With all the bad stuff going on, it’s difficult to remember that we’re winning battles all over the place. The incompetents in Washington have egg on their faces, day after day, and look more ridiculous all the time. In the meantime, thousands of people are getting it right.
House tax bill screwed up:
The House will be forced to vote for a second time on the GOP tax bill because a Senate rule forced Republicans to change it hours after leaders celebrated what appeared to be a massive legislative victory.
The House on Tuesday voted to pass the version of the tax bill that came out of the bicameral conference committee, appearing to pave the way for the Senate to pass it later in the night.
But three pieces of the bill, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, were deemed to violate the so-called Byrd rule and must be removed before the Senate can vote on the legislation.
Even Republicans can’t stomach this Trump nominee:
Two Republicans on the Senate Banking Committee helped to block President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Export-Import Bank in a critical vote Tuesday.
Sens. Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Tim Scott of South Carolina joined all Democrats on the committee to oppose Scott Garrett, a critic of the Export-Import Bank who voted twice to eliminate it as a member of Congress.
“My message to the White House has been sometimes it’s the responsibility of the Senate to advise, but not to consent. And that’s what we tried to do in this case,” Rounds told NBC News after the vote, which stops the nomination from moving forward.
Methane? Not so fast:
A coalition of nearly 20 environmental and Native American tribal groups sued the Trump administration on Tuesday, challenging its delay of a rule limiting emissions of the powerful greenhouse gas methane from oil and gas drilling operations on federal lands.
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management, part of the Department of the Interior, suspended implementation of the rule for a year, until Jan. 17, 2019, saying it wanted to avoid compliance costs for energy companies as it revises the regulation.
The delay “is yet another action taken by the Trump administration to benefit the oil and gas industry at the expense of the American public, particularly the millions of Westerners” who use public lands for ranching, hunting, hiking and other purposes, Darin Schroeder, a lawyer with the Clean Air Task Force, said in a statement.
Trump administration forced to address lack of diversity:
White House chief of staff John Kelly has invited black Republicans to submit resumes for administration jobs, after the departure of Omarosa Manigault Newman left the West Wing without prominent African-American officials.
Mr. Kelly told reporters Tuesday that he spoke with a group of black Republicans on Monday and made the request there.
“We are looking for talented young men and women,” Mr. Kelly said he told the group, though he added he didn’t specifically call for African-American or female applicants. “We’re looking for really good people,” Mr. Kelly said he told the group.
This next story makes a great talking point for alarming your CT-minded relatives about the current administration but use at your own risk.
Government Facebook data requests soar:
There’s been a ramp up in U.S. government requests for user data from Facebook, with more than half of those requests including demands for confidentiality.
The U.S. government made 32,716 requests for data from the company in the first half of 2017, up 26% from the last report, which covered the second half of 2016, the company said in its semi-annual transparency release, out late Monday.
“Fifty-seven percent of the data requests we received from law enforcement in the U.S. contained a non-disclosure order that prohibited us from notifying the user, up from 50% in our last report,” the company said in a blog post on its site.
You can laugh off harassment in Congress, but people pay attention when they (taxpayers) get hit in the wallet:
Between the years of 2008 - 2012, three cases involving sexual harassment in offices of members of Congress were quietly settled and paid out a total of $115,000 in taxpayers' money in settlements, the House disclosed Tuesday. House Administration Committee Chairman Gregg Harper, R-Miss., made the revelation, after he received information on settlement and awards statistics from the Office of Compliance.
This was part of his request from OOC for a breakdown of the $17 million total that has been paid by the congressional Office of Compliance account to settle the claims. Of the 15 claims in that time period listed by the office, three involve sexual harassment. Those claims were settled for $85,000, $10,000 and $20,000.
Earlier this month, CBS News confirmed that Rep. Blake Farenthold was the only sitting House member since 2013 to have used the account. An $84,000 claim against him was paid from the congressional Office of Compliance account. According to Politico, Farenthold's communications director had sued him in 2014 over allegations of sexual harassment, gender discrimination and creating a hostile work environment. After his name was reported, Farenthold said he would pay the money back and he also announced he would retire from Congress.
Microsoft leading the way:
Microsoft is ending a practice that prevented employees from discussing their sexual harassment cases.
The company said Tuesday it is eliminating forced arbitration agreements that required staffers to settle cases outside of the courtroom. The policy -- not unusual for businesses -- keeps claims out of the public eye and creates a silencing effect.
[...]
"We concluded that if we were to advocate for legislation ending arbitration requirements for sexual harassment, we should not have a contractual requirement for our own employees that would obligate them to arbitrate sexual harassment claims," [Microsoft's President and Chief Legal Officer Brad Smith] wrote.
And they’re all in on climate change:
The tech giant Microsoft is deploying artificial intelligence to the task of protecting our planet. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, announced on Dec. 11 that the company would be investing $50 million in their AI for Earth program over the next five years in order to “monitor, model, and manage the Earth’s natural systems.”
This investment is part of Microsoft’s expansion of its environmental policies, which center around the concept of democratizing AI so that both scientists and business owners can easily utilize the technology to analyze climate data and provide information to help us take strategic action. Smith suggested in the announcement that AI could soon be used to collect and analyze data about energy consumption and weather patterns to conserve power and reduce needless water usage in agriculture.
“AI can be trained to classify raw data from sensors on the ground, in the sky, or in space into categories that both humans and computers understand,” Smith said in the announcement. “Fundamentally, AI can accelerate our ability to observe environmental systems and how they are changing at a global scale, convert the data into useful information, and apply that information to take concrete steps to better manage our natural resources.”
