• War crimes and human rights violations committed in Afghanistan war are unlikely ever to be investigated by the International Criminal Court: ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda had tried to get the greenlight to initiate proceedings two years ago, but her request was denied. She and 86 victims appealed that ruling, leading to hearings that began Wednesday. All parties would be subject to an investigation: Afghanistan government forces, the Taliban, U.S. forces. The U.S. is not party to the ICC and officials all the way to top have made clear they will never allow an American to be prosecuted by the court. Bensouda said her preliminary investigation gave her “a reasonable basis to believe that … crimes within the court’s jurisdiction have occurred,” crimes that include torture by CIA agents at black sites. The Senate Intelligence Committee investigated and found the torture claims to be true, along with the fact that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of their interrogations. But the committee ran into opposition when it sought to release its 6,700-page report. Five years ago, a 582-page condensed version was released, but there had been opposition even to doing that. The longer report remains classified and will probably not see daylight until mid-century or later. One of the torture supervisors, Gina Haspel, is now running the CIA.
• Key question at Madrid COP25 climate summit: What role should carbon markets play in reaching Paris goals? Environmental justice advocates and indigenous groups argue that emissions trading leaves the poor bearing the brunt of pollution. "Over and over again, carbon markets have proven that they are not effective in reducing emissions," said Tere Almaguer, environmental justice organizer for PODER in San Francisco, a group focuses on organizing Latino communities. Among them are those suffering from air pollution caused by fossil fuel emissions from nearby oil refineries. She said California’s carbon cap-and-trade system allows the oil companies to invest in distant carbon mitigation projects instead of reducing emissions in their own backyard.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Seven states that are part of a 1922 compact splitting the Colorado River water among them agree to reduce their take: A century ago, the experts hugely overestimated how much water typically flows in the river. Initially, it didn’t matter because, except for California, the states were very lightly populated. For example, only 29,000 people lived in Phoenix, Arizona, at the time. Today 1.6 million do. Nearly a century of growth, combined with climate change, have forced the states to suck up reserves in Lake Mead, overdrawing 1.2 million acre feet of water annually:
As conventional wisdom has it, the states were relying on bad data when they divided up the water. But a new book challenges that narrative. Turn-of-the-century hydrologists actually had a pretty good idea of how much water the river could spare, water experts John Fleck and Eric Kuhn write in Science be Dammed: How Ignoring Inconvenient Science Drained the Colorado River. They make the case that politicians and water managers in the early 1900s ignored evidence about the limits of the river’s resources.
• 23-year-old rape victim on the way to court dies after being set afire in India by gang of men that included her rapist:
The woman was on her way to board a train in Unnao district of northern Uttar Pradesh state to attend a court hearing on Thursday over her rape when she was doused with kerosene and set on fire, according to police. [...]
The woman had filed a complaint with Unnao police in March alleging she had been raped at gunpoint on 12 December 2018, police documents showed.
• Cory Booker “taken aback” by Bloomberg’s saying the senator is “well spoken”: The billionaire candidate said he regretted having made the remark, a racist trope that in some form or other has for decades been voiced by white people supposedly praising an African American by calling him or her “articulate.” In 2007, then-Sen. Joe Biden, the day before announcing his run for the Democratic nomination, said Barack Obama was “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." Under pressure, he apologized, and Obama shrugged off the comment and obviously was undeterred when he picked his running-mate the next year. Bloomberg also expressed regret for his remark after an outcry on social media. Booker said the comment was an example how some of the party’s leading presidential hopefuls have failed to energize large percentages of black voters and communicate effectively on issues of race. But he also noted his long, favorable association with Bloomberg.