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Overlooked Stories from Around the Web

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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.

WaterBear.Com Great Selection of Planet Positive Videos along with suggested Actions

America Is a Republic, Not a Democracy’ Is a Dangerous—And Wrong—Argument Senator Mike Lee of Utah have taken to reminding the public that “we’re not a democracy.” It is quaint that so many Republicans, embracing a president who routinely tramples constitutional norms, have suddenly found their voice in pointing out that, formally, the country is a republic. There is some truth to this insistence. But it is mostly disingenuous. The Constitution was meant to foster a complex form of majority rule, not enable minority rule.

The founding generation was deeply skeptical of what it called “pure” democracy and defended the American experiment as “wholly republican.” To take this as a rejection of democracy misses how the idea of government by the people, including both a democracy and a republic, was understood when the Constitution was drafted and ratified. It misses, too, how we understand the idea of democracy today.

The ‘false positives’ scandal that felled Colombia’s military hero

When the Colombian army defeated the Farc guerrillas, ending decades of conflict, General Mario Montoya was hailed a national hero. But then it was revealed that thousands of ‘insurgents’ executed by the army were in fact innocent men

Newspaper front pages around U.S. mark Biden, Harris win in history

A front page for history: Joe Biden and Kamala Harris celebrated a long-fought victory on Saturday night. In his first speech to the nation as president-elect, Biden promised change and healing.

'They created a false image': how the Reagans fooled America

A new docuseries studies the damaging reign of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and the insidious myth-making that still surrounds their legacy.

The Reagans, a new four-part documentary airing on Showtime, pinpoints this flair for PR as the genesis of Ronald Reagan’s swift rise in government and the secret to his administration’s sweeping popularity within the Republican party. The 40th commander-in-chief and his first lady, Nancy Reagan, exercised a then-unprecedented degree of control over how they were seen, and for it, they were anointed as the new saviors of the rightwing way of life during their stint in the White House during the ‘80s. “More than any modern president, the myth-making around Ronald and Nancy Reagan has been extensive and effective,” series director Matt Tyrnauer tells the Guardian from his home in Los Angeles. “They created a false image that doesn’t conform with reality, one that is only now being fully examined.”

NY Times Article CORRUPTION ANGER CHAOS INCOMPETENCE LIES DECAY Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the greatest threat to American democracy since World War II. Mr. Trump’s ruinous tenure already has gravely damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed the public interest to the profitability of his business and political interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds.	TIME article by Charlotte Alter October, 2020 How a Road Trip Through America's Battlegrounds Revealed a Nation Plagued by Misinformation But there was a darker strain. For every two people who offered a rational and informed reason for why they were supporting Biden or Trump, there was another–almost always a Trump supporter–who offered an explanation divorced from reality. You could call this persistent style of untethered reasoning “unlogic.” Unlogic is not ignorance or stupidity; it is reason distorted by suspicion and misinformation, an Orwellian state of mind that arranges itself around convenient fictions rather than established facts.	THE GUARDIAN by Emily Holden, Jimmy Tobias and Alvin Chang Mon 26 Oct 2020 Revealed: the full extent of Trump's 'meat cleaver' assault on US wilderness While the US government is supposed to be an impartial arbiter of how public lands should be used, Trump has stacked the administration with former fossil-fuel lobbyists and conservative activists. Often, the department sells access to these lands at rock bottom prices and in places that are sacred to tribal communities, important to imperiled animals, and critical to prevent runaway climate change.
A Completely Comprehensive Voting Guide	What Have We Learned in Thirty Years of Covering Climate Change?	Newsom’s New Climate Plan: Protect Land and Oceans, Sequester Carbon Britain, Canada, EU throw weight behind 2030 biodiversity protection goal