The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton and the decline of the Republic. Please add news, signs of life or hope, or other items in the comments.
Mother JonesClimate Change Is Taking a Bigger Toll on Our Food, Water, and Land Than We Realized
As the planet warms, parts of the world face new risks of food and water shortages, expanding deserts, and land degradation, warns a major new report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Those effects are already underway, and some of them could soon become irreversible.
The changing climate has already likely contributed to drier climates in South and East Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, reducing the food and water supply. In 2015, about 500 million people lived in dry areas that experienced desertification in recent decades as a result of human activities. Those problems are only going to get worse as climate change continues to take its toll.
“Global warming has led to shifts of climate zones in many world regions, including expansion of arid climate zones and contraction of polar climate zones,” the IPCC says in the report, released Thursday. With high confidence, it adds, “Climate change has already affected food security due to warming, changing precipitation patterns, and greater frequency of some extreme events.”
White Supremacist Attacks Have Grown Deadlier During Trump’s Presidency
Two years ago, after … Donald Trump infamously defended a white supremacist rally that brought violence to Charlottesville, Virginia, some law enforcement leaders sounded the alarm about a resurgent threat of far-right extremism. Trump’s “very fine people” remarks in the aftermath of the deadly car attack in August 2017 amounted to “a disaster,” as one high-level federal law enforcement official put it to me then, warning: “There are real concerns about where it leads the country.”
By last July, a Mother Jones investigation documented a spate of far-right violence dating from the 2016 election, including two bomb plots and 15 attacks and killings around the country committed by people who expressed racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, or extreme anti-government views. A couple of cases included perpetrators who explicitly embraced Trump’s nativist ideas and rhetoric.
Since then, violence linked to far-right extremism has not only continued apace but has grown deadlier as the trend has converged with the mass shootings epidemic. The AtlanticThis Land Is the Only Land There Is
There is no shortage of scary facts in the major new report on climate change and land, a summary of which was released today by a United Nations–led scientific panel. Chief among them: For everyone who lives on land, the planet’s dangerously warmed future is already here. Earth’s land has already warmed more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the industrial revolution, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s the same amount of warming that climate activists are hoping to prevent on a global scale.
This spike makes sense, scientifically: Land warms twice as fast as the planet overall. Earth as a whole has warmed by only 0.87 degrees Celsius (1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) during the same period. But this increase makes the stakes of climate change clear: When scientists discuss preventing “1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming,” they are really talking about forestalling 3 degrees Celsius—or 5.1 degrees Fahrenheit—of higher land temperatures.
And land temperatures are what humanity usually cares about. Land, really, is what humanity cares about. That’s the point.
Cory Booker Challenges America’s Disneyfied History
In the basement of Mother Emanuel, Cory Booker’s eyes turned red. The senator from New Jersey and 2020 Democratic candidate had just addressed a small crowd that had gathered in the church sanctuary upstairs. “The act of anti-Latino, anti-immigrant hatred we witnessed this weekend did not start with the hand that pulled the trigger,” Booker told the room. “To love our country in this moment means that we have to step outside our comfort zones and confront ourselves.”
But the families of the murdered that Booker has faced over and over again, first as mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and later as a U.S. senator, are never interested in high-mindedness, he told me. Nobody who’s grieving wants to hear a beautiful turn of phrase. There’s nothing an exasperated TV appearance can do for their pain.
“Your words don’t matter,” Booker told me, sitting in the pastor’s office at Mother Emanuel, one room over from where, four summers ago, a white supremacist killed nine people, including then-Pastor Clementa Pinckney. “It’s your heart, your spirit, in moments like that,” Booker said, thinking back on the funerals and vigils he’s participated in. “There are no words that work. There’s no word that can replace the loss of a loved one. People want this to stop, this nightmare to stop.”
