Portside

Amazon factories, with their insane, round-the-clock delivery schedules, are notoriously hellish places to work. But life at corporate Amazon isn’t exactly a picnic, either.

Angélica Rivera may have dazzled on the TV screen, but her shady relationship with a government contractor has wreaked havoc on her husband's presidency.

Social Security, which continues to provide benefits at costs far below those in the private sector, celebrated its 80th birthday Friday. And polls show Americans are extremely pleased with it. But, while Democrats finally seem to have abandoned their flirtation with benefit cutting, Republicans remain committed to its privatization. Yet campaigning against Social Security is political suicide, so the Republican strategy is to convince voters the program is unreliable.

The rapidly deteriorating health of Mohammed Allaan, a Palestinian political prisoner on hunger strike has pit Israeli legislators, who recently enacted a law mandating that he be force-fed, against physicians, who refuse to comply on grounds that doing so would be tantamount to "torture," and violate their Hippocratic Oath. Hunger strikes have become a common form of protest by Palestinians held indefinitely without charge in Israeli administrative detention.

Fires are proliferating throughout California where an unprecedented drought has turned the California countryside into a tinder box of dry and dying vegetation. But the fires are also emblematic of the state’s dependence on inmates to help battle the wildfires. California’s firefighting program (Cal Fire) boasts the country’s largest inmate firefighting program. Close to half of Cal Fire’s firefighters, approximately 4,000 prisoners, are inmate firefighters.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is warning of a major humanitarian crisis in Yemen, where violence “has radically increased” since March, when the U.S.-backed Saudi aerial offensive began. According to Teresa Sancristóval, the head of MSF’s emergency unit, “The impact of this conflict is much wider than only the bombing or the shooting. Yemen is predicted to be the first country in the world to have a capital without water, and water scarcity has an enormous impact.”

Along the Atlantic coast of Honduras, Afro-Caribbean Garifuna communities are being forced from their land, as proposals for the creation of mega-tourism projects and corporate-run “model cities,” gain momentum. Mega-projects are just one of the problems Honduran Garifuna communities have had to face in the six years since a U.S-supported coup d’etat removed then-President Manuel Zelaya from power. But the Garifuna are organizing to defend their land and culture.

A&P expects to sell 118 stores to Stop & Shop, Acme Markets and Key Food. Another 25 stores will be closed.

Conservative opposition to the internationally-negotiated deal to limit Iran's ability to obtain a nuclear weapon has been the subject of numerous editorials and op-eds in U.S. newspapers that have pushed false information about the agreement and warned that it compromises U.S. and Israeli security, despite widespread praise from nuclear arms control experts who say the deal is "excellent compared to where we are today."

Many Americans do not to know that thalidomide was never approved for use in the US, and that was almost entirely due to the vigilance and, yes, outright stubbornness of one brave woman, who could sniff out spin and misinformation in a drug company application and would not be swayed by unrelenting pressure.