Portside

Tuesday, the USDA withdrew an Obama administration rule designed to protect farmers from certain predatory and retaliatory practices. The decision further immiserates family farmers who have no choice but to submit to the machinations of Big Ag processors.

A new investigation by Esquire magazine reveals how the secretive Sackler family, owners of the company that invented OxyContin, downplayed the risks of addiction and exploited doctors’ confusion over the drug’s strength.

A ProPublica review adds fuel to a longstanding worry about the nation’s highest court: The justices can botch the truth, sometimes in cases of great import.

My mother was devastated that I never became the radical she dreamed I’d be. — Peter Andreas, “My Mom, The Marxist,” New York Times, May 14, 2017

For the first time in history, gravitational wave astronomy isn't a pipe dream, nor is it a way of looking for esoteric objects we can't see via any other means.

In November 1917, British foreign secretary Lord Arthur Balfour declared British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”; in December, Jerusalem fell to British troops, and the effects of these events continue to reverberate. The Balfour Centennial should be a time of somber reflection about global responsibility for the tragedy in Palestine, which is more than a local record of colonial crimes, severe as these have been.

The PSUV won 54% of the total vote, marking a significant recovery since the ruling party's landslide defeat in the 2015 parliamentary elections when it garnered only 43.7% of the vote.

Organizations that claim to serve the public good are enriching Robert Mercer.

If there is something like a “Trump Doctrine,” it lies in two developments: the boldness with which a declared reliance on coercion and conquest now sits uncomfortably beside America’s professed moral authority; and the implications of Trump’s ethno-nationalism for how global allies and enemies are conceived.

Recently, the Spokane, Washington Spokesman-Review reported that with Hecla supervisory personnel working the mine, Lucky Friday silver production between July 2017 and September 2017 is 90 percent below its production for the same time period in 2016.