Portside

On September 3, 1991, the Imperial Food Products plant in Hamlet, North Carolina burst into flames. Twenty-five people died, trapped behind the locked doors of the red-brick factory. Most of the victims were women; many were women of color, most were single moms. Another sixty people were injured, and the blast left more than fifty children orphaned. Local officials called the fire an accident, but the women and men who worked at Imperial had been made vulnerable by the factory’s owners as well as public policy.

A new Johns Hopkins University study finds that junk food images are almost twice as distracting as healthy food images.

“We’re at a crucial historical juncture, where literally the fate of the planet hangs by a thread,” says rocker Tom Morello. “We are musicians, so our message is in the mosh pit.”

As the US media obsesses about Russia’s involvement in the U.S. elections, it is ignoring nearly everything else about the Putin government’s role in the world. But recent warnings from Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that the Trump administration is dangerously escalating the North Korean crisis deserve serious attention.

There are 23 million people around the world displaced from the only homes they've ever known.

Thousands of Arab Bedouins in Israel's Negev desert are denied power, water, sewage, and roads by the state. And their villages are under constant threat of demolition.

"RJ is a model not just for women of color, nor just for achieving reproductive freedom. RJ is a model for organizing for human equality and well-being," writes author Dorothy Roberts in her foreword to the new anthology.

Bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics kill 700,000 people a year worldwide. If we don’t find new treatments, the annual death toll could rise to 10 million by 2050.

With a theatrical adaptation opening in London, and a planned CBS revival helmed by Jordan Peele, what can the Rod Serling anthology series say about modern life?

A new film looks at the 1944 gang rape of Recy Taylor, a 24-year-old black mother and sharecropper. Following the rape, she refused to be silenced and spoke up with help from the NAACP’s chief rape investigator Rosa Parks.