Portside

“Uncovered California” is a three-part series of stories and videos examining how the Golden State is trying to fill holes in its health care coverage. Sasha Abramsky’s articles look at working people who are falling through coverage cracks, and at what’s being done to help community college students gain access to mental health services. Debra Varnado reports on efforts to expand the role of nurse practitioners to increase medical services for low-income Californians.

The U.S. had very big plans for the little atoll of Bikini. Forcing the 167 residents to relocate, they started to prepare Bikini as an atomic bomb test site. Two test bombings scheduled for that summer were intended to be very visible demonstrations of the United States’ newly acquired nuclear might. Who could have foreseen that even now – 70 years later – the Marshall Islanders would still be suffering the aftershocks from the nuclear bomb testing on Bikini Atoll?

The tide is beginning to turn on criminal justice. California is again setting the national tone, first by rolling back juvenile incarceration at unprecedented rates and now, through the same ballot initiative system that ushered in those extreme sentences, by passing voter-driven laws to roll back those laws and clean up the damage they created.

Ten years of siege, two years since the 2014 Israeli massacre - it’s high time for accountability and for a two-way military embargo on Israel!

While the nation is gripped by new police killings, hope quietly fades in the Eric Garner case

When Bernie Sanders talks about a political revolution larger than himself, it is important to understand that it must also be larger than electoral movements. Although the working class has changed from the halcyon days of yesteryear, it is still the class at the heart of the contradictions of capital, and it is time to take back its true meaning.

For all the excitement, scientists still know surprisingly little about why fecal transplants work.

Between 1968 and 1973, the two governments concealed the expulsion from the world. If anyone asked, Anglo-American officials decided to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos” were “transient contract workers,” as one bureaucrat explained. A British official called the Chagossians “Tarzans” and “Man Fridays,” in a tellingly racist reference to Robinson Crusoe.

Three years ago the Egyptian military ousted the elected President Mohamed Morsi. Since then, as Amnesty International reported this week, “tens of thousands of people have been detained without trial or sentenced to prison terms or to death....” Perhaps even without the support of significant segments of the public, including leading activists and intellectuals, the remnants of the old Mubarak regime would still have overthrown Morsi. But that support made it easier.

There was already military tutelage in Turkey before yesterday's coup attempt; which makes the attempt a coup by one military faction against the existing one. This is why a section of the military has taken sides with Erdoğan, because there is already military tutelage in Turkey.