The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton. Please add news or other items in the comments.
BuzzFeed News
Republicans Plan To “Wage War” Against The Green New Deal For The 2020 Elections
Republicans believe blasting the Green New Deal will be a winning strategy going into the 2020 elections, capitalizing on the Democrats recently botched rollout of the bold climate proposal.
As Republicans, and especially those in swing states, struggle to figure out how they will address climate change, “the Green New Deal clarifies the Republican position,” Alex Conant, a Republican strategist and former communications director for Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential bid, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s much easier to say I care about climate change but oppose the Green New Deal.”
Rather than endorse it, use it as the start of a negotiation, or ignore it, “it's better to wage a war against it,” said Matt Gorman, the former communications director at the National Republican Congressional Committee. “I think Republicans are going to use it across the ballot.”
Covington Catholic Students Won't Be Punished After Investigators Found No Evidence Of "Racist Or Offensive Statements"
Weeks after videos went viral of a group of MAGA hat–wearing teenage boys from a Kentucky Catholic school confronting a Native American elder, a third-party investigation on behalf of the school and diocese has found "no evidence of offensive or racist statements" by the students.
The Diocese of Covington, which initially denounced the students' behavior and said they could face expulsion, celebrated the news and said the teenagers had been "exonerate[d]" and "can move forward with their lives."
Another Looming Climate Disaster: Dam Collapses
Major dams in California are five times more likely to flood this century than the last one due to global warming, a new study finds, possibly leading to overtopping and catastrophic failures that threaten costly repairs and evacuations.
That means Californians can expect more disasters like the Oroville Dam, whose overflow channel failed in 2017 after days of flooding had filled state reservoirs to 85% of their capacity, leading to the evacuation of more than 180,000 people and losses of around $300 million.
In June, an analysis led by UCLA researchers concluded the Oroville Dam spillway overflow was worsened by climate change. The results of the new Geophysical Research Letters study suggest that there are at least six other major dams in California that have an even higher potential flood risk than the Oroville Dam did, study author Amir AghaKouchak of the University of California, Irvine, told BuzzFeed News. “The Oroville Dam shows what the chances of these failures look like, and might become the new normal.”
Just Security
Who is Richard Burr, Really? Why the public can’t trust his voice in the Russia probe
On the same day that Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) officially joined the Trump campaign as a senior national security advisor, the U.S. intelligence community released a statement that the Kremlin was trying to interfere in the election. But the Senator already knew those facts, and much more. Burr had been fully briefed in secret by the U.S. intelligence community a few weeks earlier. Senior U.S. officials told Burr that Russia’s interference was designed to support Donald Trump’s electoral chances. Burr decided to team up with the Trump campaign anyway, and hitch his own electoral fate in North Carolina to Trump’s political fortunes.
More than two years later, Burr now leads the Senate’s flagship investigation into whether fellow members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia’s efforts. As the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr’s work with Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) on the investigation is heading toward its final stage. The committee is expected to issue its major findings in the coming months. […]
What’s largely escaped scrutiny is the case of Burr’s own words and deeds during the 2016 campaign. It was impossible to put the pieces together back then. We now have a much clearer picture due to news reports, court filings by the special counsel, and congressional testimony by former administration officials. We have learned a lot about what Russia was doing, what the U.S. intelligence community knew, and what Burr was told. The picture that emerges is neither favorable for Burr personally, nor for what truths Americans can expect to receive from his stewardship of the committee in the months ahead.
Earther
House Science Committee Holds First Climate Hearing in Years That Isn't Total Bullshit
After years of being wasteland of denial, the House Science Committee is once again a functioning body holding hearings on climate change that don’t make your brain hurt.
