The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton.
The Washington Post
The U.S. flooded Afghanistan with money — then turned a blind eye to the graft it fueled
About halfway into the 18-year war, Afghans stopped hiding how corrupt their country had become. Dark money sloshed all around. Afghanistan’s largest bank liquefied into a cesspool of fraud. Travelers lugged suitcases loaded with $1 million, or more, on flights leaving Kabul. Mansions known as “poppy palaces” rose from the rubble to house opium kingpins.
President Hamid Karzai won reelection after cronies stuffed thousands of ballot boxes. He later admitted the CIA had delivered bags of cash to his office for years, calling it “nothing unusual.”
In public, as President Barack Obama escalated the war and Congress approved billions of additional dollars in support, the commander in chief and lawmakers promised to crack down on corruption and hold crooked Afghans accountable.
In reality, U.S. officials backed off, looked away and let the thievery become more entrenched than ever, according to a trove of confidential government interviews obtained by The Washington Post.
U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.
All was quiet when the motorboat puttered to a stop. Saltwater lapped at the narrow sandy shore. Mangrove leaves fluttered in the breeze. Then the man in a blue life jacket cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: Hoo hoo!
Like a secret password, the call unlocked a hidden primate universe. Dozens of chimpanzees emerged from the brush, hairy arms extended. They waded up to the rusty vessel with the nonchalance of someone fetching the mail.
“Time to eat,” said Joseph Thomas, their wiry guardian of 40 years, tossing bananas into the furry crowd.
Chimps aren’t supposed to be stuck on their own island — especially one with no food — or mingle with much-weaker humans. But nothing about Liberia’s Monkey Island is normal. It’s a spectacle, an increasingly costly burden and the enduring legacy of American scientists who set out to cure hepatitis B in 1974.
Los Angeles Times
Impeachment debate shows sharp partisan divide
As the House Judiciary Committee finalized articles of impeachment Thursday, Democrats and Republicans clashed over whether … Trump abused his power by urging Ukraine to investigate his political enemies.
The debate was another reflection of the sharply partisan nature of the impeachment process, with neither side conceding anything to the other.
Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio) said “no abuse of power ever took place” and accused Democrats of wasting their time with impeachment because they “hate this president.”
“The entire argument for impeachment, in this case,” he said, “is based on a charge that is not a crime, much less a high crime, and that has never been approved by the House of Representatives in a presidential impeachment before, ever, in history.”
This is what a devastating earthquake in California would look like
The high-rise towers that served as landmarks of this city are mostly gone. Blocks where historic brick buildings once stood are now vacant. At the city’s center, Christ Church Cathedral remains in ruins.
The workday bustle in one of New Zealand’s leading commercial centers, abandoned by many employers, has slowed. A once-steady stream of tourists dramatically slimmed.
Eight years ago, a huge earthquake ruptured directly under Christchurch, killing 185 people. Full recovery remains elusive.
The city offers an urgent lesson to California, whose major cities — situated along seismic faults — face similar threats.
These sex workers are fighting for union rights, leaving Spanish feminists conflicted
An angry voice blared from a megaphone at the back of the college lecture hall even before the guest speakers — sex workers — had said a word.
Students at the University of Barcelona, about 20 of them, shouted “Prostitution is slavery!” and other phrases to show their opposition to anything the speakers wanted to share about their lives, proposed labor union or rights.
“Fuera proxenetas!” a woman yelled. Out with the pimps. After about 30 minutes, the protesters exited the lecture hall, leaving the sex workers shaken but not deterred.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Stacey Abrams launches new Southern policy project
Since losing last year’s race for governor, Stacey Abrams has launched organizations aiming to promote voting rights and secure an accurate count of the 2020 U.S. census. Now, she’s delving into new think-tank territory.
The Georgia Democrat will head the Southern Economic Advancement Project, which aims to hone policies that influence how race, class and gender intersect across 12 Southern states.
The research director is Sarah Beth Gehl, a public policy professor and former Abrams campaign deputy who wants to position the project to connect elected officials and experts to develop ideas and then implement them. A broader goal, Gehl said in an interview, is to “change the narrative of the South” by contributing research in the areas of climate change, healthcare and economic security.
The Verge
This Was the Decade Climate Change Slapped Us in the Face
[…] 2019 marks the close of the hottest decade on the books. Seven of the 10 hottest years ever recorded on the planet have taken place since 2010. Not only has the globe’s average temperature run a persistent fever, but high temperatures spiked in individual locations around the world. In July 2019, during the hottest month documented in human history, a deadly heatwave swept through Western Europe, killing hundreds. Temperatures reached an unprecedented 108.7 degrees Fahrenheit (42.6 degrees Celsius) in Paris. Belgium hit an all-time high of 107.2 degrees Fahrenheit (41.8 degrees Celsius). The UK, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands all smashed records too.
