Capping off a busy day at the White House, President Trump has issued a posthumous pardon to Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion, for a 1913 conviction of violating the Mann Act. His arrest and imprisonment were for the crime of being a black man transporting a white woman across state lines.

Flanked by Sylvester Stallone and heavyweight boxers, Pres Trump signed "full pardon" for the late Jack Johnson, who served 10 months in prison for violating the Mann Act. a conviction, said @POTUS, "many view as a racially motivated injustice." pic.twitter.com/YvMU4bpUmr

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) May 24, 2018

The story of Johnson, who died in a car wreck in 1946, is a long and twisting tale of a talented, complex, and flamboyant man set against the open racism of his day.
Washington Post:

It did not help matters that Johnson was known for flamboyantly flouting turn-of-the-century America’s restrictive social mores around race and class. He was, as screenwriter John Ridley once wrote, “a guy who basically lived his life with a metaphorical middle finger raised in the air.” Johnson owned a night club, acted on stage, wore gold teeth, and reportedly walked his pet leopard while sipping champagne. “Unforgivable Blackness” recounts an incident when Johnson handed over a $100 bill to pay a $50 speeding ticket. Told by the police officer that he couldn’t make change, Johnson just flashed a smile — he planned on speeding on the way back too.

His behavior earned Johnson some critics in the African American community, including Booker T. Washington, who said “it is unfortunate that a man with money should use it in a way to injure his own people, in the eyes of those who are seeking to uplift his race and improve its conditions,” according to the book “Race on Trial.”

But above all, Johnson was excoriated for dating white women — an inviolable taboo at the time. His romantic entanglements got him boos and death threats. Whites in the South actively called for him to be lynched. Finally, in 1910, Jeffries agreed to a fight. He would come out of retirement, he announced, in order to “reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race.” The fight, billed as “the battle of the century,” was held in Reno, Nev. in front of some 20,000 fans screaming for Johnson’s defeat.

They were disappointed: after 15 rounds, Jeffries threw in the towel. “I could never have whipped Johnson at my best,” he later said. “I couldn’t have hit him. No, I couldn’t have reached him in 1,000 years.” Far from settling the question of inequality in sports, the result set off riots around the county that left dozens of people dead — most of them black.

That same year, the Mann Act was passed, making it a crime to transport women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” Aimed at preventing prostitution, it could also be manipulated to criminalize interracial relationships. Almost as soon as the law went into effect, the Department of Justice began investigating Johnson for a possible violation, according to “Unforgivable Blackness.”
Johnson had married Brooklyn socialite Etta Terry Duryea, who was white, in 1911. Their relationship was turbulent and she committed suicide a year later.

Three months after her death, he married his second wife, Lucille Cameron. Cameron’s mother, aghast that her daughter had married a black man, complained to authorities that Johnson had kidnapped her. Johnson was arrested and prosecutors began to build a Mann Act case against him, but Cameron refused to cooperate with the case against her husband, according to “Unforgivable Blackness.” Ultimately, the charges were dropped.

But not for long. Agents ultimately dug up an old relationship with a young woman named Belle Schreiber. She agreed to testify against Johnson, and he was swiftly brought to Chicago federal court. It took less than two hours for an all white jury to convict him in 1913.

Before he could be sent to prison, Johnson skipped bail and fled the country along with his wife, according to ESPN. They spent the next several years traveling around Europe and South America, Johnson participating in small-time matches for measly purses. He held onto his world title the whole while.

Then he encountered 6-foot, 6 1/4-inch, 230-pound Jess Willard in a boxing ring in Havana in 1915. Even aging and out of practice, Johnson was able to hold his own until the 26th round, when Willard delivered a knockout punch. Johnson was no longer champion — perhaps intentionally. Rumors swirled after the fight that Johnson lost intentionally in hopes that it would get the Justice Department to drop its case against him.

But he had no such luck. After seven years on the lam, Johnson surrendered to federal authorities at the Mexican border, according to “Unforgivable Blackness.” After serving his year-long prison term, he emerged to a much quieter existence than he’d had as champion. His public life was limited to small exhibition matches and a campaign to promote war bonds during World War II.

Meanwhile, boxing’s color barrier fell back into place, as impenetrable as ever. It would be another 16 years before Joe Louis defeated James Braddock in Chicago in 1937, making another black man the world’s heavyweight boxing champion.
Johnson died like he lived — in the fast lane. He was killed in a car crash in 1946. And aside from the occasional tribute or scholarly reference, his legacy was largely forgotten, eclipsed by the successes of athletes like Louis and Jackie Robinson.

