Portside

A biography of the iconic Nina Simone. Using rare archival footage, audio recordings and interviews (including talks with her daughter and extracts from Simone's private diaries), this examination of her life highlights her musical inventiveness and unwavering quest for racial justice, while laying bare the personal demons that plagued her from the time of her Jim Crow childhood in North Carolina to her self-imposed exiles in Liberia and Paris.

Downgrading workers and their jobs in the global supply chains must be stopped. Strong union organising, intelligent union strategies and collaborative working underpinned by robust international standards, is the way to do it.

Mateen didn't need to look to ISIS for inspiration for his attack on Pulse, a LGBT nightclub that he targeted on its "Latin Night," when it was populated primarily by queer and trans Latinx and Black people. The homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism and violence that Mateen reportedly exhibited on many occasions exist in abundance right here in the United States, where Mateen was born and raised.

During the recent 7th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, it was agreed that the Draft Conceptualization of the Cuban Economic and Social Model and the National Economic and Social Development Plan through 2030 would be submitted to a process of democratic consultation across Cuban society. Cuba’s Granma newspaper reported on Tuesday that the four-month long consultation process will assess aspects from two key documents approved during this year's PCC Congress.

Orlando Attack on LGBT, Puerto Rican and Latin communities; Thank You Bernie Sanders, Now, What Next?; Ending Mass Incarceration; Eliminating White Supremacy; Black-Palestinian Solidarity; U.S. Genocide Against Native Americans; Medicare for All; Demand Release of Homa Hoodfar; Victor Jara's Murderer to Face Charges; Bill Gates Gets Clucked in Bolivia; Announcements: Whitney Retrospective of photographer Danny Lyon; Activism in New York - book talk.

Using policy to shift economic power and make U.S. incomes grow fairer and faster. Boosting income growth for the bottom 90 percent requires a policy agenda that explicitly aims to halt or reverse the rise in inequality. Finding no relationship between rising inequality and faster growth means raising living standards for the bottom 90 percent can likely be better for overall growth.

A new progressive coalition seeks to end Spain's punishing austerity regime and confront the country's staggering unemployment. The new kid on the block has raised the pressure on the center-left Socialists to make a choice: follow the lead of Portugal, where the Socialist Party formed a united front with the Left Bloc and the Communist/Green alliance, or imitate the Social Democrats in Germany and join a "grand coalition" and make common cause with the right?

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, signed an executive order essentially creating a blacklist of entities that boycott or divest from Israel or encourage others to do so, banning those companies from receiving taxpayer funding. The movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, known as B.D.S., is a strategy intended to combat Israel's nearly 50-year occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, a situation akin to apartheid if allowed to continue.

Trump's strategy and campaign is to appeal to majority white, working class voters who have economic anxiety and fear of demographic change. Trump's candidacy viewed in the context of historical continuity - nativism is a primary political discourse in American history. Trump has shown us that it is just as powerful now as in the 1850s or the 1920s. Indeed, "Make America Great Again" recalls the 1920s Ku Klux Klan's appeal for "100% Americanism."

The question for the left, is whether we can transform the operation of the European Union. It's the same question asked by the left about any state institutions – whether it's the local council, the national government, or any transnational institution. We have the opportunity to re-route the referendum debate away from Tory Brexit and into a debate about the democratic future of Europe.