Portside

FOIA documents reveal Agent Orange Dioxin, toxic dumps, fish kills on Okinawa Base. Two veterans win compensation, many more denied.

The US Department of Defense will work on compensating the families of the victims killed in a deadly American airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, MSF) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The strike “mistakenly” killed 22 people.

More than four decades after construction began in 1973, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is finally getting close to starting up the Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear reactor. While the TVA and the nuclear industry describe Watts Bar 2 as “the first new nuclear generation of the 21st Century,” in fact the TVA resuscitated a demonstrably unsafe 1960s-era ice condenser design that was abandoned decades ago by the rest of the nuclear industry.

It has never made less sense to build fossil fuel power plants.

Child care costs constitute a large portion of the income families need in order to achieve a modest yet adequate standard of living—and are particularly onerous for workers paid the minimum wage.

Increasingly, workers say, they want and need a union. They also want—and say they are willing to register and to vote for—political candidates who will fight for their needs.

The Bard Debate Union at Eastern New York Correctional spends hundreds of hours preparing for a debate while carrying full undergraduate course loads.

What is happening in Israel today and what happened last week, last month, and for the past almost 50 years is about cementing sovereignty over land the international community agrees does not belong to Israel and over a subject people, the Palestinians, in contravention of international law. Yet, in Israel there is much talk about whether this is the start of the third intifada, but little talk of ending the occupation, the root cause of the escalating conflict.

The House Freedom Caucus, a relatively new group of about 40 Republicans loosely associated with the Tea Party, has an extraordinary amount of power in this process. Any potential speaker needs the support of 218 Republicans on the floor of the House. There are currently 247 Republicans in the House. That’s a large majority but without the Freedom Caucus, no candidate can get to 218.

Letelier described reading the declassified documents and discovering a memo from George Shultz, who served as secretary of state in the 1980s, to President Ronald Reagan. “[Shultz] informs [the president] that there is a conclusive document from the CIA that shows Pinochet ordered the murder of my father. This is concrete information about how Pinochet covered up his responsibility,” he said.