Portside

The world’s most dangerous malaria parasite shuffles its genes in a clever attempt to avoid the immune system. A new approach has begun to reveal how the process works.

Puerto Rico is in crisis. But the crisis is not about how to pay Wall Street. It is about the impact of centuries-long economic devastation on the men, women, and children—especially children—that live in Puerto Rico. While failure to pay the banks and the vultures makes headlines in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the human misery caused by five centuries of colonialism does not.

“It’s an enormously popular show, and up until this current season it was taking place predominantly in the Middle East/Islamic world region, and depicting that region in a very particular way that reinforces this mythological stereotype that exists in a lot of the Western world.” - Heba Amin, associate professor at the American University in Cairo

While teaching American studies at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, she, Linda Gordon and Susan Reverby assembled primary documents, including letters and diaries, that offered a sweeping history of women and labor. Their book, “America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present” (1976), was acquired for Random House by Toni Morrison, then a young editor there.

If we have to give handouts to big corporations, it seems reasonable to put some conditions on the cash. After all, we put all sorts of conditions on TANF benefits of $500 a month, it seems reasonable to ask something of the companies that get tens of millions of loan subsidies through the Ex-Im Bank. This should be a great opportunity to see where people really stand.

The International Association of Fire Fighters is a small union of just under 300,000 members with political influence far beyond its size. The obvious reason for this is the respect many Americans have for firefighters, who consistently rank as some of the country’s most admired professionals. The less obvious reason is Harold A. Schaitberger, a tall, barrel-chested man with meaty hands and rheumy eyes, who has served as the union’s general president for over 15 years.

Tea Party rebels are exposing the deep rifts between country-club elites and social-issue hard-liners.

July 2015 Paul Castaway was shot and killed by Denver police while holding a knife to his own throat. Police initially claimed that Castaway, a mentally ill Indigenous man, had charged them with a knife after stabbing his own mother. Surveillance footage would later contradict those claims and support the accounts of Castaway's family and other witnesses, who have maintained that Castaway menaced no one but himself with the knife in his hand.

“The report the Intercept story references is an internal classified document,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Linda Rojas. “As a matter of policy we don’t comment on the details of classified reports.”

Despite my criticisms and questions, Socialist Imperative is a must-read for revolutionaries. Compared to others who look for imaginary revolutionary subjects, Lebowitz remains animated with the belief that the working class “makes itself a revolutionary subject through its struggles -- it transforms itself .... which is the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change. It makes itself fit to create the new world" (p. 243).