On Wednesday, the committee held its first hearing since Democrats took over the House. The hearing was focused on climate change, and it featured five scientists whose views are well within the mainstream, including one called by the new Republican minority. And while questions betrayed that there’s a large ideological gap for how to deal with climate change (there were also a few oddball questions), the hearing was still infinitely more constructive than those held under the now-retired Lamar Smith. […]
That new direction was on display Wednesday. Democrats called Bob Kopp, Jennifer Francis, Kristie Ebi, Natalie Mahowald, climate experts in different fields from Rutgers, Woods Hole, the University of Washington, and Cornell respectively. They took seats that Lamar Smith and the Republican majority used to fill with cranks and deniers. That’s hardly surprising, though. Republicans took a big step, however, by calling Joseph Majkut, a climate scientist from the libertarian-leaning Niskanen Center whose views are in line with his peers. That the minority called him should not be news and yet it is.
The Washington Post
The big Alaskan land giveaway tucked into a sweeping conservation bill
On Tuesday, the Senate passed the biggest conservation bill in years. The Natural Resources Management Act of 2019 swells with more than 100 combined pieces of legislation related to public lands, water and natural resources. Many environmentalists are happy: Wins for public lands and wildlife have been scarce in recent years under an alternately hostile and sclerotic GOP-controlled Congress. The bill is expected to sail through the House.
Slice open this giant haggis and peer inside, though: Something reeks. The act contains language that would hand over nearly a half-million acres of federal lands in Alaska — your land and mine — to private hands. That is an area roughly equal to half the size of Long Island, or 31 Manhattans.
Alaska’s two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, say their proposal would correct a lingering injustice by granting up to 160 acres each to Native Alaskans who are Vietnam War veterans and who missed out on an earlier chance to stake a land claim because of military service during that war. They estimate about 2,800 veterans and heirs could take advantage of the program, which means 448,000 acres of land could be handed out. It presents a thorny issue for conservationists: Justice for Native veterans! What anthracite heart could object?
A Confederate book was open to a racist passage in a Republican congressman’s office. He blamed his staff.
Rep. Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) has removed from his office a biography of Robert E. Lee, which was previously displayed there under a glass case and opened to a page highlighting the Confederate general’s racist ideology.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Ferguson, who occupies one of his party’s top posts in the House, blamed the book’s presence on his staff, who he said decorated his office. Ferguson said he didn’t know the book was there until members of the American Federation of Government Employees, who were visiting congressional offices on Monday, asked about it.
The book, titled “Gen. Robert Edward Lee: Soldier, Citizen, and Christian Patriot,” was opened to a page that trumpeted proslavery beliefs, reading in part, “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race, and, I hope, will prepare and lead them to better things.”
An unlikely Washington love story: Debbie Dingell on her 38-year marriage to John Dingell
He called her “The Lovely Deborah” or, when he was annoyed or impatient, “Woman.” She called him “Honey” or just “John Dingell.”
Debbie and John Dingell lived a Washington love story for 38 years. It was a marriage, a partnership, a public romance that made them one of the most powerful couples in the nation’s capital: he as the longest-serving member of Congress in U.S. history, she as an auto executive and, more recently, his successor as the representative for Michigan’s 12th Congressional District.
They were unabashed in their affection for each other, a rare and sentimental display. Friends teased that they made every other couple in the nation’s capital look uninspired and humdrum.
Los Angeles Times
‘Shocking’ cut to California’s troubled high-speed rail project solves some problems and creates others
“It is shocking,” said a senior executive at a major engineering firm in California who has worked on the bullet train project and asked not to be identified. “I didn’t think he was that bold.”
Newsom said Wednesday that while the state has the capacity to complete the first leg in the Central Valley, extending the rail line to Southern California and the Bay Area would “cost too much and, respectfully, take too long.”
How the bullet train went from peak California innovation to the project from hell
It was billed as the most ambitious public works project since the transcontinental railroad opened up the West.
The high-speed rail network would transform California — cleaner air, less congested freeways and airports, and more limited suburban sprawl with a whole new style of housing around rail stops.[…]
Yet bite after bite, huge cost overruns, mismanagement, political concessions and delays ate away at the sleek and soaring vision of a bullet train linking San Francisco to San Diego. A project meant to drive home California’s role as the high-tech vanguard of the nation was looking more and more like a pepped-up Amtrak route through the Central Valley.
