The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton. Please add news or other items in the comments.
The Washington Post Arctic temperatures soar 45 degrees above normal, flooded by extremely mild air on all sidesWhile the Eastern United States simmers in some of its warmest February weather ever recorded, the Arctic is also stewing in temperatures more than 45 degrees above normal. This latest huge temperature spike in the Arctic is another striking indicator of its rapidly transforming climate.
On Monday and Tuesday, the northernmost weather station in the world, Cape Morris Jesup at the northern tip of Greenland, experienced more than 24 hours of temperatures above freezing according to the Danish Meteorological Institute. “How weird is that?” tweeted Robert Rohde, a physicist and lead scientist at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit organization that conducts analyses of the Earth’s temperature. “Well it’s Arctic winter. The sun set in October and won’t be seen again until March. Perpetual night, but still above freezing.”
The Danish Meteorological Institute wrote that only twice before had it measured temperatures this high during February at this location, just 400 miles from the North Pole, in 2011 and 2017
Putin ally said to be in touch with Kremlin, Assad before his mercenaries attacked U.S. troopsA Russian oligarch believed to control the Russian mercenaries who attacked U.S. troops and their allies in Syria this month was in close touch with Kremlin and Syrian officials in the days and weeks before and after the assault, according to U.S. intelligence reports.
In intercepted communications in late January, the oligarch, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, told a senior Syrian official that he had “secured permission” from an unspecified Russian minister to move forward with a “fast and strong” initiative that would take place in early February.
Prigozhin made front-page headlines last week when he was indicted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III on charges of bankrolling and guiding a long-running Russian scheme to conduct “information warfare” during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
Special counsel Mueller files new charges against Manafort, Gates
Paul Manafort was using fraudulently obtained loans and tax-cheating tricks to prop up his personal finances as he became chairman of the Trump campaign in 2016, according to a new 32-count indictment filed against him and his business partner Thursday.
The indictment ratchets up pressure on Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, who were already preparing for a trial in the District that could come later this year on fraud and money-laundering charges.
The additional charges had been expected in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s prosecution of Manafort and Gates. Manafort joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 and was campaign chairman from June to August of that year. Gates also served as a top official on Trump’s campaign.
Spectacular fossils found at Bears Ears — right where Trump removed protections
One of the world's richest troves of Triassic-period fossils has been discovered in an area of Bears Ears National Monument that just lost its protected status, scientists announced Thursday. President Trump signed a proclamation in December that shrank the national monument by 85 percent.
The discovery of intact remains of crocodile-like animals called phytosaurs came to light this week when researchers announced it at the Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists conference at Dixie State University in St. George, Utah. Based on an initial excavation, the 70-yard-long site, its depth yet unknown, “may be the densest area of Triassic period fossils in the nation, maybe the world,” Rob Gay, a contractor at the Museums of Western Colorado, said in a statement.
In an interview, Gay, who led a team of researchers on last year's expedition, called it the “largest and most complete bone bed in the state of Utah, and one of, if not the largest, anywhere in the United States.” He called the discovery of three intact toothy, long-snouted fossils from the period extremely rare, adding that the “density of bone is as high or greater than all the other Triassic sites in the country.”
The Kansas City StarGov. Greitens indicted for felony invasion of privacy stemming from affair
Gov. Eric Greitens was indicted Thursday afternoon by a St. Louis grand jury on a felony charge of invasion of privacy.
The charge stems from a 2015 affair and allegations that he threatened to release a nude photograph of the woman, taken while she was blindfolded and her hands were bound, if she ever spoke publicly about the affair.
St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner launched a criminal investigation of the allegations last month shortly after they become public. The indictment accuses Greitens of not only knowingly photographing the woman with whom he had an affair, but also transmitting the image “in a manner that allowed access to that image via a computer.”
The Denver PostClimate change in the Rockies could make this Colorado wildflower vanish forever
A creamy jasmine wildflower once common across the Colorado mountains may be vanishing forever as climate change brings warmer and drier conditions.
