The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton.
The Washington Post
Pelosi asks committee chairs to proceed with articles of impeachment
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that … Trump’s wrongdoing strikes at the heart of the Constitution and asked House committee chairs to proceed with articles of impeachment, saying lawmakers have “no choice but to act.”
Her address, in which she invoked principles espoused by the nation’s founders, came shortly after Trump went on Twitter to urge House Democrats to impeach him quickly, if they plan to do it, and suggested that he would call an expansive list of witnesses during a trial in the Republican-led Senate.
The transcript Trump released is still the only evidence needed to impeach him
Trump is a master of distraction — and with impeachment, his strategy of deflection, obfuscation and diversion is in full force. Wednesday’s hearings in the House Judiciary Committee were no exception. Trump’s allies focused on an offhand comment about the president’s son, which had nothing to do with the case. And Trump’s opponents have become so caught up in questions surrounding the process of impeachment (Will former White House counsel Donald McGahn testify? Will White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney? What robe will the chief justice wear to the Senate trial?) that many have lost sight of the big picture: The president of the United States tried to cheat in the 2020 election, and used his awesome powers as commander in chief to ask a foreign government to help him do so.
This is the very crime of which our founders were most afraid; it’s the paradigmatic impeachable offense, the one impeachment was included in our Constitution to protect against; and we already have all of the evidence we need to prove it. In fact, we’ve had the goods since Sept. 24, when Trump released an edited transcript which he has claimed is “perfect” and “beautiful,” even though it’s perfectly and beautifully impeachable.
Instead of becoming bogged down in the House Intelligence Committee’s 300-page report, which basically no Americans will read in its entirety, Democrats should focus in on that five-page transcript. Because if every American knew what was said in that conversation, and understood its implications, there’s no doubt Trump would be impeached.
Biden calls Iowa voter a ‘damn liar’ after he brings up his son and Ukraine
Democratic presidential candidate and former vice president Joe Biden got into an extraordinary exchange Thursday afternoon with an Iowa farmer who first called him too old to run and then challenged him on Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine, triggering Biden to call the man “a damn liar.”
Los Angeles Times
Warren and Biden lose ground, Sanders moves ahead in California’s shifting 2020 Democratic race
The Democratic presidential contest in California remains extremely fluid…
The survey by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found that both Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — the commanding front-runner in a September California poll — and former Vice President Joe Biden have lost ground among the state’s likely Democratic primary voters over the last two months.
That erosion has benefited Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who narrowly tops the primary field, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., who doubled his support since the September poll.
Trump claims Constitution shields his tax returns from public
Lawyers for … Trump told the Supreme Court on Thursday the Constitution shields the chief executive from being forced to disclose his tax returns in response to a subpoena from Congress.“Imposing financial disclosure requirements on the president intrudes in an area that the Constitution fences off,” they said in Trump vs. Mazars. “Requiring the president to disclose his personal finances as a condition of holding office is unconstitutional.”
Elizabeth Warren drafting legislation to reverse ‘mega-mergers’
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is drafting a bill that would call on regulators to retroactively review about two decades of “mega mergers” and ban such deals going forward.
Warren’s staff recently circulated a proposal for sweeping anti-monopoly legislation, which would deliver on a presidential campaign promise to check the power of Big Tech and other industries. Although the Trump administration is currently exploring their own antitrust probes, the proposal is likely to face resistance from lawmakers.
AP News
Paris police arrest scores amid strike over pension reform
Paris police fired tear gas at demonstrators Thursday as the Eiffel Tower shut down, France’s high-speed trains came to a standstill and hundreds of thousands marched nationwide in a strike over the government’s plan to overhaul the retirement system. At least 90 people were arrested in Paris by evening as the protests wound down.
Police said 65,000 people took to the streets of the French capital, and over 800,000 nationwide in often-tense demonstrations aimed at forcing President Emmanuel Macron to abandon pension reform.
Hong Kong residents living with tear gas worry of effects
By day, the small commercial kitchen in a Hong Kong industrial building produces snacks. At night, it turns into a secret laboratory assembling a kit for pro-democracy protesters seeking to detox after repeated exposure to tear gas.
Volunteers seated around a kitchen island sort and pack multicolored pills into small resealable bags. At another table, a woman makes turmeric pills by dipping gelatin capsules into a shallow dish of the deep orange spice.
“Police have used so much tear gas and people are suffering,” said the owner of the kitchen, speaking on condition of anonymity because she fears repercussions for her business. “We want to especially help frontline protesters, who have put their lives on the line for the city.”
Historic US towns endured wars, storms. What about sea rise?
