The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton. Please add news or other items in the comments.
Miami Herald New Irma track points straight at Miami but that could still changeHurricane Irma may deal a direct blow to Miami, new models suggest, but there’s still plenty of time for that to change.
Computer runs that earlier leaned to the east shifted back to the west Thursday evening, putting Miami at the center of the Category 5 hurricane. That could change as models wobble, and regardless, damaging winds could spread across the state as Irma ambles over land. Hurricane-force winds extend 140 miles across and tropical storm force winds reach nearly 400 miles.
Two South Florida nuclear power plants lie in Irma’s path. Are they ready?
The last time a major hurricane hit the Turkey Point nuclear power plant, it caused $90 million in damage but left the nuclear reactors along southern Biscayne Bay unscathed.
In anticipation of powerful Hurricane Irma, which projections on Wednesday showed headed straight for South Florida, Florida Power & Light’s two nuclear plants were finalizing staffing plans and cleaning up the grounds. But neither Turkey Point nor the St. Lucie plant farther up the coast had made the call yet to shutting down the plants.
Peter Robbins, spokesman for FPL, said shutting down a reactor is a gradual process, and the decision will be made “well in advance” of the storm making landfall.
Hurricane warnings in effect for Cuba’s north central coast
With hurricane warnings in effect for four central Cuban provinces with northern coastlines, Cubans completed last-minute preparations and evacuations Thursday in advance of Hurricane Irma.
Irma’s current path keeps the massive storm offshore and models don’t show it making landfall on the island. But the hurricane could still churn up storm surges of 5 to 10 feet and waves reaching as high as 13 to 20 feet, causing flooding in low-lying ares, said Cuba’s Institute of Meteorology.
The Washington PostHurricane Irma ravages Caribbean islands as Florida nervously awaits historic storm’s wrath
Caribbean islands pummeled by Hurricane Irma began to grapple with the monster storm’s toll on Thursday, while nervous residents of South Florida packed highways seeking safer ground amid forecasts warning that Irma posed an increasing threat to the region. […]
Irma’s Category 5 force pinwheeled through the Caribbean, leaving a wake of leveled neighborhoods, ravaged seafronts and at least 10 dead, according to government officials and news reports. The storm is grinding onward toward the Bahamas with winds hitting 180 mph and higher gusts registered, according to the hurricane center, which warned of storm surges capable of swallowing huge sections of the coast.
The head of Barbuda said the island is ‘literally a rubble’
Antigua and Barbuda Prime Minister Gaston Browne spoke about one of his twin island as if it were ravaged by war.
“Barbuda right now is literally a rubble,” Browne told The Washington Post Thursday, as the battering rain and howling winds from Hurricane Irma cleared the far eastern Caribbean islands, and the devastation of its first landfalls came into stark view under a sunny sky.
“It was emotionally painful,” he said. “It was sad to see such beautiful country being destroyed over a couple of hours.”
Senate approves bill doubling hurricane aid package, extending federal borrowing limit
The Senate approved $15.25 billion in disaster aid as part of an agreement struck by President Trump and congressional Democrats that will also raise the federal borrowing limit and keep the government open until Dec. 8.
The bill passed by a vote of 80 to 17 on Thursday afternoon. The House is expected to quickly vote on the package, despite growing opposition from fiscal conservatives who oppose pairing aid with debt and spending elements. […]
McConnell praised that agreement Thursday morning despite broad GOP concerns that Trump caved to Democrats on the their request that any deadline for extending the federal borrowing limit line up with a short-term spending package.
Ars TechnicaEquifax website hack exposes data for ~143 million US consumers
Equifax, a provider of consumer credit reports, said it experienced a data breach affecting as many as 143 million US people after criminals exploited a vulnerability on its website. The US population is about 324 million people, so that's about 44 percent of its population.
