After being sued for $30 million by a corporate landfill owner for “speaking their truth in order to protect their community,” four residents of Uniontown, Alabama—a poor, predominantly Black town with a median per capita income of around $8,000—are fighting back. 

On Thursday, the ACLU asked a federal court to dismiss the defamation lawsuit against Esther Calhoun, Benjamin Eaton, Ellis B. Long, and Mary B. Schaeffer—all members of the community group Black Belt Citizens Fighting for Health and Justice.

The defendants are being sued by Georgia-based Green Group Holdings for speaking out against the polluting, hazardous coal ash that the company keeps in a landfill in a residential area—a “sprawling dump” that stands as a symbol of racial and environmental injustice. 

According to AL.com:

“The lawsuit focuses on comments made by visitors to the group’s Facebook page relating to controversies over the landfill’s activities near an old cemetery and accusations that the facility is polluting the community and oppressing local residents,” Sue Sturgis wrote in April for Facing South.

Among the comments the lawsuit calls “false and defamatory” are these remarks by the group’s president, Calhoun (the bold text is the Green Group Holdings’ own, showing what the company objects to):

A first-its-kind pilot program, launching in four states this spring, aims to expand medical abortion access for women at a time when brick-and-mortar clinics are closing at a record pace.

The Guardian reported Thursday on the program, which will be run as a pilot study out of clinics in four states—New York, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington. It is the brainchild of the New York-based research group Gynuity Health Projects, which seeks to make reproductive health technologies more convenient, more acceptable, safer, and more widely accessible.

According to the Guardian, the study “may…finally deliver on what reproductive rights advocates have always seen as the true promise of abortion drugs: abortion, without the clinic.”

And in places like Hawaii, where only two islands out of the nine have abortion clinics, or Oregon, where more than 78 percent of counties are without abortion providers, this pilot program could be revolutionary. At least four U.S. states have just one operational outpatient abortion clinic, and Wyoming has none.

The paper explains:

As Dr. Elizabeth Raymond, of Gynuity, wrote with colleagues for JAMA Internal Medicine this week, following such a model “enhances privacy and autonomy as well as access. The dispersion of care also helps to avoid harassment of both patients and clinicians.”

What’s more, the authors noted, existing restrictions on medical abortion “are medically unjustified: mifepristone, which is dispensed in single doses, has no immediate clinical effects, and thus the location where a patient receives it, or even where she swallows it, is irrelevant to its efficacy or safety.”

Amid protests and strikes, Greek lawmakers passed a crushing new austerity package early on Monday.

The reform package, which passed by a razor-thin margin, was described as “the toughest…the thrice bailed-out nation has been forced to enact since its debt crisis began,” according to the Guardian.

The austerity measures represent €5.4 billion ($6.2 billion) in savings and would reduce Greece’s pension payouts while raising taxes. The so-called “Troika” of international creditors—the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank—are demanding such painful reforms in return for an €86 billion bailout agreed to last July in a bid to pull Greece out of its debt crisis.

Reuters reports:

In fact, wrote Guardian economics editor Larry Elliot on Sunday: “Greece is being set budgetary targets that the IMF knows are unrealistic and is being set up to fail. It will then be punished further for being unable to do what was impossible in the first place.”

While Parliament debated the measures inside, Greek citizens expressed their anger in the streets. Police said almost 18,000 people turned up in Athens and about 8,000 in Thessaloniki on Sunday, following additional protests on Saturday.

“Every day they destroy our country a little more,” Vassilis Papadopoulos, a young waiter, said to the Guardian of the international creditors one might argue they’d be better off without.

Indeed, “months of callous inaction have pushed the mood in Greek society into a dangerous place,” wrote journalist Paul Mason on Monday. “A population that, two years ago, started demanding and giving printed receipts as an act of collective moral renewal, has given up on them once again. The most popular graffiti tag has become ‘all this political shit’.”

Mason continued:

The Parliament’s vote came ahead of a meeting on Monday of European finance ministers to discuss Greece’s debt problems—a meeting painted as a fight between the IMF, which is calling for debt relief, and Germany, which opposes any debt forgiveness.

“Tomorrow is a very important day. After six whole years, during which European institutions have been meeting constantly to discuss the Greek (financial) crisis and have only considered austerity measures, tomorrow, the Eurogroup will also discuss Greek debt relief,” Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said on Sunday.

According to the Guardian, Tsipras “won unexpected support at the weekend from Germany’s vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel. In a statement to Reuters, Sigmar, who is also the economy minister, insisted debt relief was now the only way of plucking Greece out of its seemingly endless economic death spiral. ‘The eurogroup meeting on Monday must find a way to break the vicious circle,’ he wrote. ‘Everyone knows that this debt relief will have to come at some point. It makes no sense to shirk from that time and time again’.”

The BBC quoted the head of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, as saying Monday’s discussion was merely preliminary and that he hoped a deal with Greece would be finalized by May 24. 

Speaking after the meeting, Greek finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos reportedly said, “the IMF wants more on debt relief than member states.”

However, in a recent blog post, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis warned against giving the IMF too much credit for its seemingly reasonable stance.

“The IMF’s austerity package is inhuman because it will destroy hundreds of thousands of small businesses, defund society’s weakest, and turbocharge the humanitarian crisis,” Varoufakis wrote in April. “And it is unnecessary because meaningful growth is much more likely to return to Greece under our policy proposals to end austerity, target the oligarchy, and reform public administration (rather than attacking, again, the weak).”

He continued: “Abandoning the template in Greece would be to confess to the possibility that decades of anti-social programs imposed globally might have been inhuman and unnecessary.”