The CutElizabeth Warren’s Classroom Strategy
The story of Elizabeth Warren’s career in education — at least in legal education — begins with one word: assumpsit. It is literally the first word of the first case she had to read for the first class she ever took as a 24-year-old law student at Rutgers University in 1973. She has recalled, in vivid detail, the fear and confusion she’d felt as a young mother, former public-school teacher, and unlikely law student when her first law professor walked into the room and called on a student whose name began with A, asking her, “Ms. Aaronson, what is ‘assumpsit’?” Ms. Aaronson had not known, and neither had the next several students he called on after her. Ms. Warren also had not known what assumpsit meant, despite having done the reading for the day.
Since her last name was at the end of the alphabet, Warren was spared public humiliation, but she left her first law-school class badly shaken, with a degree of clarity about how she must move forward: “Read all the words and look up what you don’t know.”
Los Angeles TimesA clean energy breakthrough could be buried deep beneath rural Utah
If you know anything about solar and wind farms, you know they’re good at generating electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and not so good at other times.
Batteries can pick up the slack for a few hours. But they’re less useful when the sun and wind disappear for days at a time — a problem the Germans call “dunkelflaute,” meaning “dark doldrums.”
Those long stretches of still, cloudy days are one of the main obstacles standing in the way of renewable energy fully replacing fossil fuels.
For Los Angeles, salt may be a solution.
Uber lost $5.2 billion last quarter and posts disappointing sales
Uber Technologies Inc. posted disappointing quarterly results Thursday, sparking a sell-off in after-hours trading. Its ride-hailing rival Lyft Inc. beat analysts’ expectations the day before, but Uber’s second-quarter adjusted sales fell short of estimates and the company posted a net loss of $5.24 billion.
Most of that loss was attributed to stock-based compensation associated with the initial public offering in May, a routine expense for newly public companies. The adjusted loss — a more commonly used metric for ride-hailing companies, which excludes interest, tax and other expenses — more than doubled to $656 million but wasn’t as large as the $979.1-million average of analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg. […]
In its filing, Uber also acknowledged the creation of a $6.1 billion Dutch tax deduction that will help the company reduce a chunk of its global tax bill for years to come. The deduction, which came through an increase in the value of intellectual property that Uber transferred between its offshore subsidiaries, will be a cushion should the company ever turn a profit.
Facebook loses appeal, must face class action over facial recognition
Facebook Inc. has failed to undo a ruling that allows millions of its users to band together in a lawsuit accusing the social network of gathering and storing biometric data without consent, potentially exposing the company to billions of dollars in damages.
A federal appeals court in San Francisco on Thursday rejected the company’s request to block the privacy suit from proceeding as a class action on behalf of Illinois Facebook users going back to 2011 whose photos were tagged and collected in a company-controlled database.
Vanity FairThe Beautiful Power of Ta-Nehisi Coates
When I meet Ta-Nehisi Coates, I am surprised. All of the photos I’ve seen of him are somber and inscrutable, but when I walk into the café where he’s suggested we meet, he’s not like that at all. He’s one of those people who looks young at any age: There’s a kind of weightlessness and buoyancy in the way he holds himself, with a serious, clear eye that looks knowing and hesitant all at once. He also has a baby face. But even though he looks at me with kindness, I’m nervous. […]
As our conversation properly begins with my first question, which is why he chose this café as his office, I learn that Coates has his own reasons for self-doubt and self-consciousness. I learn that I’m not the only one who is nervous today, because after writing dozens of lauded articles and three book-length works of creative nonfiction, Coates has written a novel, a wondrous, unpredictable novel set in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Virginia called The Water Dancer; it follows an enslaved man named Hiram as he attempts to find his way to freedom. But it is not straightforward and cutting like his nonfiction, where he wields his mind to devastating effect. In The Water Dancer, amid love and covetousness and tenderness and brutality, Hiram wields magic. He has an ability called Conduction (capitalized throughout the book), wherein he can bend, fold, time and space. This is a proper novel, an abrupt departure from what overbearing, messy fame demands of Coates. And because of that, he is nervous too.
Part of the reason Coates returned to the pastry shop is because he felt it allowed him to take on the trappings of the novelist throughout the 10 years it took him to complete the book. His son went to a school nearby, and it was, first, convenient. “I imagined that this was a place where a writer could just work.
