“Frankly, the guy — I don’t want to say bad stuff — is clueless on the Middle East,” one source told NOTUS.
...According to two sources in attendance for the private dinner, Grenell came off as unsympathetic to the plight of Palestinians while actually angering some participants by reiterating a comment from Trump’s other son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who said in March that Israel should remove Palestinians from the valuable “waterfront property” in Gaza.
“He repeated Jared Kushner’s statement about beachfront property, which I think floated like a lead balloon in the room,” one of the meeting’s participants said of Grenell, who was Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence.
Another participant in the meeting stressed that Grenell kept saying how “brilliant” Trump was with his handling of the Abraham Accords, which were agreements Israel signed with certain Arab countries in 2020. But this person also mentioned that Kushner’s comments about turning Gaza’s waterfront property into world-class beaches fell flat.
“This is either too naive or too stupid of him to say something like this. Even the Israeli press made fun of Kushner when he said that,” this source said.
“Frankly, the guy — I don’t want to say bad stuff — is clueless on the Middle East,” this person added.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments
Russia alarmed NATO allies by proposing to unilaterally redraw its border in the Baltic Sea, before withdrawing the bombshell text without offering an explanation.
The since-deleted draft decree authored by Russia’s defense ministry appeared on the government’s legal portal on Tuesday, and argued that the existing maritime border needed revising because it was established in 1985 on the basis of nautical charts now out of use.
The current border “does not allow the establishing of the external boundary of Russia’s internal waters and does not take into account the practice of establishing direct baselines by other states,” the decree read.
...Seemingly trying to defuse tension, Russia's news agencies TASS, Interfax and RIA all ran identical news articles Wednesday morning citing an unnamed military-diplomatic source as denying Russia's intention to change the border.
“There has been and is no plan to revise the width of territorial waters, the economic zone, continental shelf off the mainland or lines of Russia’s border in the Baltic,” the source said.
A farmworker who had regular exposure to infected livestock recovered from mild symptoms. At least 51 herds in nine states have reported infections.
...“The current health risk to the general public remains low," Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, Michigan's chief medical executive, said in a news release. "We have not seen signs of sustained human-to-human transmission at this point. This is exactly how public health is meant to work, in early detection and monitoring of new and emerging illnesses.”
The person was being monitored for symptoms following exposure to infected dairy cows, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a statement. The person developed conjunctivitis, or pinkeye, and a sample taken from the eye tested positive for the virus. A sample taken from the person's nasal passages was negative.
At a news briefing Wednesday, Dr. Nirav Shah, the CDC’s principal deputy director, said the negative nasal sample is reassuring, in a sense.
"It reduces the likelihood — it does not eliminate, but it reduces the likelihood — of a respiratory route of transmission," Shah said...
Undecided voters are concerned that if Donald Trump returns to the White House, he’ll never leave.
As the rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump draws nearer, political professionals are detecting an unusual concern among some undecided voters: that if Trump returns to the White House, he’ll refuse to step down when his term is up.
Seiji Carpenter, vice president at David Binder Research, noticed this fear in early April while conducting focus groups of people who had voted for Biden in 2020 but became disillusioned and were considering switching sides. “We were talking to Latino men and Asian American-Pacific Islander women in battleground states,” Carpenter recalls, “and they went straight to the issue of, what if Trump won’t give up power?”
...“Typically, when we raise concerns about a candidate’s agenda, people are skeptical and want to do their own research first or think it’s an attack,” says Carpenter, the focus group director. “With Trump, that’s not true. Voters believe that he would try to remove term limits, and they’re nervous about what’s possible.”
Carpenter’s conversations with uncommitted voters have led him to believe that, beyond Jan. 6 and Trump’s inflammatory comments, this shift owes a great deal to a less obvious catalyst: the Supreme Court. Its 2022 decision overturning Roe v. Wade and eliminating women’s constitutional right to an abortion has caused voters to wonder what else that they take for granted might be changed or removed. “The dimensions of what constitutes a credible threat have expanded because of Roe,” Carpenter says. “Since that decision, you hear voters talking themselves out of the notion that an idea is too far-fetched.”...
And it isn’t Joe Biden
...But then a funny thing happened. Right after he announced his independent bid , NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist , conducted a poll that found Biden would beat Trump in by 49 to 46%, but when Kennedy entered the mix, Biden’s lead over Trump jumped to 7 points. (Biden lost 5 points, but Trump lost 10.) It turns out that the “common sense guy” who pushes a raft of conspiracy theories is more appealing to the right than the left. Who could have guessed?
In case you’re wondering, here’s a very small sample of his cracked beliefs. Setting aside his decades-long disinformation campaign against vaccines, he has also said that mass shootings are caused by antidepressents and that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a neocon and CIA operation. He promises to seal the border permanently and thinks that kids are swimming through a soup of toxic chemicals that cause them to become transgender. And he thinks 5G cell towers are going to control our behavior and Bill Gates want to genetically modify humanity. That’s just for starters. This “common sense guy” is a full fledged conspiracy freak. It stands to reason that he would be popular among Republicans. They “do their own research” too.
