).

There was something disturbing in seeing Trump once again being normalized by being made part of an ordinary contest in coherence and “presentation” and “preparation.” In truth, that was the least of it, because what was really outside any norm of decency was what he thought even after you had dutifully distilled away the incoherence and the manic improvisations.

While prisoners refuse to perform their jobs, some guards are not showing up to work.

UK media eats crow; Facebook gets political; Rurals get unplugged; No jack makes jack; Times ethics; Detoxing from tech

Up for Debate: The Lesser Evil. "We can't ignore the ways that having a Democrat in the White House matters."

Besides birtherism and anti-Blumenthalism, Donald Trump basically ignored the entire Republican agenda of the past eight years. The upshot of last night is not merely that one candidate is hyper-qualified to be the next president of the United States and the other one is not even a decent beauty-queen host; it’s that the entire Republican Party agenda of the past eight years has been a hoax.

“The horrible night has ceased,” said Santos, quoting a phrase from Colombia’s national anthem. ‘I can’t believe this is really happening. This is a great day for Colombia,’ says Alonso Cardoza from the remote town of Uribe where the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia formally took its name.