BBC NewsClimate change: Marine heatwaves kill coral instantly
Increasingly frequent marine heatwaves can lead to the almost instant death of corals, scientists working on the Great Barrier Reef have found.
These episodes of unusually high water temperatures are - like heatwaves on land - associated with climate change.
Scientists studying coral after a heat event discovered that extreme temperature rises decayed reefs much more rapidly than previously thought.
The study revealed that corals became up to 15% weaker after an extreme heat event, causing some fragments to actually break off from the reef.
The ‘condescending old people’ of South Korea's workforce
Wouldn’t it be nice if millennials weren’t accused of being entitled, self-righteous and stubborn? Perhaps, but that is unlikely to happen. In South Korea, however, there is another group that is notorious for being the most self-righteous – even worse than millennials. They are called ‘kkondae’.
In Korean, kkondae loosely translates as “condescending older person”, the kind you often find in a middle- or upper-management position. The kkondae title is usually attributed to men and almost always used as an insult, pointedly calling out supervisors who are quick to dole out unsolicited advice and even quicker to demand absolute obedience from their juniors. […]
It also gives a name to the tension caused by a generational divide that seems wider than ever before.
BloombergTrump’s Hamptons Fundraisers Put High-Profile Donors in a Bind
Donald Trump’s fundraising swing through the Hamptons on Friday is creating headaches for some of his high-dollar donors, who face threats of boycotts and employee complaints for supporting a president [who is a] racist.
Celebrities and social media users have threatened to cancel their memberships to Equinox Fitness Club and its indoor-cycling subsidiary SoulCycle after Stephen Ross -- a real estate developer who owns the fitness brands and the NFL’s Miami Dolphins -- agreed to host a fundraiser at his Southampton home.
A who’s-who of investment and real estate executives have been invited to Ross’s fundraiser, according to names provided by a person familiar with planning for the event, and they too may find themselves facing a backlash should they attend.
Companies Use Borrowed Billions to Buy Back Stock, Not to Invest
When the Federal Reserve cuts interest rates, making it cheaper to borrow, it’s supposed to deliver a direct boost to the economy. But one key part of that machinery has broken down.
Business investment used to rise when U.S. companies took on more debt—because most companies borrowed to add capacity. Nowadays, they’re likelier to funnel the money to shareholders.
Investment is stuck at low levels by historical standards. … Donald Trump’s reduction in corporate taxes hasn’t changed the pattern. Neither has a decade of low interest rates, even before the Fed’s quarter-point cut on July 31.
The GuardianRevealed: FBI and police monitoring Oregon anti-pipeline activists
Law enforcement groups, including the FBI, have been monitoring opponents of a natural gas infrastructure project in Oregon and circulated intelligence to an email list that included a Republican-aligned anti-environmental PR operative, emails obtained by the Guardian show.
The South Western Oregon Joint Task Force (SWOJTF) and its members were monitoring opponents of the Jordan Cove energy project, a proposal by the Canadian energy company Pembina to build the first-ever liquefied natural gas export terminal on the US west coast, as well as a new 232-mile pipeline that would carry fracked natural gas to the port of Coos Bay.
The Trump administration has named Jordan Cove as one of its highest-priority infrastructure projects. Jordan Cove opponents have raised concerns about the project’s significant environmental impacts, impacts on public lands, indigenous rights and climate change.
Climate crisis may be increasing jet stream turbulence, study finds
The climate crisis could be making transatlantic flights more bumpy, according to research into the impact of global heating on the jet stream.
Jet streams are powerful currents of air at the altitudes which planes fly. . They result from the air temperature gradient between the poles and the tropics, and reach speeds of up to 250mph (400kmph). They also sometimes meander.
Researchers say previous studies of the speed and location of the fastest part of the north Atlantic jet stream have found only small changes over time, although there are signs it is slowly shifting northward. Experts say the lack of dramatic alterations is because climate change produces competing effects at different altitudes.
Kashmir: India’s ‘draconian’ blackout sets worrying precedent, warns UN
The unprecedented communications blackout imposed on Indian-administered Kashmir could signal a departure in the way in which democratic states clamp down on information in contentious areas, the UN’s special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, has said.
