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Important and Overlooked Stories on the Web

Canada's trucker protesters aren't who Americans might think

Carlson, Trump and Musk see something monumental here. They're wrong. Whatever the facile comparisons, familiar symbols and fearful words, this Canadian protest isn't a grassroots revolt or even a Prairie brushfire. More likely, it's a winter carnival, ephemeral, a flaring of anger -- and one that is very, very Canadian.

The US senate presents a long-term threat to US democracy

The filibuster has consistently been an instrument of white Christian domination: during the 20th century, it was used predominantly to block civil rights legislation and measures such as anti-lynching bills. However .... Let’s be specific about how undemocratic an institution this is – something that is best captured in numbers: in the current 50:50 Senate, Democratic senators represent 40 million more voters; by about 2040, 70% of the country will be represented by just 30 senators, while less than one-third of the electorate will get to determine 70 out of 100 members of the Senate.

Carter warns America 'teeters on the brink of a widening abyss' in stark op-ed ahead of January 6

By Shawna Mizelle and Colin McCullough, CNN 1/05/2021

"I now fear that what we have fought so hard to achieve globally -- the right to free, fair elections, unhindered by strongman politicians who seek nothing more than to grow their own power -- has become dangerously fragile at home," said Carter, who in his post-presidency started the Carter Center, a nonprofit that monitors free elections around the globe.

It's Past Time For Democrats To Defy the Supreme Court

  The year 1981 was a big one for court-stripping—or, as it’s sometimes called, jurisdiction-stripping. No fewer than 30 pieces of legislation were introduced that year into the US House of Representatives by Republican congressmen that included court-stripping provisions. It was a huge topic of discussion and legal activity among Republicans.

          And a young lawyer working in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, an up-and-comer named John Roberts, was hot on the trail. …

‘We will all die’: In Kenya, prolonged drought takes heavy toll

Since September, much of Kenya’s north has received less than 30 percent of normal rainfall – the worst short-rain season recorded in decades, according to the Famine Early Warning Systems Network. The lack of rainfall has wiped out pastures and exacerbated food and water shortages.

It wasn’t always like this. While residents such as Adow are used to lean times when faced with the effects of droughts – when maize becomes their only meal, the distance to find water extends, their animals become so weak their bones poke from underneath their skin – they are also accustomed to the eventual return of rainfall and, along with it, greener pastures, healthier animals and fewer financial troubles.

The 2021 Made in America Holiday Gift Guide

By shopping Made in America this holiday season, you can help strengthen American manufacturing and support good factory jobs. But best of all, these American-made gift ideas are just really cool! We think there’s something for everyone on your list, but if you still can’t find what you’re looking for, check out our Made in America Directory or previous gift guides, which are linked below. And don’t forget to share the gift guide with family and friends, and on social media using the hashtag #MadeinUSAGifts.

I was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death. We need to do more to help exonerees.

There are nearly 2,900 exonerees in the United States. Many are the lucky ones who had DNA available in their case. I lost 17 years of my life, but I’ve lost more than just hours and days. I lost an innocent man who was my husband; I missed birthdays and moments that can never be replicated. My life is dedicated to helping others who have faced wrongful incarceration.

Why the WHO approval of the first malaria vaccine is a big deal

But progress is happening. On Wednesday, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced it has given its stamp of approval to a vaccine against malaria for children for the first time, after encouraging results from a pilot study that has reached hundreds of thousands of children across parts of sub-Saharan Africa since 2019. The vaccine, called Mosquirix and made by GlaxoSmithKline, is far from perfect — it produces about a 30 percent reduction in severe malaria in fully vaccinated children, which is lifesaving but smaller than would be hoped for.

U.S. retail operations got lean by making CEOs fat, and now everyone is paying the price

For an on-the-ground example, see Costco. Throughout the pandemic, even as photographers snapped shots of the empty racks at other retailers, Costco has done a phenomenal job of keeping its stores operating not just as well as they did before the pandemic, but better. Same store sales are up 16% in the last year, and Costco managed this while at the same time increasing their own online sales by 44%. It’s done that, in part, by keeping employee turnover at a minimum, which comes from years of paying its employees well, offering them benefits, and respecting their health concerns during the pandemic. If “lean” companies are now finding themselves unable to keep the shelves stocked, Costco is fat and happy.

