Portside

Revitalizing labor's commitment for a government healthcare system is essential or we risk the peril of being overwhelmed by an ever increasing cost structure imposed by private insurers "just because they can."

Lee Lorch, a soft-spoken mathematician whose leadership in the campaign to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, the gargantuan housing development on the east side of Manhattan, helped make housing discrimination illegal nationwide.

Micah Uetricht's "Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity" relates the stirring transformation of the Chicago Teachers Union into a democratically organized force for social justice.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states and local governments with a history of discrimination no longer needed to submit new voting laws for federal approval. Now, voting rights advocates are trying to put them back under oversight using the courts and Congress.

In a once-secret 1947 Navy memo, officials discussed the “insufficiency” of ship decontamination. Radioactive ships were cleared for use, not because they were safe, the memo said, but because the Navy lacked a means to make them so.

The NED and its institutes continue to actively fund projects in Venezuela today. In other words, NED and its institutes are not active in Venezuela to help promote democracy, as they claim, but in fact, to act against popular democracy in an effort to restore the rule of the elite, top-down democracy.

Genetic evidence proves that Asian populations made the trek across Beringia roughly 25,000 year ago. But a recent genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA shows that these populations didn't actually make it to North America until about 15,000 years ago. Quite obviously, it shouldn't take a group of paleolithic-era humans 10,000 years to trek across a 51 mile stretch. So what happened?

I think we now have seen the descent of a new Cold War divide – this time not in Berlin but on Russia’s borders. Can it end there? I mean it’s already fateful – can it not get worse? I think it depends on whether the West now rises to leadership and gives Putin the guarantees he needs to back off. Now, in America there’s a different view – that he has to back off first. But that’s where we stand. -- Steven Cohen