Portside

If Billie Holiday and Ethel Rosenberg were alive, they’d both celebrate their 100th birthdays this year. At first glance they may seem an unlikely couple, but a closer look reveals surprising parallels.

While hysteria and panic reign over the barbaric acts of the faraway Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, U.S. involvement in the “war on drugs” in a neighboring country gets just passing attention here. Curiouser and curiouser, hysteria and panic over Mexico only seem to rise when ISIS is reputed to be involved (at least in the fantasy worlds of various right-wingers). Consider it all part of the true mysteries of our strange American age of repetitive war.

. . . the publication of Alfred Wegener’s Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane (The Origin of Continents and Oceans) . . . was the beginning of a true scientific revolution that transformed geology right down to its core, although the final stage of the revolution was not completed until the 1950s and 1960s.

As many as 50,000 mostly indigenous workers have stopped harvesting produce for more than a week in protest of labor law violations. What they want is for their basic needs to be met, such as obtaining health care, getting overtime pay and vacation days, and being paid wages higher than the dismal $8 a day that most of them earn.

. . . this anachronistic style of coverage reproduces, in condensed form, many of the worst habits of modern American journalism on the subject of Africa. To be clear, this means that Africa warrants the public’s attention only when there is disaster or human tragedy on an immense scale, when Westerners can be elevated to the role of central characters or when it is a matter of that perennial favorite, wildlife.

Viewing war as an engineering problem focuses on technology (which benefits contractors) and destructive physical effects, but ignores and is offset by the fundamental truth of war: Machines don’t fight wars, people do, and they use their minds.

For the next week, we can concentrate on basketball and marvel at the remarkable athletes playing their hearts out and set politics aside. But perhaps, maybe during the commercials, we can reflect on the fact that the vast majority of these games are being played by teams from public universities in states whose governments are hostile to public universities and whose policies increase the already considerable financial burden on the students at these universities.

Attorney "Marty" Stroud was the prosecutor in the 1984 murder trial of Glenn Ford, who was sentenced to death for the murder of Isadore Rozeman. Ford was released from prison in 2014, after the state admitted new evidence proving Ford was not the killer. Stroud denounces the state’s attempt to deny compensation for Ford’s wrongful conviction, speaks of his role in creating the “horrors” Ford suffered, and denounces the death penalty as an "abomination."

Fifteen non-profits launched a petition on March 23 calling on the Smithsonian's American Museum of Natural History and the Natural History Museum of New York to remove David Koch from their boards of trustees because "he bankrolls groups that deny climate science." Serious questions are being raised about institutions that accept money from donors whose business and political dealings are in direct opposition to the institutions' missions.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, Congress’ refusal to extend unemployment benefits in 2014, coupled with cuts in benefits at the state level, has reduced the percentage of people receiving unemployment insurance to the lowest level in more than three decades. And, despite higher unemployment rates for Black workers, unemployed Black workers are even less likely to receive unemployment benefits than their white counterparts.