The Most Detailed Map of Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution in the U.S.

It’s not a secret that industrial facilities emit hazardous air pollution. A new ProPublica analysis shows for the first time just how much toxic air pollution they emit — and how much the chemicals they unleash could be elevating cancer risk in their communities. ProPublica’s analysis of five years of modeled EPA data identified more than 1,000 toxic hot spots across the country and found that an estimated 250,000 people living in them may be exposed to levels of excess cancer risk that the EPA deems unacceptable.

Beware: Gaia may destroy humans before we destroy the Earth

This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics. It is impossible to understand these subjects in isolation because they are interconnected. The same is true of living organisms that greatly influence the global environment. The composition of the Earth’s atmosphere and the temperature of the surface is actively maintained and regulated by the biosphere, by life, by what the ancient Greeks used to call Gaia.

Earth is already becoming unlivable. Will governments act to stop this disaster from getting worse?

These temperature thresholds will again be the focus of upcoming UN climate talks at the COP26 summit in Scotland as countries variously dawdle or scramble to avert climate catastrophe. But the single digit numbers obscure huge ramifications at stake. “We have built a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore,” as Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University, puts it.

How natural disasters benefit rich people but make the poor poorer – an illustrated story

Government programs that help people recover their wealth after natural disasters end up reinforcing inequality

Pandora papers: biggest ever leak of offshore data exposes financial secrets of rich and powerful

The secret deals and hidden assets of some of the world’s richest and most powerful people have been revealed in the biggest trove of leaked offshore data in history.

Branded the Pandora papers, the cache includes 11.9m files from companies hired by wealthy clients to create offshore structures and trusts in tax havens such as Panama, Dubai, Monaco, Switzerland and the Cayman Islands.

They expose the secret offshore affairs of 35 world leaders, including current and former presidents, prime ministers and heads of state. They also shine a light on the secret finances of more than 300 other public officials such as government ministers, judges, mayors and military generals in more than 90 countries.

The myths about slavery that still hold America captive

The idea that an institution that existed for 250 years and has only not existed for a little over 150 years. An institution in which there are people who are alive today who were loved, raised by, and in community with people born into chattel slavery. The idea that that would have nothing to do with what the contemporary landscape of inequality looks like today is morally and intellectually disingenuous.

America faces supply-chain disruption and shortages. Here’s why

The specific policies that led to our supply constrained world are lax antitrust, deregulation of basic infrastructure industries like shipping, railroads and trucking, disinvestment in domestic production, and trade policy emphasizing finance over manufacturing......Take biopharmaceutical equipment necessary to make vaccines. There’s a shortage of fancy plastic bags that you mix chemicals in to make medicine, which isn’t surprising in a pandemic. But the reason for the shortage isn’t just Covid but a merger wave; over the last 15 years, four firms bought up the biopharmaceutical equipment industry, without any antitrust agency taking meaningful action. These firms now have market power, and dominate their competitors, by ensuring their bags can only interoperate with their specific mixing machines. It’s like not having enough Keurig coffee machine pods; the shortage isn’t the coffee, it’s the artificial bottleneck used to lock in customers.......Ocean shipping is the same. The 1997 Ocean Shipping Reform Act legalized secret rebates and led to a merger wave. The entire industry has now consolidated globally into three giant alliances that occasionally crash their too-big-to-sail ships into the side of the Suez canal.

