Portside

Can you stomach any more bad news? Here goes… While raising the minimum wage will certainly help to reduce some of the burden on workers, they still won’t be able to “afford” rent by the government’s standards.

In this very small volume of messed-up corroded metal you have packed in there enough knowledge to fill several books telling us about ancient technology, ancient science and the way these interacted with the broader culture of the time.

The struggle for independence upset the “politics of deference.” The colonial elites, explains historian Clement Fatovic, found it “more and more difficult” to reconcile “great disparities of wealth with the animating principles of the Revolution.”

Culinary historian Michael Twitty is on a journey to discover himself, through the food of his ancestors. Joe Yonan talks to him about history, identity, and what exactly goes into a kosher soul roll.

An Iraqi politician once said that the problem in his country was that parties and movements were “too weak to win, but too strong to lose.” This is increasingly the pattern for the whole region and is spreading elsewhere. It carries with it the possibility of an endless cycle of indecisive wars and an era of instability that has already begun.

The BET Awards Sunday featured tributes to Prince and Muhammad Ali, and a performance by Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar. But this year, the actor Jesse Williams commanded the spotlight with an impassioned speech calling for an end to police killings, racial inequality and cultural appropriation.

The Jornalero app has three main functions: First, it allows day laborers to record the hours they work. Second, it allows them to file a wage theft report directly to a workers’ center from their phone. Third, it allows them to send out an alert when they experience wage theft, to warn other day laborers with the app about nonpaying employers in the area.

“In my view it is a very, very, very bad piece of legislation,” Sanders said at the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials conference in Washington last week. “[W]e are taking away virtually all of the political and democratic rights of the people of Puerto Rico. We are treating them as an absolute colony.”

Waterkeeper Alliance, North Carolina Riverkeeper organizations and Environmental Working Group collaborate on unprecedented GIS initiative showing the location and waste outputs of more than 6,500 swine, cattle and poultry operations

“[Measure 1] will only drive up the price of land and rent as corporate farms expand their land base to gain ‘efficiency’ by spreading costs over more acres. This will cause farming margins to be thinner yet for all farmers and make it difficult for family farmers and especially beginning farmers to compete for land against the deep pockets of corporations.”