Skip to main content
Portside aims to provide material of interest to people on the left that will help them to interpret the world and to change it.

The Actual Brazil World Cup Scandal Isn’t About Thongs

Michelle Chen In These Times
"We are not interested in waving Brazilian flags or volunteering for the World Cup… We need jobs. We need education. We need land titles. We need health care. And we need to know where this road they are planning to build is going, and who will be affected.” - Brazilian activist Rafael Lima

Lee Lorch, Desegregation Activist, Dies at 98

David Margolick The New York Times
Lee Lorch, a soft-spoken mathematician whose leadership in the campaign to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, the gargantuan housing development on the east side of Manhattan, helped make housing discrimination illegal nationwide.

Voting Rights Advocates Try to Put Oversight Back on the Map

Kara Brandeisky ProPublica
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states and local governments with a history of discrimination no longer needed to submit new voting laws for federal approval. Now, voting rights advocates are trying to put them back under oversight using the courts and Congress.

Treasure Island Cleanup Exposes Navy's Mishandling of Its Nuclear Past

Matt SmithKatharine Mieszkowski Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
In a once-secret 1947 Navy memo, officials discussed the “insufficiency” of ship decontamination. Radioactive ships were cleared for use, not because they were safe, the memo said, but because the Navy lacked a means to make them so.

The National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela

Kim Scipes CounterPunch
The NED and its institutes continue to actively fund projects in Venezuela today. In other words, NED and its institutes are not active in Venezuela to help promote democracy, as they claim, but in fact, to act against popular democracy in an effort to restore the rule of the elite, top-down democracy.

America's Frst Settlers Were Trapped in Beringia for 10,000 Years

George Dvorsky io9
Genetic evidence proves that Asian populations made the trek across Beringia roughly 25,000 year ago. But a recent genetic analysis of mitochondrial DNA shows that these populations didn't actually make it to North America until about 15,000 years ago. Quite obviously, it shouldn't take a group of paleolithic-era humans 10,000 years to trek across a 51 mile stretch. So what happened?
Subscribe to Portside