Portside

Earlier this month, the Israeli Defense Minister both admitted Israel has nuclear weapons, and discussed the possibility of using them against Iran, citing the U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as moral justification. Yet, the U.S. media has completely blacked out these incendiary remarks. Had the Iranian Defense Minister referenced Hiroshima in a discussion about Israel, it would have been front page news.

As the investigation continues into the oil spill along the California coast, new details emerged about the pipeline operator's long history of wreaking environmental damage. Plains All American operates the pipeline that burst near Refugio State Beach on the Gaviota Coast and dumped more than 105,000 gallons of crude oil into the ocean. Plains All American has been responsible for 175 spill incidents nationwide since 2006, including 11 in California.

Last Sunday’s broad daylight shoot-out between rival biker gangs in Waco, Texas left nine dead and eighteen others hospitalized, and shocked the nation. However, the Waco shootout also served to graphically underscore how drastically different the police and media treatment of violent incidents is when those involved are white. This racial disparity was intensely explored on Twitter this week by commentators and critics on hashtag#WacoThugs.

California poet Erica Goss raises the question, knowing the reader will have an answer: Is one child's life worth more than another's?

If we are serious about preventing future catastrophes of this nature, we must equip railroad workers with the necessary tools - including but not limited to those outlined below -- to enable them to perform the job safely. Railroad Workers United believes it is time we learn from these terrible tragedies and get serious about implementing the necessary measures to ensure safe railroad operations.

Stone tools unearthed at a site in Kenya predate any identified human ancestors -- previously thought to be the first makers of stone tools -- by hundreds of thousands of years. These finds "will force us [to rethink] what makes us humans ... Increasing knowledge of our remote past is casting doubts on previous certainties and is showing that the process of becoming what we are now is far more gradual than what we previously thought."

It took only a few minutes for Mr. Obama’s account to attract racist, hate-filled posts and replies. They addressed him with racial slurs and called him a monkey. One had an image of the president with his neck in a noose. But they appeared to be a small number in what was an otherwise social-media-fueled show of love for Mr. Obama, who was drawing followers at a rapid pace — nearly 2.3 million by Thursday afternoon.

The fundamental problem with both the “not now, maybe later” and the “not on your life” rejections of electoral politics is their small mindedness, their view that political activity is a zero sum game where a Sanders candidacy inevitably diminishes some other truly valuable activities because there are only a limited number of potential activists out there.