The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton.
The Los Angeles Times
Michael Flynn tries to get his guilty plea thrown out in Russia investigation
Michael Flynn, … Trump’s first national security advisor, is seeking to have his guilty plea thrown out for lying to the FBI during the Russia investigation — a risky legal strategy that could irritate the federal judge who will sentence him next month.
In seeking to dismiss the case, Flynn’s lawyers have asked U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to hold prosecutors in contempt of court for withholding evidence. They also have embraced what appear to be unrelated conspiracy theories pushed by Trump and his allies to discredit federal investigators.
Legal experts said it is clear from court filings that the real audience for Flynn’s moves is not Sullivan, a no-nonsense judge who has little patience for defendants seeking to duck responsibility for their crimes…
“Flynn is playing to Trump,” said James Cohen, a law professor at Fordham University in New York.
1 in 4 Americans are uncertain about Trump impeachment, poll finds
Americans are divided about the impeachment inquiry into … Trump, and as the House prepares for public hearings next week, roughly 1 in 4 remain uncertain, providing a large audience that could be especially swayed by the evidence, a new poll shows.
Currently, 44% say the House should vote to impeach and 30% say it should not, according to the latest USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times nationwide poll. But 26% say they either don’t know or that it’s too soon to tell.
The Washington Post
George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for Ukraine, criticized Rudolph W. Giuliani, … Trump’s personal lawyer, for engaging in a smear campaign against the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, according to the transcript of his closed-door deposition released by House investigators Thursday.
Kent testified that Giuliani’s “assertions and allegations against former Ambassador Yovanovitch were without basis, untrue, period.”
Earlier Thursday, Jennifer Williams, a special adviser to Vice President Pence on Europe and Russia, appeared after being subpoenaed and testified behind closed doors for about five hours as former national security adviser John Bolton declined to appear before House investigators.
A spokesman said that Bloomberg “believes that Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to our nation” and that “the current field of candidates is not well positioned” to defeat him. He plans to file for access to the Alabama ballot before Friday’s deadline; deadlines for filing for additional state ballots are looming.
In March, Bloomberg said that he would not run for president after concluding that his path to the Democratic nomination was narrow and that he could accomplish more as a private citizen.
Bloomberg
For 53 million Americans stuck in low-wage jobs, the road out is hard
Unemployment is hovering near a five-decade low, workforce participation is at the highest level in six years and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell recently called the labor market “strong.” Yet, 44% of Americans age 18 to 64 are low-wage workers, according to a Brookings Institution report.
An estimated 53 million Americans are earning low wages, according to the study. Their median wage is $10.22 an hour and their annual pay is $17,950.
While many are benefiting from high demand for labor, the data indicated that not all new jobs are good, high-paying positions. The definition of “low-wage” differs from place to place. The authors define low-wage workers as those who earn less than two-thirds of the median wage for full-time workers, adjusted for the regional cost of living.
Americans Start Adapting to Climate Change. They’re Doing It Wrong
Americans took a long time to decide that adaptation to the changing climate was an idea worth exploring. It’s taken only a short time for them to start doing it wrong.
Decisions on projects and infrastructure are being made not on the basis of what’s effective or sensible in the long-run. And as is often the case, the poorest citizens are bearing the brunt of bungled policies. That’s the conclusion suggested by research published last week in the journal Ocean and Coastal Management.
The Guardian
One year ago, at an election night party in downtown Atlanta, Stacey Abrams took the stage and delivered a speech that could well have been made 60 years ago, when this city was known as the cradle of the civil rights movement. […]
Her goal is to export lessons she learned fighting voter suppression in Georgia, and to mobilize a base of progressives and marginalized communities to help Democrats win the White House in 2020. While many had urged her to consider a run for the presidency herself, she believes the new mission may be a more formidable undertaking.
