Jo Sakai had come to the United States after graduating from Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. After studying finance at NYU, he was attracted to Florida by advertisements from Florida’s Bureau of Immigration and the Model Land Company promising plentiful land and profitable farming opportunities. The Model Land Company was a corporation set up by developer and railroad tycoon Henry Flagler to manage the massive grants of land given by the State of Florida as an incentive for building the Florida East Coast Railway.

Sakai inspected the land available for sale and purchased one thousand acres from the Model Land Company near modern-day Boca Raton. The idea was that he would establish a colony of workers, develop a successful farming operation, and pay for the land over time. As an incentive, the Model Land Company agreed to front the money for the colony’s equipment and housing.

Jo Sakai left for Japan in March 1904 to seek willing individuals for the new proposed farming colony. By autumn he had several takers, but they had to carefully disguise their intentions to avoid disruption by the Japanese Foreign Ministry. To reduce suspicion, Sakai’s colonists told the government they needed their exit permits and passports so they could study in the United States. Once in the U.S., the colonists traveled to Florida on Henry Flagler’s dime, another sign of how eager developers were to get South Florida’s economy going. By the end of 1904, a dozen colonists were ready to work.

The Japanese newcomers called their new home “Yamato,” an ancient name for Japan itself. Getting the farming underway was slow at first. The soil was fertile, but it had never been cleared before. Months of manual labor went into preparing only a few acres for cultivation. The inhospitable climate and mosquitoes didn’t help matters.

So-called “orphan” oil and gas wells, which have been abandoned by defunct companies that cannot pay to plug them, are a growing problem in many states thanks to a recent slump in energy prices that has forced marginal operators out of business.

Adam Peltz, a senior attorney at the Environmental Defense Fund, said he heard officials from 10 states highlight their work on orphan wells at a spring meeting of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission. “It’s probably the issue that was raised by the most number of states.”

Peltz said that dealing with orphan wells is a cyclical issue — more wells become the state’s responsibility after a downturn — but it’s getting worse over time, as states struggle with a backlog of wells that dates back decades.

Nobody knows how many orphan and abandoned drilling sites litter farms, forests and backyards nationwide. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are more than a million of them. Unplugged wells can leak methane, an explosive gas, into neighborhoods and leach toxins into groundwater.

The cruelty of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), under orders from the boss in the White House, knows no bounds.

It isn’t enough that FEMA botched recovery efforts post-Hurricane Maria, has cast the blame on Puerto Ricans themselves, and that evacuees to the mainland have been living under the fear of eviction for months now. The only thing that is saving them from being tossed into the streets with no place to go has been a court order—issued by Judge Timothy S. Hillman.

Kremlin officials are in intense negotiations with their counterparts in Washington to strike at least one deal they hope will let President Donald Trump tout his summit with Vladimir Putin as a triumph that justifies steps to repair relations.

At the top of the list for the July 16 meeting in Helsinki, Finland, is Iran's role in Syria, an issue that Moscow is simultaneously negotiating with Tehran, a senior Russian official said on condition of anonymity because he's not authorized to comment on the record..

It may seem counterintuitive that the only means of saving democracy is to jettison the civility and standards that lay at its foundations. But this mistakes civility as the source of good in democracy and not the product of a system that sees and protects the equality of its citizens. The former view ― seeing empathy, reciprocity and mutual respect as ends in and of themselves rather than tools of consensus and understanding ― only leaves the door open for abuse from those who have no interest either.

If Democrats are to change the course of events, they will need to process that they, like all of us, have been utterly betrayed.

It will be difficult. It will make our politics feel more rancorous, more hostile, less conciliatory. But it would be wrong for the Democrats to seek reconciliation while the Republican Party organizes government to recognize only its ideology as legitimate, systematically assaults Democratic constituents and actively condones the abandonment of international law and the heinous human rights abuses still happening to thousands of asylum-seekers.

There can be no peace on terms that leave this order intact. It may be that the only way to reveal the better angels of their nature is to purge them of their demons first.

In a few seconds, I am going to ask you to give to my campaign. Please hear me out.

America is in a fight for its soul and my opponent Devin Nunes is at the center of the storm. He has a flagrant disregard for norms and decency.

I am running to replace him in Congress, it is going to be a tough fight but I know I can win. Unfortunately, he recently raised $2.25 million from Republican millionaire and billionaires and unless you step up I won't be able to compete with his ONSLAUGHT of negative ads this summer and fall.

I'm not taking money from big corporate donors, just regular people like you but I need you to chip in and help!

These statements are both so indistinct that I have a hard time associating them with anything, let alone socialism. Mostly, it just sounds like the left wing of the Democratic Party but without trade unions. What kind of socialism doesn’t care about the means of production and doesn’t mention unions once in a 5,000-word platform?

It’s funny. I guess what really gets me is that we already have a perfectly good term to describe people like Ocasio-Cortez (and Bernie Sanders): social democrat. That’s basically the European left, which is why Ocasio-Cortez’s platform would sound pretty ordinary if she were running for office in Sweden or Germany. It’s what I call myself if I’m talking to someone who understands what it means. But the fact that it’s foreign makes it taboo in America. Instead we make up a new term and then struggle to define exactly what it means.

But the truth is that American liberals aren’t becoming either socialists or Bernie-bots. American liberalism is simply moving once again in the direction of Europe. This is something that conservatives have been accusing us of for decades, mostly because it’s true. Our progress in that direction is slow and halting, and sometimes it just stops dead for a while, but American liberals have always admired the social democratic model of Europe. Maybe sometime soon it will become acceptable to just say so.

Myth No. 3: Illegal immigrants are coming to the U.S. to expand the gang’s reach.

According to U.S. officials, MS-13 leaders in El Salvador are sending gang members to the United States to bolster local cells. As President Trump has equated “illegal immigrants” with MS-13 members who want to “pour into and infest our Country.”

Yet only a minuscule share of undocumented immigrants who have entered the country in the past few years are linked to MS-13, according to Stephanie Leutert at the University of Texas. The overwhelming majority of those who have joined the gang in Central America have never left their countries. A Florida International University survey of mostly imprisoned gang members in El Salvador in 2016 showed that 91 percent have never been in the United States. Those who leave often do so because of family, joining the massive migration flows from Central America, not because the gang instructs or sponsors them. In many cases, they are trying to flee the group and its violence. As with other brand-name gangs that have spread in the United States, the growth of MS-13 seems to be linked more to the relocation of family groups than to a deliberate expansion plan.