India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, made his first public statement on Thursday since the decision to remove Kashmir’s special status, describing it as the start of a “new era” that will help end decades of terrorism and separatism.
Kaye told the Guardian: “There’s something about this shutdown that is draconian in a way other shutdowns usually are not.”
The OregonianReport touting benefits of Snake River dam removal stirs controversy
A new report from a Portland-based economics firm, which says the removal of dams on the Snake River in Eastern Washington would have broad financial benefits, is getting pushback from local politicians in the Tri-Cities area.
The report, released last week by ECONorthwest, lays out the financial case for removing the Ice Harbor, Lower Monument, Little Goose and Lower Granite dams, which sit on the Snake River between its confluence with the Columbia and the Idaho Border.
Using a cost-benefit analysis, the firm looked at a number of factors — including hydropower generation, transportation, irrigation and recreational use of the river — and concluded “the benefits of removal exceed the costs, and thus society would likely be better off without the dams.”
AP NewsTrump picks new acting national intelligence director
Donald Trump on Thursday named Joseph Maguire, the nation’s top counterterrorism official, as acting national intelligence director, part of a leadership shake-up at the agency that oversees 17 U.S. spy agencies.
Maguire will become acting director on Aug. 15, the same day that National Intelligence Director Dan Coats’ resignation takes effect. It’s also the same day that deputy national intelligence director Sue Gordon will be walking out the door. Democrats accused Trump of pushing out two dedicated intelligence professionals.
Republicans freezes Twitter spending after McConnell account locked
The Republican Party, the Trump campaign and other GOP organizations said Thursday that they are freezing their spending on Twitter to protest the platform’s treatment of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Twitter temporarily locked McConnell’s campaign account Wednesday after it shared a video in which some protesters spoke of violence outside his Kentucky home, where he is recovering from a shoulder fracture.
The social media platform said in a statement that users were locked out temporarily due to a tweet “that violated our violent threats policy, specifically threats involving physical safety.”
Deutsche WelleUS immigration raids leave children without parents
US border protection authorities released 300 migrants from detention on Thursday, one day after the country's largest immigration raid in a decade. The raids against some 680 immigrants in Mississippi left many children at home with no parents.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) spokesman Bryan Cox did not provide an explanation for why some people were released and others were not, though he did mention "humanitarian factors" in a statement sent via email to the press.
"They were placed into proceedings before the federal immigration courts and will have their day in court at a later date," Cox wrote.
Iconic Belfast shipbuilder Harland and Wolff goes under
Harland and Wolff (H&W), the Belfast shipyard that built the Titanic, went into administration on Monday. Its Norwegian owner, Dolphin Drilling, filed for bankruptcy in June and put the firm up for sale, with no takers so far.
A spokesman for H&W said: "There has been a series of board meetings, the result of which is that administrators will be appointed." The accountancy firm BDO took over the business on Tuesday.
The workforce at the yard has fallen from a high of 35,000 in the 1920s to 130 today as Northern Ireland's heavy industries declined. The firm has not made a ship for 15 years, but had been attempting to reposition itself as a force in the offshore energy sector, also focused on repair work on ships and oil rigs.
NPR News'I've Got Nothing Over Here': Michigan Man Deported By ICE Dies In Baghdad
Jimmy Aldaoud was deported from the U.S. in June to Iraq, a country that his family said he had never set foot in. Two months after he arrived there, his family got word that he was found dead in Baghdad.
Aldaoud was born in Greece, his sister Mary Bolis said, after his family fled Iraq. He didn't speak Arabic.
He was 41 when he died, and he arrived legally in the U.S. in May 1979 when he was a year old, his lawyer, Chris Schaedig, said. He lived near Detroit until he was put on a plane to Najaf by U.S. federal officials.
"I begged them. I said, 'Please, I've never seen that country. I've never been there.' However, they forced me," Aldaoud said in a video recorded shortly after his arrival in Iraq, which was posted on Facebook by a family friend.
Aldaoud is shown looking dejected and exhausted. He said he was trying to find food. "I've got nothing over here, as you can see," he said.
