Portside

Thailand Police Raptured Away in Solidarity; Big Food Portrays Itself As Anti-Big Food; A Plan to Save the Detroit Institute of Art Might Also Save Detroit's Pensions; JP Chase Morgan Reads Reverend Billy the Riot Act; The Phony Philanthropy of eBay's Billionaire Pierre Omidyar; Subtext of Super Heroes is Fascism.

Knesset passes revised law for detention of African asylum seekers - The previous law was struck down by the High Court, which ordered the state to begin releasing the asylum seekers it was indefinitely detaining. Instead, the Knesset passed a law to circumvent the ruling and indefinitely detain asylum seekers in `open prisons.'

• 500 signatories include five Nobel prize winners • Writers demand 'digital bill of rights' to curb abuses

Blame interest-rate swaps, not retirees, for the Motor City’s downfall.

The word “inequality” makes conservatives uncomfortable, as if it invokes class struggle, the 99 percent versus the 1. They much prefer “mobility,” which connotes a purely aspirational relationship to wealth and the wealthy.

With our inequality coming close to that of Jamaica and Argentina, as Obama pointed out in his Dec. 4 speech on inequality and social mobility, we can no longer ignore the danger it poses to our democracy and living standards.

With Washington tied up on other issues, states and municipalities are handling minimum-wage increases on their own. Legislators and voters in five states — California, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Rhode Island — and in four local governments this year approved measures raising the minimum wage above the current national rate of $7.25 an hour, in one case as high as $15 an hour.

Malta's prime minister, Joseph Muscat, exclaimed to journalist Gwynne Dyer that "we are building a cemetery within our Mediterranean Sea.” An NGO, Fortress Europe, says 6,450 died in the channel between Sicily and North Africa between 1994 and 2012. This figure is similar to the 5,570 people found dead in the desert between Mexico and the United States from 1998 to 2012, and has earned the Mediterranean the nickname “sea of death.”