At the North Pole, scientists were shocked to see temperatures reach a relatively balmy 35 degrees Fahrenheit in February 2018, which is a full 50 degrees warmer than usual for the season, The Washington Post reported. In 2012, Arctic sea ice cover dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded. The planet’s natural iceboxes were dramatically defrosting, and people were starting to take notice.
PBS News Hour
UN leader warns climate change could fuel ‘economic disaster’
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres urged countries and companies Thursday to tackle climate change, saying failure to do so would mean “economic disaster.”
Speaking at the annual U.N. climate meeting in Madrid, Guterres said fears that measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions would decimate existing industries ignored the opportunities arising from the ‘green economy.’
“For too long, vested interests have peddled the false story that economic growth and tackling climate change are incompatible,” the U.N. chief said. “This is nonsense. In fact, failing to tackle global heating is a sure-fire recipe for economic disaster.”
Military Times
Arctic threats, water shortages and rising conflicts: Climate change will require military responses
As impacts from climate change grow in the coming years, troops might see beefed up Arctic capabilities, such as icebreaking ships, better infrastructure and mobile nuclear reactors in the region.
At the same time, forces face increased conflict in northern African and the Middle East over dwindling water resources and more demand for responses to damage from ever-increasing natural disasters.
That’s the diagnosis from a panel of military intelligence and planning experts who testified this week before members of the House Armed Services Committee.
Vox
Scientists feared unstoppable emissions from melting permafrost. They may have already started.
Every year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases an Arctic Report Card, detailing the state of the frozen world at the top of the globe.
And each year, its findings grow more dire. This year, the report revealed that the Arctic itself may now be contributing to climate change. That’s because Arctic soil contains a lot of carbon, which would stay there if it weren’t for the fact that the planet is warming. As the frozen ground across the Arctic starts to thaw, it releases that carbon, which turns into a greenhouse gas. Some of that carbon gets taken up by plants growing in the summertime, but more and more of it is now escaping into the atmosphere.
“Thawing permafrost throughout the Arctic could be releasing an estimated 300-600 million tons of net carbon per year to the atmosphere,” the NOAA writes in the report. That’s roughly the equivalent of Japan’s annual emissions.
Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year
Congress has not been especially productive during the Trump years, to say the least. And it’s safe to say that most of the action has not been notably pro-clean energy. But there’s at least a chance Congress could get something positive done here in the waning days of Trump’s first term. (Yes, believe it or not, it’s still the first term.)
By December 20, Congress must pass a spending bill to keep the government running. The Democratic House must agree to the bill. Right now there are furious negotiations taking place as Democrats try to secure a few key political wins, just under the wire.
House Democrats are trying to figure out what to prioritize. Many in the party want a boost in the earned income tax credit (EITC) and/or child care tax credits and are pressuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to push for them. The other candidate for top priority is a package of clean-energy tax credits.
CityLab
America After Climate Change, Mapped
In 100 years, what will a United States transformed by climate change look like? At this point, you don’t have to use much imagination to predict what’s coming: Temperatures will continue to climb; sea levels will continue to rise. And, by the 2060s, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that global migration patterns will bring 100 million new people into the country, who will settle from coast to coast.
Almost everything else about the climate of tomorrow and the nation’s ability to survive it is less inevitable, however, says Billy Fleming, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology. “There are certain general things we’re certain about, but the shape and content of the future is not one of them,” he said. “We get the future we build for ourselves.”
With other researchers from the McHarg Center, he designed a series of maps of the U.S. for an online collection dubbed The 2100 Project: An Atlas for A Green New Deal. The website use a variety of projected and current data sources to sketch out the country’s possible fate, displaying its geography in economic, ecological, agricultural, and ideological terms. Climate models vary, as do timelines and confidence intervals for each map. But collectively, Fleming says the images provide visual evidence that it’s not too late for grand interventions to make a fundamental difference. Ambitious proposals like the Green New Deal—which involves a dramatic overhaul of the nation’s energy and building infrastructure—could be the key, he said.
