Portside

The Value of Water Coalition was formed by large, well-resourced water and wastewater organizations to change the way we think about water. The rest of us need to know that we may not like the way they think of us and our rights to water.

In the proposed new picture, the engine behind Earth's interior processes is not heat from the core but cooling at the planet's surface. This cooling and plate tectonics drives mantle convection, the cooling of the core, and Earth's magnetic field. Volcanoes and cracks in the plate are simply side effects.

This summer Jackie Robinson West become the first all-African-American U.S. Champion of the Little League World Series in 30 years. In 1959 another group of Chicago boys – Chatham’s Tuley Park Comets -- had a similar experience. They were the first all-African-American team to win the Chicago Park District’s Little League baseball championship, going undefeated at 32-0 that season. Their run also included winning the Thillens Stadium Tournament.

This week 43 veterans of Israeli military intelligence publicly denounced Israeli surveillance of innocent Palestinian civilians and announced their refusal to participate in operations in the occupied territories. The veterans charge much of the intelligence gathering is directed at creating "divisions in Palestinian society" in order to maintain the occupation, using intelligence to "extort/blackmail" Palestinians into collaborating with Israel.

In yet another example of a corporation using international laws to prevent countries from restricting their profits, an obscure tribunal housed at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. will soon decide the fate of millions of people in El Salvador. At issue is whether the government of El Salvador will be punished for refusing to let a Canadian mining company operate on its territory because it wants to protect its main source of water.

A damning report released last week by the Sentencing Project lays bare how racial bias, and the interconnecting systemic structures that reinforce it, disproportionately affect African-Americans. The report, a powerful condemnation of the "perversity" of racial oppression, reveals how "the overassociation" of blacks with criminality has a devastating impact on society in general and Black and other people of color in particular.

Cuba's Minister of Public Health announced September 12th that Cuba would be sending a medical team of 165 experienced medical professionals to Sierra Leone to help combat the Ebola crisis there. The announcement, which came at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, represents "the largest offer of a foreign medical team from a single country during this outbreak," according to WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan.

Facing a Scottish referendum on independence September 18th that suddenly appears to close to call, the not so united United Kingdom and its pro-unionist partners in Scotland are panicking and resorting to desperate measures. If, after 307 years as a part of the United Kingdom, Scotland votes to secede, the UK loses one-third of its land mass and 10 percent of its Gross National Product.

In Spain this past May, the elections to the European Parliament produced a shock. A two-month-old party led by a 35-year-old, pony-tailed political scientist appeared out of nowhere—but clearly from the Left—to win 8 percent of the votes and five seats, transforming the infant organization into the country’s 4th largest political force. One of the party's founders, political scientist Juan Carlos Monedero, spoke with us in late August.

Colleges and universities, which receive enormous tax benefits to serve the public interest, should be held to a minimum level of effort to enroll and graduate low-income and working-class students eligible for Pell grants. Governments could also provide financial rewards targeted to universities that commit to increasing socioeconomic diversity and that shift their funds from non-need merit grants to students in actual need.