That’s the conclusion unveiled Wednesday by scientists who conducted a 25-year experiment above Crested Butte near Gothic at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory tracking northern rock jasmine, a delicate white-petaled species also known as fairy candelabra. These wildflowers, a type of nonfragrant primrose, are typically found at elevations between 5,000 feet and 17,000 feet across the northern hemisphere.
The scientists simulated conditions that conservative climate change models indicate will be likely, continuing a trend that a preponderance of scientists have linked to climate change caused by human emissions of heat-trapping “greenhouse” pollution.
Their results show that a temperature increase of an additional 3 degrees Fahrenheit would cause the “local extinction” of northern rock jasmine in the area above Crested Butte, where abundant wildflowers have long been celebrated for their beauty.
Shelby County ReporterRare yellow cardinal spotted in Shelby County, Alabama
An Alabaster resident and bird enthusiast has recently been receiving visits from an unexpected, but very welcome, guest.
According to Charlie Stephenson, a rare American Northern Cardinal with a pigment mutation first appeared in her back yard in late January, and has been spotted there almost every day since.
“It’s exciting every time he comes to the back yard,” Stephenson said. “I have yet to not get excited every time he comes around.” […]
After she contacted Auburn University biologist Geoffrey Hill, she learned that spotting a cardinal with this type of pigment mutation is an extremely rare occurrence. Yellow American Northern Cardinals are typically only seen once a year in the United States, and one has not been documented for the past five years.
x xYouTube Video Miami HeraldParkland school cop ‘never went in’ during the shooting. There were other failures, too.
Eight days after mass shooter Nikolas Cruz murdered 17 people inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Broward’s top cop on Thursday revealed a stunning series of failures by the sheriff’s department.
A school campus cop heard the gunfire, rushed to the building but never went inside — instead waiting outside for another four agonizing minutes as Cruz continued the slaughter.
And long before Cruz embarked on the worst school shooting in Florida history, Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies had multiple warnings that the 19-year-old was a violent threat and a potential school shooter, according to records released Thursday.
x"There was nothing left to repair" A medic writes about the Florida mass shooting. https://t.co/sSZew0VwXD
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) February 22, 2018Florida Senate president’s support for arming teachers sets up showdown on gun bills
Florida Senate President Joe Negron said Thursday that he supports arming school teachers, endorsing a controversial proposal that has been severely criticized by educators, law enforcement and even U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, the former speaker of the Florida House. […]
Sen. Greg Steube, R-Sarasota, advocated the proposal (SB 1236) Tuesday, suggesting in a radio interview that more guns on campus would make schools safer. His arguments were similar to those an Alabama lawmaker made the same day while proposing near identical legislation.
Is century-old Florida flamingo mystery finally solved? Scientists say yes
One sunny spring day in 2012, Tony Pernas, a botanist for the Big Cypress National Preserve, volunteered his boat to take colleagues on a scouting trip to chase down a rumored flock of rare flamingos spotted in a remote Everglades lake. […]
What Pernas didn’t realize at the time is that he’d stumbled into a century-old debate among ornithologists. Early naturalists spotted plenty flamingos, but never made a definitive decision. A century later, after plume hunters ravaged the state, they’d mostly disappeared. Now, a comprehensive study published Wednesday in the American Ornithological Society’s journal The Condorfinally provides an answer: Flamingos are likely natives, though their footprint in Florida is as light as their hot pink feathers.
The study, written by Pernas, Zoo Miami's Steve Whitfield and Frank Ridgely, Audubon Florida's Pete Frezza and Jerry Lorenz, biologists Anne Mauro and Judd Patterson, depicts a rich — and gruesome — flamingo legacy in South Florida, and an enduring mystery about their habitats and haunts.
Chicago TribuneGov. Rauner drinks chocolate milk to demonstrate his commitment to diversity
In an awkward onstage appearance this week, Gov. Bruce Rauner drank a glass of chocolate milk to demonstrate his belief in diversity.
“It’s really, really good,” Rauner said after taking a sip of the sugary drink. “Diversity!”