Historic cities and towns along the Southeastern U.S. coast have survived wars, hurricanes, disease outbreaks and other calamities, but now that sea levels are creeping up with no sign of stopping, they face a more existential crisis.
With a total annual budget of $225 million, Charleston, South Carolina, can’t afford the billions of dollars to save itself without federal help. It’s counting on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to help surround its downtown peninsula with seawalls, harkening to the barriers the city built when it was founded 350 years ago.
Keeping water off the streets and buildings is even more difficult for smaller towns like Swansboro, North Carolina, with 3,200 people and a $4 million budget that doesn’t account for climate-related sea rise.
Deutsche Welle
Climate change-related deaths and damage on the rise
As the Earth warms, climate change-related disasters are on the rise. More people are being killed as a result of heatwaves, droughts and storms. In 2018, Japan, the Philippines and Germany were hit particularly hard.
To what extent have extreme weather events inflicted casualties and financial losses around the world? And which countries are worst-affected?
The answers to these questions have been provided by the Global Climate Risk Index. For 14 years, the environmental and development organization, Germanwatch, has presented this report at the annual United Nations climate conference (COP). For 2018, the index revealed Japan, the Philippines and Germany were hardest hit by weather extremes.
At the top of the ranking is Japan where 1,282 people lost their lives as a result of extreme rainfall, heatwaves and typhoons last year. The total damage was equivalent to €32 billion ($35 billion) and led to the loss of 0.6% of Japan's gross domestic product (GDP)
Russia posted GRU agents in French Alps for EU ops — report
Agents likely used the region of the Haute-Savoie as a springboard for "clandestine operations," French media report. President Emmanuel Macron could use this information as leverage, an international observer told DW.
An international hunt for Russian spies discovered an apparent "rear base" of Russia's GRU military intelligence agency in southeastern France, the newspaper Le Monde reported on Thursday.
Investigators identified 15 agents — all of them members of GRU's elite Unit 29155 — who visited the Alpine region of Haute-Savoie from 2014 to 2018, according to the newspaper.
The Guardian
Revealed: Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib targeted in far-right fake news operation
Two Muslim US congresswomen have been targeted by a vast international operation that exploits far-right pages on Facebook to inflame Islamophobia for profit, a Guardian investigation has found.
A mysterious Israeli-based group uses 21 Facebook pages to churn out more than a thousand coordinated fake news posts per week to more than a million followers around the world. It milks the traffic for revenue from digital advertising.
How does Nato look at the age of 70? It's complicated
Seventy years after Nato was founded to protect western Europe from Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, the military alliance returned this week to its first home in London to discuss an increasingly sprawling set of goals while bickering leaders competed to see who could offer the most contentious soundbite.
Normally this is an arena that would be dominated by Donald Trump, although this time he was somewhat upstaged by Emmanuel Macron, whose pre-summit declaration that the organisation had become “brain dead” obliged Trump to describe his French counterpart’s comments as “very, very nasty”.
Plastic pollution kills half a million hermit crabs on remote islands
More than half a million hermit crabs have been killed after becoming trapped in plastic debris on two remote island groups, prompting concern that the deaths could be part of a global species decline.
The pioneering study found that 508,000 crabs died on the Cocos (Keeling) Islands archipelago in the Indian Ocean, along with 61,000 on Henderson Island in the South Pacific. Previous studies have found high levels of plastic pollution at both sites.
United Press International
Vaping-illness cases still growing, now in all 50 states, CDC says
The number of vaping-related illness cases across the United States still is growing, with deaths climbing by one to 48, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday. Other deaths are under investigation, the agency said.
The number of cases of hospitalized patients was reported Thursday to be 2,291, up from 2,290 reported Nov. 21. But the agency said 175 outpatient cases had been removed from the total count indicating that the total hospitalization figure rose by 176 in the last two weeks.
U.S., South Korea end defense burden talks without agreement
The fourth round of negotiations over defense burden sharing between the United States and South Korea ended without a major agreement, according to Seoul's foreign ministry.
Two days of talks in Washington on the Special Measures Agreement began on Tuesday and ended Wednesday, South Korean news service Tongil News reported.
In a statement issued following the talks, the South Korean foreign ministry said the two sides were unable to narrow differences on the principles of "equity and rationality," according to the report.
Vox
Kamala Harris and the fallibility of identity politics
Harris’s national odyssey commenced in 2012 when, as California’s attorney general, she gave a brief speech endorsing then-President Barack Obama for a second term at the Democratic National Convention. When she ran for Senate in 2016, Obama gave her an endorsement of his own. […]
In a post-Obama era, she also appeared as a close facsimile of many of the characteristics that made Michelle Obama so adored not just by Black women but women in general (she even earned Hillary Clinton’s support). And throughout the ensuing 11 months, one word anchored her campaign, officially called Kamala Harris for the People: identity.