Texas Monthly
Immigration Officials Have Stopped Force-Feeding Some Asylum Seekers on Hunger Strike in El Paso
Two hunger strikers who have been force-fed for nearly a month at the El Paso Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center have had their feeding tubes removed, their lawyer said at a court hearing Wednesday. But the judicial orders allowing ICE to force-feed nine El Paso hunger strikers in recent weeks remain shrouded in secrecy.
A court hearing for two of the hunger strikers, Malkeet Singh and Jasvir Singh, was the first time the government has discussed the hunger strike publicly in any detail—although parts of the hearing were conducted in private. The ICE physician overseeing the force-feeding, for example, Dr. Michelle Iglesias, testified behind closed doors about the condition and status of the two men. She then testified at a public court session in clinical terms about the hunger strike process, starvation and force-feeding.
Louis Lopez, the lawyer representing Malkeet and Jasvir Singh, let slip a key detail in the closed part of the hearing just before court adjourned. When U.S. District Judge David Guaderrama of El Paso asked him if he had anything further for the court, Lopez said he needed some clarification “now that the tubes are out.” Guaderrama quickly stopped him and said, “You’re not supposed to say that. That’s the closed portion.”
The Guardian
Exposure to weed killing products increases risk of cancer by 41% – study
A broad new scientific analysis of the cancer-causing potential of glyphosate herbicides, the most widely used weed killing products in the world, has found that people with high exposures to the popular pesticides have a 41% increased risk of developing a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
The evidence “supports a compelling link” between exposures to glyphosate-based herbicides and increased risk for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), the authors concluded, though they said the specific numerical risk estimates should be interpreted with caution.
The findings by five US scientists contradict the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) assurances of safety over the weed killer and come as regulators in several countries consider limiting the use of glyphosate-based products in farming.
'Uniquely American': Senate passes landmark bill to enlarge national parks
Joshua Tree and Death Valley national parks are to be enlarged, and stunning river landscapes in California and Utah will be protected, under new legislation that passed the US Senate on Tuesday.
In all the public lands package sets aside more than a million acres of new wilderness and conservation areas in western states.
The Natural Resources Management Act passed 92-8 in the Republican-controlled Senate, a notable bipartisan effort in an administration marked by conservation rollbacks. Since Donald Trump took office, his administration has shrunk national monuments and put large swaths of land up for oil, gas and mining leases, including on the doorsteps of national monuments, parks and wilderness areas. The bill will go to the Democrat-controlled House next, where it’s likely to pass, and then to the president’s desk.
Philadelphia Magazine
The fact that Philadelphia barrister Francis Alexander Malofiy, Esquire, is suing Led Zeppelin over the authorship of “Stairway to Heaven” is, by any objective measure, only the fourth most interesting thing about him. Unfortunately for the reader, and the purposes of this story, the first, second and third most interesting things about Malofiy are bound and gagged in nondisclosure agreements, those legalistic dungeons where the First Amendment goes to die. So let’s start with number four and work our way backward.
… “Stairway to Heaven” is arguably the most famous song in all of rock-and-roll, perhaps in all of popular music. It’s also one of the most lucrative — it’s estimated that the song has netted north of $500 million in sales and royalties since its 1971 release. Malofiy’s lawsuit, cheekily printed in the same druidic font used for the liner notes of the album Led Zeppelin IV, alleges that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant — Zep’s elegantly wasted guitarist/producer/central songwriter and leonine, leather-lunged lead singer, respectively — stole the iconic descending acoustic-guitar arpeggios of the first two minutes of “Stairway” from “Taurus,” a song with a strikingly similar chord pattern by a long-forgotten ’60s band called Spirit. At the conclusion of a stormy, headline-grabbing trial in 2016 that peaked with testimony from Page and Plant, the jury decided in Zep’s favor.
When the copyright infringement suit was first filed in Philadelphia by Malofiy (pronounced “MAL-uh-fee”) on behalf of the Randy Craig Wolfe Trust — which represents the estate of Randy “California” Wolfe, the now-deceased member of Spirit who wrote “Taurus” — people laughed. Mostly at Malofiy.