Ranked-choice voting is the best fix for our democratic crisis

“A complicated, complex field simplified with a simple trip to the ballot box, at a fraction of the cost of a full-fledged runoff"

Granted, there are a lot of reasons why the Electoral College’s time has long since passed. For instance, it was written into the Constitution in an effort to placate Southern states who wanted their large numbers of slaves to count in their populations. As most of us know, the Northern states were unwilling to count slaves at all. They needed the Southern states for the new government to be viable, so they agreed to let slaves count as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives......Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight estimated that Joe Biden would not have been favored to win the Electoral College unless he won the popular vote by at least 3-4%. Silver also concluded that Biden would have needed to win the popular vote by at least 4-5% in order to close off any realistic path for Trump to win........

Bitcoin miners align with fossil fuel firms, alarming environmentalists

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies use blockchain technology, essentially a shared database of transactions, where entries must be confirmed and encrypted. The network is secured by “miners” who use powerful computers to compete in an enormous guessing game that ultimately verifies the transactions. If a computer “wins” the game, it’s rewarded with a newly created bitcoin, currently worth about $40,000. The process consumes a lot of electricity, and the computers generate a lot of heat, which means they require industrial cooling systems that need even more energy.

Flying Microchips The Size Of A Sand Grain Could Be Used For Population Surveillance'

The devices don't have a motor, but engineers were instead inspired by the maple tree's free-falling propeller seeds — technically known as samara fruit. They optimized the aerodynamics of the microfliers so that "as these structures fall through the air, the interaction between the air and those wings cause a rotational motion that creates a very stable, slow, falling velocity," said John A. Rogers, who led the development of the devices.

How Trump with Pence's Help Planned to Overthrow the Election

If Eastman seems like he must be some radical character from outside the ranks of the Republican mainstream, he’s not. Eastman is a former clerk for Clarence Thomas, the former dean of Chapman University School of Law (a private law school for those whose primary qualification is having enough cash to pay the tuition—i.e. Hugh Hewitt’s alma mater), and is the founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the conservative Claremont Institute. Claremont, as The Daily Beast reported in July of 2020, “has arguably done more than any other group to build a philosophical case for Trump’s brand of conservatism.” And what is that case? As Slate explained one month later, Claremont “masquerades as an intellectual salon of the right, but it is really just a racist fever swamp.”

‘Havana syndrome ’ and the mystery of the microwaves

Then Ambassador Stoessel, himself, fell ill - with bleeding of the eyes as one of his symptoms. In a now declassified 1975 phone call to the Soviet ambassador to Washington, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger linked Stoessel's illness to microwaves, admitting "we are trying to keep the thing quiet". Stoessel died of leukaemia at the age of 66. "He decided to play the good soldier", and not make a fuss, his daughter told the BBC.  

Adding Rock Dust to Soil Can Capture Carbon

BY SUSAN COSIER • SEPTEMBER 2, 2021 Yale Environment360

The hemp field experiments go beyond testing which amendments increase yields and sequester carbon and examine how much rock dust should be applied for best results. Some sections got 20 tons of rock dust per acre, while others got 40, allowing the researchers to get a more fine-tuned picture of the relationship between the dust, the soil, and the crops. The research adds to a growing body of scientific work showing the potential for these soil amendments to become one of the many measures needed to help solve our climate crisis.

Economists' erroneous estimates of damages from climate change

Here we review the empirical work done by economists and show that it severely underestimates damages from climate change by committing several methodological errors, including neglecting tipping points, and assuming that economic sectors not exposed to the weather are insulated from climate change. Most fundamentally, the influential Integrated Assessment Model DICE is shown to be incapable of generating an economic collapse, regardless of the level of damages. Given these flaws, economists' empirical estimates of economic damages from global warming should be rejected as unscientific, and models that have been calibrated to them, such as DICE, should not be used to evaluate economic risks from climate change, or in the development of policy to attenuate damages.

U.S. boarding schools for Indians had a hidden agenda: Stealing land’

This is because the U.S. schools had a very specific purpose: They helped the government acquire Indian lands. Beginning with Carlisle in Pennsylvania in 1879 and ending with the Sherman Institute in California in 1903, the U.S. government operated 25 off-reservation boarding schools. (Some religious denominations also opened their own mission schools.) At the same time, a massive dispossession took place in the form of the General Allotment Act, which authorized the president to survey and divide Indian lands. Boarding schools, designed to reeducate Indian youth who would no longer have a tribal homeland, went hand in hand with this genocidal policy.

Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth’

Book Review Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, Jason Stanford

Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos--Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels--scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over.

Too hot to work: the dire impact of extreme heat on outdoor US jobs’

Southern states will face the largest number of days when working outside is all but impossible. In Louisiana, for example, workers already lose about $1,000 in wages because of days when it’s too hot to work. That figure could increase to nearly $5,000 due to 34 days worth of lost work time annually.

IPCC climate report: Earth is warmer than it’s been in 125,000 years’

Modern society’s continued dependence on fossil fuels is warming the world at a pace that is unprecedented in the past 2,000 years — and its effects are already apparent as record droughts, wildfires and floods devastate communities worldwide — according to a landmark report from the United Nations on the state of climate science. The assessment from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says things are poised to get worse if greenhouse-gas emissions continue, but also makes it clear that the future of the planet depends in large part on the choices that humanity takes today.

Toyota is quietly pushing Congress to slow the shift to electric vehicles’

By Andrew J. Hawkins@andyjayhawk Jul 26, 2021 The Verge

The company came under fire recently after it was revealed that it was the largest corporate donor to Republican lawmakers who objected to the certification of the 2020 presidential election. A majority of those politicians also dispute the scientific consensus on climate change. Toyota initially defended the contributions, but then later said it would halt them. You know things are bad for the company when a Toyota spokesperson has to confirm to the Times that the automaker does indeed believe that climate change is real.

The Seas Are Rising. Could Oysters Help?’

By Eric Klinenberg August 2, 2021 The New Yorker

“A lot of coastal infrastructure lacks surface complexity,” Pippa Brashear, one of Orff’s colleagues at scape, told me. “It’s mostly hard walls.” The scape project will be the opposite. “If you put on a scuba suit and swim around Living Breakwaters, you’ll see something that looks like an oyster reef, with lots of nooks and crannies,” she said. “It’s designed to be messy, with lots of little critters, invertebrates like tunicates, really colorful sponges, young sea bass and striped bass and silversides darting around and finding places to hide. Then we’ll have the oysters, hopefully tons of them. It’ll be teeming with life.”

It could feed the world’: amaranth, a health trend 8,000 years old that survived colonization’

Cecilia Nowell in Albuquerque, New Mexico Aug 7th The Guardian

Indigenous women in North and Central America are coming together to share ancestral knowledge of amaranth, a plant booming in popularity as a health food.

Americas Bolivia's lake Poopo dries up and scientists fear refill unlikely’

Scientists say the one-time lake, which sprawls across Bolivia's sun-drenched, high-altitude altiplano, has fallen victim to decades of water diversion for regional irrigation needs. And a warmer, drier climate has made its recovery increasingly unlikely.

Environmental impact of bottled water ‘up to 3,500 times greater than tap water’

Research led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) found that if the city’s population were all to drink bottled water, this would result in a 3,500 times higher cost of resource extraction than if they all drank tap water, at $83.9m (£60.3m)a year.

For Billion-Dollar COVID Vaccines, Basic Government-Funded Science Laid the Groundwork

The idea of creating a vaccine with messenger RNA, or mRNA—the substance that converts DNA into proteins—goes back decades. Early efforts to create mRNA vaccines failed, however, because the raw RNA was destroyed before it could generate the desired response. Our innate immune systems evolved to kill RNA strands because that’s what many viruses are.

Why are so many babies dying of Covid-19 in Brazil?

More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are now at their peak. But despite the overwhelming evidence that Covid-19 rarely kills young children, in Brazil 1,300 babies have died from the virus. One doctor refused to test Jessika Ricarte's one-year-old son for Covid, saying his symptoms did not fit the profile of the virus. Two months later he died of complications from the disease.