But, ultimately, banking on identity wasn’t enough.
Why the US bears the most responsibility for climate change, in one chart
Carbon dioxide emissions reached a record high in 2019, according to a report published Wednesday by the Global Carbon Project. The report also found that the rate of emissions growth is slowing down among some of the world’s largest emitters. […]
What’s abundantly clear is that the United States of America is the all-time biggest, baddest greenhouse gas emitter on the planet.
xAnimation: The countries with the largest cumulative CO2 emissions since 1750Ranking as of the start of 2019:1) US – 397GtCO22) CN – 214Gt3) fmr USSR – 1804) DE – 905) UK – 776) JP – 587) IN – 518) FR – 379) CA – 3210) PL â€“ 27 pic.twitter.com/cKRNKO4O0b
— Carbon Brief (@CarbonBrief) April 23, 2019
Chicago Tribune
On a barren patch of land shaded by a single Southern live oak tree sits a cinder block building that serves as the Democratic headquarters of the smallest, poorest and most African American county in South Carolina.
Inside the modest structure, Pete Buttigieg stood under exposed beams and on a concrete floor partially covered with old scraps of orange carpet, eager to field questions as the first presidential candidate to visit Allendale County in more than a decade. Willa Jennings, the party’s 70-year-old chairwoman, didn’t start with a softball.
“I have to ask you this, OK? I hear a lot about how you don’t have support from African Americans,” she said. “I just want to know why they’re saying that about you."
The South Bend mayor responded that it was “so important to earn support from black voters,” noted that many candidates were polling at less than 5% with African Americans and chalked up his low numbers to being “new on the scene.”
Jennings wasn’t all that impressed. His excuse of not being known, she said, didn’t square with the fact that the well-funded candidate had been in the presidential contest for nearly a year.
Live Science
Student Solves a Decades-Old Physics Mystery
A university student recently solved a question that's puzzled physicists for over half a century: Why do gas bubbles appear to get stuck inside narrow vertical tubes? The answer may help explain the behavior of natural gases that are trapped in porous rocks.
Years ago, physicists noticed that gas bubbles in a sufficiently narrow tube filled with liquid did not move. But that's "kind of a paradox," said senior author John Kolinski, an assistant professor in the department of mechanical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).
NPR News
Measles Numbers Were Bad In 2018. This Year, They're Even Worse
After decades of progress against one of the most contagious human viruses, the world is seeing measles stage a slow, steady comeback.
The World Health Organization and the CDC say in a new report that there were nearly 10 million cases of measles last year, with outbreaks on every continent.
An estimated 140,000 people died from measles in 2018, WHO says, up from an all-time low of 90,000 in 2016 and so far 2019 has been even worse.
Why America's 1-Percenters Are Richer Than Europe's
A new Gilded Age has emerged in America — a 21st century version.
The wealth of the top 1% of Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia, where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace…
… the share of total income claimed by the top 1% of earners in the U.S. has more than doubled — from 8% in 1970 to 20% in 2010. In Western Europe, on the other hand, the gains for 1-percenters have been much more modest — rising from 7.5% in 1970 to about 10% in 2010, according to the World Inequality Lab at the Paris School of Economics.
The Sydney Morning Herald
'Explosion of fire' forced firefighters to flee in Sydney's south-west
Firefighters were forced to run from an "explosion of fire" in Sydney's south-west on Thursday night, as the bushfire crisis again tightened its grip over the state.
At the peak of the crisis, seven fires around NSW were classified as burning at emergency warning level on Thursday, from Tenterfield in the north of the state to the Shoalhaven on the South Coast.
In the early hours of Friday morning, the last of the fires burning at emergency warning level were downgraded to watch-and-act level, but residents were told to remain vigilant. Those blazes included the Little L Complex fire in the Yengo National Park, and the Gospers Mountain fire.
Bleaching risks rise for Australian coral reefs as warm seas forecast
Coral reefs across parts of Australia's north may experience severe bleaching this summer, as forecasters predict a return of unusually warm waters for an extended period of time.
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Bureau of Meteorology both say a lengthy period of warming out to March or beyond is likely, especially for waters off north-western WA.
"There's a good chance near-shore reefs of Western Australia will suffer severe bleaching," said Morgan Pratchett, a coral researcher at James Cook University.
