Portside

Not far from the Deepwater Horizon accident site, Royal Dutch Shell is now developing the deepest offshore oil field in history. In the Caspian Sea, an international consortium is exploring the Kashagan oil and gas field, a mega-project that the consortium itself describes as an enormously challenging endeavour. And the hunt for Arctic oil takes place in some of the most inhospitable waters in the world.

The document substantiates claims by opponents that the TPP is a corporate-rights agreement designed to facilitate the export of U.S. jobs, allow corporations to sue governments for enacting labor and environmental protections, make it illegal for governments to favor local businesses, and advance the colonization of national economies by global corporations and financiers.

Adios (muy buenas), Sábado; Shut up, Credo; Solidarity, Gawker; Not so fast, Comcast; Ahoy, maties; Leak on, Julian

Last week actor Alec Baldwin sent out tweets bemoaning the "Fight fir $15" protests in New York City that he claimed made his life inconvenient. New York Times columnist Rachel Swarns responds to Baldwin.

Concerns about healthy eating and childhood obesity are helping to shape a new generation of foodies and feeding a budding publishing trend.

The worst-paid workers in America have been the mainly silent and most extreme victims of the rising inequality and wage stagnation for the past 40 years in America. Their occupations have also been—and are projected to be—the fastest growing part of the workforce.

As soon as the fighting started in the spring of 2011, the genebank’s staff switched gears from collecting and distributing seed samples to devising a rescue plan. People there became very familiar with northern Syria’s back roads as they drove the seeds out of the country.

“These researchers had deliberately withheld treatment for this group of poor, uneducated, black sharecroppers in order to document what eventually might happen to them. I became incensed. How could physicians, who were trained first and foremost to do no harm, deliberately withhold curative treatment so they could understand the natural history of syphilis?”

With the passage of half a century, it may be difficult to understand why so many political and cultural organizations, led by individuals with a generally liberal or leftist outlook, covertly collaborated with the CIA in the 1950s and first half of the 1960s, before exposés in Ramparts and other publications put an end to most such arrangements. This was also a period in which many other Americans with similar views collaborated with the FBI.

This weekend, the Art Institute of Chicago is commemorating the famed and controversial Wall of Respect, which celebrated black achievement, with a symposium and other events.