Los Angeles Times
Senate invokes War Powers Act in vote to restrain Trump’s military actions in Iran
Trump’s ability to use military force against Iran would be restricted unless he first received congressional approval, according to a bipartisan resolution approved by the Senate on Thursday.
But Trump is certain to veto the resolution, and it is unlikely that either the House or Senate would have the two-thirds majority needed to override him, making Thursday’s vote more of a symbolic rebuke.
The resolution, sponsored by Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), gained steam in the wake of the U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani in early January. A vote was delayed by the impeachment trial of Trump, which under Senate rules had to take precedence over any other legislative action. It passed Thursday 55-45, with eight Republicans joining all Democrats in support.
Trump seeks to divert more Pentagon money to border wall construction
The Trump administration is seeking to shift $3.8 billion more from the defense budget to pay for constructing a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, the Pentagon notified Congress on Thursday, immediately provoking bipartisan objections for a second year.
The plan would pay for a further 177 miles of wall construction by taking the money from Pentagon accounts earmarked to buy fighter aircraft, vehicles, warships and other big-ticket weapons systems, the document showed.
The Washington Post
Trump to headline a $580,600-per-couple fundraiser
Trump will be the guest of honor at a Saturday fundraiser at the palatial Palm Beach estate of billionaire Nelson Peltz. Trump’s fellow guests: donors who gave $580,600 per couple to support the president’s reelection, making it the most expensive such fundraising event since Trump took office. […]
It also shows the special access enjoyed by many of Trump’s wealthiest donors, including business executives and lobbyists, who get the chance to air their grievances with the president’s tariffs or promote their pet projects, often while dining on Trump’s favorite foods. […]
[Trump] and the Republican Party have assembled a formidable war chest, with about $200 million on hand as of last month for the general election fight, party officials said.
Trump allies take aim at Buttigieg’s sexuality
Allies of … Trump have sharply focused attention on the sexual identity of presidential contender Pete Buttigieg in recent days, questioning in stark terms whether Americans are ready for a gay candidate who kisses his husband onstage.
The attacks are prompting blunt responses from Buttigieg’s allies and even his Democratic rivals, who call the remarks inappropriate and offensive. The exchanges were ignited by radio host Rush Limbaugh, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Trump last week and who framed his comments as an ostensible analysis of how Democrats feel. […]
Limbaugh’s comments quickly reverberated around right-wing circles; the Federalist, a conservative magazine, defended them as “not homophobic,” saying he was simply asking, albeit in an “uncouth” way, how voters would respond to a gay candidate.
Opinion: You like Amy Klobuchar now? Remember that when your inner sexist starts doubting her.
A gentle warning to Democrats who are newly awakened to the prospect of Amy Klobuchar: Remember that right now you like her.
The U.S. senator from Minnesota had a surprisingly strong third-place finish in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, and suddenly voters and pundits lifted their weary heads and declared that maybe a woman did have a shot at winning the election, after all — just not any of the women they’d been paying attention to.
Amy. Amy was the one they’d been waiting for. Amy was the right mix of tough and empathetic, savvy and fresh. (“She finds a way to care,” pundited Chris Matthews on MSNBC.)
A woman but not, you know, the Elizabeth Warren kind of woman everyone had decided they didn’t like or couldn’t win. (“Her tone/posture isn’t presidential,” pundited someone on Twitter, referring to Warren.) An electable woman. Acceptable to the assorted Biden castoffs and Buttigieg skeptics. (“Help me choose you,” that same Twitter person beseeched Klobuchar, dipping a toe in the wave of Klomentum.)
Turtles the size of a car once roamed the earth
In the swamps of northern South America some 10 million years ago, quotidian life-or-death battles unfolded at epic scale. Giant caimans, in the same family as alligators, stalked the wetlands of modern-day Venezuela and Colombia, slinking along at 30-feet, snout to tail. Among their most formidable prey: the Stupendemys geographicus, a colossal turtle about which little was known — until now.
New research, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, reveals important findings about the Stupendemys, a now-extinct freshwater turtle, and details the discovery of one of its shells — the largest known turtle shell found to date, at nearly nine-and-a-half-feet long. The animal would have resembled, in length and weight, a midsized car.
