The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton.
CNN
Republicans in Congress take the reins in impeachment defense amid damaging testimony for Trump
Faced with a barrage of damaging headlines for … Donald Trump stemming from impeachment inquiry testimony, congressional Republicans are beginning to coalesce around a strategy aimed at discrediting key witnesses and taking a more confrontational stance against the Democratic-led impeachment process.
Republicans on Thursday ramped up their skepticism of the testimony delivered by US diplomat Bill Taylor — which undercut White House claims Ukraine aid wasn't tied to an investigation that could help him politically — and the Senate's No. 2 Republican Sen. John Thune walked back earlier concerns he expressed about Taylor's opening statement.
Republicans in the Senate have also shown little interest in investigating the frozen Ukraine aid, with two committee chairmen signaling that's not a priority right now.
Congressional Republican lawmakers and aides say they are taking the reins to defend the President in the impeachment inquiry amid mounting fears that the White House is not consistent nor organized enough to lead the President's defense. But their efforts come as the President publicly and privately is pushing congressional Republicans to toughen up their defense of him as the Democratic impeachment process marches forward.
Tim Morrison, a top Russia and Europe adviser on … Donald Trump's National Security Council, is expected to testify before House impeachment investigators next week and corroborate key elements of a top US diplomat's account that Trump was pressing for Ukraine to publicly announce investigations into the Bidens before he would greenlight US security assistance, according to sources.
Bill Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, said in extraordinary testimony on Tuesday that Trump pushed for Ukraine to publicly announce investigations, including one into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, using as leverage the military aid the country sought to fight back against Russian aggression.
Morrison's testimony is expected to be significant because he is a current White House official whose name was cited 15 times in Taylor's opening statement, which Democrats view as damning for Trump.
The Guardian
Exxon sowed doubt about climate crisis, House Democrats hear in testimony
House Democrats on Wednesday laid out four decades of evidence that oil behemoth Exxon knew since the 1970s that the burning of fossil fuels was heating the planet and intentionally sowed doubt about the climate crisis. […]
“What they did was wrong. They spread doubt about the dangers of climate change,” testified Martin Hoffert, who was a scientist consultant for Exxon Research and Engineering in the 1980s. “The effect of this disinformation was to delay action internally and externally … As a result, in my opinion, homes and livelihoods will likely be destroyed and lives lost.” […]
Hoffert testified that in 1982, Exxon scientists predicted how carbon dioxide levels would rise and heat the planet as humans burned more and more fossil fuels.
Labour poised to block bid for 12 December general election
Labour appears poised to block Boris Johnson’s offer of a pre-Christmas general election on 12 December by telling MPs to abstain in Monday’s vote.
The party previously said that it would back an early election when a no-deal Brexit scenario could be firmly ruled out, and has twice rejected attempts by Johnson to go to the polls before 2022.
But Jeremy Corbyn told the BBC he still wants to make sure a no-deal Brexit is taken off the table. It is understood that he will make a final decision on how to instruct MPs once the EU27 have confirmed what extension the UK will be offered.
US plans to send tanks to Syria oil fields, reversing Trump troop withdrawal – reports
The US is reportedly planning to deploy tanks and other heavy military hardware to protect oil fields in eastern Syria, in a reversal of Donald Trump’s earlier order to withdraw all troops from the country.
The most likely destination for US armoured units is a Conoco gas plant near the city of Deir Ezzor, the site of a February 2018 clash between US special forces and Syrian regime-backed militias fighting with Russian mercenaries.
The Washington Post
The White House’s trade representative in late August withdrew a recommendation to restore some of Ukraine’s trade privileges after John Bolton, then-national security adviser, warned him that … Trump probably would oppose any action that benefited the government in Kyiv, according to people briefed on the matter.
The warning to Robert E. Lighthizer came as Trump was withholding $391 million in military aid and security assistance from Ukraine. House Democrats have launched an impeachment inquiry into allegations that the president did so to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the business activities of former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden. As part of the inquiry, lawmakers are closely scrutinizing the White House’s actions between July and September.