A DuPage County Republican official on Thursday vowed to stay in an Illinois House race despite calls for him to drop out over “inappropriate” comments that attorney general candidate Erika Harold said he made to her about race and sexual orientation in mid-October.
Harold, an African-American who made anti-bullying part of her platform in becoming Miss America in 2003, said Winfield Township GOP Chairman Burt Minor asked her if she was a “lesbo” and repeatedly used the N-word when he met with her after she launched her statewide candidacy.
Boston Globe‘The day they ask me to carry a gun in the classroom is the last day I teach’
Kristen Frazier, an eighth-grade teacher in Fitchburg, accepts the grim possibility that she might have to risk her life and barricade a classroom door with her body in the event of a school shooting. She has also undergone training that helps teachers assess when they should flee, lock down, or try to fight back during an attack.
But as for President Trump’s suggestion that she and other teachers should be armed as a way to deter mass shootings like the one at a Florida high school last week? That crosses a line, Frazier said.
“The day they ask me to carry a gun in the classroom is the last day I teach,” she said. “Period. End of story.”
Neanderthals had an eye for art, according to a new study of cave paintings in Spain
Neanderthals, rather than humans, created the world’s oldest known cave paintings, according to new research that suggests our extinct cousins, whose name over the years has become synonymous with “unintelligent,” had greater abilities than previously known.
Paintings found in three caves in Spain were created more than 64,000 years ago, 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe, meaning they must have been made by Neanderthals, the University of Southampton said in a statement.
The research, conducted by an international team led by the British university and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, was published Thursday in the journal Science.
The Philadelphia InquirerPa. Republicans are talking about impeaching state Supreme Court justices. Do they have an argument?
Pennsylvania Republicans, furious that the state Supreme Court threw out the existing congressional map and imposed one that stripped much of their partisan advantage, have been talking about a stark response: impeaching the justices who ruled against them. […]
Only once has a Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice been impeached and removed from office — Justice Rolf Larsen after being convicted in 1994 of criminal conspiracy. Dush’s proposal calls for impeaching five at the same time, an act that would almost certainly throw the state judicial system into a tailspin. […]
Republicans are “flirting with an idea at odds with American history and dangerous to the rule of law,” said Seth Kreimer, a professor of state constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania. “A system in which a judge may be impeached and convicted because the legislators disagree with her vote in a particular case may appeal to unabashed and unrestrained populists. But it is not the system under which America has lived and thrived.”
Republican congressmen jump into fight over Pa. congressional map with federal lawsuit
With campaign deadlines approaching, a group of Republican congressmen from Pennsylvania, joined by two state lawmakers, filed a complaint in U.S. District Court here Thursday asking it to block a new congressional district map from being used in the upcoming primary and general elections.
Instead, they want the elections to be run under the previous map that was adopted in 2011 — the same map that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court threw out last month as a partisan gerrymander.
“Our concerns stem from the attack on the [U.S.] Constitution initiated by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court — not the design of a map,” state Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman (R., Centre) said in a statement. “We are unwilling to acquiesce to the court’s attempt to hijack the functions of the legislative and executive branches.”
The Sacramento BeeCalifornia a 'crime nest' without ICE agents, Trump muses
Donald Trump on Thursday suggested yanking federal immigration agents out of California as punishment for the state's sanctuary policies.
Removing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials from California could result in the state "begging" for the ICE agents to come back, Trump said.
"We're getting no help from the state of California," Trump said during a listening session at the White House on school safety and gun violence. "Frankly, if I pulled our people from California, you would have a crime nest like you've never seen in California. All I'd have to say is, 'ICE, Border Patrol, leave California alone."
Invasive swamp rodent has California scrambling to come up with a battle plan
About the size of a beagle, they can quickly turn a lush green marsh to a wasteland. They use their long orange teeth to gnaw through vegetation and reach the succulent bits they crave.