The data exposed in the hack includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some cases, driver license numbers. The hackers also accessed credit card numbers for 209,000 US consumers and dispute documents with personal identifying information for about 182,000 US people. Limited personal information for an unknown number of Canadian and UK residents was also exposed. Equifax—which also provides credit monitoring services for people whose personal information is exposed—said the unauthorized access occurred from mid-May through July. Equifax officials discovered the hack on July 29.
"Criminals exploited a US website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files," Equifax said in a statement late Thursday, without elaborating.
FDA slams EpiPen maker for doing nothing while hundreds failed, people died
The manufacturer of EpiPen devices failed to address known malfunctions in its epinephrine auto-injectors even as hundreds of customer complaints rolled in and failures were linked to deaths, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
The damning allegations came to light today when the FDA posted a warning letter it sent September 5 to the manufacturer, Meridian Medical Technologies, Inc. The company (which is owned by Pfizer) produces EpiPens for Mylan, which owns the devices and is notorious for dramatically raising prices by more than 400 percent in recent years.
The GuardianThe unprecedented drought that's crippling Montana and North Dakota
[…] While much of the country’s attention in recent weeks has been on the hurricanes striking southern Texas and the Caribbean, a so-called “flash drought”, an unpredictable, sudden event brought on by sustained high temperatures and little rain, has seized a swathe of the country and left farmers with little remedy. Across Montana’s northern border and east into North Dakota, farms are turning out less wheat than last year, much of it poorer quality than normal.
Most farmers in and around the Fort Peck Reservation agree that climate change is to blame for the sudden drought and ruined crops, but that doesn’t change the fact that farmers and others who make their living off of agriculture are now subject to shifting political winds and strained debate around the issue.
“This is unprecedented,” says Tanja Fransen of the National Weather Service in Glasgow, a larger city just up the road from Fort Peck. “This is as dry as it’s been in recorded history and some of our recording stations have 100 years of data. A lot of people try to compare this to previous years, but really, you just can’t.”
Massacre at Tula Toli: Rohingya recall horror of Myanmar army attack
It was the fast-flowing river that doomed the inhabitants of Tula Toli.
Snaking around the remote village on three sides, the treacherous waters allowed Burmese soldiers to corner and hold people on the river’s sandy banks. Some were shot on the spot. Others drowned in the current as they tried to escape. […]
More than 160,000 of Myanmar’s 1.1 million ethnic Rohingya minority have fled to Bangladesh, bringing with them stories that they say describe ethnic cleansing.
African governments' actions push people into extremism, study finds
Hundreds of violent extremists in Africa have told researchers that government action aimed at countering terrorism and insurgency across the continent was the “tipping point” for their decision to join an extremist group.
The finding, in a United Nations study published on Thursday which is one of the largest of its kind, is likely to prompt controversy.
Authorities are battling jihadi groups such as Boko Haram in west Africa and al-Shabaab in east Africa, as well as Islamic State and al-Qaida offshoots in the Sahel, often with the support of the US and other western powers.
John le Carré on Trump: ‘Something seriously bad is happening’
John le Carré, one of Britain’s greatest living writers, has spoken of the “toxic” parallels between the rise of Donald Trump and the rise of 1930s fascism. […]
“Something truly, seriously bad is happening and from my point of view we have to be awake to that,” he told an audience at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
“These stages that Trump is going through in the United States and the stirring of racial hatred … a kind of burning of the books as he attacks, as he declares real news as fake news, the law becomes fake news, everything becomes fake news.
“I think of all things that were happening across Europe in the 1930s, in Spain, in Japan, obviously in Germany. To me, these are absolutely comparable signs of the rise of fascism and it’s contagious, it’s infectious. Fascism is up and running in Poland and Hungary. There’s an encouragement about.”
The OregonianA dramatic picture of people golfing at Beacon Rock Golf Course in North Bonneville while a hillside across the Columbia River in Oregon goes up in flames has taken on a life of its own…
So, who took the shot? A novice photographer in the billing department of a company she'd rather not name, who lives in Vancouver, Wash.