Ars Technica
Ex-director of FBI, CIA takes on a phone scammer—and wins
If you're trying to extort money from people, there are probably better choices for a victim than William H. Webster. Back in 2014, Webster was called by a Jamaican man, 29-year-old Keniel Aeon Thomas, who was attempting to perpetrate the all too common advance-fee fraud scam (often known as the 419 scam, after the section of the Nigerian Criminal Code that addresses fraud). According to Thomas, Webster and his wife had won $15.5 million and a Mercedes-Benz in the Mega Millions lottery, and the caller would be all too happy to release those funds, just as long as Websters first paid $50,000 to cover taxes.
Over a number of weeks, Thomas, calling himself David Morgan, made a series of calls to the Websters, and they soon turned threatening: he described their house, and he said that if they didn't hand over $6,000, he'd shoot them in the head or burn their house down, boasting that the FBI and CIA would never find him.
But unknown to Thomas, William H. Webster is a man with a considerable past. He was director of the FBI under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan (1978-1987), and then director of the CIA under Reagan and George H.W. Bush (1987-1991), making him the only person to have led both intelligence agencies.
Since Trump tariffs, solar jobs have atrophied
This week, an advocacy group called The Solar Foundation released its ninth annual solar jobs report. In 2018 the industry contracted, shedding 8,000 solar jobs, or a loss of about 3.2 percent from 2017. The solar industry employed 242,343 people in 2018, the report said.
The solar industry is the largest renewable energy employer in the US and the second largest energy employer behind the oil and gas industry. Wind and coal trail far behind solar in terms of the number of people employed. (For comparison, coal mining lost 2,000 jobs between 2016 and 2017, although that industry employs only slightly more than 50,000 people.)
2018 marks the second year in a row that the solar industry has posted job losses.
Politico
Michael Bloomberg’s $500 million anti-Trump moonshot
Michael Bloomberg is preparing to spend at least $500 million from his own pocket to deny … Donald Trump a second term, according to Democratic operatives briefed on his plans.
Bloomberg has not yet announced whether he will run in the Democratic primary. If he runs, he will use that half-billion-dollar stake — roughly $175 million more than the Trump campaign spent over the course of the entire 2016 election cycle — to fuel his campaign through the 2020 primary season, with the expectation that the sum represents a floor, not a ceiling, on his potential spending.
If Bloomberg declines to seek the presidency, his intention is to run an unprecedented data-heavy campaign designed to operate as a shadow political party for the eventual Democratic nominee.
CNBC
The great Equifax mystery: 17 months later, the stolen data has never been found, and experts are starting to suspect a spy scheme
On Sept. 7, 2017, the world heard an alarming announcement from credit ratings giant Equifax: In a brazen cyberattack, somebody had stolen sensitive personal information from more than 140 million people, nearly half the population of the U.S.
It was the consumer data security scandal of the decade. The information included Social Security numbers, driver's license numbers, information from credit disputes and other personal details. CEO Richard Smith stepped down under fire. Lawmakers changed credit freeze laws and instilled new regulatory oversight of credit ratings agencies.
Then, something unusual happened. The data disappeared. Completely.
Vox
A record number of US workers went on strike in 2018
Last year’s labor unrest started with a teachers strike in West Virginia and ended with Marriott workers picketing across four states.
A record number of US workers went on strike or stopped working in 2018 because of labor disputes with employers, according to new data released Tuesday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. A total of 485,000 employees were involved in major work stoppages last year — the highest number since 1986, when flight attendants, garbage collectors, and steelworkers walked off the job. […]
Working-class Americans haven’t been this fed up with their employers since the 1980s…
California has 149 million dead, dry trees ready to ignite like a matchbook
California has just emerged from two back-to-back years of record-setting wildfires, including the Camp Fire, the state’s single most deadly and destructive blaze on record, which killed at least 86 people in October 2018.
This week, the state received a fresh warning sign of why the risks of massive, devastating blazes like it are growing.
According to the US Forest Service’s latest aerial survey of federal, state, and private land in California, 18 million trees throughout the state died in 2018, bringing the state’s total number of dead trees to more than 147 million. The concern is these trees could be matchsticks for another conflagration, or that the decaying timber could maim a hiker, a ranger, or a firefighter.