ACLU says 1,500 more migrant children were taken from parents by the Trump administration
The American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday that the Trump administration separated 1,556 more immigrant children from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border than has previously been disclosed to the public.
The majority of the children are ages 12 and under, including more than 200 considered “tender age” because they are under 5 years old.
The ACLU said the Justice Department disclosed the final tally — which is in addition to the more than 2,700 children known to have been separated last year — hours before a federal court deadline to identify all children separated since mid-2017, the year … Trump took office.
Economists rush to help Sen. Elizabeth Warren solve Medicare-for-all tax puzzle
Internal and external economic policy advisers are trying to help Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) design a way to finance a single-payer Medicare-for-all health-care system that would place every American on a government insurance program.
Warren has promised more details within weeks, but her team faces a challenge in crafting a plan that would bring in large amounts of revenue while not scaring off voters with big middle-class tax increases.
The proposal could cost more than $30 trillion over 10 years. Complicating matters, she has already committed all of the money she would raise from a new wealth tax, close to $3 trillion over 10 years, to several other ideas, including child care and student debt cancellation. This has limited the Warren campaign’s options for finding additional sources of revenue without affecting middle-class Americans.
Bloomberg
U.S. Recession Chances Hit 27% Within Next 12 Months: Tracker
Recession fears have grown in recent months amid a persistent trade war with China, pullbacks in corporate hiring and investment and a manufacturing sector that has already slipped into contraction. The economy is cooling, but the big question is whether the slowdown will morph into something darker.
Bloomberg Economics created a model to determine America’s recession odds. Right now, the indicator estimates the chance of a U.S. recession at some point in the next year is 27%. That’s higher than it was a year ago but lower than before the last recession. There are reasons to keep a close eye on the economy but no need to panic yet.
‘Smoking Gun’ Testimony Accelerates Democrats Timeline on Impeaching Trump
The explosive testimony of senior U.S. diplomat William Taylor handed Democrats a key to unlock their impeachment case against … Donald Trump, which soon will be brought into public view.
Even as the Trump administration attempts to block witnesses and withhold documents, the inquiry has managed to snare testimony that sketches out a back-channel outreach to Ukraine by the president and his closest advisers that appears to have focused on leveraging U.S. foreign policy to dig up dirt on a political rival.
“We have smoking gun sitting on top of smoking gun at this point. And there is no alternative story,” Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said Wednesday. Taylor’s statement on Tuesday “has dramatically accelerated the investigation.”
Los Angeles Times
U.S. officials try to contain the damage and assure allies after Trump’s Syria withdrawal
[…] Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Thursday attended an uncomfortable session of NATO in Brussels where members harshly criticized Turkey’s incursion into Syria and apparent U.S. acquiescence. Turkey’s bloody military operation that killed scores of Kurdish fighters formerly allied with the U.S. came after Trump essentially greenlighted the move by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“Turkey put us all in a very terrible situation, and I think the incursion’s unwarranted,” Esper said ahead of the meeting of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The 29-member post-World War II transatlantic body includes most of Western Europe and Turkey, along with the United States.
His comments contrasted with those of Trump, who a day earlier claimed the results of Turkey’s invasion — in which Turkish forces hooked up with Russia to take control of an enormous swath of Syrian territory once home to the Kurds and patrolled by the U.S. — were a victory for his administration.
Critics say it’s difficult to see exactly how the routing of the Kurds and the withdrawal of American forces constituted a victory, though the developments are in keeping with Trump’s campaign promise to end U.S. involvement in foreign wars.
Can Elizabeth Warren afford to be all in on ‘Medicare for all’?
Elizabeth Warren built her brand on confronting government’s most vexing challenges with plans that sell sweeping change as common sense. But every day that a workable solution to the nation’s healthcare woes eludes Warren, that brand risks erosion.
For weeks she caught flak for hedging when asked who will cover the immense price tag for the “Medicare for all” system she has endorsed in principle.
In an effort to still the criticism, Warren is now promising to produce a detailed blueprint laying out how she would make it all pencil out. Doing so could give the candidate her biggest political test since she surged to the front of the large pack of Democratic White House hopefuls.