The Case for Portland-to-Vancouver High-Speed Rail
Only 175 miles separate Portland from Seattle. Then it’s another 140 miles north to Vancouver, British Columbia. The three Pacific Northwest cities, which together form the Cascadia megaregion, are currently served by Amtrak service that tops out at 79 mph, shares track with BNSF freight trains, and runs infrequently—just twice daily round-trip between Seattle and Vancouver. If you want to make the full 315-mile run from Portland to Vancouver on rails, it’s going to take you at least 8-and-a-half hours. By bus or car, expect the journey to eat up 5 or 6 hours, with metro-area traffic an unpredictable wild card that regularly balloons travel times.
But Roger Millar, Washington State’s secretary of transportation, sees a better way: a trans-national, ultra-high-speed rail line that can hit 250 mph and put the three booming cities within super-commuting range. Such a system—common in Europe and Asia but still alien to North America—might cost $50 billion or so. That sounds like a lot, but it could be a bargain compared to adding a lane to I-5, the current north-south corridor linking the megaregion.
“[For] $108 billion we’ve got another lane of pavement in each direction, and it still takes you all day to get from Portland to Vancouver,” Millar said earlier this month of a hypothetical lane-widening project. “Half of that invested in ultra-high speed rail and it’s two hours. That’s game-changing stuff.”
Portland Tribune
Historic Portland steam locomotive marks 45th restoration anniversary
Rail enthusiasts will celebrate the 45th anniversary of the saving of Portland's most famous historic steam locomotive on Saturday, Dec. 14.
The Southern Pacific 4449 had been unused and rusting in Oaks Park until Dec. 14, 1974, when it was moved to the Hoyt Street Roundhouse in downtown Portland for restoration. Four months later, in April 1975, it began pulling the American Freedom Train to cities and towns all over the country to celebrate America's bicentennial.
Now the fully-restored SP 4449 is the centerpiece of the Oregon Rail Heritage Center, where the city's two other historic steam locomotives are also housed near OMSI at 2250 S.E. Water Ave.
BBC News
Why Australia's PM is facing climate anger amid bushfires
Australia has spent months in the grip of a bushfire emergency, as vast areas of the nation continue to burn.
Since September, blazes in eastern Australia have killed six people, destroyed more than 700 homes and blanketed towns and cities in smoke.
As the crisis rolls on, many Australians have raised concerns about the impacts of climate change in exacerbating fires.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and his opponents have faced a mounting backlash over their climate policies.
EU leaders haggle over climate neutrality pledge
European Union leaders are holding talks in Brussels amid pressure to commit to making the 28-member bloc climate neutral by 2050.
Several Eastern European countries want financial and other guarantees before they agree to the EU cutting to zero its net amount of greenhouse emissions.
But Ursula von der Leyen, the new head of the EU's executive, has placed the aim at the heart of a new "Green Deal".
Billions of euros would be added to the EU budget to move from fossil fuels.
CNN
World must reach 'peak meat' by 2030 to meet climate change targets, scientists warn
The world needs to reach "peak meat" within the next 10 years to combat the effects of climate change, scientists have warned.
In a letter to The Lancet Planetary Health Journal, they said all but the poorest countries needed to set a time frame for livestock production to stop growing, since the meat and dairy sector is responsible for such a large proportion of emissions.
The scientists called on governments to identify the largest emissions sources or land-occupiers in the livestock sector and set reduction targets to help fight the risk of global temperatures rising by more than the "safe" limit of 1.5-2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Indian military deployed and internet shut down as protests rage against citizenship bill
Troops have been deployed to India's ethnically diverse northeastern states of Assam and Tripura, amid violent protests against the passing of a controversial and far-reaching law that offers a path to Indian citizenship for non-Muslim minorities from three neighboring countries.
The Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) was approved by President Ram Nath Kovind on Thursday, a day after the country's parliament passed it. It has been described by Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government as a means of protecting vulnerable groups from persecution.
Critics, however, say the bill marginalizes Muslims and undermines the country's secular constitution. Others say it risks bringing an unwanted influx of immigrants from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan into India's northern states.
Politico
Judge rejects government’s motion to toss suit over missing Trump-Putin meeting notes
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to toss out a lawsuit over missing notes documenting … Donald Trump’s face-to-face meetings with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.
American Oversight and Democracy Forward, a pair of left-leaning watchdog groups, sued Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the State Department, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the archivist of the United States in June over the missing notes. The groups charge that Pompeo violated the Federal Records Act by allowing Trump to reportedly confiscate meeting notes prepared by State Department employees and for failing to preserve them.
Republicans try to avoid an impeachment trial civil war
Senate Republicans are keeping their impeachment trial options open — officially, at least.