"I don't golf at all," Kristi McCluer said over the phone on Thursday morning. Instead, she said, "I have spent a great part of my life in the Columbia River Gorge, hiking." […]
"It's a real photo," she confirmed, of the picture of people golfing as the fire roars. She did lighten it a little bit, but other than that, the photo captures the moment.
Congress moves forward on wildfire aid funding
The U.S. Senate passed legislation Thursday that ensures the Forest Service and other federal agencies can pay for fighting wildfires through the 2017 season.
That language was included in a bill amended to provide $7.85 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief fund following severe flooding in Texas due to Hurricane Harvey.
U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley had discussed adding wildfire aid to the disaster relief package with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who relayed that message to President Trump in efforts to make a deal over the funding package, Merkley said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
The Seattle TimesAmazon plans to build second, ‘equal’ headquarters outside Seattle
Amazon.com has outgrown Seattle.
The online retail giant, which employs about 40,000 people in the city after a hiring boom and urban build-out with little precedent in modern American history, is searching for a second home.
The company, still growing quickly in the city it has called home for 22 years, said Thursday it would seek to place another headquarters somewhere in North America starting in 2019. Amazon says it expects to spend upward of $5 billion on a new corporate campus, and house as many as 50,000 employees there.
The new headquarters will “be a full equal” to Amazon’s Seattle base, chief executive Jeff Bezos said. “We’re excited to find a second home.”
The MissoulianMore than 1 million acres have burned this summer; state fire fund drained
The cost to the state of Montana for battling wildfires that have burned more than a million acres this summer has reached $53.7 million, a staggering price tag that has completely drained a state fire fund that was already slashed in half by decisions made in the 2017 Legislature.
In April lawmakers passed a cost-cutting bill that called for taking $30 million from the roughly $62 million fire fund to maintain an informal $200 million rainy-day account for state government and to reduce the depth of cuts to other state operations and services, cuts that would be triggered if state revenues came in lower than projected. That happened in July.
The Houston ChronicleEPA says Harvey flooded or may have damaged 13 Superfund sites
Thirteen of the 41 Superfund sites in the areas impacted by Hurricane Harvey have been flooded "and/or are experiencing possible damage due to the storm," according to a statement released Saturday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
So far, federal and state officials have only been able to evaluate two of those flooded Superfund sites — Falcon Refinery, a 104-acre site contaminated with chemicals in Ingleside, Texas; and Brine Service, a waste disposal pit in Corpus Christi — to determine whether emergency clean-up is needed.
Eleven others await inspection. But EPA promises it has teams on stand-by to conduct inspections as soon as conditions permit.Researchers warn of high bacteria levels in Clear Lake floodwaters
University of Houston-Clear Lake researchers have found staggering levels of dangerous E. coli and other fecal bacteria in Hurricane Harvey floodwaters in the Clear Lake watershed.
The amount of bacteria found by researchers in some cases was 100 times those set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for recreational water use.
How sick and what sicknesses people could face by coming into contact with the contaminated floodwaters depends on a number of factors, including how long one was exposed to the water, the presence of open wounds, and the source of the contamination.
It is unclear where this bacteria came from, said Michael LaMontagne, a microbiology professor at the university.
PoliticoCourt rejects Trump administration on travel ban exemptions
President Donald Trump's travel ban policy suffered another defeat Thursday as an appeals court rejected the administration’s attempt to deny grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins of Americans a temporary exemption from the controversial executive order.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously declined to overturn a district court judge’s ruling that the administration was taking too narrow a view of an exception the Supreme Court carved out from the travel ban in June.
Facebook faces backlash over Russian meddling
Facebook is facing intense political fallout and thorny legal questions a day after confirming that Russian funds paid for advertising on the social media platform aimed at influencing voters during last year’s presidential election.