...There’s no way of knowing if Kennedy will get on the ballot in all the swing states or if people will actually vote for him or one of the other third party candidates in November. It would be better not to have them running when the stakes are so high. But it would be poetic justice if Steve Bannon putting an anti-vax conspiracy theorist into the mix proved to be Trump’s undoing. Live by the rat-f***k, die by the rat-f***k.
In 2010, the Ohio legislature passed a law creating an arbitrary deadline that candidates for each political party must be nominated 90 days before the election to get on the ballot. That provision has never been enforced to keep a candidate off the ballot - until now.
Both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions took place after the 90 day Ohio deadline in 2012 and 2020. Both times the legislature passed a bill to extend the deadline so there were no issues. However, 2024 is the first time that only one party has their nominating convention after the deadline, and it just happens to be the Democrats which will nominate Biden on August 22, two weeks after Ohio's arbitrary deadline.
The Republican supermajority was asked again, just like in 2012 and 2020, to extend the deadline so there will not be an issue. They have refused to do so. Now, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose has just send a letter to the Chair of the Ohio Democratic Party stating that he does not believe the legislature is going to grant an extension so the DNC is going to be forced to either change the date of their nominating convention to satisfy Ohio Republicans, or take them to court.
State regulators slashed solar programs that school districts rely on to cut energy bills and finance sustainability projects. A new bill could fix that.
California regulators’ hostility to rooftop solar may have hit its political limit, at least when it comes to the impact on public schools.
In the past few months, a host of bills seeking to reverse or amend California’s regulatory push against rooftop solar have faltered in the state Capitol. The exception, so far, is Senate Bill 1374. The bill would amend the November California Public Utility Commission (CPUC) decision that prevents schools, farms, apartment buildings, and other types of customers from using the solar power they generate to offset their power purchases from Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric, the state’s three major utilities.
In April, SB 1374 passed through the California Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee, which is chaired by an avowed opponent of solar net metering. Last week, the bill successfully emerged from a Senate Appropriations Committee process that’s held back hundreds of bills on the grounds that the expenses they would incur conflict with Governor Gavin Newsom’s (D) tightened state budget plan. And on Monday it passed the Senate on a vote of 28–7.
State Senator Josh Becker (D), SB 1374’s author, emphasized that the bill does not treat schools, farms, and other multi-metered utility customers differently from single-family homes subject to the CPUC’s new regulations on solar net metering. It would simply allow those customers to use their own solar power to offset their utility bills, just as residential customers do.
County sheriff's officers are three times more lethal than city police, a CBS News investigation has found.
More people were killed by U.S. law enforcement in 2023 than any other year in the past decade, outpacing population growth eightfold. But despite a focus on urban areas, fatal police violence is increasingly happening in small town America at the hands of sheriffs, the top law enforcement officials in counties nationwide.
The revelation is part of the findings of a yearlong reporting effort that documented chronic misconduct in sheriff's offices and oversight failures that can enable abuses to go unchecked. The consequences can be fatal. But the majority of those cases go unreported, in violation of state and federal laws, making patterns of abuse harder to detect and stop.
CBS News gathered and analyzed federal law enforcement data that showed while more people died overall in encounters with city police, deaths in encounters with county sheriffs occurred at a significantly higher rate. For every 100,000 people arrested, more than 27 people died in the custody of sheriffs, while that number was fewer than 10 for police officers in 2022, the most recent year of available data.
...Gravity started as an electric taxi fleet operator back in 2021 and then pivoted to building charging stations. It recently inaugurated a 500-kilowatt, 24-stall charging station in the heart of Manhattan near Times Square. Now it wants to deploy a curbside charging solution dubbed “DEAP Trees.” The abbreviation stands for what the company calls distributed energy access points.
Unlike Flo's Level 2 curbside chargers, Gravity has Level 3 DC fast units. This is a big deal because curbside charging has so far been restricted to Level 2 speeds. Depending on the EV and its voltage architecture, these DEAP Trees can add 200 miles of range in 13 minutes with a 200 kW dispenser, or just five minutes with the 500 kW charger. They can also deliver 1,000 volts, the company said and don’t require any utility upgrades.
...According to the NYC Department of Transportation, curbside chargers have a surprisingly high usage rate. That's despite gas cars gobbling dedicated EV parking spots 20% of the time during the first 18 months of the city's pilot program launched in partnership with Flo.
The dispute between Scarlett Johansson and OpenAI is adding fresh heat to long-simmering questions about CEO Sam Altman's credibility.
Why it matters: Altman and OpenAI, the company avowedly dedicated to making sure that AI "benefits humanity," have to persuade a skeptical world that AI can be trusted — and that will be a lot harder if they lose trust themselves.