As outside entities hold Greece’s fate in their hands, Varoufakis argued, “[t]he result is a Europe more deeply immersed in disrepute and a Greek people watching from the sidelines an ugly brawl darkening their already bleak future.”

A study released last week offered confirmation that the Troika’s “bailout” packages delivered to Greece primarily served European banks rather than the Greek people.

This Tuesday, April 26, marks 30 years since an explosion decimated reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl’s nuclear power plant, killing 31 nuclear and rescue workers, sickening thousands more, and forcing hundreds of thousands to evacuate. 

Chernobyl was the worst nuclear disaster in history, exposing hundreds of millions of people in 40 different countries to at least some dose of radioactivity.

Its repercussions continue to be felt far and wide.

Just this week, the Associated Press described Belarus, where 70 percent of the radioactive fallout from Chernobyl landed, as “a nation showing little regard for the potentially cancer-causing isotopes still to be found in the soil.”

AP reported:

Meanwhile, a teacher from Belarus’s heavily contaminated Mogilev region tells Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe officer Andrey Allakhverdov that around 40 percent of her students have health problems: asthma, diabetes, and cancer or weak immune, respiratory, and digestive systems.

“The suffering caused by Chernobyl shows why we need to get rid of nuclear power for good,” Allakhverdov wrote on Monday.

But as ABC News wrote on Tuesday, “the long-term health effects of Chernobyl remain intensely disputed.”

USA Today reported: “The total death toll from cancer from the accident is projected to reach 4,000 for people exposed to high doses of radiation, and another 5,000 deaths among those who had less radiation exposure, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations and the World Health Organization.”

And in its account titled, “Thirty Years After Chernobyl, We’re Still Calculating How Much Cancer It Caused,” Slate noted that in 2006, an international team of scientists predicted a total of 22,800 radiation-induced cancers, excluding thyroid cancers, among the 572 million people who got at least some exposure to Chernobyl radioactivity.

After weeks of polls showing Donald Trump gaining on Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton’s once sizable lead, for the first time on Monday, Real Clear Politics recorded the New York billionaire ahead in the national polling average.

For the period between May 13-19, the presumptive Republican nominee polled ahead of Clinton by a national average of 0.2 points.

The new figure places the upcoming presidential contest in stark new light. 

Addressing concerns that the media may preemptively announce his rival Hillary Clinton as the “presumptive Democratic Party nominee” even before she has won the requisite numbers of pledge delegates, Bernie Sanders over the weekend indicated that such reporting would be both wrong and irresponsible and held to his commitment to take his campaign all the way to the national convention when so-called superdelegates will finally—and for the first time, in fact—be able to cast their vote for who they believe will make the best nominee.

Six states are holding Democratic primaries this Tuesday, including California, New Mexico, New Jersey, Montana, South Dakota, and North Dakota.

Amid some speculation, bolstered by overt comments by people like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, that cable outlets or other news agencies would call the election in favor of Clinton before all the results of next Tuesday’s results are in, Sander reiterated his argument that even though he has a steep hill to climb, the race is much closer than often reported.

“It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night,” Sanders said at a press conference in California on Saturday. “Now I have heard reports that Secretary Clinton has said it’s all going to be over on Tuesday night. I have reports that the media, after the New Jersey results come in, are going to declare that it is all over. That simply is not accurate.”

What that means, he added, is that he will continue to campaign until the last votes are cast in Washington, D.C.’s primary on June 14 and will then bring his message to July’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. “[It] will be a contested convention,” he said.

On Sunday morning’s Face The Nation, Democratic Party operative David Axelrod was the latest to say that Clinton would likely “clinch” the nomination before polls close in California.

While Sanders does not deny the delegate math is not in his favor, he explained to the more 13,500 supporters at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum why he continues to believe he is the best choice to defeat Donald Trump in the general election.

Citing the consistent trends of both national and state polls showing him performing better against the billionaire reality tv star than Clinton, Sanders declared: “I hope that the delegates going to the Democratic National Convention understand that in virtually every state poll we do much better against Donald Trump than Secretary Clinton. If the delegates at the Democratic National Convention want to make sure we defeat Trump and defeat him badly we are the candidate to do that.”

And on Sunday, Sanders tweeted:

As of Saturday afternoon, according to Associated Press figures, Sanders trailed Clinton in pledged delegates by a tally of 1,769 to 1,501 — a difference of 268. Meanwhile, among the superdelegates—elected and party officials who automatically attend the convention where they vote for the candidate of their choice—Clinton has the stated support of 547 of them, compared to 46 who at this point say they back Sanders. Importantly, however, none of these superdelegates have actually “voted” and they can change their minds at any point until casting their ballot at the convention.

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And so while the real difference between the candidates is less than 300 delegates, the media often continue to report that difference as more than twice that.

Laying bare the horrors of Syria’s ongoing civil war, heartbreaking footage of a young boy rescued from the rubble following an airstrike in Aleppo has gone viral. 

Much as last year’s photos of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi—”The Boy on the Beach”—offered a stark reminder of the human toll of the refugee crisis, the images of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh—”The Boy in the Ambulance”—are forcing many to consider the devastating realities of life in war-torn Syria, where more than 250,000 people, including many children, have died in almost five years of war.

The photo and accompanying video, taken and distributed by the activist group Aleppo Media Centre, show Omran being pulled from a partially destroyed building and placed in a chair inside a brightly lit ambulance after an airstrike Wednesday evening. His face and body are covered in ash, dust, and blood. Seemingly dazed, he says nothing.

Watch the video below [warning: graphic content]:

According to news outlets, Omran was taken to a hospital, treated for head wounds, and released. It has been confirmed that though his parents and siblings were also wounded in the attack, they survived. 

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The Associated Press reports: “An hour after his rescue, the building the boy was in completely collapsed.”