Females can have litters of a dozen or more and become pregnant within 48 hours after giving birth, their fertility adding to the speed with which this South American rodent can fan across a landscape, burrowing into levees and and destroying wetlands along the way.
They are called nutria, and right now they’re starting to spread through the waterways leading into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the ecologically fragile network of sloughs and rivers that functions as the heart of California’s flood-control and water distribution system. The first ones were discovered last year in Merced County. Since then, at least two dozen more have been found there and in Stanislaus, Tuolumne and Fresno counties.
The GuardianTheresa May at risk of Commons defeat as Labour shifts on Brexit
Jeremy Corbyn could use a key Brexit speech on Monday to pave the way for Labour to inflict a Commons defeat on the government, by backing a rebel Tory amendment seeking to keep Britain in “a customs union”.
With Theresa May expected to unveil her vision for departure from the EU next week, following eight hours of talks with key ministers at the prime minister’s Chequers country retreat, she now faces the prospect of Labour sabotaging the carefully choreographed process.
In what will be a closely watched speech, Corbyn is expected to signal that Labour is prepared to back the UK staying in a customs union with the EU.
Russia blocks UN resolution on eastern Ghouta ceasefire
Russia has blocked a UN resolution that would have established a 30-day ceasefire and humanitarian deliveries in eastern Ghouta, saying that widespread reporting of heavy civilian casualties in the besieged area on the edge of the Syrian capital, Damascus, was a product of “mass psychosis”.
The Russian envoy to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, told an emergency meeting of the security council on the situation in eastern Ghouta that Russia would not support the ceasefire resolution put forward by Sweden and Kuwait in its present form, calling it unrealistic. […]
Moscow has vetoed 10 previous UN resolutions on Syria and has consistently used its permanent seat on the security council to shield the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, from concerted UN action on war crimes. In November, Russia used its veto to block a resumption of UN investigations into the use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces.
Debt for dolphins: Seychelles creates huge marine parks in world-first finance scheme
The tropical island nation of Seychelles is to create two huge new marine parks in return for a large amount of its national debt being written off, in the first scheme of its kind in the world.
The novel financial engineering, effectively swapping debt for dolphins and other marine life, aims to throw a lifeline to corals, tuna and turtles being caught in a storm of overfishing and climate change. If it works, it will also secure the economic future of the nation, which depends entirely on tourism and fishing. With other ocean states lining up to follow, the approach could transform large swaths of the planet’s troubled seas.
The challenge for the Seychelles is clear on the coral reef fringing Curieuse Island, once a leper colony and now a national park. The mass bleaching caused by warming waters in 2016 has left the white limbs of branching corals lying like bones in a ploughed graveyard, with rare flashes of the cobalt-blue coral survivors.
Deutsche WelleIran signals plan to build nuclear-powered ships
Tehran has told United Nations nuclear inspectors of its plan to build nuclear reactors for ships, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Thursday.
In a quarterly report on Iran's conformity with the landmark 2015 nuclear deal that restricted Tehran's nuclear ambitions, the IAEA said the Islamic Republic remained compliant and had informed the agency of a "decision that has been taken to construct naval nuclear propulsion in future."
The Vienna-based UN body said it received a letter in January, but it contained no further details of the project. Tehran now has until mid-May to provide more comprehensive proposals.
Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny detained in Moscow
Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny was detained by police in Moscow on Thursday as he left his dentist's office. He later took to Twitter to inform followers that he had been charged with repeatedly violating rules prohibiting him from organizing political rallies. He wrote: "I've been released pending trial. I don't know when the hearing will be."
Navalny suggested the Kremlin had orchestrated the arrest in order to keep him behind bars in the run-up to Russia's March 18 presidential election. Navalny is barred from candidacy due to a prior conviction for financial crimes, a verdict he called politically motivated.
HaaretzRise and Fall of Telecom Tycoon at the Center of the Netanyahu Corruption Scandal
April 14 will mark the eighth anniversary of the most important deal in Shaul Elovitch’s life – the deal that could be his downfall. When that date comes around again, he’ll no longer be the controlling shareholder of Israel’s dominant telecom company, Bezeq. Another tycoon will have taken his place.
