Portside

Powerful new quantitative tools are now available to combat partisan bias in the drawing of voting districts.

In dismissing both men's convictions, Judge James Linn said he was "stunned" by the prosecution decision to abandon the case. "I'd never seen anything like this," the longtime judge said before tossing their convictions. No physical evidence linked Almodovar to the 1994 double homicide, according to an investigation led by former U.S. Attorney Scott Lassar, who found it "more likely than not" that Almodovar was in fact innocent of the murders.

Theoretically, a bill or nomination could pass out of the Senate with the support of senators representing only 16.2 percent of the population.

Four companies have publicly raised concerns about how the Arkansas Department of Correction came to stockpile the drugs for its lethal injection cocktail — midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride — but only the McKesson Corporation, the drug distributor that ranks fifth on the Fortune 500 list of companies, made an explicit allegation of deception.

Far from a bucolic idyll, farming in America is one of its most dangerous professions. And almost no one is trying to change that.

Part 2 of Baz Luhrmann’s Netflix series about hip-hop’s origins continues the squandering of great material and talent.

The number of women age 20 and older not in the labor pool has soared from 40 million in 2000 to nearly 49 million today; another 315,000 called it quits last month. The participation rate of women in the workplace has dropped from a high of 60.7 percent in 1999 to 58.8 percent today. By contrast, some 72.5 percent of men are either working or looking for a job. What’s going on?

Every year in the United States, 4,500 Americans die a year in workplace accidents. And yet we only spend approximately $550 million on OSHA’s budget to prevent workplace accidents—on OSHA’s total budget.

For some reason, all the billionaire reformers and all their politician friends prefer ordering cuts to fixing the state’s revenue system. Some argue, not without plausibility, that they welcome fiscal crisis as an excuse to push privatization.

Eight University of Michigan students were arrested Wednesday night after they blocked a busy intersection near campus in protest over the university's policy not to offer undocumented students from Michigan in-state tuition.