Flashback: Altman won an epic boardroom fight last fall against directors who fired him because they said he was "not consistently candid" with them.
- At the time, it was a puzzling explanation for an abrupt dismissal — but a growing chorus of critics is now saying, "Oh, this is what you were talking about."
Driving the news: OpenAI and Altman continue to insist that ChatGPT's female voice named "Sky" wasn't modeled on Johansson's, which famously represented an AI assistant in the celebrated 2013 movie "Her."
- But Johansson said Monday that Altman had twice approached her to model the voice herself — a relevant bit of evidence that the company never shared.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration is blocking cities from using rainbow lighting on bridges for Pride Month and other events.
As part of what Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is calling “Freedom Summer,” his Transportation Department has told cities across the state that if they want to light up their bridges at night, they can only use the colors red, white and blue.
The order — which was shared by Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue on social media recently — means that bridges across the state that normally illuminate in colorful arrays of light to mark holidays or awareness events won’t be able to use any other colors from May 27 through Sept. 2.
“As Floridians prepare for Freedom Summer, Florida’s bridges will follow suit, illuminating in red, white, and blue from Memorial Day through Labor Day!” Perdue wrote on X. “Thanks to the leadership of Gov. Ron DeSantis, Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation.”
A number of bridges across the state prominently display rainbow colors in honor of Pride Month in June, among other celebrations throughout the year. Many see the order to display only red, white and blue as another move against the LGBTQ+ community, which has been targeted by a number of DeSantis-backed laws in recent years.
...A significant portion of these Red Lobster post-mortems are placing the blame on Red Lobster’s “Endless Shrimp” promotion, poor management, or the clearly mistaken decision by seafood supplier Thai Union to think it would know how to run a restaurant chain.
...Eileen Appelbaum, with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, told Business Insider that the early decision by private equity owner Golden Gate to sell off Red Lobster’s real estate helped seal the company’s fate.
"Once they sell the real estate, then the private-equity company is golden, and they've made their money back and probably more than what they paid," Appelbaum told Business Insider. "The retail apocalypse is all about having your real estate sold out from under you so that you have to pay the rent in good times and in bad."
In case you haven’t noticed, real estate prices – costs, rentals, leases – have gone up
Seventy years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled separating children in schools by race was unconstitutional. On paper, that decision — the fabled Brown v. Board of Education, taught in most every American classroom — still stands.
But for decades, American schools have been re-segregating. The country is more diverse than it ever has been, with students more exposed to classmates from different backgrounds. Still, around 4 out of 10 Black and Hispanic students attend schools where almost every one of their classmates is another student of color.
The intense segregation by race is linked to socioeconomic conditions: Schools where students of color compose more than 90% of the student body are five times more likely to be located in low-income areas. That in turn has resounding academic consequences: Students who attend high-poverty schools, regardless of their family’s finances, have worse educational outcomes.
Efforts to slow or reverse the increasing separation of American schools have stalled. Court cases slowly have chipped away at the dream outlined in the case of Brown v. Board, leaving fewer and fewer tools in the hands of districts to integrate schools by the early 2000s.
...“School integration exists as little more than an idea in America right now, a little more than a memory,” said Derek Black, a law professor at the University of South Carolina. “It’s actually an idea that a pretty good majority of Americans think is a good idea. But that’s all.”
A Tennessee judge on Wednesday blocked a foreclosure sale of Graceland, ruling that it’s in public’s best interest to slow any potential ownership change of Elvis Presley’s “well loved” estate.
The Shelby County Chancery Court judge went as far as to say that actor Riley Keough, the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and granddaughter of the “King of Rock and Roll,” would likely prevail in her lawsuit, accusing a creditor of falsely claiming rights to Graceland, as long as there is evidence to back up her claims.
...Naussany Investments and Private Lending LLC claims it made a $3.8 million loan to Lisa Marie Presley in 2018 with Elvis’ famed home used as collateral.
Keough, who is known as “Danielle Riley Keough” in court documents, insists that the alleged creditor used forged signatures to create a loan that never existed.
Which political races should climate advocates focus on to get the most bang for their buck? (Hint: not the presidency.) In this episode, executive director Caroline Spears of Climate Cabinet explains how her organization uses data science to identify state and local races with high potential to impact climate progress.
If you ask climate-oriented voters about the upcoming election, they will inevitably begin arguing about Joe Biden. This is one of the frustrating features of US political discourse: attention is overwhelmingly focused on the federal level.
But the vast, vast majority of elected offices are held at the state and local level, and that is where a great deal of climate policy and politics will play out in coming years. These state and local races do not often get the attention and money they need from the climate community, despite their importance.
In 2020, a new organization called Climate Cabinet set out to address this problem. It bills itself as “Moneyball for climate,” using data and data science to identify under-the-radar state and local races where relatively modest interventions can yield substantial climate progress.
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The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw