Portside

"But until you can quantify and put the whole thing into a computer and simulate it and show your computer model can behave in the same way as the real one, I don't think you can say you understand it."

Detroit’s ever-growing black mountain is the unloved, unwanted and long overlooked byproduct of Canada’s oil sands boom. And no one knows quite what to do about it, except Koch Carbon, which owns it. The company sells the high-sulfur, high-carbon waste, usually overseas, where it is burned as fuel.

For all the talk of scandal regarding the IRS targeting groups named “Tea Party” or “Patriot,” it’s not hard to draw an additional lesson from the facts of the case — a pattern that follows the well-worn model of the modern political age: Benefits flow to the rich and the well-connected, with pain for the rest.

Karen Lewis, the fiery leader of the Chicago Teachers Union who led a strike last year and became a nationally known anti-school reform figure, has been elected to another three-year term as president. Today she will lead the first of three days of protests against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to close 54 public schools. New report issued on 59th anniversary of Brown v Board of Ed and history of disruptive actions against communities of color by Chicago Public Schools.

Lewis won about 80 percent of the votes, soundly defeating a candidate representing a coalition of groups that used to run the union until Lewis took office three years.

‘We have been through some bitter experiences and we need to learn from the past.'

A 40-day strike of more than 500 dockworkers at the Port of Hong Kong ended with a settlement including a 9.8 percent wage increase - a much-needed sign that resistance to global capital is still relevant and possible. Strikers accepted the offer by a 90 percent vote. Interview with the dockworkers union Secretary Wong Yu Loy