Portside

What is happening in Israel today and what happened last week, last month, and for the past almost 50 years is about cementing sovereignty over land the international community agrees does not belong to Israel and over a subject people, the Palestinians, in contravention of international law. Yet, in Israel there is much talk about whether this is the start of the third intifada, but little talk of ending the occupation, the root cause of the escalating conflict.

Now with Gov. Malloy proposing anti-union, anti-faculty contract language and pushing the need for public employee concessions as a way to balance the budget – a budget Malloy promised would not need new taxes, cuts or concessions – Connecticut’s public employees are getting a taste of what they feared most.

The House Freedom Caucus, a relatively new group of about 40 Republicans loosely associated with the Tea Party, has an extraordinary amount of power in this process. Any potential speaker needs the support of 218 Republicans on the floor of the House. There are currently 247 Republicans in the House. That’s a large majority but without the Freedom Caucus, no candidate can get to 218.

Letelier described reading the declassified documents and discovering a memo from George Shultz, who served as secretary of state in the 1980s, to President Ronald Reagan. “[Shultz] informs [the president] that there is a conclusive document from the CIA that shows Pinochet ordered the murder of my father. This is concrete information about how Pinochet covered up his responsibility,” he said.

Join us at the largest-ever national conference of single-payer advocates, including hundreds of union activists and leaders!

Rep. Scott Allen Statement on the closing of GE Waukesha. Disappointment was my first reaction of the news about GE shutting down its engine manufacturing functions at the Waukesha Power and Water facility. In a press release, and substantiated by my conversation with GE corporate spokesperson, Patrick Theisen, this afternoon, GE wishes to blame the problem on the House of Representatives and that body's failure to act on the U.S. Export Import Bank.

The Persian poet Majid Naficy fled Iran in 1983 to live in exile in various places, currently in Los Angeles. His poetry here addresses the sense of loss, the urge to create roots.

For the first time, a complete DNA sequence from Africa dating back thousands of years has been recovered. The DNA of this Ethiopian man sheds new light on the movement out of Africa, and also movement of Eurasians back into Africa.

It’s time that our politicians acknowledge that it’s way too easy to get guns – legal and illegal – in this country. No one should be able to get an AK-47 through a few phone calls – including me.

To a degree unseen since the Gilded Age over a century ago, money will pour into the 2016 elections from a handful of donors giving once unimaginable sums. Many want something from government. And many of these donors will operate undisturbed -- their identities secret from the public, if not from the grateful politicians. It's called "dark money."