Portside

New Gallup poll shows 76% of Americans want wage to increase; trend shows consistent support for increased federal minimum wage.

Puget Sound workers are latest to join the strike wave, with weeks to go before a Black Friday showdown

Silicon Valley Dreams of Secession; Ms. Marvel is a Muslim; Homeland has a Muslim Problem; NFL Player Quits Football After Studying Chomsky; "Conventional" Racism

Typhoon Haiyan (known in the Philippines as Typhoon Yolanda) will go down as one of the deadliest and most destructive weather events ever recorded - a surge, very high winds and torrential rains. The Philippine people need urgent assistance - here are ways about how you can help.

Through her life, Faith was many things: a mother, a wife, a shipfitter, a Wobbly and a peace striker. She worked in the San Joaquin Valley with with the Farm Security Administration helping migrant workers, marched with the Civil Rights movement in Selma, visited Russia as part of a peace delegation, floated down the Amazon, and solo-backpacked around the Europe. She was godmother to several generations of musicians that passed through the San Francisco Folk Music Club.

The crisis in funding for pensions, both private and public, is a manufactured one. It's rooted in the Enron-style accounting and "something-for-nothing" financial engineering that set off the 2008 financial meltdown. Now that state and local governments are swimming in red ink because of tax cuts and the Wall Street meltdown, unions are caught flat-footed. Their erstwhile allies, after testing today's political winds, now line up to ax their pay and pensions.

Medicine may be on the brink of an enormous public health achievement: turning the tide against hepatitis C, a silent plague that kills more Americans annually than AIDS and is the leading cause of liver transplants. If the effort succeeds, it will be an unusual conquest of a viral epidemic without using a vaccine. But the new drugs are expected to cost from $60,000 to more than $100,000 for a course of treatment. Access could be a problem, particularly for uninsured.

After the coup, Honduras had the most rapid rise in inequality in Latin America and now has the most unequal distribution of income in the region. Over 100 percent of all real income gains in in 2010 and 2011 went to the wealthiest 10 percent of Hondurans -- the poverty rate increased by 13.2% while the extreme poverty rate increased 26%. But whoever wins next election will have ample room to increase employment, and invest in infrastructure, education and development.