Portside

The Fourth Circuit appeals court finds that Republicans “targeted African Americans with almost surgical precision.”

When U.S. firms dominate a $70 billion a year global market, you’d expect to hear about it. Not so with the global arms trade. There are occasional pieces that, for example, note the impact of U.S. weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia, or the disastrous dispensation of weaponry to U.S. allies in Syria. But the sheer size of the U.S. arms trade, the politics that drive it, the companies that profit from it, and its devastating global impacts are rarely discussed.

As the last remaining months of President Obama’s term pass by, my anxiety increases. I believe that this President is my last hope for freedom, and I will surely die here if I am not released by January 20, 2017. So I ask you all again, as this is the most crucial time in the campaign to gain my freedom, please continue to organize public support for my release, and always follow the lead of the International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee.

Former Irish Life and Permanent Chief Executive Denis Casey was sentenced to two years and nine months following the 74-day criminal trial, Ireland's longest ever. Banks in the United States and Britain have paid billions of dollars in fines and settlements connected to wrongdoing over their handling of subprime loans that helped cause the crisis. But no senior industry executives in those countries have been sent to jail.

The decision means that the voting power of black citizens in the important swing state will not be hobbled in November by a repressive 2013 law that the court found was steeped in blatant racism, in violation of the Constitution.

But it's unlikely the politicians and labor leaders involved in the law expected this: an Uber-funded investigation of local union politics by a CIA-linked intelligence company.

Which President Do You Want Picking Them? This election is all about the Supreme Court that will shape our lives for the next 30 years.

After the murders, poet Anita Barrows addresses this elegy to a survivor, Diamond Lavish Reynolds, asking "how can we make your tears not/another deleted narrative?"

Victor Grossman reports from Berlin on causes of the spate of violence striking Germany and across Europe. We need not look too far to find possible causes of such hatred or, frequently, of distorted despair. I think of what so many have gone through. War-torn home towns, shootings, explosions and bombings in their native Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, a terrifying flight to get away, to find some haven, where they can escape and perhaps even realize their hopes and wishes.

An open letter to the voters of the United States...We believe it is our responsibility to use our platforms to bring attention to the dangers of a Trump presidency, and to the real and present threats of his candidacy. Initiated by 100 artists, actors, musicians, DJs, writers, directors, performers...