Portside

On the morning of February 18, 2015, the ExxonMobil oil refinery in Torrance, California exploded, causing chemical ash to rain on the surrounding community for hours. Eight workers had to be decontaminated and four were sent to hospitals with minor injuries. With new evidence that the explosion could have been much worse, and that other aging refineries around the country are also at risk, scientists, industry watchdogs and a few lawmakers are sounding an alarm.

A troubling new investigation by the Guardian has found that at least 33 large cities in the United States may be improperly testing tap water in order to pass FDA regulations on allowable levels of lead. Reporters from the paper looked at 41 cities across 17 different states, and compared local officials’ water testing methods to those suggested by the EPA.

G4S, where Omar Mateen worked as a security guard, profits from both U.S. border militarization and the Israeli occupation.

Big Food is snapping up smaller, independent companies operating in niches of the industry that are actually growing, like organics. Three much-loved small players recently succumbed to the appetites of larger players.

One of Orange Is the New Black's greatest accomplishments in Season 3 was exploring the Litchfield guards' inner lives just as deeply, richly, and with just as much complexity as it has the inmates' lives. Rather than set up a false dichotomy where the prisoners are the "good guys" who just got themselves into a bad situation and the guards are the monsters, Season 3 shows us that the guards have it tough, too. So tough, in fact, that they decide to unionize.

As education activists draw attention to high rates of suspensions, racial disparities, and the “school-to-prison pipeline,” the political winds are shifting.

Underutilized provisions of the National Voter Registration Act could help enfranchise millions of Americans.

There goes the neighborhood.

While there has recently been a push from advocates and policy -- makers alike to reexamine sentencing policy and practice, the negative impacts on former prisoners and people with felony convictions themselves and the economy as a whole will grow in scale unless the burgeoning reform trend continues and accelerates.

The abolition movement was an interracial radical social movement of disfranchised people, men and women, white and black, free and enslaved. Slave resistance lay at its heart. On this Juneteenth, it is important to recall that African Americans were not passive recipients of the gift of freedom but architects of their own liberation.