Portside

In northeastern Colombia, corruption, climate change and coal mining have collided to unleash a fatal drought.

Donald Trump’s remarkable comments about American blacks never being worse off demonstrated a stunning ignorance of or callousness toward the grotesque evils of slavery and Jim Crow, writes Marjorie Cohn.

Given the nature of the terrorist threat, no matter how many people it surveils or what kinds of communications it listens in on, no matter the drones in the air or the cameras on the streets, it remains remarkably helpless when it comes to finding the Syed Rizwan Farooks, Dahir Adans, and Ahmad Khan Rahamis of our world. It is incapable of picking those unexpected needles out of the vast haystack of us.

An in-depth investigation reveals that multibillion-dollar Big Ag corporations—including DuPont Pioneer and Monsanto—as well as small-scale farmers routinely use labor recruiters who crowd migrant workers in housing riddled with health and safety violations, such as bed bug infestations and a lack of running water. When state inspectors visit migrant labor camps, they find violations as much as 60 percent of the time.

A North Dakota state prosecutor has sought to charge award-winning journalist Amy Goodman with participating in a "riot" for filming an attack on Native American-led anti-pipeline protesters. The new charge comes after the prosecutor dropped criminal trespassing charges. Democracy Now!’s report went viral online and was viewed more than 14 million times on Facebook

Next month's election is important. But the core supporters of Donald Trump are not going to move to Canada -- or Russia -- if their candidate loses. Those who crave the simplistic, authoritarian solutions offered by dangerous populists around the world are not going to retreat into political apathy simply because of the scorn heaped upon them by the mainstream.

Everywhere in the country where there are problems, there are people working to find solutions.

Environmental groups had hoped the deal could reduce global warming by a half a degree celsius by the end of this century. This agreement gets about 90% of the way there, said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development. Zaelke’s group said this would mean the “largest temperature reduction ever achieved by a single agreement”.

On Oct. 13, the U.S. carried out its first direct military action against Houthi targets in Yemen, in alleged retaliation for two failed missile attacks on a U.S. ship. The Obama Administration thus underscored its position as a co-belligerent in the Saudi-led war, even as calls mount for an international investigation into Saudi war crimes following the Oct. 8th bombing of a funeral that killed 140 people and wounded hundreds of others, the deadliest attack of the war.

His calls for racial voter intimidation on Election Day could explode in all our faces.