The Canadian Press
From seals to belugas, scientists describe worrying signs for Arctic ‘sentinels’
Scientists attending a national gathering of Arctic researchers are outlining a widening range of climate change risks for so-called “sentinel” species, such as ringed seals and beluga whales, which have sustained Inuit for millennia.
The ArcticNet conference happening this week in Halifax comes in the wake of a scientific committee advising that ringed seals be listed under the federal Species at Risk Act.
“This small seal needs sea ice to thrive,” states the opening line of the executive summary released last week by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, or COSEWIC.
Al Jazeera
Risk of more flooding and landslides as rains batter East Africa
Tropical Cyclone Pawan is making its way to the Horn of Africa and heading for the Somali coast, raising fears of fresh flooding.
Several countries in East Africa, including Somalia, Kenya, Uganda and Djibouti, have reported deadly floods and landslides in recent weeks of heavy rains, with more in the forecast for the region.
It is usually on the advance or retreat of the southwest monsoon that cyclones form in the Arabian Sea, in the northern half of the Indian Ocean.
Repression rules: Report finds freedoms under attack across Asia
The assault on civil society and fundamental freedoms in Asia is getting worse, according to a new report from the civil rights group CIVICUS, which found only one of 25 territories in the region could be considered free.
In a report released on Wednesday, the Johannesburg-based group said it downgraded two more countries to the "repressed" category, leaving Taiwan the only place considered "open".
The report said it was "particularly alarmed by the regression of fundamental civic rights" in India, the world's largest democracy, and Brunei, an absolute monarchy in Southeast Asia.
China continues to be the main offender on censorship, it added.
Mother Jones
Global Carbon Emissions Will Hit a Record High in 2019… Again.
Global carbon emissions will hit a record high once again in 2019, despite climate scientists warning louder than ever of impending environmental disaster, according to a study published Wednesday.
The report, from a consortium of researchers as part of the annual Global Carbon Budget, found countries around the world will spew more than 40.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air by the end of 2019, up about 0.6 percent from last year. The rise was spurred in part by increased output in China and India (though emissions in those countries were lower than expected) and comes despite a series of bleak reports released in recent months urging a dramatic cutback of carbon emissions to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
The Atlantic
The Russification of the Republican Party
Just how far will Republicans go in following … Donald Trump’s embrace of Russia? An answer may be crystallizing as the GOP mobilizes its defense of the president against impeachment.
Both congressional Republicans and conservative commentators are defending Trump from impeachment partly by accusing Ukraine of intervening against him in the 2016 presidential election—despite repeated warnings from national-security and intelligence officials that those claims are not only baseless, but advance Vladimir Putin’s goal of discrediting Ukraine.
The Climate Hellscape Is Coming, and Capitalism Can't Save Us
In her 2007 book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein coined the term disaster capitalism, which refers to the tendency of free markets and governments to respond opportunistically to catastrophic events. This phenomenon of extreme capitalism has troubling implications when it comes to climate change. As the staff writer Alexis C. Madrigal suggests, you can’t buy your way out of a warming planet.
x xYouTube Video
Ars Technica
Senators want answers about algorithms that provide black patients less healthcare
A recent blockbuster study found that software used in healthcare settings systematically provides worse care for black patients than white patients, and two senators want to know what both the industry and regulators are going to do to fix the situation.
Senators Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Tuesday issued letters to the Federal Trade Commission, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and the five largest US health insurers asking about bias in the algorithms used to make healthcare decisions.
"In using algorithms, organizations often attempt to remove human flaws and biases from the process," Booker and Wyden wrote. "Unfortunately, both the people who design these complex systems, and the massive sets of data that are used, have many historical and human biases built in. Without very careful consideration, the algorithms they subsequently create can further perpetuate those very biases."
Here’s how much global carbon emission increased this year
Large oceangoing ships turn very slowly, which can be frustrating to someone accustomed to speeding around on nimble watercraft. Those eagerly watching for progress on climate change can relate. Every year, another batch of stats on greenhouse gas emissions comes in, and we're left to wonder whether we're turning things around yet.
This year's update was just published as part of the Global Carbon Project—a large scientific collaboration that coordinates this difficult accounting work. The researchers compile the latest estimates for every component of Earth's carbon cycle, from fossil fuel emissions and deforestation to the uptake of carbon by the ocean and vegetation.
The topline numbers are the total global emissions estimates. As this is published before the end of the year, the report includes a preliminary estimate for 2019 and a revision to the 2018 numbers published last year. Estimated 2018 emissions come in at a 2.1 percent increase over 2017—well within the error bars of last year's preliminary estimate of 2.7 percent.