Gizmodo
NASA Releases Remixed Version of Iconic ‘Pale Blue Dot’ Photo
A humbling photo of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 probe from a distance of 3.7 billion miles has been reprocessed by NASA to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the image.
On February 14, 1990, NASA’s Voyager probe turned its camera toward Earth, resulting in one of the most awesome photos ever taken.
It's Straight Up Balmy in Antarctica
Picture this: It’s 68 degrees Fahrenheit. You’re comfortably rocking a light denim jacket. You’re sipping a gin and tonic. You’ve got a picnic blanket and a spread of raw veggies and dips. The wind is in your hair. So nice to be in…the Antarctic.
Seriously, it’s straight up balmy in Antarctica right now. On Sunday, Seymour Island—a chain of islands off the Antarctic Peninsula—registered a temperature of 20.75 degrees Celsius, or about 68 degrees Fahrenheit, for the first time on record. That’s almost a full degree higher than the area’s previous record of 19.8 degrees Celsius (67.6 degrees Fahrenheit).
“We are seeing the warming trend in many of the sites we are monitoring, but we have never seen anything like this,” Carlos Schaefer, a Brazilian government scientist who studies the Antarctic, told the Guardian, which first reported the story.
The Guardian
Chief justice urged to step in as Trump's 'abuse of power' condemned
The scandal embroiling the White House and US justice department in the case of Donald Trump’s former confidant Roger Stone deepened on Thursday as senior Democrats condemned an “abuse of power” by the president and called for the chief justice of the supreme court to intervene to protect the judge in the case. […]
While Trump continued to deny wrongdoing, Democrats urged the chief justice, John Roberts, to defend the independence of the judicial branch from the president’s continued attacks.
Bolsonaro attacks Pope Francis over pontiff's plea to protect the Amazon
Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonarohas lashed out at Pope Francis after the pontiff pleaded for the protection of the Amazon rainforest, and attacked the environmental group Greenpeace as “rubbish”.
“Pope Francis said yesterday the Amazon is his, the world’s, everyone’s,” said Bolsonaro, who has often railed against international criticism of his environmental policies as an attack on Brazilian sovereignty.
“Well, the pope may be Argentinian, but God is Brazilian.”
Huge rise in coronavirus cases casts doubt over scale of epidemic
The true scale of the epidemic caused by the new coronavirus in Hubei province has been thrown into doubt after the Chinese authorities reported more than 13,300 extra cases going back over an unknown number of days or weeks.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said the huge jump in cases in Hubei, bringing the total to more than 60,000 worldwide, was due to a change in the way Chinese authorities was counting them.
Cases where doctors have seen chest infection on a CT scan are now being classed as coronavirus rather than just those confirmed by a lab test result, leading to a 254 rise in deaths to a total of 1,370 since the outbreak began. All but two of the deaths have been in China.
CNN
Jessie Liu resigns from Treasury after pulled nomination
'Operation chaos': How conservatives are working to disrupt the South Carolina Democratic primary
Some conservatives in South Carolina want to disrupt the state's upcoming Democratic primary and inject chaos into the race for the nomination… by getting Republicans to vote in the Democratic primary.
"You know I guess you could call it meddling," said Christopher Sullivan, one of the organizers of the Conservative Defense Fund in South Carolina. "I would love to see the Democrats -- whoever wins the South Carolina Democrat primary -- for everybody else to have accused him of having stolen the election because he was actually elected with Republican support and therefore prolonged the chaos and the disruption."
In South Carolina, Republicans aren't holding their own presidential primary this year. The state's open primary rules allow for eligible voters to cast ballots in the Democratic contest even if they are registered Republicans. That gives GOP voters a chance to play spoiler in the Democratic contest that is shaping up to be a do-or-die moment for former Vice President Joe Biden and his campaign.
DC federal court chief judge: 'Public criticism or pressure is not a factor' after Trump ripped proposed sentence for Roger Stone
The top judge on the Washington, DC, federal district court said Thursday that judges in the federal court will not be influenced by public criticism after tweets sent earlier this week by … Donald Trump over the sentencing recommendation for his former adviser, Roger Stone.
"The Judges of this Court base their sentencing decisions on careful consideration of the actual record in the case before them; the applicable sentencing guidelines and statutory factors; the submissions of the parties, the Probation Office and victims; and their own judgment and experience," said DC District Court Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell. "Public criticism or pressure is not a factor." […]
Howell's comment is also notable as yet another instance of federal judges, especially those in Washington, asserting their independence in the wake of Trump's attacks of the judiciary.
Politico
Warren on the ropes
Elizabeth Warren convened a conference call Tuesday night after her fourth-place finish in the New Hampshire primary and delivered some straight talk to demoralized staffers.
“I don’t kid myself,” Warren said, according to a source on the call. “I know that when the pundits and naysayers criticize us, I know it gets hard. And I know your jobs get hard, but these are the moments we find out who we are. ... These are the moments when we dig deep.”
The moment is an enormous test not just for the Warren team, but for the candidate herself… She’s proceeded cautiously. But the hyperdisciplined Warren is inching toward drawing more contrasts with her opponents, after sticking to an “I’m not here to attack other Democrats” approach for most of the campaign.
Kevin McCarthy faces uneasy right flank over climate push
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is eagerly pushing a new conservative effort to combat climate change. But not everyone in the GOP is racing to embrace the plan just yet — and it's already facing blowback from some groups on the right.
McCarthy (R-Calif.) and a cross-section of House Republicans on Wednesday unveiled a package of narrow environmental bills — the first phase of the GOP’s modest effort to combat global warming, a top priority for young voters and an opportunity for Republicans to draw a contrast with some of the proposals on the left.
There’s wide consensus among Republicans that they need to do something to address climate change…
Trump reflects on impeachment: 'I think of Nixon more than anybody else'
Donald Trump reflected Thursday on his place in American presidential history in the aftermath of his Senate impeachment trial — revealing in a rare moment of introspection that he experiences "a little bit of a different feeling" when he gazes upon Richard Nixon's White House portrait. […]
"And, you know, I think of Nixon more than anybody else, and what that dark period was in our country," he continued. "And the whole thing with the tapes and the horror show. It was dark, and it went on for a long time. And I watched it."
Deutsche Welle
Dresden marks 75 years since Allied firebombing in far-right stronghold
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier chose his words carefully on Thursday as he marked what is perhaps the most difficult of this year's anniversaries linked to the end of World War II — the bombing of Dresden.
"When we remember the history of the bombing war in our country today, then we remember both: the suffering of the people in German cities, and the suffering that Germans inflicted on others," he said his speech at Dresden's Kulturpalast concert hall, part of a ceremony attended by Britain's Prince Edward and a host of Saxon politicians.
"We don't forget," Steinmeier continued. "It was Germans who started this horrific war, and by the end it was millions of Germans who carried it out — not all, but then many out of conviction."
US announces 7-day partial truce with Taliban
The United States has secured a seven-day partial truce with the Taliban, following talks to negotiate a path to peace in Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said on Thursday.
"The United States and the Taliban have negotiated a proposal for a seven-day reduction in violence," he said.
The announcement was made as NATO defense ministers met in Brussels, and a day after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani touted "notable progress" in negotiations with the insurgent group.
Ars Technica
Amazon wins court injunction on controversial JEDI contract
Cloud-computing and retail behemoth Amazon won a legal victory today against rival Microsoft as a federal judge agreed to order a hold on a massive federal contract Microsoft was awarded late last year.
Amazon late last year filed suit against the Trump administration over the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud-computing contract. Amazon last month asked the court to grant a temporary injunction halting any JEDI work while the case is pending, and today Judge Patricia Campbell-Smith agreed. Although the existence of the injunction is public, documents relating to the matter are presently sealed. […]
Amazon filed suit a month later. The company argued that it didn't just lose the contract for ordinary reasons of cost or capability but was instead sabotaged for political reasons. Microsoft's win flowed from "improper pressure from … Donald J. Trump, who launched repeated public and behind-the-scenes attacks to steer the JEDI Contract away from AWS to harm his perceived political enemy—Jeffrey P. Bezos," the lawsuit argued.
Details pour in from New Horizons’ visit to a Kuiper Belt Object
Following its successful rendezvous with Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft was sent on towards a smaller object out in the Kuiper Belt. As it shot past, the spacecraft captured images of a small world consisting of two very distinct lobes, with properties that scientists found a bit confusing. But details would have to wait, as the combination of distance and power budget meant that transmitting much of New Horizons' data back to Earth was a slow process.
The wait for that data is now over, as the high-resolution imagery is now available, and scientists have used it to try to better understand the formation and structure of what is now known as Arrokoth (named for the Powhatan word for "sky"). While the data doesn't answer every question we might have about Arrokoth, it does give us some very good ideas about how such a strange structure could have formed.
NASA signals interest in Venus and volcanoes for next science missions
NASA scientists must not have had an easy decision this winter as they considered more than a dozen intriguing concepts for Discovery-class missions to explore the Solar System.
But decide they did, selecting four missions for additional study and refinement on Thursday. NASA said the proposals were chosen based on their potential science value and feasibility of development plans, through a competitive peer-review process.
Each of the mission teams will now receive $3 million from NASA to finalize its proposals over a nine-month period. After this, NASA will likely select two missions to proceed into development and toward launch later in the 2020s. Discovery missions have a cost cap of $450 million.
Vox
Jeff Bezos’s first employee: Amazon “scares me”
Jeff Bezos once called him “the most important person ever in the history of Amazon.com.”
Now, Amazon’s very first employee, Shel Kaphan, says a breakup of Amazon “could potentially make sense.”
In an interview for a new PBS Frontline documentary about Amazon viewed by Recode, which airs February 18, Kaphan said the company’s rise to power has left him conflicted.
“On one hand I’m proud of what it became,” Kaphan told the documentary’s host, James Jacoby. “But it also scares me.”
“I think not all of the effects of the company on the world are the best,” he added. “And I wish it wasn’t so, but I had something to do with bringing it into existence; it’s partly on me.”
Here's why America’s democracy is failing
Broadly speaking, there are four features of our system of government that make our democracy less democratic, many of them working in interlocking ways. These features also happen to give the [Republcians] a structural advantage.
- The Senate is deeply unrepresentative of the country
- The next winner of the Electoral College could lose the popular vote by as much as 6 percentage points
- Partisan gerrymandering is still allowed
- The Constitution is virtually impossible to amend
The New York Times
McClatchy, a Major U.S. Newspaper Chain, Files for Bankruptcy
It was a thriving family business that got its start in 1857 as a four-page newspaper for residents of Sacramento in the wake of the gold rush. Now the McClatchy Company, the publisher of The Sacramento Bee, The Miami Herald and 28 other dailies across the country, has filed for bankruptcy and is expected to be run by a New York hedge fund. […]
McClatchy has struggled with debt for more than a decade, after it acquired a rival newspaper chain, Knight Ridder, for $4.5 billion in 2006. Then came the recession and a sharp decline in revenue that accompanied the rise of digital media, a one-two punch that destabilized the industry. In November, McClatchy announced a plan to end its Saturday print editions by the end of 2020.
Bloomberg
Hedge Fund Behind Trump’s Favorite Tabloid To Own McClatchy
…McClatchy filed for bankruptcy in New York with plans to hand majority ownership of one of the industry’s largest newspaper publishers to hedge fund Chatham Asset Management, owner of the scandal-plagued tabloid National Enquirer. […]
If McClatchy’s bankruptcy plan succeeds, more than one-third of the total circulation of U.S. newspapers will be controlled by private equity firms or hedge funds, according to analyst Ken Doctor.
“These are companies in a distressed industry,” he said. “It takes financial players to come in and operate them and they’re cutting and cutting.”
Trump to Stop Allowing Aides to Listen to Foreign Leader Calls
Donald Trump said he is considering blocking administration officials from listening to his telephone calls with foreign leaders, after a whistle-blower complaint about his conversation with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskiy led to his impeachment.
“That’s what they’ve done over the years, when you call a foreign leader, people listen,” Trump said in a radio interview with Geraldo Rivera that was broadcast on Thursday. “I may end the practice entirely, I may end it entirely.” […]
Trump said he was considering a total ban in response to a question about the removal of Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman from the White House National Security Council last week.
Wonkette
Trump's Reichstag Fire Is Here, And It's Going To Burn For The Next Nine Months
[…] The time we have feared in the Trump presidency is right now, and it's going to last at least until the election in November. What happens after that is up to the American people. Or at least hopefully it's still up to us.
This is Trump's Reichstag Fire, and yes, he's going to bumblefuck his way through it, because he's not the brightest bag of dicks in the knife drawer. But it's still happening. He might even try to make a Moscow Apartment Bombing happen, or at least tell his followers it happened, and they will accept it as true, because he has captured them. As Rachel Maddow asked last night, is there anything that you honestly believe this amoral shithole of a man would not do to this country, if it helped him retain or grow his power? Anything?
In a Wonkette piece yesterday — aptly titled "PULL THE FUCKING FIRE ALARM," because that's what you do when the Reichstag is on fire — we ended by saying everyone needs to go back and re-read Masha Gessen's "Autocracy: Rules For Survival," published two days after the election. In it, the Russian-born Gessen, who knows a thing or nine about living under authoritarian regimes, correctly predicted what the Trump presidency would become and offered a roadmap for how to handle it. Rule number one is "Believe the autocrat" when he says he's going to do something. (Not when he says there's a hurricane a-bearin' down on Alabama, that's different.) Rule number three is that "Institutions will not save you."
Hippie Enviros And Big Timber Reached A Deal, And Oregon GOP Is Losing Its Mind
As Oregon — or at least its most populous parts — has become an increasingly blue state, Republicans … have largely been reduced to just blocking as much legislation as they can manage — even if it means they have to bug out of the state to block climate legislation. The worst thing about their new status as the party of permanent obstruction? In the case of their walkout to prevent a vote on the cap-and-trade bill last June, it worked.
But now, the GOP delegation in the state lege faces a dire new threat: Some of the corporations Republicans assumed would always be on their side seem far more interested in making money than in sticking it to the Democratic majority. On Monday, a bunch of Oregon's timber industry groups announced they'd reached an agreement with a bunch of Oregon environmental groups — over two dozen industry and eco groups all together — to work with a mediator on future legislation. The two biggest goals are passing updates to the state's outdated forest-management laws, and creating a "statewide Habitat Conservation Plan" that would govern protections for endangered and threatened species on private timber acreage. […]
And that's why Republicans in the state Senate feel outraged and betrayed… The Senate Republican leader, Herman Baertschiger Jr., whined Tuesday that Big Trees had no loyalty, no loyalty at all:
These people come into our offices, ask us to do things for them and then turn around and throw us under the bus [...] You kind of scratch your head and say: who are we fighting for?
Mongabay
Economists, conservationists, political leaders urge adoption of carbon tax to halt tropical deforestation
A comment piece published in Nature yesterday urges tropical countries to adopt a tax on carbon emissions in order to halt global warming, species loss, and deforestation.
The authors of the piece include Edward B. Barbier, a distinguished professor of economics at Colorado State University in the US; Ricardo Lozano, Colombia’s Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development; Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, Costa Rica’s Minister of Environment and Energy; and Sebastian Troëng, executive vice-president of US-based NGO Conservation International.
“Tropical deforestation and land-use change must be halted to safeguard the climate and global biodiversity,” the authors write in Nature. “The widespread adoption of a tropical carbon tax is a practical way forward.”
Illegal pangolin trade may have played a part in coronavirus outbreak
The death toll from the novel coronavirus outbreak, the disease now called COVID-19, crossed the 1,000 mark this week as confirmed cases surpassed 60,000, but it remains unclear how the virus arrived into human populations. Bats are widely believed to be the source of the new virus.
Some findings suggest it did not jump from bats to humans directly. Instead, pangolins, the group of scaly anteaters that constitute the most trafficked mammals in the world, are suspected to be the intermediary. China’s Xinhua News Agency reported last week that researchers had found the closest genetic match yet to the novel coronavirus infecting humans in a virus detected in pangolins. However, scientists have cautioned against jumping to conclusions before the research is published and reviewed.
Science
How Congress could reverse cuts in Trump’s budget request for NSF
On its face, the proposed 2021 budget unveiled this week for the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) looks like a disaster: An overall reduction of 6.5%, including a 7.8% cut in its research programs.
But a closer look suggests outgoing NSF Director France Córdova has made it as easy as possible for Congress, the final arbiter of federal spending, to lessen the sting. She has crafted her last budget to appeal to both Democratic and Republican lawmakers—and left holes that those legislators will likely want to fill. […]
Despite a bottom line that is $537 million below its current level of $8.28 billion, NSF’s proposed 2021 budget gives a big boost to two White House priorities—artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information science (QIS). Those increases, a near doubling over 2019, should appeal to lawmakers who have already shown that they see these two disciplines as key drivers of U.S. economic growth and national security.
The Sydney Morning Herald
'Never seen anything like this before': Bloomberg's astonishing $460m ad spend
[…] Bloomberg's campaign has hired thousands of campaign staffers in recent weeks, and is paying them nearly twice as much as other candidates. It shows. The level of slickness on display exceeded anything you find at the other Democratic candidate events. […]
Last week Larry Sabato, one of America's best-known political analysts, was sick, so he spent the day at home. Flicking between different television channels, he was amazed by what he saw.
Sabato lives in Virginia, a state that will send a big chunk of delegates to the Democratic Party's presidential convention in July.
"I saw at least 30 ads for Mike Bloomberg and none for any of the other candidates," Sabato says. "It is unbelievable what he is doing. We have never seen anything like this before."
'He said what the rest of us were thinking': Firefighter who sprayed PM sees free beers flow in
Paul Parker had been fighting fires for days when he became so famous for his acrid view of Prime Minister Scott Morrison that strangers all across Australia decided he deserved a beer and a bar tab without end.
Exhausted and emotional, Parker, from the tiny riverside village of Nelligen on the NSW South Coast, gained national notoriety in early January when he roared in a fire truck towards a TV camera crew, hung out the window and unloaded an expletive-laden tirade aimed at the Prime Minister.
The Atlantic
Did Trump Lose His Big Gamble on Biden?
Joe Biden might not be out, but he’s way, way down. After consecutive poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, the onetime prohibitive front-runner is in deep trouble.
It’s impossible to talk about this turn of events without talking about Donald Trump, and not only because he’s the man Biden hopes to succeed as president. Biden’s peak in the RealClearPolitics polling average came in early May 2019—right around the time that The New York Times published a story titled “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies.”
What has happened since then is well known: Trump and his allies still haven’t managed to turn up any specific evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden or his son Hunter related to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Trump’s pursuit of dirt on the Bidens led directly to his impeachment, in December, making him only the third president to suffer that sanction.
The Cascading Consequences of the Worst Disease Ever
Karen Lips could hear that the frogs had gone. Since 1997, she had been working in the national park near El Copé, Panama—an area whose forests were rich in amphibians, and whose air resounded with their croaks and ribbits. But since 2004, when a deadly fungus called Bd swept through the region, that chorus has all but disappeared. “It’s pretty obvious,” says Lips, who is based at the University of Maryland. “You don’t hear them. You go out at night, and you know numbers are down.”
Bd, or Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, is a pathogen like no other. While most diseases affect a few host species, Bd indiscriminately kills amphibians—an entire class of animals. In El Copé alone, it wiped 30 species from the region, and reduced overall amphibian numbers by more than 75 percent.
This sudden froglessness has consequences, some of which are apparent to human senses. The streams, for example, are now slippery and hard to walk through, because the rocks are overgrown by algae that was once eaten by frog tadpoles. Other changes are harder to pinpoint. Many frogs are food for snakes, and if the prey vanish, the predators should suffer. But tropical snakes are notoriously hard to find: They’re not vocal like frogs, can remain motionless for hours, and often blend into their backgrounds. Besides, many are naturally rare. “I could go to a site, and if you asked me how the snakes are doing, I wouldn’t know,” Lips says.