Portside

What if the most popular hypothesis is wrong? Plenty of fringier theories exist.

In 2010 two former employees of Integrity Staffing Solutions, a temp agency that supplies workers at many of Amazon’s U.S. warehouses, sued the company demanding back pay for the time they spent in security lines after clocking out at Amazon warehouses in Nevada. On Oct. 8 the Supreme Court will hear arguments about whether that time counts as work.

From the crime novel's mainstream inception in the early 20th century in the United States, numerous authors have explored a wide range of politically charged themes, including class distinctions, government corruption and the oppression of women and people of color.

Why doesn’t North Carolina want people to vote?

Investment of public money needs transparency and accountability. The CalPERS decision to end hedge fund investments should be a clarion call for pensions to re-examine their relationship with these and other nontraditional investment instruments. Trillions of dollars of public money as well as the retirement security of millions of workers are at stake.

The Obama administration’s war plans in Iraq and Syria are illegal, ill-conceived, and destined to fail. With scarcely a whisper of serious debate, Obama has become the fourth consecutive U.S. president to launch a war in Iraq—and in fact has outdone his predecessors by spreading the war to Syria as well. Here’s everything wrong with the White House’s so-called War on the Islamic State. And here's what should be done instead.

Forty leading Jewish Studies Professors have denounced the pro-Israel group, AMCHA, for degrading the "currency of academic freedom." AMCHA is circulating a list of 218 professors it charges with "an anti-Israel bias" or "antisemitic rhetoric." The Jewish Studies Professors in North America said AMCHA's monitoring of university lectures and conferences is "deplorable " and "strains the basic principle of academic freedom."

Two articles on Venezuela. The first is on the takeover of an abandoned Clorex factory, by the Venezuelan government. The second is about the assassination of a young member of the Venezuelan Socialist Party.

The massive demonstrations in Hong Kong are an enormous test for China's commitment to its complex "one country, two systems" approach to Hong Kong, implemented after Britain's return of the region to Chinese sovereignty in 1984. Student demonstrators and others are challenging China's decision on how the next Chief Executive of Hong Kong will be selected and the very meaning of the "high degree of autonomy" promised to Hong Kong's residents.

The number of Texas clinics providing safe abortion services to women were reduced to eight overnight. On Thursday, the conservative judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed an earlier court decision that had allowed 13 other clinics to remain operating in the country's second largest state. According to one clinic operator, Texas now "faces a health care crisis, brought on by its own legislators.”