How the Supreme Court laid the path for Georgia's new election law

And at another time, before the Roberts Court enhanced state latitude in a series of rulings, legislators might have hedged before enacting policies from new voter identification requirements, to a prohibition on third-party collection of ballots to a rule against non-poll workers providing food or water to voters waiting in lines.

From Crisis to Reform: A Call to Strengthen America’s Battered Democracy

After experiencing a gradual decline in respect for political rights and civil liberties over the past decade, the United States is now facing an acute crisis for democracy.

New stars on the American flag? Fresh hope as Puerto Rico and DC push for statehood

But with the impetus of last summer’s protests against racial injustice, and the election of a Democratic president, one of those territories – Puerto Rico – is aiming to become the 51st state of the union. A parallel effort by Washington, District of Columbia (DC), is also closer than ever to its similar goal.

Two of India’s richest men face farmers’ ire over new laws

Two of India’s richest men have landed in an unlikely controversy over farming laws, becoming targets of protesters who allege the tycoons have benefited from their close links to Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The new farm legislation, passed in September, will allow private companies to buy produce directly from farmers, moving from the decades-old system of state-run wholesale buyers and markets that guaranteed a minimum support price. India’s top court last week barred the implementation of the law until the court decides on the matter.

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

Major changes in the biosphere are directly linked to the growth of human systems (summarized in Figure 1). While the rapid loss of species and populations differs regionally in intensity (Ceballos et al., 2015, 2017, 2020; Díaz et al., 2019), and most species have not been adequately assessed for extinction risk (Webb and Mindel, 2015), certain global trends are obvious. Since the start of agriculture around 11,000 years ago, the biomass of terrestrial vegetation has been halved (Erb et al., 2018), with a corresponding loss of >20% of its original biodiversity (Díaz et al., 2019), together denoting that >70% of the Earth's land surface has been altered by Homo sapiens (IPBES, 2019). There have been >700 documented vertebrate (Díaz et al., 2019) and ~600 plant (Humphreys et al., 2019) species extinctions over the past 500 years, with many more species clearly having gone extinct unrecorded (Tedesco et al., 2014). Population sizes of vertebrate species that have been monitored across years have declined by an average of 68% over the last five decades (WWF, 2020), with certain population clusters in extreme decline (Leung et al., 2020), thus presaging the imminent extinction of their species

Bellingcat breaks stories that newsrooms envy — using methods newsrooms avoid

by Elahe Izadi and Paul Farhi Jan. 9, 2021

The investigative collaborative — which relies on both paid and volunteer researchers combing through “open-source” digital data available to anyone with the right searching skills — has been responsible for several eye-popping scoops: pinning the crash of a Malaysian airliner in Ukraine to a Russian missile, unmasking spies supposedly behind the poisoning of a Russian double agent in England and dissecting the racist motives of the Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque mass shooter.

These wild lands in California and the West may soon get federal protection

LA Times SAMMY ROTHSTAFF DEC. 10, 20206 AM

But that’s not the end of the story. There are still legions of activists working to get the bill across the finish line. They’ll keep at it when the next Congress is seated in January, with an eye toward protecting 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.

America's Vaccine Rollout Disaster

It’s happening all over again. For months, Americans who despaired about the country’s coronavirus-suppression efforts looked desperately to the arrival of a vaccine for a kind of pandemic deliverance. Now that it has arrived, miraculously fast, we are failing utterly to administer it with anything like the urgency the pace of dying requires — and, perhaps most maddeningly, failing in precisely the same way as we did earlier in the year. That is, out of apparent, near-total indifference.

A huge study of 50 years of tax cuts for the wealthy suggests 'trickle-down' economics makes inequality worse. <embed>https://www.businessinsider.com/tax-cuts-rich-trickle-down-income-inequality-study-2020-12?fbclid=IwAR1ppv6ngBVFRDNuNAeDpCrsezYPPt25Gaap_f0G_8f6fmTTu7vmCaCSaFY </embed>

"Our analysis finds strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment" in the short and long term, the researchers wrote.After major tax cuts for the rich were introduced, the top 1% share of pretax national income increased by almost 1 percentage point, they found.