For the past week, Elovitch has been living in Nitzan Prison like a common criminal, facing huge debts and a police recommendation that he be indicted in the second case in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is suspected of offering a quid pro quo for positive news coverage.
Israel Believes Syria Strikes Took Out Nearly Half of Assad’s Air Defenses
In Saturday’s exchange of fire Syria scored a rare success, downing an Israeli F-16 fighter jet with an antiaircraft missile, apparently taking advantage of a vulnerability in the way the crew flew the jet. Israel however destroyed nearly half of President Bashar Assad’s air defenses, according to military estimates.
Senior Israel Defense Forces officials told Haaretz that the wide-ranging aerial operation over the weekend is considered a success and the army is aware of the risks involved in such an operation, which at times can also result in planes being hit. The strikes by Israel took out the batteries that fired missiles at its fighter jets and also hit four Iranian targets, including the drone control center and communications systems.
Syria was able to down the Israeli plane because it was flying too high. That, at least, is the initial assessment based on an Israel Air Force investigation of the incident.
BBC NewsEgypt: The place where people disappear
Egypt will elect a president next month. Opponents have been rounded up. Many have been jailed, tortured or disappeared.It was a family wedding, a happy occasion that was supposed to lift her spirits. Zubeida was badly in need of that. The 23-year old was an inpatient at a Cairo hospital, being treated for recent traumas.
Her younger brother collected her and they headed for the family’s former home, in a crowded, gritty neighbourhood. Some of her best clothes were still at the old flat.
He rushed to the chemist to fill a prescription for Zubeida, leaving her at the entrance. When he returned, minutes later, his sister was gone.
That was 14:00 on 8 April 2017. She hasn’t been seen since.
The Sydney Morning HeraldWorld's coral reefs face new peril from beneath within decades
The world's coral reefs, already enduring multiple threats from bleaching to nutrient run-off from farming, also face another challenge - this time from below.
New research, published in the journal Science on Friday, has found the sediments on which many reefs are built are 10 times more sensitive to the acidifying oceans than the living corals themselves. Some reef bases are already dissolving.
The study used underwater chambers at four sites in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, including Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef, and applied modelling to extrapolate results for 22 reefs in three ocean basins.
The VergeChina overtakes US in AI startup funding with a focus on facial recognition and chips
The competition between China and the US in AI development is tricky to quantify. While we do have some hard numbers, even they are open to interpretation. The latest comes from technology analysts CB Insights, which reports that China has overtaken the US in the funding of AI startups. The country accounted for 48 percent of the world’s total AI startup funding in 2017, compared to 38 percent for the US.
It’s not a straightforward victory for China, however. In terms of the volume of individual deals, the country only accounts for 9 percent of the total, while the US leads in both the total number of AI startups and total funding overall. The bottom line is that China is ahead when it comes to the dollar value of AI startup funding, which CB Insights says shows the country is “aggressively executing a thoroughly-designed vision for AI.”
Ars TechnicaCrush the right rock and spread it on farms to help soil and the climate
The best response to a leaking pipe is to stop the leak. But even if you haven’t quite got the leak solved, a mop can keep the pool of water on your floor from spilling into the next room.
That’s kind of the situation we’re in with our emissions of greenhouse gases. The only real solution is to stop emitting them, but anything that removes existing CO2 from the atmosphere could help lower the peak warming we experience. Some techniques to do that sound like pipe dreams when you consider scaling them up, but others can plausibly make at least modest contributions.
A new paper from a group of authors led by David Beerling of the University of Sheffield argues the case that something that sounds a little wild—spreading crushed basalt over the world’s croplands—could actually be pretty practical.
Amateur astronomer tries out new camera, catches supernova at its start
Back in 2016, an astronomy enthusiast named Víctor Buso decided it was a good night to test a new camera on his telescope. The test went well enough that hardware in space was redirected to image what he spotted, and Buso now has his name on a paper in Nature.
