Portside

A union leader is being hailed as a possible mayor in Chicago while elsewhere mayors are pursuing policies Obama has been unable to enact on the national stage. Now Karen Lewis is seriously considering running against Rahm Emanuel in Chicago next year. She could win. A Chicago Sun Times poll last month gave Lewis a nine-point lead with 18% undecided.

Might Thuringia, the land of Weimar and Jena and long the home of Goethe and Schiller, become the very first Left-led state in all Germany? This is a possibility; five years ago the Social Democrats rejected just such a solution - but later came to regret it.

The Great Recession may be over, but every night people are sleeping on benches or in makeshift shelters. Here are a few of their stories.

The logarithm is 400 this year. Glen Van Brummelen, a fellow in the Dibner Library of History of Science and Technology, explains how logarithms came to be and why they're considered miraculous.

The worst states are all in the Old South.

The deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and former president of the National Lawyers Guild calls for the criminal prosecution of U.S. and Israeli leaders for committing, aiding and abetting war crimes in the war against Gaza. She outlines the charges against the Israeli leaders for the commission of war crimes, "aided and abetted" by the U.S., which provided the "means for its commission" through its vast military aid.

In moves likened to the privatization of East Germany’s state-owned enterprises following unification, international finance has placed the privatization of Greece's public sector, one of the most developed in Europe, in the hands of the Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (TAIPED). This "extra-legal organization" has close ties to the banks and no accountability for the impact of so-called austerity measures on Greece's increasingly impoverished population.

A new report by Standard & Poor's, one of the country's Big Three credit-rating agencies, points to increasing income inequality and the danger it poses to continued U.S. economic growth. In its report,. "How Increasing Income Inequality is Dampening U.S. Economic Growth, And Possible Ways to Change the Tide," S&P cites "all sorts of nasty" economic and political problems that flow from this growing inequality, but few solutions.

While the United States is "still in the coup-support game" in Latin America, nowadays the U.S. relies more on the mobilization of so-called "civil society" to destabilize democratically-elected progressive governments and make the country ungovernable. Like before, U.S.-backed military coups take place under the guise of establishing stability. But unlike before, today the military returns to its barracks, leaving a civilian dictatorship in power.

On August 1st Pope Francis reinstated Father Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, the former Nicaraguan Foreign Minister and President of the United Nations General Assembly, as a practicing priest. Pope John Paul II had suspended Father d'Escoto from his ministry in 1985 for serving in the Revolutionary Sandinista Government of Nicaragua, and as part of his concerted campaign against the influence of Liberation Theology within the Catholic Church.