#In Syria, the United States "is only one player in a battlefield tat has included hundreds of armed Syrian factions: Russian, Iranian, Turkish, British, and French troops; Al Qaeda and the Islamic State; Hezbollah and Iraqi militias and Russian and Afghan mercenaries; and Saudi and Qatari funders and arms suppliers." "The unofficial U.S. policy has been that the more people battling the Islamic State the better." [1]
#Martin Garbus tells us what he saw at an Immigration Detention Center. "Nearly every women seeking asylum that I met there came from the Northern Triangle of Central America: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador." [2]
One of Garbus's most vivid observations was that, often, "bathroom breaks are not granted, or not in time, so both women and children soil themselves" He describes the prison-like detention as an attempt to persuade these immigrants to give up before they are even interviewed by an asylum officer."
#This past October, the World Wildlife Fund announced that the populations of thousands of vertebrate species around the world have declined by an average of 60 percent since 1970. "Plants and animals are disappearing at rates comparable to past extinctions." "Forty-five years later, the ESA remains the best and most effective law for wildlife conservation in the world." "The power of the ESA is that it safeguards not only the 1,618 domestic species currently listed but also their habitats." [3]
#Abortion Facts
6 - Number of weeks after which an abortion is now illegal in five states -- part of a recent wave of so-called heartbeat bills.
4-7 - Number of weeks it takes most women to realize they're pregnant.
50% - Percentage of women in Wyoming who live more than 160 miles from the nearest abortion clinic.
1 - Number of abortion clinics that Missouri and Mississippi each have.
29 - Number of states that restrict insurance companies from covering abortion services.
O - Number of states that provide "total access" to comprehensive reproductive health care, according to NARAL's metrics. [4]
#Yemen's Dire Condition
77% - Percentage of Yemen's population in need of humanitarian assistance.
5M - Yemenis on the brink of famine,or more than one in six residents.
1.4M - Suspected cholera cases in Yemen since the violence started to escalate in 2016.
85,000 - Yemeni children who died from disease or starvation from April 2015 to October 2018.
19,278 - Saudi air attacks on Yemen from 2015 to January 2019.
$68.2B - Value of US arms deals with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates since 2015.
1 - Joint resolutions passed by Congress to end the US involvement in Yemen (vetoed by President Trump). [5]
#Some Taxation Effects
$266M - Tax revenue from Colorado pot sales in 2018 that went toward funding public-health services.
$850M - Annual revenue raised via a new Ohio gas tax that will go into fixing the state's roads.
503K - Number of handguns sold in California each year that may be subject to a gun tax to fund violence-intervention programs.
1.5C - Per-ounce soda tax in Philadelphia used to fund preschools and parks, though the tax has been criticized for targeting the poor.
$650M - Estimated revenue from New York City's abandoned pied-a-terre tax that could have been used to fix the subways. [6]
ADDENDUMS:
*Last month the Pentagon announced two military contracts worth $976 million for border wall construction.
*The number of migrants required to report to ICE has jumped by 26 percent to 2.9 million.
*Last year saw 151 exonerations in the U.S., in which people were cleared of convictions for crimes they did not commit, according to the National Registry of Executions data published April 9. The 151 served 1,639 years in prison, a record, averaging 10.9 years per exoneree.
Footnotes:
[1] Shane Bauer, "Behind the Lines," Mother Jones, May/June 2019.
[2] Martin Garbus, "What I saw at an Immigration Detention Center," The Nation, April 22, 2019.
[3] Rachel Nawer, "What the World Knows." Sierra, March/April 2019.
[4] Isabel Cristo, "By the Numbers," The Nation, May 20/27, 2019.
[5] Edwin Aponte, "By the Numbers," The Number, May 13, 2019.
[6] Liz Boyd, "By the Numbers," The Nation, April 29, 2019.
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