Portside

First European Citizens' Initiative calls for water to be human right, not a commodity.

The well-publicized debate at the Creation Museum was not about two minds sparring.

In one of the worst coal ash spills in U.S. history, up to 27 million gallons of contaminated water and 82,000 tons of coal ash spilled into North Carolina’s Dan River after a pipe burst underneath a waste pond. Did state regulators intentionally block lawsuits against Duke Energy in order to shield the company where Republican Gov. Pat McCrory worked for 28 years?

The dark money strategies Noble helped pioneer at the Center are likely to play a substantial role in the upcoming midterms. Targeted blasts of spending by outside groups could have far more effect on this year’s smaller slate of congressional and local races than they had on 2012’s megabuck national and statewide contests, campaign finance experts said.

“Profiting from Probation: America’s ‘Offender-Funded’ Probation Industry,” describes how more than 1,000 courts in several US states delegate tremendous coercive power to companies that are often subject to little meaningful oversight or regulation. In some of these cases, probation companies act more like abusive debt collectors than probation officers, charging the debtors for their services.

When the new farm bill is enacted, many of America’s hardest working families will experience cuts in services and have trouble putting food on their family’s table. But there will be major gains for an industry that most Americans might not expect: banking.

"The outcome of the vote, however, does not change our goal of setting up a works council in Chattanooga," Gunnar Kilian, secretary general of VW's works council, said in a statement on Sunday, adding that workers continued to back the idea of labor representation at the plant.