Portside

Karen Lewis, the fiery leader of the Chicago Teachers Union who led a strike last year and became a nationally known anti-school reform figure, has been elected to another three-year term as president. Today she will lead the first of three days of protests against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to close 54 public schools. New report issued on 59th anniversary of Brown v Board of Ed and history of disruptive actions against communities of color by Chicago Public Schools.

Lewis won about 80 percent of the votes, soundly defeating a candidate representing a coalition of groups that used to run the union until Lewis took office three years.

‘We have been through some bitter experiences and we need to learn from the past.'

A 40-day strike of more than 500 dockworkers at the Port of Hong Kong ended with a settlement including a 9.8 percent wage increase - a much-needed sign that resistance to global capital is still relevant and possible. Strikers accepted the offer by a 90 percent vote. Interview with the dockworkers union Secretary Wong Yu Loy

Hospital lobbyists have tried for years to convince us all that predatory pricing policies don’t matter. But the grotesque reality tells a different story.

Can photographers be participants in the social events they document? Eighty years ago the question would have seemed irrelevant in the political upsurges of the 1930s, in both Mexico and the United States. Many photographers were political activists, and saw their work intimately connected to workers strikes, political revolution or the movements for indigenous rights. Now a book and a recent exhibition should reopen this debate.

Mothers Day, unemployment, Pope Francis, climate change and more...