Portside

Fourteen years after 9/11, the World Trade Center Health Program is scheduled to end next month. And the Victim Compensation Fund is set to expire in October 2016. Unless Congress pledges more money, funding for both programs will end just as scientists and doctors are on the verge of finding a definitive link between the incident and various cancers. Not only would 9/11-related cancer treatment and compensation end, but all research would be discontinued as well.

Since 9/11, the Pentagon has increasingly viewed the African continent as a place with a multitude of problems that can only be remedied by military means. But, despite billions of dollars in aid and training missions and joint exercises conducted by America’s most elite troops, West African nations find themselves chronically imperiled by a plethora of insurgent groups and members of their own armed forces, many of whom were trained by these same U.S. special forces.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has a set a November 19 deadline for people to comment on its proposed relaxation in standards for nuclear power plants, an alarming change in U.S. federal policy that is based on a theory that low doses of radioactivity are good for people. The NRC is supporting changes being pushed by the nuclear industry and “a group of pro-nuclear fanatics,” according to the Nuclear Information and Resource Service.

Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the British Labor party, in a stunning first-round victory that dwarfed even the mandate for Tony Blair in 1994. The election of the anti-war activist and rank and file Member of Parliament means the Labor party now has one of the most leftwing, anti-establishment leaders in its 115-year history. Minutes after his victory, Corbyn said the message is that people are “fed up with the injustice and the inequality” of Britain.

As the partisan Congressional Republican attack on Planned Parenthood heated up this week, a new study released Tuesday by the Guttmacher Institute found, "unequivocally that for women in many areas of the country, losing Planned Parenthood would mean losing their chosen provider—and the only safety-net provider around." Safety-net providers provide care and services in low-income, medically underserved, immigrant, and communities of color.

Scientists have discovered a new human-like species in a burial chamber deep in a cave system in South Africa.

To ask if the rogue Republican’s surge is good for Democrats is the wrong question. The most important question that should be asked about the Trump candidacy is: What is wrong with America that this racist, misogynist, money-cheating clown should be the frontrunner for the presidential nomination of one of its two major parties?

The 9/11 attacks and the thousands of innocents killed were an international crime of the first order. But 14 years later, no one in Washington has yet taken the slightest responsibility for blowing a hole through the Middle East, loosing mayhem across significant swathes of the planet, or helping release the forces that would create the first true terrorist state of modern history.

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