“I am not convinced at all that we will have free and fair elections unless we work to make it so,” she said in August, during the first of several conversations with the Guardian. “In America, we have the theory of free and fair elections, but unfortunately we’ve seen, particularly over the last 20 years, an erosion of the ability to access that right.”
Mothers promised full year of maternity pay in Labour manifesto
Mothers will be given maternity pay for a full year after the birth of their children and all employees will have a right to work flexibly as part of a Labour manifesto pledge to improve life for parents.
Dawn Butler, Labour’s shadow women and equalities secretary, said she wanted to see a “step change in how women are treated at work”, which would be reflected in the party’s manifesto when it is published in a few weeks’ time.
She said Labour would stick with its 2017 pledge to increase statutory maternity pay from nine to 12 months, allowing mothers or partners sharing parental leave to spend a full year between them with their newborn babies.
Vox
Trump: We should keep Syria’s oil. The Pentagon: Nope.
What exactly the US military’s new mission is in Syria keeps changing depending on whom you ask.
Following … Donald Trump’s abrupt announcement early last month that nearly all US troops would be withdrawing from northeastern Syria — effectively abandoning America’s Kurdish allies in the region — he reversed course, announcing that US troops would be staying in Syria after all. Only now, their mission was to secure oil fields in other parts of the country.
And Trump was clear about who that oil would belong to: “We’re keeping the oil — remember that,” he told a gathering of Chicago police officers in late October. “I’ve always said that: ‘Keep the oil.’ We want to keep the oil. Forty-five million dollars a month? Keep the oil.”
Unfortunately for Trump, it seems the US military isn’t so keen on that idea — perhaps because stealing Syria’s oil could constitute a war crime.
We get it, rich guys are not into Elizabeth Warren
[…] As Warren has risen in the polls in the Democratic primary, so has the number of Wall Street bigwigs and corporate executives speaking out against her. The senator has tried to emphasize that she doesn’t have a “beef with billionaires” but instead thinks that people who built their wealth in America and using American resources — infrastructure, workers, public services — should give a little back. But her rich detractors aren’t buying it. […]
Warren is a longtime critic of the financial industry. She’s running on a message of big structural change. If she’s elected, her first priority will be a sweeping anti-corruption package, and one of her most high-profile policy proposals is a plan to impose a wealth tax on those with fortunes of over $50 million. So it’s no surprise that some of the richest of the rich don’t like her (though plenty of the finance industry’s rank and file like her just fine). And she seems to relish their opposition. In other words, Warren versus rich guys isn’t going away anytime soon. […]
Warren’s big-money critics tend to couch their arguments as generalized warnings against her — she’ll hurt the market, which is bad news for your 401(k); she’s got the wrong ideas about the economy; or she’s just not being very nice. But what they’re not saying is that they’ve got bigger stakes in this game than a correction in the S&P 500 or a social media spat. Guys like this can withstand a mean tweet from a senator. It’s the wealth tax that would wipe 2 percent off of their billions each year they’ve got a problem with.
Deutsche Welle
Mike Pompeo tours Germany amid tense relations
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has begun an official visit to Germany. Relations between the NATO allies are at a low, but a recent announcement by one of Angela Merkel's ministers seemed to nod to US complaints.
In the week marking the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, bilateral ties between the US and Germany on Thursday could not have been a starker contrast to the cooperation of 30 years ago.
But despite the plethora of disputes that have led to increasingly sour relations in recent years, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his German counterpart, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, made the effort in Leipzig to reiterate their commitment to transatlantic relations.
The EU declares war on e-waste
To help reduce electronic waste, a new EU law will require manufacturers to ensure their home appliances are easier to repair. Environmentalists have hailed it as a milestone. But the new law still has gaps.
Technician Christopher Olk concentrates hard as he removes the broken drive from a DVD player and pushes it back in again.
"If it's the mechanics or the electronics, I can fix it," explains the 26-year-old, who is working on his PhD in battery technology at Aachen University. "If the chip or the cooling system is affected then I can't do anything, because I'm missing the equipment and spare parts."
