Portside

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer and Grammy-winning musician, AllenToussaint, passed away while on tour in Spain. Toussaint played a pivotal role of formulating a unique style of soul, funk and R&B that became emblematic of New Orleans.

Recounts the short, complicated history of the Black Panther Party. Using remarkable black-and-white archival footage, the current voices of more than twenty former Panthers, a former FBI agent, several retired police officers, a number of Panther lawyers and community activists, and a collection of historians and accompanied by some soul stirring period music, the lessons to those engaged in today’s struggles against racism and for justice are there for all to see.

Cooperative colonies — ants, termites, and some wasps and bees — have fascinated scientists for more than a century because they pose an evolutionary conundrum. Only a very small number of insects actually get to reproduce: the queens and their mates. The rest give up their chance to contribute to the gene pool, caring for the offspring of others instead. How did this lifestyle, known as eusociality, evolve?

Sabaaneh’s mordant cartoons celebrate what Palestinians call “popular resistance”

Cuts in U.S. Census funding threaten to produce an undercount of minorities and the poor and to reduce their share of federal aid.

Congress’s 1965 decision to limit immigration from Latin America and the Caribbean coincided with an increase in that immigration—largely, as a result of U.S. policies, including support for vicious dictatorships in many countries, the funding of civil wars in Central America, and the promotion of neoliberal economic programs throughout the region. The result is our current undocumented population of about 11.7 million, including some 8 million workers.

President Obama welcomed Indonesian President Joko Widodo to the White House last week, 50 years after the U.S. backed military coup that resulted in the killings of hundreds of thousands of suspected Indonesian Communists and just weeks after the CIA’s declassification of intelligence documents offers an opportunity to revisit the U.S role in those murderous events. But neither president appears ready to probe further one of the worst massacres since World War II.

Just a few years ago, insiders and experts wrote us off and assured the world Keystone XL would be built by the end of 2011. Together, ranchers, tribal nations and everyday people beat this project back, reminding the world that Big Oil isn't invincible.

Jefferson County school board politics have made headlines across the state and the nation for nearly two years. Pundits called the election Tuesday a political “proxy war” over larger right-left economic and cultural issues, a key battle for the future of public education, a warm up for the 2016 presidential election year in a bellwether county in a crucial swing state.

Dear Dr. Dollar: It seems like Puerto Rico’s economic and financial mess came out of nowhere. Until recently, there wasn’t much about Puerto Rico in the press, but what there was seemed to portray things as fine, with a generous amount of funds going to the island from Washington. Sometimes, Puerto Rico was held up as a model for economic development. So where did the current mess come from? —Janet Sands, Chicago, Ill.