China's Contaminated Soil, and Its Toxic Rice Bowl
The Economist
After Donald Trump ditched the Paris climate accord, many praised China for sticking with it. Yet anointing it a champion of greenery is premature to say the least. Its air and water are notoriously foul, and it's not transparent about such problems. Less noticed but just as alarming, its soil is poisoned too: acreage equal to Mexico's arable farmland. Cleanup cost: $1,000 trillion. That's not a typo. That's more than all the wealth in the world. Pollution Is Endangering America's Inmates
Truthout and Earth Island Journal
Environmental hazards are threatening one of society's most marginalized groups: the incarcerated. According to this new investigation, prisons are often located in areas with known environmental hazards. Nearly 600 federal and state prisons are within three miles of a Superfund site on the National Priorities List, and more than 100 of those are just one mile from a site. 'Who Told You to Tear My House Down?' Costly City Screwups
The Virginian-Pilot
In August 2014, city contractors came by to demolish Cecelia Cuffee's rental home while the 76-year-old was at work. Oops. The city of Chesapeake, Va., paid her $31,000 for the mistake. But that's just a drop in the bucket of the compensation money local governments have to pay out when public employees harm people and property. Liberals Debate Expanding the 'Deep State' to Undercut Trump
Washington Examiner
Resist President Trump from within or without? At the American Constitution Society's convention, attendees were divided, but a live option was expanding the opaque workings of the so-called "deep state." Ex-Justice Department lawyer William Yeomans called the Trump presidency "an assault on the federal bureaucracy." And UCLA law professor Jon Michaels said: "I kind of embrace this notion of the ‘deep state.'" A Trump Activist, a False Tweet and a Runaway Story
New York Times
When it comes to "fake news," an erroneous tweet gets around the world before the truth has time to put its pants on. One, by a pro-Trump activist, put words vindicating the President into former FBI director James Comey's mouth. It was widely circulated by sympathetic outlets. And it's a case study in how bunk can spin the news cycle. Climate 'Hunger Game': One Town Won Relocation, One Didn't
Quartz
The residents of Isle de Jean Charles, La., and Newtok, Alaska, have two big things in common: a cultural attachment to their land, and the peril of rising waters. The coastal communities both competed for federal "resilience" funding to relocate their entire towns, and Isle de Jean Charles won it. What happens next holds lessons for 13.1 billion Americans living in coastal homes projected to be underwater by 2100. Investigative Classics: Making of a Homegrown Terrorist, 1970
United Press International
The latest installment in RealClearInvestigation's weekly feature on journalism's greatest hits: It harks back a generation ago, when radicals, often young whites from affluent families, used bombs and other weapons to foment social change. In a Pulitzer-winning profile, Lucinda Franks and Thomas Powers tell the story of Diana Oughton of the Weather Underground, longtime girlfriend of Bill Ayers, who died when a pipe bomb she was assembling to murder army officers exploded in a Greenwich Village townhouse. |
