When we watch the fireworks exploding overhead this fourth of July, let’s all think for a minute what it would be like to be civilians trapped under life-threatening explosions in…
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When we watch the fireworks exploding overhead this fourth of July, let’s all think for a minute what it would be like to be civilians trapped under life-threatening explosions in the sky. Not pleasant, but perhaps imagining this will help us understand what Iraqis and Syrians are facing in their skies – and move us to demand that Congress review the legality, utility and morality of military campaign against ISIS – never authorized by our legislators.
Think about the inconsistencies: The US has been outraged when the Assad government has killed civilians in opposition-held areas of Syria. American politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, expressed horror at this year’s civilian-killing attacks in Paris and London. But when it’s US planes dropping bombs – including white phosphorus which is prohibited under international law – on the Syrian city of Raqqa where tens of thousands of civilians are trapped, our policy makers seem to have lost their moral compass.
Ontario and Alberta are both moving to a $15 per hour minimum wage. The potential Green-NDP government in British Columbia has plans to do the same. Such increases tend to churn up misguided discussions on social media of the possible economic impact on employment, wages and consumer prices.
“The backlash is all generated by employers,” said Mark Thompson, professor emeritus of industrial relations at the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia who chaired a commission on employment standards in the ’90s.
“When the minimum wage goes up here in British Columbia, the restaurant industry and the small business people are going to trot someone out who says they can’t make it under these conditions. But you don’t hear about the ones that are making it under the minimum wage.”
Data shows it does have an effect on one demographic: young people.
An award winning front-line investigative news magazine, that focuses on human, civil and workers right, issues of war and peace, Global Warming, racism and poverty, and other issues. Hosted by Dennis J. Bernstein.
In 2011, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency made an ill-informed decision that triggered a massacre in a town in Mexico that led to dozens, possibly hundreds, of deaths and kidnappings. We talk to Ginger Thomas of ProPublica about that story, and what it tells us about the DEA, government..
In an exclusive interview with teleSUR, Netfa Freeman, Cuba policy analyst for the Washington D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies, commented on U.S. President Donald Trump’s announcement rolling back the normalization of relations with Cuba.
Trump called the U.S. rollback on Cuba, among other things, humanitarian. Can you address this point?
These are people who have no concept of what human rights and freedom for a people mean. And this doesn’t just mean Donald Trump. This applies also to all U.S. political officials who uphold the capitalist, imperialist system. Trump himself is a capitalist who leeches off of the super-exploitation of people and the environment.
We are talking about leaders of a country that has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world and the free labor of those incarcerated is exploited to produce all manner of goods and services for the private profit of the rich. Statistics show that U.S. police kill at least three people each day who are disproportionately people of African descent and Indigenous North Americans.
The U.S. has the worst election system in the industrialized world with voter suppression and all sorts of rigging and disenfranchising improprieties going on that are never addressed by either the Republican or Democratic party.
President Donald Trump made a last-ditch appeal to Georgia’s 6th District voters Monday, tweeting at two different points in the day that that they should back Republican Karen Handel during tomorrow’s special election in order to block Democrats’ tax, health care and border security agenda.
“The Dems want to stop tax cuts, good health care and Border Security. Their ObamaCare is dead with 100% increases in P’s,” Trump tweeted shortly before 8:30 a.m., referring to health care premiums. “Vote now for Karen H.”
When it comes to Indian Point, many have likely assumed that when the plant stops operating, the threat of some sort of nuclear accident goes away. But the Lower Hudson Valley is only beginning to learn about what happens after a nuclear plant closes — and there is much to learn about the nuclear waste that could remain in Buchanan for a long, long time.
We may be entering an “age of nuclear waste,” as Gordon Edwards, a Canadian expert on nuclear issues, said at a recent forum in Garrison called “When Nuclear Plants Close.” That’s because a generation of plants are closing or will cease operations before long. The same questions and concerns will be raised again and again about the handling of radioactive waste and the uncertain future of former plant sites.
There are currently no real solutions for the disposal of this waste.
An age of nuclear power may be winding down, but the age of nuclear waste has just begun.
That was the opening message, from Gordon Edwards, at a conference in Garrison on June 9 to discuss the decommissioning of Indian Point Energy Center in Buchanan. The nuclear plant is expected to close by 2021 as part of a legal settlement between the plant’s owner and operator, Entergy Corp., and the state government.
Edwards is president of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility. He and a group of about a dozen nuclear experts and environmental advocates gathered at the recent forum to discuss Indian Point’s decommissioning and nuclear waste storage. The event, which drew about 100 people to the basement of the Desmond-Fish Library, was co-sponsored by Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, The Journal News and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
After giving a brief walk-through of the process that creates nuclear energy, Edwards cautioned that nuclear waste “will be a public health problem for millennia to come.”
Humberto Calzada takes a tough line on Cuba’s socialist regime. He fled with his family in the first wave of exiles in 1960, fearing what laws the new revolutionaries would impose on the Caribbean island’s well-heeled set.
He was a teenager then. Now a 73-year-old Cuban-American artist living in Miami, Florida, he still lobbies for the United States to use its economic might to bring about the downfall of the government in Havana.
“It’s not an ideology; it’s a criminal enterprise that has crushed the spirit of the Cuban people,” Calzada told Al Jazeera.
