Mark Rifkin, a onetime football player, is tackling an alleged Silicon Valley monopoly.

It was the first day of his first job out of law school, and Mark Rifkin had to stop by a federal court for what was supposed to be a mere scheduling hearing for his midsize law firm in Philadelphia. When the judge arrived, though, Rifkin was asked to provide not a calendar but an argument — the key argument for why his firm believed the case should be dismissed. “So I argued,” says Rifkin, his 6-foot-5 frame hunched over a coffee table at a trendy café in Washington three decades later, “and won.”

Rifkin, 58, has a competitive streak. The former shot-putter and offensive lineman at Princeton University considered the NFL — even signing an agent — before tackling the law. With an uncanny calm under pressure, he’s become one of the nation’s foremost antitrust lawyers, named both a “Titan of the Plaintiffs Bar” by Law360 and a “trailblazer” by the National Law Journal. He challenges monopolies in any form, from representing college football players suing the NCAA for pay, to consumers forced to pay royalties for using the song Happy Birthday. The latter, called a “lawsuit for the ages” by The New York Times, led to a $14 million settlement and the popular song moving to the public domain.

Energy, housing and transport projects dominate over natural habitats.

Late last year Seychelles issued the world’s first government bond dedicated to marine conservation — a so-called blue bond, aimed at supporting sustainable fisheries.

But an initial round of congratulations soon gave way to nagging questions among investors: Why was the issuance so small, at $15 million, and why had it taken so long?

Capital market instruments designed to improve the natural environment are more than a decade old. The World Bank issued the first “green” bonds in 2008, and the market has since grown steadily, expected to top $250 billion in issuance by the end of 2019, according to the Climate Bonds Initiative. But amid all this accelerating activity, the planet’s wildlife — on land and in the oceans — has been mostly left behind.

Get to know the candidates — and how they might battle it out this week.

The top 20 Democratic presidential contenders will gather on Wednesday and Thursday in Miami for the first formal debates of the 2020 campaign season. And while general election debates rarely move the needle for one candidate or another, primary debates — which are more about choosing a candidate and less about preexisting partisan allegiance — have been shown in some studies to have a polling impact comparable to the Iowa caucuses.

The candidates are starting to get chippy — witness the rising heat on front-runner and former Vice President Joe Biden — and the debate stage is where we’ll likely see the first real punches of the campaign season thrown. Debates are also an opportunity for lesser-known candidates to break onto a wider radar for the first time. They’ll all be playing for a memorable riff, not just for the audience tuning in at 9 pm ET/6 pm PT each night on NBC, MSNBC and Telemundo but also for the replays across cable news and Facebook feeds in the following days. Here’s a brief look at the 20 candidates.