Someone else without male genitalia hosting news on PBS:
Premiering on Monday, January 2, 2018, Beyond 100 Days will air weeknights Monday-Thursday, with BBC World News, a half hour of the top global news stories of the day, filling the time slot on Fridays.
Beyond 100 Days is hosted by Katty Kay in the United States and Christian Fraser in the UK. With President Trump making headlines each day in the White House, the UK rapidly moving towards its exit from the EU and nearly daily tensions as North Korea tests its long-range missiles, Beyond 100 Days cuts to the heart of the seismic stories changing the global political landscape.
Following the day’s big stories with expert insight from the U.S. and around the world, Beyond 100 Days will help audiences understand the events that are shaping our world. The half-hour show (full hour on BBC World News) showcases key news and policy makers in the U.S., alongside high-profile guests and expert BBC News reporters around the world. It closely examines the Trump Administration and its global impact, as well as other major international stories, including the Brexit talks, German elections, and relations across Russia, China and the Middle East.
A city does what Congress won’t:
Mayor Steve Benjamin of Columbia, South Carolina, said he plans to introduce a city ordinance that would ban "bump stocks and trigger cranks" like the ones used in the deadly Las Vegas massacre last month.
“I believe in responsible gun ownership, and I believe in common sense,” Benjamin said in a statement announcing the ordinance on Wednesday. “That’s why I’ve decided to do what our federal and state governments are either unable or unwilling to do.
“The simple fact is that automatic weapons have been illegal in this country for more than 30 years, and the only purpose these devices serve is to circumvent that law multiplying firing rates tenfold to approximately 400-800 rounds per minute and turning a semi-automatic firearm into a mass murder machine,” he added.
States investigate pension failure:
Massachusetts and New York regulators are investigating MetLife's failure to pay pensions to thousands of retirees.
The investigations began Monday, two days after the New York-based insurer disclosed that it is trying to locate a subset of approximately 600,000 retirees who are owed average annuity benefits of less than $150 a month.
Those affected, fewer than 30,000 retirees by MetLife's current estimates, are people who "have moved jobs, relocated or otherwise could not be located," MetLife CFO John Hele said during a Friday conference call with financial analysts.
Market continues for electric semis:
United Parcel Service Inc (UPS.N) said on Tuesday it is buying 125 Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) all-electric semi-trucks, the largest known order for the big rig so far, as the package delivery company expands its fleet of alternative-fuel vehicles.
Tesla is trying to convince the trucking community it can build an affordable electric big rig with the range and cargo capacity to compete with relatively low-cost, time-tested diesel trucks. This is the largest public order of the big rig so far, Tesla said.
[...]
The Tesla trucks will cost around $200,000 each for a total order of about $25 million. UPS expects the semi-trucks, the big rigs that haul freight along America’s highways, will have a lower total cost of ownership than conventional vehicles, which run at about $120,000.
Bad news for fracking:
Living near a fracking site appears to be detrimental to infant health, a study eyeing the gas production practice in Pennsylvania suggests.
Babies of moms living within one kilometer of a hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, site in the state had a 25 percent greater chance of being born underweight than did babies whose moms lived at least three kilometers away, researchers report online December 13 in Science Advances. The chance of having a low-birth-weight baby was 1 in 14 for the moms living closest to a fracking site, but 1 in 17 for moms three to 15 kilometers away, says Janet Currie, an economist at Princeton University.
For babies born to moms living within one to three kilometers away from a site, the chance of being underweight at birth was about 8 percent greater than for babies of the more distant moms, Currie says. The study found no ill effect on infants born to moms residing farther away, an indication that fracking’s health impact may be highly local. In the study, distance of residences from the fracking sites was used as a stand-in for potential pollution exposure. But the researchers did not measure actual pollution exposure, or figure out whether people faced exposure through water, air or both.
We’re all a bit safer online:
If you ask the White House, North Korea's WannaCry attack was just the tip of the iceberg. Homeland security adviser Tom Bossert reported that Facebook and Microsoft disabled a range of North Korean online threats in the past week. Facebook removed accounts and "stopped the operational execution" of ongoing attacks, while Microsoft patched existing attacks that went beyond WannaCry. Details of just what those attacks were aren't available.
Facebook has confirmed its role. A spokesman told Reuters that it had deleted accounts associated with the Lazarus Group, the hacking team associated with WannaCry and other campaigns, and had notified users who'd had contact with those accounts. It recommended additional security measures in case they might be victims. Microsoft didn't initially comment on Bossert's statements.
Without more targeted accusations or political actions, the revelations don't accomplish much more than fueling the administration's existing arguments that North Korea is running out of time to mend its ways. We certainly wouldn't expect North Korea to change course. However, it does illustrate how comprehensive North Korea's hacking campaign really is. On top of this, it shows how major tech companies like Facebook and Microsoft are effectively being drafted into a wider political conflict -- in many cases, they're first line of defense against North Korean hacks that could prove devastating.
Another gene therapy approved:
Luxturna, a form of gene therapy, has been approved to treat a rare group of inherited vision disorders that can lead to blindness.
The disorders are broadly grouped together and known as biallelic RPE65 mutation-associated retinal dystrophy. They affect a combined 1,000 to 2,000 people in the United States, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday in a news release.
Luxturna, or voretigene neparvovec-rzyl, delivers a working copy of an existing defective gene that produces a retinal enzyme needed for normal vision.
The moral of the story is, keep fighting. Do little things to make life a bit better for all of us. It’s the power of collective action that is unstoppable; a person can be made powerless, but millions of us each doing something too small to notice alone make an irresistible force.