Today, President Trump posthumously pardoned heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. pic.twitter.com/JzKP87ZxVM

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) May 24, 2018

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Add weed killing to the list of things the robotic age may change in the near future. Big name chemical companies, who produce the herbicides vital for mass agriculture, are making plans that might affect not just farmers, but also the billions of dollars in equipment that delivers their product to the fields.

Reuters:

Undergoing final tests before the liquid is replaced with weedkiller, the Swiss robot is one of new breed of AI weeders that investors say could disrupt the $100 billion pesticides and seeds industry by reducing the need for universal herbicides and the genetically modified (GM) crops that tolerate them.

Dominated by companies such as Bayer, DowDuPont, BASF and Syngenta, the industry is bracing for the impact of digital agricultural technology and some firms are already adapting their business models.

The stakes are high. Herbicide sales are worth $26 billion a year and account for 46 percent of pesticides revenue overall while 90 percent of GM seeds have some herbicide tolerance built in, according to market researcher Phillips McDougall. “Some of the profit pools that are now in the hands of the big agrochemical companies will shift, partly to the farmer and partly to the equipment manufacturers,” said Cedric Lecamp, who runs the $1 billion Pictet-Nutrition fund that invests in companies along the food supply chain.

In response, producers such as Germany’s Bayer have sought partners for their own precision spraying systems while ChemChina’s Syngenta [CNNCC.UL], for example, is looking to develop crop protection products suited to the new equipment.

These are not just start-ups, as all the big names in both chemicals and agricultural equipment converge on this $100B industry:

While Blue River, based in Sunnyvale, California, is testing a product in cotton fields, it plans to branch into other major crops such as soy. It expects to make the product widely available to farmers in about four to five years, helped by Deere’s vast network of equipment dealers.

ROBO’s Lightbound and Pictet’s Lecamp said they were excited by the project and Jeneiv Shah, deputy manager of the 152 million pound ($212 million) Sarasin Food & Agriculture Opportunities fund, said the technology would put Bayer and Syngenta’s crop businesses at risk while seed firms could be hit – albeit to a lesser extent.

“The fact that a tractor and row-crop oriented company such as John Deere did this means it won’t be long before corn or soybean farmers in the U.S. Midwest will start using precision spraying,” Shah said.

While the technology promises to save money, it could be a tough sell to some U.S. farmers as five years of bumper harvests have depressed prices for staples including corn and soybeans. U.S. farm incomes have dropped by more than half since 2013, reducing spending on equipment, seeds and fertilizer.

Still, the developments are giving investors in agrochemicals stocks pause for thought, according to Berenberg analyst Nick Anderson. And agrochemical giants are taking note.

Bayer, which will become the world’s biggest seeds and pesticides producer when its acquisition of GM crop pioneer Monsanto completes, teamed up with Bosch in September for a “smart spraying” research project. The German partners plan to outpace rivals by using an on-board arsenal of up to six different herbicides and Bayer hopes the venture will prepare it for a new commercial model – rather than cannibalizing its current business.

“I would assume that within three years we would have a robust commercially feasible model,” Liam Condon, the head of Bayer’s crop science division said in February.

“I’m not concerned in terms of damping sales because we don’t define ourselves as a volume seller. We rather offer a prescription for a weed-free field, and we get paid based on the quality of the outcome,” he said. Bayer agreed to sell its digital farming ventures, including the Bosch project, to German rival BASF as part of efforts to win antitrust approval to buy Monsanto. But BASF will grant Bayer an unspecified license to the digital assets and products.

The meeting of a high dollar business segment, robotic technology, and environmental concerns is also driving the push for new tech from an angle more familiar to manufacturing processes – precision and efficiency:

Michael Underhill, chief investment officer at Capital Innovations, also said the major players may be underestimating the potential impact on their pesticides businesses.

“Precision leads to efficiency, efficiency leads to decreased usage, decreased usage leads to decreased margins or margin compression, and that will lead to companies getting leaner and meaner,” said Underhill.

He said the GM seeds market would also take a hit if machine learning takes over the role genetic engineering has played so far in shielding crops from herbicides’ friendly fire.

“Instead of buying the Cadillac of seeds or the Tesla of seeds, they may be buying the Chevy version,” Underhill said.

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While deforestation remains a huge environmental concern in parts of the world such as South America, Europe is seeing a boon in greenery across the board.

The Economist:

FORESTS in countries like Brazil and Congo get a lot of attention from conservationists, and it is easy to see why. South America and sub-Saharan Africa are experiencing deforestation on an enormous scale: every year almost 5m hectares are lost, net. But forests are also changing in rich Western countries. They are growing larger, both in the sense that they occupy more land and that the trees in them are bigger. What is going on?

Forests are spreading in almost all Western countries, with the fastest growth in places that historically had rather few trees. In 1990 28% of Spain was forested; now the proportion is 37%. In both Greece and Italy, the growth was from 26% to 32% over the same period. Forests are gradually taking more land in America and Australia. Perhaps most astonishing is the trend in Ireland. Roughly 1% of that country was forested when it became independent in 1922. Now forests cover 11% of the land, and the government wants to push the proportion to 18% by the 2040s.

Two things are fertilising this growth. The first is the abandonment of farmland, especially in high, parched places where nothing grows terribly well. When farmers give up trying to eke out a living from olives or sheep, trees simply move in. The second is government policy and subsidy. Governments have protected and promoted forests for diverse reasons, ranging from the need for wooden warships to a desire to promote suburban house-building. Increasingly they welcome forests because they are carbon sinks. The justifications change; the desire for more trees remains constant.

The Washington Post had an in-depth story back in 2014 that included some very detailed graphics of the phenomenon:

In the southern French region of Vaucluse, entire mountain ranges were de-forested at the beginning of the 20th century, but the country invested heavily to reverse the trend. Meanwhile, agricultural projects in southern Spain transformed once arid, barren areas into profitable agricultural fields or even forests.

A similar development was documented in Italy. Former cropland were abandoned due to market competition, urbanization and emigration. Today, many parts of the Apennine Mountains (located on the right side of the map below) are dominated by grasslands and forests again.

The end of communism also led to forest growth in eastern Europe. In eastern Europe, many forests re-grew after the end of the Soviet Union. Fuchs and his colleagues explain the development with the fact that many privatized agricultural farms were less competitive on the global market. Therefore, farmers abandoned unprofitable cropland. Particularly in Romania and Poland, former cropland was taken back by nature afterward, first turning into grassland and later into forests.

But as in all things, what is greeted as good environmental news is not universally welcomed, as the end of The Economist piece details.

The greening of the West does not delight everyone. Farmers complain that land is being taken out of use by generously subsidised tree plantations. (They get subsidies, too, but the ones for tree-planting are especially generous.) Parts of Spain and Portugal are afflicted by terrible forest fires. These burn especially hot in areas with lots of eucalyptus trees—an Australian import that was planted for its pulp but has spread of its own accord. Others simply dislike the appearance of conifer forests planted in neat rows. They will have to get used to the trees, however. The growth of Western forests seems almost as inexorable as deforestation elsewhere.

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Just weeks after the country was shocked by the arrest of a suspect in the 40 year old East Area Rapist/Golden State Killer case, the use of DNA and an open-source geneology website has apparently solved another, lesser known murder, this time from 1987:

The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office in Washington says a 55-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the cold case of a young Saanich couple found murdered in Washington state in 1987.

According to investigators, William Earl Talbott II, who is from the Seattle-Tacoma area, has been taken into custody. He has been charged with the first-degree murder of Tanya Van Cuylenborg, 18.

Van Cuylenborg and her boyfriend, 20-year-old Jay Cook, were found dead near Seattle in November 1987.

***

In this cold case, a digital file containing DNA genotype data from evidence at the crime scene was uploaded to GEDmatch, a public genetic genealogy website. Matches were found for two of the suspect’s relatives.

Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Virginia that also developed the composite sketches, discovered Talbott’s identity from the matches and police then got an abandoned DNA sample from a cup he had used.

Seattle Times Reporter Jessica Lee tweeted an informative graphic, showing how the case was solved:

Today, I tried to knock on the door of a home owned by William Earl Talbott II — who authorities arrested hours earlier in a cold-case double homicide. Neighbors aggressively shooed me away. https://t.co/QdHQaFoUNJ pic.twitter.com/LCXaneHfFj

— Jessica Lee (@jessleeST) May 19, 2018

The world of crime-solving brims with excitement, speculating on which cold case will be solved next:

Good. I saw this today & wondered how many of these animals thought they got by w/perfect crime are getting worried now https://t.co/NLiF7WL69P

— LouLou (@cowgirl9471) May 21, 2018

Interesting question, that: just how many murderers are now living with the nerve-wracking worry that they, too, will soon face their day of reckoning?