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Johns Hopkins Medicine Terminates Compromised Black Lung Program

Jamie Smith Hopkins Center for Public Integrity
On Wednesday, John Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore quietly announced it had discontinued its program that focuses on Black Lung Disease. The controversial program had been suspended in 2013, two days after a joint investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and ABC News revealed how physicians at the nationally recognized university hospital had routinely helped the coal companies reject the legitimate disability claims of more than 1,000 sick miners.

A Greek Lesson: Europe’s Left Needs a New Horizon

Ronan Burtenshaw Analyze Greece
Ronan Burtenshaw is vice-chair of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions Youth Committee and coordinator of Ireland’s Greek Solidarity Committee. He warns it isn’t only Greece that is being forced to choose between staying in the European Union, with austerity, and leaving to face international capital alone. And that neither is a viable alternative. Europe’s Left must learn from Latin America and seek alternative political and economic unions for Europe.

U.S. Quietly Helps Saudis Block UN Resolution on Yemen

Samuel Oakford VICE News
Human rights experts charged the U.S. with sabotaging an independent UN inquiry into human rights violations in Yemen. The Netherlands put forward the resolution authorizing the inquiry, which the Saudis and their Gulf allies vigorously opposed. In what was termed “a shameful capitulation to Saudi Arabia” that “denied Yemeni victims their first real opportunity for justice,” the U.S. pressured the Dutch to modify and ultimately withdraw their resolution.

Thinking About a Next System with W.E.B. Du Bois and Fannie Lou Hamer

Jessica Gordon Nembhard The Next System Project
Before launching The Next System Project, we sat down with historian and economic activist Jessica Gordon Nembhard to learn what the tradition of Black cooperative economic development and the long struggle for civil rights could teach us about system change and system models. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation.

PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE AS “LIBRARY AFTER AIR RAID, LONDON, 1940”

Cintia Santana Beloit Poetry Journal
We've become inured to civilian bombing, collateral damage, refugees on the road--the consequences of warfare--but it wasn't always so. As poet Cintia Santana depicts the World War II bombing of a scholarly library, she leads us to "the shock of light."

HBO’s Show Me a Hero and the Sordid History of “Negro Removals”

Kevin Baker The Guardian
David Simon’s HBO TV series Show Me a Hero follows the racist fight against public housing in 1980s Yonkers, New York but, as author Kevin Baker reveals, it’s just one instance in the sordid American history of kicking Black people out of their neighborhoods. The issue is not only the refusal of white people to live with people of color, but their conviction that Black space is not legitimate, and that whatever Black people own can be expropriated.