Portside

Richest fortunes rise 23 percent this year to top $5 trillion Bloomberg Billionaires Index uncovered 67 billionaires in 2017

Israel has transferred Ahed Tamimi to three different detention facilities in the last five days even though she has not yet been charged with a crime

Sally Yates stood up to Donald Trump, while Colin Kaepernick knelt; Ashley Judd named names and Jonathan Smith saved lives. Here are a dozen to salute.

At the heart of the conflict is the sturdy little fungus Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense; it infects and kills banana plants and, since the banana industry relies so heavily on one species, it is spreading steadily across banana-rich Southeast Asia and into Australia and the Middle East.

Thanks to strong bargaining power, the IG Metall union, which represents some 3.9 million workers in the metal and electrical industries, is pushing for a 6% wage increase and a 28-hour week for a two-year period — with limited impact on wages.

The rise of fascism shaped Schrödinger’s cat fable.

Gov. Bruce Rauner is on track to spend $50 million on legislative races this year. Even for a guy like Rauner, that’s a lot of money– nearly twice what he spent on his own campaign two years ago. Two Rauner allies, billionaires Ken Griffin and Richard Uihlein, are also spending tens of millions of dollars. The end game is taking down unions and squelching voting rights.

New details are emerging about how AT&T has been spying on Americans for profit with a secret plan called Project Hemisphere.

Voting rights advocates have won a string of court battles, but state election officials have found ways to restrict early voting anyway—often at the behest of GOP leaders. ----- Rethinking about our two party system and our election system: Ranked-choice voting opens up elections to a broader, more diverse range of candidates and ideas. ----- Modernizing our voter registration system.

Historians are so accustomed to viewing slaveholders at the top of a complex pyramid of class, racial, and gender hierarchies in Southern society that we forgot that they were also the nation’s most powerful political leaders, and the world’s most powerful slaveholding class. Only in the past fifteen years or so have historians begun to look more systematically at slaveholders as leading national and international actors, as well as Southern social elites.