Portside

Indiana takes the heat; Keeping STEM male; Economics of me first; Ask not for whom the joke cracks; Chuy-gilantes

Steve Howard, executive director of the VSEA, told NPR recently, “Before you take money out of the paychecks of snowplow drivers, nursing assistants, custodians and administrative assistants … we believe you have a moral obligation to ask for a greater contribution from a broad-based revenue source paid mostly by the wealthiest Vermonters who have had all the economic gains of the last decade.”

The four American Jews above are on a national campus tour. All in their 70s, they are veterans of the civil rights movement; they went south 50 years ago to help free our country from Jim Crow, risking their lives for equal rights.But they have been banned from speaking at Hillel, the Jewish campus organization, because they have come out in favor of Palestinian human rights.

Cuba to be certified by WHO as first country to eradicate the transmission of HIV and syphilis from mother to child.

Our own progress against racism in the United States remains too recent, too fragile, and too incomplete to go on abetting apartheid in Israel.

The Ukraine conflict has become a complex proxy war involving four of the world’s five original nuclear armed countries: the United States, Russia, France, and the United Kingdom. It’s time to step back from the brink.

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.