Portside

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.

A major agricultural labor action is entering its second week in Mexico, where such walkouts are rare. But workers report that they gained experience in the US - via the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, or with the UFW on the west coast - and those lessons helped inspire workers to organize and fight for their rights in Mexico.

Outlander returns on April 4, 2015 with new episodes to finish out its inaugural season. While it’s difficult to label neatly, there’s much to both enjoy and analyze in the complexity of Outlander, even as that very quality is likely to earn it foes. Its feminine focus and occasionally disconcerting sexual politics may earn it rejection from both sides of the gender discussion—some because it is “too feminist,” others because it’s not feminist enough.

Of the numerous problems Rahm Emanuel is facing in his campaign for reelection as Chicago's mayor, two in particular stand out. One, Emanuel is widely perceived as anti-worker and anti-union while being a close ally to the city's financial elites. (He used to work as an investment banker, after all.) Two, he's widely acknowledged as being a jerk. The hospitality workers union UNITE HERE Local 1 has a solution: an ad campaign with workers emphasizing "Rahm Love."

. . . 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.

. . . this anachronistic style of coverage reproduces, in condensed form, many of the worst habits of modern American journalism on the subject of Africa. To be clear, this means that Africa warrants the public’s attention only when there is disaster or human tragedy on an immense scale, when Westerners can be elevated to the role of central characters or when it is a matter of that perennial favorite, wildlife.