San Francisco Gate
Fast-moving Kincade Fire in north Sonoma County explodes to 10,000 acres overnight
A wildfire that ignited Wednesday night in rural northern Sonoma County has exploded to 10,000-plus acres, with flames racing across a parched landscape amid windy conditions. At a press conference early Thursday afternoon, Cal Fire officials said the blaze was at zero percent containment, and it's too soon to know how many structures have been damaged or destroyed. No injuries have been reported.
Overnight efforts were focused on evacuations and the high winds made the blaze difficult to contain.
Cameras caught the moment the Kincade Fire started in Sonoma County
The cameras, which are set up by the University of Nevada, Reno, UC San Diego, and the University of Oregon, are meant to help firefighters and first responders locate fires faster, especially in remote areas. In the video, their Barham North camera is all quiet until around 9:20 p.m., when a bright light appears on the horizon. The flames continue to grow, cresting over the ridge and giving off plumes of smoke.
Another camera at Geyser Peak shows a sudden burst of flames, almost straight up into the air, as heavy wind gusts blew through the area. The National Weather Service reported gusts of over 70 miles per hour overnight.
Cal Fire officials said the blaze had zero containment as of Thursday morning and several structures have been damaged or destroyed. Firefighters are observing "long range spotting," meaning smaller fires are starting and spreading quickly.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Protesters march, rally against Washington team's name before Vikings game
Chanting "We are not your mascot," several hundred protesters rallied Thursday in downtown Minneapolis ahead of the Vikings' game against the Washington Redskins, denouncing the team's name as racist and degrading to American Indians.
Among several impassioned speakers outside U.S. Bank Stadium was Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, who recalled how her 6 year-old daughter recently watched the Washington team on TV, heard its name and said, "Mommy, that's not right. We're not animals. We're people. We're not mascots." […]
Along the march route, cars honked and drivers cheered as the marchers passed by. A woman in a traditional jingle dress danced the entire way, and a drummers' circle performed from the back of a pickup truck.
Duluth cleans up after storm — a process that's becoming familiar
City spokeswoman Kate Van Daele said though it is too early to know exactly how much harm Monday’s waves and winds did, it was less severe than storms that hammered Duluth in April and last October, when the city received state and federal aid to support recovery efforts. […]
Van Daele said while the high water certainly doesn’t help, if the conditions are right, storms can cause major damage regardless of the lake level. The challenge for Duluth, she added, is the frequency of the severe weather systems.
“Even scientists are trying to figure out climate change and certain patterns affect us. And we just know that we’re seeing patterns right now.”
The Wichita Eagle
‘Insane’ to question U.S. credibility after Trump’s Kurdish crisis, Pompeo says
Pompeo rejected a question about whether the president’s treatment of the Kurds had undercut U.S. credibility.
“The whole predicate of your question is insane,” Pompeo said. “The word of the United States is much more respected today than it was just two and a half years ago.”
Since Trump’s announcement of the withdrawal, Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence have led a diplomatic effort to end an outburst of violence that followed, displacing roughly 200,000 people and leaving prisons holding Islamic State fighters unmanned.
“We make clear the things that we will do,” Pompeo continued. “We also make clear the things that we’re not prepared to do. I think it’s important for people to understand that other countries have to step up too. Other countries must share the burden for not just the security of the world, but security for their own countries.”
Deutsche Welle
Syrian Kurds begin withdrawal, accuse Turkey of violating truce
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) on Thursday accused Turkey and its rebel proxies of violating a ceasefire that halted a two-week offensive.
SDF military chief Mazloum Abdi said the Turkish military and "their jihadists" continue to launch attacks east of the border town of Ras al-Ayn. He called on Russia and the US to "rein in the Turks." […]
Russia said military forces have started patrolling the border as part of a deal reached with Turkey in the Black Sea city of Sochi on Tuesday.
Under the terms of the deal, the SDF is to withdraw from a 30-kilometer (19-mile) section of the border by next Tuesday and hand control over to the Russian and Syrian militaries.
Four in five EU coal plants are unprofitable — report
The majority of coal plants in the European Union (EU) are unprofitable and could face losses of nearly €6.6 billion ($7.3 billion) this year, the Carbon Tracker Initiative reported on Thursday.
