Varied Subjects, Starting With China's Belt and Road Initiative

Mike Ives, "The Train and the Swamp,"  Sierra, January/February 2020.
"The multi-billion dollar project, known as the East Coast Rail Link, one of the many that fall within China's Belt and Road Initiative, a colonial-style endeavor that links infrastructure loans with geostrategic diplomacy. The BRI is part of China's larger effort to project its own institutions as alternatives to the Western-led order represented by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund."

"It would be difficult to overestimate the BRI's scale. The project, which launched in 2013, would end up involving as many as 125 countries and costing $8 trillion by 2049. Top Chinese officials have described it as a vast network of roads, rail line, and maritime shipping routes that will radiate outward from China's land and sea borders like a spiderweb. Yet while China has made strides recently to flatten its greenhouse gas emissions, some climate experts fear that the BRI's sheer size will inevitably boost resource extraction and fossil fuel consumption. Yet a recent study in 'Conservative Biology' found that proposed BRI road and rail routes would overlap with biodiversity hot spots for over 4,138 animal and 7,371 plant species across Asia and Africa."

Diane Dimond, "We must find, free the innocent people in prison," The Albuquerque Journal, December 7, 2019.
"The National Registry of Exonerations keeps track of those who have been set free, and reports that since 1989 there have been  at least 2,522 convicts officially exonerated. The duration of their unwarranted imprisonment totals more than 22,300 years."

Philadelphia's District Attorney Larry Kramer won election in 2018, and "since then his CIU (Conviction Integrity Unit) has enabled 10 wrongly convicted murder defendants to walk free and have their records erased." "In Detroit, Michigan the prosecutor's Conviction Integrity Unit, set up two years ago, has helped secure the release of 11 former prisoners. But now, Texas, New York, Illinois, and California lead the way in ferreting out and overturning inaccurate convictions."

New York Times reporter Rukamine Callimachi says that according to two U.S. officials, the evidence for Solemaine's assassination is "razor-thin." Three discrete facts: 1. his pattern of travel; 2. his request for the Iranian Supreme Leader's approach for an unspecified "operation;"  and 3. Iran's supposed "increasingly bellicose position towards American interests in Iraq." In Trump's menu of options, killing Solemaine was the "far-out option." CNN's legal analyst says that "if this thread is accurate than both the policy and legal justifications for the strike are about to crumble."

The Hill-Harris X survey funds 58% of respondents said Trump acted improperly, compared to 42% who said he acted properly. 62% of Independents disapproved of Trump's action.

Barry Yeoman, "Raising a Stink," The Nation, January 13/20, 2020.
North Carolina's "2,300 swine operations are responsible for most of the 10 billion gallons of wet livestock waste generated in North Carolina, according to a 2016 analysis by the Environmental    Working Group and Waterkeeper Alliance, an international clean water group. There are roughly 3,300 waste lagoons."

"A 2014 study concluded that African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos are more likely than whites to live within three miles of a large swine operation. Those farms quintupled the state's hog populations over four decades, to 9 million today."

"In 2017, lawmakers [in North Carolina] voted to limit future nuisance damages, leaving the industry on the book only for the diminished sale or rental value of a  plaintiff's home." Elizabeth Haddix, a managing attorney at the North  Carolina regional office of the lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, has said: 'The right to use and enjoy your property without unreasonable interference -- that's been common law since before we were the United States.' "