Octpbr #"The Legacy," Sierra, November/December 2020.
"In March [2020] Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the COVID-19 pandemic proved that the United States needs to take mining for uranium into its own hands. It was stated that that it was 'a matter of national security.' "
"By the 1950s, [the mining company] Kerr McGee and the US government knew that uranium mining likely caused cancer and lung disease, but did not share that information with the miners." "That year, Congress passed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, which provided a one-time settlement for affected people or their surviving families."
"There are more than 1,000 abandoned uranium mines throughout the Navaho Nation. But there are no definitive federal or regional cleanup plans yet for any of the mines covered in the settlement -- mining waste is usually backfilled into the mine it was dug out of, or its interred at a newly constructed off-site facility."
"Navaho laws haven't been respected in the past. The US-Navaho Treaty of 1868 guaranteed sovereignty to the Navaho Nation, but in 1919, Native reservation lands were opened to leasing by the Interior Department anyway." "Waste from the uranium mines was often left on the ground in unmarked locations."
#Sonia Shab, "No Exit," The Nation, October 5-12, 2020.
"Around the world, policy-makers and governments recognize that as the climate crisis deepens, the marginalized communities of low-lying island nations will bear the heaviest burdens. Thanks to the hydrocarbon-fueled lifestyles of the wealthy around the world, as many as 200 million people will need to leave their homes as seas rise, deserts spread, and increasingly severe storms strike, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration."
"As the primary landmass between the United States and Haiti, the Bahamas also proved critical to efforts to prevent Haitians from reaching U.S. shores. Steeped in their own long-standing anti-Haitian bias, US policy-makers went to 'extraordinary lengths' to prevent Haitians from coming to this country, as the Migration Policy Institute put it, including sending Coast Guard boats to sweep the high seas for desperate asylum seekers and force them back to Haiti." "In the post-Dorian Bahamas, what [critical] activists called a campaign of de facto ethnic cleansing unfolded."
#Steve Coll, "Spreading Trouble," The New Yorker, October 19, 2020.
"Last February 7th, at five-thirty in the morning, Donald Trump tweeted praise for China's 'great discipline' in fighting the coronavirus and predicted that XI Jinping would be 'successful, especially as the weather starts to warm up, the virus hopefully becomes weaker and then gone.' "
After being infected by the coronavirus, and then sent to Walter Reed Hospital, Trump convinced the hospital staff to let him ride in a vehicle to great his supporters gathered near the hospital. Coll points out that at "least two Secret Service agents were required to join him in the sealed, armored vehicle, putting them at risk of exposure. It was a inane campaign stunt and a study in selfishness."
Coll says that the "essence of Trump's failure during the pandemic does not lie with his Administration's crisis management, botched as that has been; it is the result of his character." "Democracies endure because of their capacity for self-correction."
#Rachel Nuwer, "Nature Is Returning," Sierra, November/December 2020.
"Whatever the animal origin, China's extensive wildlife likely brought the virus or the person it was in contact with to a wet market in Wuhan, where public health experts think SR Cov-2 first spread."
"Exotic-animal markets in other nations with a busy wildlife trade, and a high potential for disease transmission , including Indonesia and Nigeria, remain open. Few countries have enacted meaningful new wildlife laws; the United States hasn't."
#Andrew Maroatz, "Explicit Content," The New Yorker, October 19, 2020.
"Facebook has erred on the side of allowing politicians to post whatever they want, even when it has led the company to weaken its own rules, to apply them selectively to creatively reinterpret them, or to ignore them altogether." Dave Williams, a content moderator, as said that "If that's their position, that hate speech is inherently dangerous, then how is it not more dangerous to let people use hate speech as long as they're powerful enough, or famous enough, or in charge of a whole army." " 'That's a false choice,' Rashad Robinson has said: 'Facebook already has all that power. They're just using it poorly.' He pointed out that Facebook consistently removes recruitment propaganda by ISIS and other Islamist groups. but that it has been far less aggressive in cracking down on white-supremacist groups.
"One of Facebook's main content-moderation hubs outside the U.S. is in Dublin, where, every day, moderators review hundreds of thousands of reports of potential violations from Europe." "Normally, after a Facebook page violated the rules multiple times, the page is banned. But, in the case of Britain First and [its leader], Tommy Robinson, the ban has never come." Facebook does not consider it to be a hate organization. Facebook defines hate organizations as those that advance hatred as one of their primary objectives, or that they have leaders who have been convicted of hate-related offenses.
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