The London-based think tank analyzed the numbers behind every coal plant in the EU, concluding that 79% of the electricity-generating power stations are running at a loss.
"EU coal generators are hemorrhaging cash because they cannot compete with cheap renewables and gas and this will only get worse," said Matt Gray, co-author of the report.
Lower costs for renewable energy and natural gas are increasingly competitive versus coal in electricity production.
The Sydney Morning Herald
Wild wind spoils climbers' party as clock ticks down to Uluru closure
A line of would-be climbers snaked 200 metres across the dust at the base of the rock an hour before the sun rose over hulking Uluru.
But at 7am, with a chilled desert wind judged to be scudding at 20 knots, rangers hoisted a wooden sign declaring the ‘‘climb [is] closed due to strong winds at summit’’.
There was a resigned sigh and confusion among the hundreds gathered all along the line. They had travelled from many parts of Australia and nations overseas, and most of them were prepared to ignore another sign at the base pleading ‘‘Please don’t climb’’.
‘‘We, the Anangu traditional owners, have this to say,’’ the sign begins, ‘‘Uluru is sacred in our culture. It is a place of great knowledge. Under our traditional law climbing is not permitted.’’
The 24-year-old who became an overnight billionaire after a gift from his parents
Sino Biopharmaceutical's billionaire founder and his wife are transferring about one-fifth of the company's share capital, or around $US3.8 billion ($5.5 billion), to their son - as a gift.
The grant of 2.7 billion shares, detailed in a Hong Kong exchange filing late Tuesday, makes Eric Tse one of Asia's richest individuals overnight. (There's no tax on gifts or inherited wealth in the former British colony.) But the 24-year-old son of Tse Ping and Cheng Cheung Ling says he'll try to keep a low profile.
According to the statement, Eric has "indicated that in response to nomination for Billionaire List or wealth ranking organised by media or other organisations, he will endeavor not to participate in such rankings in his own name, and would recommend participating in such nominations in the name of the Tse Ping family."
AP News
Swarm of sea urchins wreaks destruction on US West Coast
Tens of millions of voracious purple sea urchins that have already chomped their way through towering underwater kelp forests in California are spreading north to Oregon, sending the delicate marine ecosystem off the shore into such disarray that other critical species are starving to death.
A recent count found 350 million purple sea urchins on one Oregon reef alone — more than a 10,000% increase since 2014. And in Northern California, 90% of the giant bull kelp forests have been devoured by the urchins, perhaps never to return.
Vast “urchin barrens” — stretches of denuded seafloor dotted with nothing but hundreds of the spiny orbs — have spread to coastal Oregon, where kelp forests were once so thick it was impossible to navigate some areas by boat.
Atty: Trump calendar helps prove woman’s 2007 groping claim
Donald Trump’s private calendar helps support a former “Apprentice” contestant’s claim that he subjected her to unwanted kissing and groping, her lawyer said in a court filing Thursday.
The calendar records, filed in Summer Zervos’ defamation lawsuit, show Trump was scheduled to be at the Beverly Hills Hotel in California on Dec. 21, 2007, in the timeframe when she claims Trump made unwanted advances at that hotel.
She said he kissed and groped her, despite her objections, at what she thought would be a professional dinner, and then invited her to meet him at his nearby golf course the next morning. The calendar records show he was scheduled there the morning after his arrival at the hotel.
Huff Post
Senate Confirms Another Trump Court Pick Rated ‘Not Qualified’ To Serve
Senate Republicans voted Thursday to confirm Justin Walker to a lifetime seat on a federal court, despite the fact that he earned a rare and embarrassing “not qualified” rating from the American Bar Association.
Every Republican present voted to put Walker, 37, onto the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky. Every Democrat present voted no. The full vote tally is here.
Walker “does not presently have the requisite trial or litigation experience” to be a federal judge, the ABA’s Standing Committee concluded in a July review.
Sen. Bernie Sanders Lays Out Plan To Legalize Marijuana
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Thursday unveiled a proposal to legalize marijuana within his first 100 days in office as president with an executive order.
