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Al Jazeera Documentary Shows Mexican Farmworkers’ Struggles in Historic Strike

Rachel Luban In These Times
A historic farmworker uprising ignited this March in Baja California, Mexico. Thousands of crop pickers stopped work at peak harvest in the valley of San Quintin, a major source of the U.S.’s tomatoes, cucumbers and berries, demanding better pay, legally mandated benefits and an end to sexual harassment in the fields. Fault Lines’ “Invisible Hands” premieres on Al Jazeera America on Monday, June 22nd at 10 p.m. Eastern time/ 7 p.m. Pacific.

Israeli Nukes

Dan Drollette, Jr. / Avner Cohen and William Burr Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
While negotiations over limiting Iran’s enrichment program have taken center stage in news coverage, the history of Israel’s covert nuclear program draws relatively little media attention. Israel has long maintained a policy of nuclear ambiguity, neither confirming nor directly denying that it has a nuclear deterrent, and the United States government has officially taken the same stance.

The Hoax of Climate Denial Why “Politically Motivated” Science Is Good Science

Naomi Oreskes TomDispatch
In recent decades, of course, the Republicans have lurched rightward on many topics and now regularly attack scientific findings that threaten their political platforms. In the 1980s, they generally questioned evidence of acid rain; in the 1990s, they went after ozone science; and in this century, they have launched fierce attacks not just on climate science, but in the most personal fashion imaginable on climate scientists.

Naomi Oreskes, a Lightning Rod in a Changing Climate

Justin Gillis The New York Times
Dr. Oreskes’s core discovery, made with a co-author, Erik M. Conway, was twofold. They reported that dubious tactics had been used over decades to cast doubt on scientific findings relating to subjects like acid rain, the ozone shield, tobacco smoke and climate change. And most surprisingly, in each case, the tactics were employed by the same group of people.

This Land Is Your Land

Woody Guthrie's unabashedly patriotic, slyly subversive, defiantly democratic, adopted-from-below unofficial national anthem. (With scenes from US national parks, and lyrics.)
 

Vietnam: An Unfinished Debt

H. Patricia Hynes Portside
The American war in Vietnam was a doomed modern military invasion against a popular, rural-based insurgency for independence...During the ten years (1961-1971) of aerial chemical warfare in Vietnam, U.S. planes sprayed more than twenty million gallons of herbicide defoliants, Agent Orange, the dioxin-contaminated and toxic herbicide constituted about 61 percent of the total herbicides sprayed in the war.The American war in Vietnam was a doomed modern military.