Reading archive 2025-04-03

Rats in ‘heaven’ as strike buries U.K. city in 19,000 tons of trash: Birmingham officials have declared a “major incident” as a sanitation-workers strike passes three weeks — with nearly 1,000 tons of garbage piling up each day.

EPA cuts could leave small rural towns choking in smoke: The EPA’s slashing of more than $1 billion in grant funding has hit hard in Western communities that have felt climate impacts from flooding, wildfire smoke and melting permafrost.

Canadian travel to U.S. is plummeting: ‘There’s a lot of anger’: One travel analytics firm projects 4 million fewer Canadians will visit the U.S. this year compared with 2024.

America was at its Trumpiest 100 years ago. Here’s how to prevent the worst.: During WWI, America lurched toward autocracy. Resistance was minimal. - "Warren G. Harding, who succeeded Wilson, was not one of our great presidents, but he stopped censorship and began releasing political prisoners, even inviting Debs to stop in at the White House on his way home. Harding said he enjoyed the Socialist leader’s company, and, privately, he told a friend that Debs was right: The United States should never have entered the war. The frenzy gradually died away, but it left behind a scarred country, tens of thousands of wrecked lives and police forces at every level accustomed to regarding dissent as treason. In 1923, when author Upton Sinclair began giving a speech in San Pedro, California, he was arrested while reading aloud the First Amendment."

Fear of fallout from Trump tariff plan puts some Republicans in tough spot: Steep new tariffs triggered a stock market sell-off Thursday, upping pressure on Republican lawmakers, some of whom are worried about the political fallout.

Trump’s Tariffs Are Designed to Backfire: Instead of leading to reduced trade barriers, the new global tariff plan is all but guaranteed to raise them. - "[Ed. insert: the tariff rates are based on net trade imbalance, not the target's tariff regime.] The result is that there is no clear or obvious path that countries could take to get those tariffs removed even if they wanted to. Countries can remove all of their trade restrictions and still run a trade surplus. South Korea, Mexico, and Canada, for example, export more to us than they import from us despite imposing virtually no trade barriers. As The New York Times reported, 'Trump’s decision to put a 32 percent tariff on Switzerland stunned politicians and business leaders in the Alpine country. Switzerland has an open trade policy and recently abolished all industrial tariffs, including on goods from the United States, which is also its largest export market.'

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"What makes the new reciprocal tariffs all the more baffling is that a much less risky method exists to get other countries to agree to free trade. It is called a free-trade agreement. Trump ought to know. In his first term, his administration negotiated the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or 'New NAFTA,' which lowered trade barriers between America and its neighbors while requiring all parties to abide by higher labor and environmental standards. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal negotiated by the Obama administration between the U.S. and 11 countries, including Vietnam, Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, would have done something similar if Trump hadn’t pulled the U.S. out of the deal upon entering office in 2017. Those are some of the same countries that he is now trying to tariff into submission. He would have been better off remembering the art of the deal."