Lost in the uproar over silica sand mining is a serious threat to Minnesota’s environmental-review procedures with potentially far-reaching implications. And it appears no one in state government or our congressional delegation is taking this threat seriously.
In the historic Mississippi River town of Wabasha, a clever and aggressive Canadian sand company found a way to flout Minnesota’s environmental-review measures. They leased land from a railroad and then claimed exemption from state and local review, using the railroad’s federal right of pre-emption over state and local zoning laws. This longstanding privilege basically says that state and local governments cannot restrict a railroad’s right to operate in interstate commerce.
Over the past couple of decades, Big Tobacco has come under fire for selling products that kill people. Now, leading cigarette producers like Philip Morris and Reynolds American are moving into the rapidly growing electronic cigarette business, touting the battery-powered nicotine inhalers as a safer alternative to traditional cigarettes.
Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians flooded into the streets on the first anniversary of Islamist President Mohamed Mursi's inauguration on Sunday to demand that he resign in the biggest challenge so far to rule by his Muslim Brotherhood.
Since journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed the existence of the National Security Agency’s PRISM domestic surveillance program, he and his source, the whistleblower Edward Snowden, have come in for a series of ugly attacks.