The Couple Killed Saving Their Baby In El Paso Had Just Found A Future Together
Andre and Jordan Anchondo were expecting houseguests for a barbecue last Saturday. It was supposed to be a triple celebration. Andre had just finished building their new home, the couple was celebrating their first wedding anniversary and their daughter was turning 6. […]
A man with a gun entered the store and opened fire, killing the Anchondos and at least 20 others in an attack federal prosecutors are treating as domestic terrorism and a potential hate crime.
Andre Anchondo died protecting Jordan; she died shielding their 2-month-old baby, Paul, who was grazed by a bullet but survived the shooting.
The California Sunday MagazineBy the time I made it to Paradise, the deadliest wildfire in California history was four months past, and the burned-out ridge between the two river canyons was pouring rain. I was riding the Skyway, the road from Chico to Paradise, flatland to hilltop, trying to understand what forces had conspired last November to create a blaze of such anger that it took the lives of 85 people and destroyed 19,000 structures.
I had puzzled out enough disasters to know that tragedy was a force of intricate construction. It wasn’t one detached act that materialized as tragedy but myriad smaller acts — some incidental, some accidental, others malevolent — that lined up in perfect continuity. Had one circumstance in the sequence lost its footing, a cosmic stumble, the next circumstance would have never hitched on, and tragedy would have been averted.
CBC NewsU.S. mayors urge Senate to return to Washington for gun bill vote
More than 200 U.S. mayors, including two anguished by mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, are urging the Senate to return to the Capitol to act on gun safety legislation amid criticism that Congress is failing to respond to recent back-to-back shootings that left 31 people dead.
In a letter Thursday to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer, the mayors wrote, "Our nation can no longer wait for our federal government to take the actions necessary to prevent people who should not have access to firearms from being able to purchase them."
The mayors urged the Senate to vote on two House-passed bills expanding background checks for gun sales that passed that chamber earlier this year
Union of Concerned ScientistsUnion of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program Co-Director David Wright today released the following statement commemorating the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945.
“Some 74 years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Japan, the risk of nuclear war is higher today than many people realize—and it is increasing.
“Current U.S. policy permits the United States to use nuclear weapons first against a nuclear-armed opponent during a non-nuclear conflict—thereby starting a nuclear war—and the president alone has the authority to order a nuclear launch.
“Making such a launch more of a possibility, the Trump administration recently built and would like to field a new ‘low-yield’ nuclear weapon with relatively small destructive power that it might consider to be more usable in a crisis than a larger warhead.
SalonBeto O'Rourke and Elizabeth Warren call Trump a "white supremacist"
Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former Rep. Beto O'Rourke both said they believe … Donald Trump is a white supremacist — the fiercest denunciations yet of the commander-in-chief's rhetoric from Democratic presidential candidates.
Warren told the New York Times "without hesitation" that Trump is a white supremacist who has "done everything he can to stir up racial conflict and hatred in this country."
"He has given aid and comfort to white supremacists. He's done the wink and a nod. He has talked about white supremacists as fine people," Warren told the newspaper, seemingly referring to Trump's infamous "both sides" defense after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a self-professed neo-Nazi killed a counter-protester.
Ars TechnicaNew IPCC report shows land use is part of solution to climate change
During the negotiations leading up to the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But they also gave climate scientists some extra homework. In addition to the periodic IPCC reports assessing the latest in climate science, nations wanted some specific reports focused on topics that hadn’t really been covered before. As some nations demanded a new and more stringent goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C rather than 2°C, they needed a report on what that would take—and how much risk it could avoid.
Today saw the release of another report, this one focused on land use. The report is the result of volunteered efforts of 107 scientists from 52 countries, referencing research from some 7,000 studies. It covers the ways that human agriculture, forestry, and land use contributes to climate change, the way climate change is impacting these activities, and what we can do about both of those things.
Human land use contributes almost a quarter of our current greenhouse gas emissions. Clearing forests takes the carbon in the vegetation and adds it to the atmosphere as CO2. Farming can also result in a release of carbon as CO2, nitrous oxide from fertilizer, and methane from (primarily) livestock and rice paddies.