Sanders vowed to immediately declassify marijuana as a controlled substance under the Controlled Substances Act if elected president.
Federal law currently classifies marijuana as a Schedule I drug ― along with heroin, LSD and ecstasy, meaning it is considered to have no medicinal use and have a high potential for abuse.
Vox
A top Trump adviser was asked if the Bidens came up in China talks. He wouldn’t answer.
One of … Donald Trump’s top trade advisers on China is refusing to say whether he brought up China possibly investigating Joe Biden and his son during trade negotiations with Beijing.
Asked the question repeatedly by CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Thursday, Peter Navarro — one of the architects of Trump’s hardline trade policy toward China — said, “you don’t have the right to know what happens behind closed doors in the administration.”
While in one sense he’s right, governments need secrecy to hold sensitive diplomatic talks, it should’ve been quite easy for Navarro to answer “no” — unless the answer really is “yes.”
Why scientists are so excited about “quantum supremacy”
Scientists at Google on Wednesday declared, via a paper in the journal Nature, that they’d done something extraordinary. In building a quantum computer that solved an incredibly hard problem in 200 seconds — a problem the world’s fastest supercomputer would take 10,000 years to solve — they’d achieved “quantum supremacy.” That is: Google’s quantum computer did something that no conventional computer could reasonably do.
Computer scientists have seen quantum supremacy — the moment when a quantum computer could perform an action a conventional computer couldn’t — as an elusive, important milestone for their field. There are many research groups working on quantum computers and applications, but it appears Google has beaten its rivals to this milestone.
According to John Preskill, the Caltech particle physicist who coined the term “quantum supremacy,” Google’s quantum computer “is something new in the exploration of nature. These systems are doing things that are unprecedented.“
The Atlantic
The Greatest White Privilege Is Life Itself
I had a 30-minute ride to the train station. I nestled into my seat, opened my phone, and saw that Representative Elijah Cummings had passed away.
I gasped and covered my mouth. The driver peeked at me in his rear-view mirror. He saw me shaking my head and whispering what many Americans whispered last Thursday: He was only 68.
My mind turned to my father, whom I had just left at a hotel in Princeton, New Jersey. Dread burned in my chest. To get my mind off my father’s mortality, I started reading obituaries for Cummings, who will lie in state today at the U.S. Capitol. The more I learned about the gentleman who would not yield, the more my chest burned for his family, for my family—for all the black families worrying about the mortality of their loved ones, for the black families burying their loved ones this week in caskets made from tears of They had so much more to give.
Ars Technica
End-Cretaceous mass extinction saw big swings in ocean pH
As nasty as the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous sounds, you wouldn't think scientists would be spending much time asking, "Yeah, but how did things actually die?"
It's not just a macabre fascination. With so many awful things going on at once—including a remarkable stretch of volcanic eruptions in what is now India—there are a handful of kill mechanisms to choose from. And when you closely examine the patterns of which species in which environments went extinct, the picture gets complicated.
One major question has been the extinctions in the oceans. On land, there were several years of freezing temperatures and sunless skies, not to mention the tsunamis and worldwide wildfires. The oceans have a tremendous thermal mass, however, that would have moderated the global chill. In the deep ocean, the loss of sunlight wouldn't be felt as immediately.
Zuckerberg faces heat in Congress: “It’s almost like you think this is a joke”
Committee chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) kicked off the hearing with words that Facebook executives do not particularly like to hear.
"You have opened up a serious discussion about whether Facebook should be broken up," Waters said, following a litany of the company's offenses.
"Each month, 2.7 billion people use your products. That's over a third of the world's population. That's huge," Waters said. "That's so big that it's clear to me, and to anyone who hears this list, that perhaps you believe you're above the law."
That growth has victims, she added:
And it appears you're aggressively increasing the size of your company and are willing to step on or over anyone, including your competitors, women, people of color, your own users, and even our democracy, to get what you want. All of these problems I have outlined, and given the company's size and reach, it should be clear why we have serious concerns about your plans to establish a global digital currency that would challenge the US dollar.