The Sydney Morning Herald
'This is a big deal': Mighty glacier finally succumbs to climate change
One of the world's thickest mountain glaciers is finally succumbing to global warming, a new analysis reports. The Taku Glacier, located north of Juneau, Alaska, has started to retreat as temperatures rise, said Mauri Pelto, a glaciologist at Nichols College in Massachusetts.
Up until now, of the 250 glaciers that he has studied, all had retreated except one: Taku Glacier.But an analysis shows that Taku has lost mass and joined the rest of the retreating glaciers.
"This is a big deal for me because I had this one glacier I could hold on to," Pelto told NASA's Earth Observatory. "But not anymore. This makes the score climate change: 250, and alpine glaciers: 0."
Trump fined $2.9m for misuse of charity money
Donald Trump was ordered by a New York judge to pay $US2 million ($2.9 million) in restitution after he admitted to using his charitable foundation to raise money for political purposes during the 2016 campaign.
The order handed down Thursday by New York State Supreme Court Justice Saliann Scarpulla largely resolves a lawsuit filed by the New York attorney general's office over violations of the state's nonprofit laws.
ProPublica
How Mike Pence’s Office Meddled in Foreign Aid to Reroute Money to Favored Christian Groups
Officials at USAID warned that favoring Christian groups in Iraq could be unconstitutional and inflame religious tensions. When one colleague lost her job, they said she had been “Penced.”
Last November, a top Trump appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a candid email to colleagues about pressure from the White House to reroute Middle East aid to religious minorities, particularly Christian groups.
“Sometimes this decision will be made for us by the White House (see… Iraq! And, increasingly, Syria),” said Hallam Ferguson, a senior official in USAID’s Middle East bureau, in an email seen by ProPublica. “We need to stay ahead of this curve everywhere lest our interventions be dictated to us.”
The email underscored what had become a stark reality under the Trump White House. Decisions about U.S. aid are often no longer being governed by career professionals applying a rigorous review of applicants and their capabilities. Over the last two years, political pressure, particularly from the office of Vice President Mike Pence, had seeped into aid deliberations and convinced key decision-makers that unless they fell in line, their jobs could be at stake.
How One Employer Stuck a New Mom With a $898,984 Bill for Her Premature Baby
Lauren Bard opened the hospital bill this month and her body went numb. In bold block letters it said, “AMOUNT DUE: $898,984.57.”
Last fall, Bard’s daughter, Sadie, had arrived about three months prematurely; and as a nurse herself, Bard knew the costs for Sadie’s care would be high. But she’d assumed the bulk would be covered by the organization that owned the hospital where she worked: Dignity Health, whose marketing motto is “Hello humankindness.”
She would be wrong.
Bard, 30, had been caught up in an unforgiving trend. As health care costs continue to rise, employers are shifting the expense to their workers — cutting back on what they’ll cover or pumping up premiums and out-of-pocket costs. But a premature baby, delivered with gaspingly high medical claims, creates a sort of benefits bomb, the kind an employer — especially one funding its own benefits — might look for a way to dodge altogether.
Daily Beast
Donald Trump Jr. Went on ‘The View’ and It Was a Total Shitshow
[…] Abby Huntsman kicked things off by comparing Trump Jr. to a “dictator” for tweeting out the alleged name of the whistleblower in the Ukraine scandal. “The whole point of releasing a name is to intimidate someone, to threaten someone, and to scare other people from coming out,” she said. “That’s something that dictators do. I have lived in China. I have seen that firsthand. That’s not what America does. We stand by our people. Why did you want to release the name?”
For the next several minutes, Trump Jr. defended his actions by arguing that the name had already been published on sites like the Drudge Report and expressed no regret for doing what could amount to a federal crime. He went on to whine that he wishes the “outrage” was equal when his family has been targeted by critics.
“He asked to be anonymous. Your family did not!” Joy Behar shot back. […]
Meghan McCain, who did not utter one word during the first segment, made her presence known after the break. “If you could let me speak, I would appreciate it,” she began. Seemingly on the verge of tears, she described the various ways the Trump family has damaged “the soul of this country” before asking, “Does all of this make you feel good?”
In early September, as Hurricane Dorian battered the east coast, President Donald Trump didn’t want to admit he was wrong about the storm’s impact in a tweet he had sent, so he instead dug in, dragged senior government officials into his charade, and even hosted reporters in the Oval Office to show them a days-old forecast map that he’d personally altered to prove that Alabama was in danger when it really wasn’t.
It was yet another bizarre, protracted episode of the Trump presidency and one that, as emails released under the Freedom of Information Act show, created massive internal headaches for personnel at various agencies. (The Daily Beast was among the news outlets that requested these communications under the FOIA.) One top official said that workers directly involved in handling hurricane response were forced to turn their cell phones off because of the influx of media calls seeking an explanation for the president’s tweets and his accompanying efforts to prove he’d been right about Alabama all along.
“This has really gotten out of hand,” Chris Darden, the meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service office outside of Birmingham, AL, wrote in an email dated September 5.
Mother Jones
Roger Stone’s Trial Is Going Very Badly for Roger Stone
In a federal courtroom in Washington, DC, Thursday, jurors heard Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) as he questioned Roger Stone, the longtime associate of President Donald Trump. Quigley wanted to know how Stone had communicated with an intermediary who, Stone claimed, had in 2016 helped him learn what WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was planning to do with stolen Democratic emails. […]
The Stone-Quigley exchange was one of five audio clips prosecutors played on Thursday in which Stone denied having written records of his contacts with his intermediary, having text messages related to the hacked Democratic emails, possessing messages related to Julian Assange, or having other records relevant to the committee’s investigation into Russian interference.
Another Big Winner in Tuesday’s Elections: America’s Frustrated Teachers
On Tuesday night, Kentucky Attorney General Andy Beshear, while declaring victory over the Trumpish “bully” incumbent Matt Bevin, made sure to praise one group of voters Bevin had bad-mouthed during his first term: teachers.
“To our educators, your courage to stand up and fight against all the bullying and name-calling helped galvanize our entire state,” Beshear, the son of the state’s last Democratic governor, said in his acceptance speech. (Bevin has refused to concede and on Wednesday requested a re-canvassing of the vote totals, which have Beshear winning by just over 5,000 votes.)
Teachers were everywhere on Tuesday night, scoring victories across the US map.
Ars Technica
Members of violent white supremacist website exposed in massive data dump
Private data for Iron March, a notorious website for violent white supremacists, has been published online in a stunning leak that exposes a trove of detailed information on as many as 1,000 or more members. The 1GB SQL database appears to contain the entirety of the site's information, including user names, private messages, public posts, registered email addresses, and IP addresses.
The leak was posted on the Internet Archive on Wednesday by an anonymous individual using the handle antifa-data. A list of domains used in email registrations shows two from US universities. Private messages show some members discussing life in the US Marines, Navy, Army, and military reserves.
Massive Facebook document leak gives ammunition to investigators
xFacebook is facing a new round of intense scrutiny worldwide after 7,000 pages of confidential files stemming from a lawsuit were made public yesterday. Those documents are not the ones California's attorney general needs, though, so separately, the company is also facing a court challenge demanding it produce more documentation for an investigation amid allegations of stonewalling.
The piles of leaked documents, which directly reference the company's questionable position on competition, are likely to be extremely helpful to the dozens of entities currently investigating Facebook on antitrust grounds. California, however, is conducting a privacy investigation.
State Attorney General Xavier Becerra yesterday took to court seeking to have a subpoena against Facebook enforced. The petition (PDF) alleges Facebook failed to respond to repeated subpoenas and other legal requests for information related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
And, in fact, I did 2/ https://t.co/alnlqhyMBf
— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) November 3, 2019