Mark Warner, the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Thursday he hopes to call executives from Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies to testify publicly about what role their companies may have played, however unwittingly, in the wider Kremlin effort to manipulate the 2016 White House race.
"I think we may just be seeing the tip of the iceberg,” the Virginia Democrat told reporters in response to Facebook’s Wednesday disclosure that apparent Russian-tied accounts spent some $150,000 on more than 5,200 political ads last year. Warner said Facebook’s disclosure was based only on a “fairly narrow search” for suspicious ad-buying accounts.
Feinstein faces growing storm on the left
Sen. Dianne Feinstein has dominated California politics for more than a quarter of a century. But facing blistering criticism that she’s out of touch with the progressive left following her recent comments about President Donald Trump and DACA, it’s increasingly looking like the Democratic lawmaker will face a major primary challenge if she runs for a fifth full term.
Feinstein, the oldest member of the Senate, has been the target of sustained liberal criticism since January. Her centrist brand of politics, skeptical view of single-payer health care and support for some of the president’s earliest nominees have drawn the ire of progressives who have little tolerance for Feinstein’s pragmatic approach in the Trump era. […]
Buzz in state political circles increasingly centers on one prospective Democratic challenger, Kevin de León of Los Angeles, the first Latino to hold the powerful position of state Senate president pro tempore in more than 120 years.
NPR NewsDeadly Bird Flu In China Evolves, Spreads To New Regions
This past year China had the largest outbreak of a deadly bird flu since the virus was first detected in March 2013. For the past five years, China has had annual waves of H7N9 outbreaks that peak around January and February.
During the 2017 season, the country reported nearly the same number of cases as all four previous years combined, researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report Thursday. The virus cropped up in more geographic regions. And it showed signs of evolving in ways that cause concern.
As NPR reported in April, the virus has picked up mutations that make it more deadly in poultry and less susceptible to antiviral treatments. "Our research shows it can kill all the chickens in our lab within 24 hours," virologist Guan Yi told NPR.
States Sue To Block DACA Termination, Citing Trump's 'Racial Animus'
Several states are suing the Trump administration to block it from terminating the program protecting young immigrants known as DREAMers.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in the Eastern District of New York, was brought by the attorneys general of 15 states and the District of Columbia. All are Democrats.
It follows the administration's announcement Tuesday that it would phase out the Obama-era program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said DACA would end in March 2018 unless Congress takes action to salvage it.
Here's How Big North Korea's Latest Nuclear Test Actually Was
When North Korea conducted its latest nuclear test, the ground trembled more than 3,000 miles away in western Kazakhstan. Recording the shaking was AS059, an automated seismic station that's part of a global network designed to detect underground nuclear explosions.
The network is run by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization(CTBTO), a U.N.-affiliated group devoted to monitoring for illicit nuclear tests. While the test ban treaty itself is not yet in force, the United States and other nations fund the monitoring network.
This wasn't the first time a North Korean bomb shook AS059. The station has detected each of the North's six nuclear tests. But as the above chart shows, this test on Sept. 3 was far more powerful than previous ones.
The AtlanticTa-Nehisi Coates: The First White President
IT IS INSUFFICIENT TO STATE the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit. […]
Has Climate Change Intensified 2017’s Western Wildfires?
This wasn’t supposed to be a bad year for Western wildfires.
Last winter, a weak La Niña bloomed across the Pacific. It sent flume after flume of rain to North America and irrigated half the continent. Water penetrated deep into the soil of Western forests, and mammoth snowdrifts stacked up across the Sierra Nevadas. California’s drought ended in the washout.
Yet fires are now raging across the West. More than two dozen named fires currently burn across Washington and Oregon. More than one million acres have burned in Montana, an area larger than Rhode Island, in the Treasure State’s third-worst fire season on record. And the largest brushfire in the history of Los Angeles currently threatens hundreds of homes in Burbank.
Canada may be experiencing an even worse year for wildfires: 2.86 million acres have burned in British Columbia, the largest area ever recorded in the province.