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Venezuela’s Citgo provides free gas to Harvey rescue teams
Venezuela has provided free gas to rescues workers, firefighters and police in their efforts to help victims in areas affected by Harvey, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday.
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Another privatization fail: 5 things you don’t know about school lunches (but probably should)
One thing is clear: school lunches have a long way to go, and there’s no simple solution in sight. As school districts struggle to balance costs with meeting federal nutritional standards and other requirements, students are left to weather the storm with lackluster food choices that may not be having the positive effect on their mental and physical health that educators and parents want—and are certainly not having the tastebud-pleasing effects students hope for.
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United Nations finds Iran in total compliance with nuclear deal
Trump and the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, have regarded Iran and the agreement with suspicion, with Trump threatening to withhold certification of Iranian compliance, and saying in an interview in July, “If it was up to me, I would have had them noncompliant 180 days ago.”
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Painters union fights to free member from immigration jail
Imagine being arrested and detained for months just for showing up to work. That’s what happened to construction workers Hugo Mejia and Rodrigo Nuñez on May 3, when their company sent them to work on a hospital inside Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California.
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Facebook’s advertising machine
The US market evidently has a powerful influence on social trends elsewhere in the world. It has been shown not only by the popularity among youth of wearing low-hanging trousers and baseball caps backwards—although, thankfully, these trends have, like, faded—but also by how a system designed for an elite US university, Harvard, could end up becoming the world’s largest social media site.
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Angela Davis on Black Lives Matter, Palestine, and the future of radicalism
“I have spent most of my life studying Marxist ideas and have identified with groups that have not only embraced Marxist-inspired critiques of the dominant socioeconomic order, but have also struggled to understand the co-constitutive relationship of racism and capitalism.”
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A tale of many cities: potholes in the road to municipal reform
As a growing number of groups on the left have begun dabbling in local electoral politics—most notably via the Democratic Socialists of America (or DSA-backed candidacies)—we would do well to heed the warning of Juan Gonzalez about the “consultant class” (currently in the employ of Mayor de Blasio). The allure of corner-cutting political consultants, corporate cash, and the always pernicious influence of pay-to-play after any election day success by would-be reformers are pitfalls that left electoral efforts must avoid at all cost.
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People are radicalizing the Bolivarian Revolution
For those confused by the recent headlines on Venezuela, this is a point worth explaining. The so-called ‘peaceful’ ‘pro-democracy’ demonstrators of the opposition had made threats against those who planned to participate in the Constituent Assembly elections, leaving many people fearful to vote in their own communities, particularly those with a strong opposition presence. This fear was not unfounded.
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As Arkema plant burns, six things we know about petrochemical risks in the wake of Harvey
In many ways, Harvey is unprecedented. Yet, we live in a world where our president revokes policies that ensure our infrastructure is storm ready, where climate mitigation efforts have stagnated, and where disaster relief efforts often don’t reach those that need it most. We must do better.
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Freedom rider: Joe Arpaio is no aberration
Even most leftish white Americans like to think that their country is good and its institutions are fair and equitable. According to this wishful thinking human rights abuses only happen in faraway places and injustices here are resolved by reining in a few bad apples. The facts say otherwise and prove that the United States is consistently one of the worst human rights violators in the world.
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Fascism in the United States
The combination of the Nazi flag and the Confederate flag is a standard feature of the Right’s iconography—the linkage between a desire for White domination with a rehabilitation of the ‘lost cause’ of the Confederacy. This period of great economic instability has produced some truly morbid symptoms.
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Recession on the horizon
There are strong reasons to expect a recession within the next year or so. And it will likely hit an increasingly vulnerable working class hard.
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U.S. wages cyberwar abroad under cover of ‘activism’
Like many other episodes of extraterritorial political interference up to and including military intervention, America’s meddling in Thailand is done on behalf of corporate interests seeking to expand their respective and collective hegemony both regionally in Asia vís-a-vís Beijing, and globally.
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There’s no other way to say it: Trump’s Arpaio pardon is fascist
This is a dark moment in American history, perhaps one of the darkest, illuminated only by the broad swath of conservatives, moderates, and liberals who have rejected what Trump and Arpaio stand for. Let us pray that they—we—prevail.
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The alt-right and the 1%
When President Donald Trump let loose at his Tuesday press conference, equating anti-racism protesters with neo-Nazis, it was a big hit with the men who’d taken part in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.
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The real price of Trump’s Venezuela sanctions
Until now, the sanctions have been more bark than bite, but it’s clear the Trump administration is now very eager to change this – at least in terms of public perception.
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U.S. massacring hundreds of Syrian civilians every week in Raqqa
The eruption of U.S. imperialist violence in ever more bloody forms is a devastating indictment of all of those political forces which have sought over the past quarter century to portray Washington as the defender of “human rights” and “democracy.”
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U.S. nuclear modernization plans to bury existing arms control regime
You may like Donald Trump or not but he will go down in history as the President who made decisions of fundamental importance for his country and the world. Nobody else but Donald Trump will determine the configuration of US future nuclear arsenal, which is to go through massive modernization.
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Slick maneuvers
Both ExxonMobil and the Wall Street Journal have been engaged in pretty slick maneuvers in order to protect their profits by failing to publish any opinions critical of ExxonMobil.
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Charlottesville is America: the myth of the white supremacist tidal wave
However, white supremacy is not a tidal wave. And it isn’t a lurking storm that seeks to wreak havoc on the shores of the US either. That happened centuries ago, when English colonizers laid their claim to the North American mainland circa the mid to late 17th Century.