Portside

Drug possession is the No. 1 reason people were in Cook County Jail last year. That’s been the case for the better part of the past decade. Since 2006, people have been booked and released more than 100,000 times for possession, according to jail records. And during that same time period, taxpayers have spent $778 million jailing people on the lowest-level possession charges.

Different palaeolithic populations around the world might have developed a crucial toolmaking skill independently. No mysterious migration required to explain how chipping technique appeared in different continents.

This week 35 Congressional Democrats demanded the Obama Administration act to protect children laboring on U.S. tobacco farms. The U.S. Representatives announced their support for a letter to Labor Secretary Thomas Perez September 23rd from U.S. Representatives David Cicilline (D-RI) and Matt Cartwright (D-PA), calling for the Department of Labor to close the loophole in U.S. labor law Labor which allows children over the age of 12 to work in tobacco fields.

A new report from Yesh Din, Volunteers for Human Rights, denounces the Israel Defense Force's (IDF) privatization of law enforcement in the occupied territories. The Israeli Human Rights group accuses the IDF of transferring the power to arrest, search, question, and detain West Bank Palestinians to settler militias "who are motivated by an aspiration to seize additional Palestinian land and who refuse to recognize Palestinian land rights.".

Complexity and uncertainty create extra difficulty for experts in explaining their results, and for non-experts in understanding them. Climate science is not sound bite science.

The Fed encourages its employees to keep their heads down, to obey their managers and to appease the banks. That is, bank regulators failed to do their jobs properly not because they lacked the tools but because they were discouraged from using them.

Over the past two seasons, 306 players have suffered a combined 323 concussions, according to team injury reports. As Concussion Watch kicks off for a third straight season, 15 players have already been added to the list for head injuries from the preseason and Week 1.

Researchers noted a correlation between clinical signs of metabolic disorder — such as increasing weight or decreasing efficiency of glucose metabolism — and consumption of artificial sweeteners. The findings could cause a headache for the food industry.

The Redskins' Name -- Catching Racism. Johnny Cash -- Hurt. Forward 13: Waking Up the American Dream. Emma Watson at United Nations: This Is Feminism. John Oliver: Miss America Pageant.

After more than a year of labor protests and strikes, eight major clothing brands committed this week to pay more for goods made in Cambodia in order to guarantee garment workers a higher wage. The eight clothing companies made their pledge on the eve of wage talks between the Cambodian government and the garment workers union scheduled for October. Cambodia's garment sector generates one-third of the country's gross national product.