Portside

Facing a Scottish referendum on independence September 18th that suddenly appears to close to call, the not so united United Kingdom and its pro-unionist partners in Scotland are panicking and resorting to desperate measures. If, after 307 years as a part of the United Kingdom, Scotland votes to secede, the UK loses one-third of its land mass and 10 percent of its Gross National Product.

Cuba's Minister of Public Health announced September 12th that Cuba would be sending a medical team of 165 experienced medical professionals to Sierra Leone to help combat the Ebola crisis there. The announcement, which came at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, represents "the largest offer of a foreign medical team from a single country during this outbreak," according to WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan.

A damning report released last week by the Sentencing Project lays bare how racial bias, and the interconnecting systemic structures that reinforce it, disproportionately affect African-Americans. The report, a powerful condemnation of the "perversity" of racial oppression, reveals how "the overassociation" of blacks with criminality has a devastating impact on society in general and Black and other people of color in particular.

In yet another example of a corporation using international laws to prevent countries from restricting their profits, an obscure tribunal housed at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. will soon decide the fate of millions of people in El Salvador. At issue is whether the government of El Salvador will be punished for refusing to let a Canadian mining company operate on its territory because it wants to protect its main source of water.

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Yet transparency is essential to democracy, so that citizens, rather than an elite, make decisions, especially when it comes to life-or-death issues.

Thousands of employees at the European aviation and defense giant EADS have taken to the streets across Germany to protest looming job cuts. The company had said it would have to overhaul its sluggish defense business.

There's no reason to rollback the progress the ACA has made. But we should go all the way and dump the for-profit system.