The New Yorker
Private Mossad for Hire
One evening in 2016, a twenty-five-year-old community-college student named Alex Gutiérrez was waiting tables at La Piazza Ristorante Italiano, an upscale restaurant in Tulare, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Gutiérrez spotted Yorai Benzeevi, a physician who ran the local hospital, sitting at a table with Parmod Kumar, a member of the hospital board. They seemed to be in a celebratory mood, drinking expensive bottles of wine and laughing. This irritated Gutiérrez. The kingpins, he thought with disgust.
Gutiérrez had recently joined a Tulare organization called Citizens for Hospital Accountability. The group had accused Benzeevi of enriching himself at the expense of the cash-strapped hospital, which subsequently declared bankruptcy. […] As 2016 came to a close, the group was pushing for a special election to unseat Kumar; if he were voted out, a majority of the board could rescind Benzeevi’s contract. […]
The recall was a clear threat to Benzeevi’s hospital-management business, and he consulted a law firm in Washington, D.C., about mounting a campaign to save Kumar’s seat. An adviser there referred him to Psy-Group, an Israeli private intelligence company. Psy-Group’s slogan was “Shape Reality,” and its techniques included the use of elaborate false identities to manipulate its targets. Psy-Group was part of a new wave of private intelligence firms that recruited from the ranks of Israel’s secret services—self-described “private Mossads.” The most aggressive of these firms seemed willing to do just about anything for their clients.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg Isn’t Looking to Retire Yet, But Is Another Supreme Court Justice Ready to Go?
No one tells a Supreme Court Justice when to retire. But there are currently two retirement dramas under way at the Court—one semi-public and the other semi-private—and they both have the potential to reshape the meaning of the Constitution for decades.
The public story is that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court’s senior liberal. Late last year, she fell and broke three ribs and, when she was being treated, doctors discovered that she had lung cancer, her third bout with cancer. She underwent surgery, apparently successfully, and the Court released word that she would need no further treatment. But, in January, she missed oral arguments for the first time in twenty-five years on the Court, and there is no guarantee that she will be there when the Justices next hear cases, on February 19th. Still, the retirement drama regarding Ginsburg is straightforward. She will hang on for as long as she can, in the hopes that a Democratic President will appoint her successor after the 2020 election.
The more complex drama involves Clarence Thomas, who is seventy years old and the longest-tenured Associate Justice on the Court. With fifty-three Republicans now in the Senate (and no filibusters allowed on Supreme Court nominations), …Trump would have a free hand in choosing a dream candidate for his conservative base if Thomas were to retire this year. The summer of 2019 would seem an ideal time to add a third younger conservative to the Court (along with Neil Gorsuch, who is fifty-one, and Brett Kavanaugh, who is fifty-four). It’s true that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, would likely violate his Merrick Garland rule and try to push through a nominee in 2020, an election year, but 2019 would be much easier to navigate. So, many conservatives are asking, why shouldn’t Thomas leave now?
NPR
Inside The Largest And Most Controversial Shelter For Migrant Children In The U.S.
Thousands of migrant children continue to arrive at the Southern border every month, without their parents, to ask for asylum. The government sends many of them to an emergency intake shelter in South Florida. That facility has come under intense scrutiny because it's the only child shelter for immigrants that's run by a for-profit corporation and the only one that isn't overseen by state regulators. […]
"We see a very different picture," says Leecia Welch, senior director of legal advocacy and child welfare at the National Center for Youth Law. "We see extremely traumatized children, some of whom sit across from us and can't stop crying over what they're experiencing."
She continues, "We hear stories of children who are told from the first day of their orientation that under no circumstances can they touch another child in the facility, even their own sibling, even friends who they're saying goodbye to after many months of shared intense experience. They can't hug them goodbye. If they do, they're told they will be written up and it could affect their immigration case."
Welch concludes, "We see a very different picture than the reporters see."
StreetsBlog
All the Bad Things About Uber and Lyft In One Simple List
Here’s the latest evidence that Uber and Lyft are destroying our world: Students at the University of California Los Angeles are taking an astonishing 11,000 app-based taxi trips every week that begin and end within the boundaries of the campus.
