Portside

Protesters are levying a broad range of concerns about public policies that devastate Colombia's workers, indigenous, and Afro-Colombian communities. The US-Colombia Free Trade Agreement has forced small farmers to compete with subsidized US products, made them more vulnerable to market fluctuations, and eroded their protections and social safety nets through the implementation of neoliberal policies domestically.

Twenty-five years ago it was already evident that damage to the global environment threatened the basic conditions on which life depends and posed a clear and present danger that required a global response. Why, I asked, aren’t governments and politicians racing to meet this looming threat? Why, we might ask today, are we still unable to “get our act together” and make the necessary changes in time?

Governments in Washington, London and Paris should realise that in one respect the slaughter by chemical weapons of hundreds of people in Damascus on 21 August is an opportunity as well as a crime. It is an opportunity because the chemical weapons atrocity and the crisis it has provoked show that the Syrian civil war cannot be left to fester. The use of poison gas is the grossest sign, but not the only one, that the level of violence is spiralling out of control.

Scarcely touched by the nation’s housing recovery and tired of waiting for federal help, Richmond is about to become the first city in the nation to try eminent domain as a way to stop foreclosures.

A large strike in Colombia underscores the dangers of free trade agreements and suggests that we should pay close attention to current negotiations around the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

In the last few years the amount of geospatial information - electronic maps - that's become available is large. Information is available on such factors as climate data, land use, and distance to the river or elevation. Using this information, and by looking at the types of rocks present in the country, and in particular their age, the researchers pinpointed the regions where the toxic element is most likely to be found.

A slight majority of people still spend at least one year of their adult life in poverty, and for some demographic groups, almost everyone experiences poverty at some point.

I think we’ve often forgotten the economic issues that were really central to the march, in hindsight. That’s something that we need to remember as we remember this march, that it really was—and I think had a very profound effect on shifting the national conversation, even within the civil rights movement itself, toward a major focus on the connections between racial equality and economic justice.

A lineup of civil rights heroes, current movement leaders, labor leaders and Democratic officials addressed a vast crowd that stretched east from the Lincoln Memorial to the knoll of the Washington Monument.