Portside

“It is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy,” the Wall Street Journal quoted a senior US official as saying.

Company documents show VW’s management method is modeled on “lean production,” the philosophy created at Toyota, then popularized across the auto industry and beyond. In fact, VW is trying to out-Toyota Toyota. The German company aims to overtake its Japanese competitor and become the world’s most profitable automobile manufacturer by 2018. So the Chattanooga plant provides a window into the state of the art of brutal productivity-maximizing management schemes.

International and European trade union bodies are calling on the European Union to bolster action on workers’ rights and safety in Bangladesh’s garment industry. The Bangladesh government has failed to implement vital labour law reforms, and a compensation fund for victims of the Rana Plaza disaster still remains US$ 9 million short of the target.

Edward E. Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism details how financial speculation is baked into the American economy. Baptist explains 185 years ago, acquisition of slaves, like other "property", could be financed by mortgages; that bonds were sold to investors based on the value of those mortgages; and, securities based on enslaved human beings produced a “slave asset bubble” not unlike the 2008 financial crisis.

According to a new independent report from the Economic Roundtable, raising the minimum wage to $15.25 will create $5.9 billion for LA’s economy, generate 46,400 new jobs, and increase state and local tax revenue by $414 million.

In honor of International Women’s Day, Activestills (http://activestills.org/) paid tribute to more than a quarter century of anti-occupation activism by the ‘Women in Black’ group in Israel. Every Friday since 1988, the women have stood in the main squares of cities or at highway junctions with signs calling to end the Israeli occupation. Often spat at, cursed or violently harassed by passersby, they have become a symbol of persistence.

In an exclusive interview with teleSUR, Julian Assange talks about why he chose Ecuador for asylum and the ongoing U.S. investigation into WikiLeaks.

The latest sanctions, like the ones approved in December . . . represent a victory for a political faction that wants to prevent the normalization of diplomatic relations with Venezuela. It was not a result of pressure from the right in Congress, but came from deep within the Obama administration.

The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health insurers spend at least 80-85 percent of premiums on actual medical care had no impact in the law’s first three years

Being on the way to becoming a new species isn’t the same thing as actually speciating. Actual speciation without isolation is quite rare, and even the Santa Cruz Island jays have not actually speciated, and may never even do so. But the implications for long-held evolutionary principles are intriguing. Darwin’s famous Galapagos finches certainly prove that isolation leads to speciation, but now it may be that isolation isn’t always necessary to get species to diverge.