Lots of amateurs, like Buso, have spotted supernovae. That typically leads to a search of image archives to determine when the last time a specific location was imaged when the supernova wasn't present—this is often years earlier. Buso didn't have to search, because his first batch of images contained no sign of the supernova. Then 45 minutes later, it was there, and the supernova continued to brighten as he captured more pictures. Buso had essentially captured the moment when the explosion of a supernova burst out of the surface of a star, and the analysis of the follow-on observations was published on Wednesday.
Prehistoric Europe much like a game of Civilization, according to ancient DNA
We can understand the prehistoric past only by interpreting the things people left behind. Finds don't come with words to explain how an object arrived at a site or why people decorated a pot a certain way. So there’s a lot of detail about prehistoric people’s lives, cultures, and interactions that these objects can only hint at. In recent years, however, the DNA of ancient people has added depth and detail to the information gleaned from artifacts. Genomic studies, it turns out, can tell us who the people using those artifacts were and where they came from.
Most of the genomic work so far has been relatively small-scale due to the massive effort involved in sampling and processing ancient DNA, but two new studies add several hundred prehistoric genomes to the existing data.
“The two studies published this week approximately double the size of the entire ancient DNA literature and are similar in their sample sizes to population genetic studies of people living today,” Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich, who coordinated the studies, told Ars. “We can pick out subtleties in ancient demographic process that were more difficult to appreciate using the small sample size studies available before.”
ReutersAustralian deputy prime minister resigns from Cabinet, remains in parliament
Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce said on Friday he will resign as leader of his party and will move to the backbench after weeks of pressure over an extra-marital affair with his former media secretary.
Joyce said he will step down on Monday as leader of the National party, the junior partner in Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s centre-right coalition. He will remain in parliament, safeguarding Turnbull’s shaky one-seat majority.
Joyce, a practising Catholic, has been married for 24 years and has campaigned on “family values”.
Trump administration to target North Korea with new sanctions on Friday
The Trump administration plans to announce on Friday what is being billed as the largest package of sanctions yet against North Korea to increase pressure on Pyongyang for its nuclear and ballistic missile tests, a senior administration official said. […]
On Thursday, Pence used tough rhetoric to describe North Korea in remarks to the CPAC gathering in a Washington suburb. He called Kim Jo Yong, the younger sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, is “a central pillar of the most tyrannical and oppressive regime on the planet.”
The VoxTrump’s quiet campaign to bring back preexisting conditions
The Trump administration is quietly dismantling the Affordable Care Act, taking a series of regulatory steps that will make it easier for insurance companies to sell plans that exclude patients with preexisting conditions or don’t cover basic services like maternity care, mental health treatment, and prescription drugs.
Republicans weren’t able to repeal Obamacare in Congress. Now the Trump administration appears to be settling for the second-best thing: weakening Obamacare’s insurance regulations, changes that will hurt Americans who are older and sicker while benefiting the young and the healthy.
The Health and Human Services Department published new rules Tuesday that widen access to “short-term” health plans, a small subset of insurance products that are meant to cover short gaps in insurance coverage. The Obama administration aggressively regulated these plans, allowing insurance companies to sell them only as 90-day options.
New York MagazineThe Trump Administration Is a Golden Age for Corporate Crooks
The Republican Party’s main legislative achievement was to facilitate the direct transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars into the hands of business owners. (The proceeds of the Trump tax cuts are mainly going into stock buybacks, a simple windfall for owners of capital.) But a second, less visible channel is the Trump administration’s program of lax regulation. While the tax cuts spray money at business owners as a whole, weak enforcement of regulations confers a windfall targeted specifically at businesses that cheat their customers or break the law.
The Securities and Exchange Commission has brought dramatically fewer cases and lower penalties under Trump. From last February through September, the agency brought 15 cases and collected $127 million in civil penalties, in comparison with 43 cases and $702 million in penalties during a comparable period in 2016. Likewise, the Environmental Protection Agency is collecting far less in penalties from polluters than it did under any of the previous three administrations.