The report in the Daily Bruin revealed anew that Uber, Lyft, Via and the like are massively increasing car trips in many of the most walkable and transit friendly places in U.S.
It comes after a raft of recent studies have found negative effects from Uber and Lyft, such as increased congestion, higher traffic fatalities, huge declines in transit ridership and other negative impacts. It’s becoming more and more clear that Uber and Lyft having some pretty pernicious effects on public health and the environment, especially in some of the country’s largest cities.
Harper’s Bazaar
Why Does It Feel Like Everyone Has More Money Than You?
[…] Take a look around you at the lives you envy, the ones that make you boil with resentment, or fill you with insecurity about your own subpar existence: That adorable Brooklyn brownstone or chic-but-rustic upstate home; the career that YOU want (and you should have, what are you doing wrong?); the impeccable wardrobe; the mid-century modern furniture; the international vacations; the time spent flitting between gorgeous hotels or going to boutique fitness classes or (seemingly) not working at all. Maybe it’s simply an ease of life indicating that whoever possesses it has been better at this game than you have. But how does anyone start their own company or buy a home, much less travel to Fiji, in a time of crushing student debt, when the job market is shifting at an out-of-control rate into a soulless gig economy, industries are dying left and right, we’re totally burning out, and we’re being replaced with robots. Health care costs are rising faster than you can make a doctor’s appointment, but that’s OK, because robots don’t get sick. […]
As with any “meritocracy,” appearances are only a piece of the story. Wealth inequality has increased more in this decade than any other in American history, while economic mobility has done the opposite, as Matthew Stewart writes in an Atlantic article about the new American aristocracy. Money has always been passed down in families, but today, across America, parents who can are helping their grown children at unprecedented levels. A recent study from Merrill Lynch and Age Wave reported that 79 percent of the parents surveyed are providing financial support to their adult children, at an average $7,000 a year—making for a combined $500 billion annually. Increasing numbers of first-time home buyers in the U.S. are getting money from their parents for down payments. In a CreditCards.com survey of parents with children over the age of 18, three out of fourhelped their kids pay debts and living expenses, including rent, utilities, and cell phone bills. The help continues in death; roughly 60 percent of America's wealth is inherited, though this, like the rest of privilege, skews heavily white: According to the authors of a 2018 study published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, the average inheritance for white families is over $150,000; for black families, it’s under $40,000.
USA Today
Just in time for Valentine's Day: Newly discovered dinosaur had heart-shaped tail
There have been dinosaurs with feathers, "baby dragon" ones and even dinos that looked like ducks. Now, just in time for Valentine's Day, scientists say they've discovered a dinosaur that had a heart-shaped tail.
Not just a novelty act, this new dinosaur – which scientist say wears its “heart” on its tail – provides new clues as to how ecosystems evolved in Africa, a new study suggests.
The new dinosaur is "a unique species and provides new insights into sauropod evolution," the study said.
Salon
Lucian K. Truscott IV: A photo of a uniquely American racist act dominates the news, but my photo is an act of equality
The man on the left is Shannon Lanier. He is my cousin. We are standing on our great-grandfather’s grave at Monticello. The man buried beneath that obelisk fathered two children with his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and six children with his slave, Sally Hemings. My fifth great grandmother is Martha Jefferson. Shannon’s fifth great grandmother is Sally Hemings. We talk all the time about the “founding fathers” of this nation, the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, who attended the Constitutional Convention. Well, this nation had founding mothers, as well. One of our founding mothers was a slave, Sally Hemings.
Just as the early citizens of the United States and the descendants of its founders helped to build this country, so did the enslaved humans they owned, and their children, and their descendants. If Thomas Jefferson had not owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime, we would not have Monticello to visit today. Slaves built every inch of Monticello. They felled the trees and put them through a saw mill to make the lumber. They forged the nails to hammer that lumber into walls and floors and doors and windows. They made every brick with their hands — in fact, you can see the fingerprints of slave children in some of the bricks in the walls of Monticello today.