The party is uniting around a strategy that could quickly acquit President Donald Trump of articles of impeachment while giving them the opportunity to call witnesses later in the trial if Republicans and the president are not satisfied with how things are going, according to interviews with nearly a dozen Republican senators on Thursday.
Heading into the trial, Republicans’ plan would be to call no witnesses and simply allow House Democrats and then the president’s attorneys to make their case before the public. After that, the Senate would consider calling people either for live testimony or closed-door depositions.
AP News
Pentagon watchdog investigating $400M border wall contract
The Defense Department’s internal watchdog is investigating a $400 million border wall contract awarded to a firm that used multiple appearances on Fox News to push for the job.
The Pentagon’s inspector general sent a letter Thursday to House Homeland Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson telling him the contract awarded to North Dakota-based firm Fisher Sand and Gravel Co. would be audited. Thompson, D-Miss., asked for the review last week, in part over concerns the proposals did not meet operational requirements and prototypes came in late and over budget. […]
The company was awarded a contract Dec. 2 to build 31 miles of wall in Arizona, part of a series of contracts to push out increased mileage. Fisher had made a number of appearances on Trump’s favorite cable news channel — Fox News — talking about his desire to win a contract. His firm, though, has little experience with such construction and a previous proposal was rejected.
Brazil paves highway to soy, sparking worries about Amazon
Night falls in Brazil’s Amazon and two logging trucks without license plates emerge from the jungle. They rumble over dirt roads that lead away from a national forest, carrying trunks of trees hundreds of years old.
After pulling onto a darkened highway, the truckers chug to their turnoff into the woods, where they deliver their ancient cargo. By morning, the trunks are laid out for hewing at the remote sawmill, its corrugated metal roof hardly visible from the highway.
The highway known as BR-163 stretches from soybean fields to a riverside export terminal. The loggers were just south of the road’s juncture with BR-230, known as the Trans-Amazon. Together the highways cover more than 5,000 miles, crossing the world’s fifth-biggest country in the state of Para.
Deutsche Welle
EU extends sanctions on Russia over Ukraine conflict
EU sanctions targeting Moscow's finance, energy and defense industries will stay in place until mid-2020. The decision comes after the leaders of Russia and Ukraine met in Paris to seek a solution to Ukraine conflict.
European Union leaders meeting in Brussels on Thursday agreed to extend economic sanctions against Russia for another six months, officials said.
The measures were first implemented in 2014 after Moscow annexed Ukraine's Crimean peninsula and backed a separatist insurgency in the country's east. The sanctions, which were set to expire in January, will now be in place until the end of July 2020.
High emission countries: Why are they lagging on climate protection?
Even the world's largest CO2 emitters are suffering the effects of climate change. So what's stopping countries like Germany, India, Saudi Arabia, the US and China from changing tack and going green?
A drastic reduction in emissions is needed to avert catastrophic global warming. And it's needed fast, say climate scientists. Global greenhouse gas emissions must fall by 7.6 per cent each year over the next decade to limit rising temperatures to the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) threshold outlined in the Paris Agreement, a UN Environment Program report warns.
Reducing emissions must be a global effort. But some nations emit far more CO2 than others. From industry to infrastructure, resources to development, and population to politics, there are different reasons for these countries' high carbon emissions. But why is it so hard to cut back on carbon and make progress on climate protection?
The Guardian
Boris Johnson and Tories predicted to win 86-seat majority in exit poll
Boris Johnson appears on course to secure a crushing majority of 86, and take Britain out of the EU in January, after a shock exit poll showed his party would win 368 seats in Thursday’s general election.
That would be the biggest Conservative majority since Margaret Thatcher’s third election victory in 1987; and mark a dramatic repudiation of Jeremy Corbyn’s offer of “real change” for Britain.
If the poll is vindicated as results come in, the Conservatives will have smashed through the “red wall” of Labour-held seats across Wales and the Midlands, many of which voted leave in the 2016 EU referendum.
Senate committee passes bipartisan bill to stop Trump withdrawing from Nato
Legislation to stop Donald Trump from withdrawing the US from Nato has been approved for a Senate vote, amid uncertainty over the president’s intentions towards the alliance.
The Senate foreign relations committee on Wednesday voted unanimously for the bipartisan bill which will now await a slot to go to the Senate. Senator Tim Kaine, the draft legislation’s lead Democratic sponsor, said it was a response to fears that the Trump administration is actively considering withdrawal.
“We’re aware that it has been seriously debated and seriously considered in the White House at the highest levels,” Kaine told the Guardian. Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, reportedly warned last month that, if re-elected in 2020, Trump could go “full isolationist” and withdraw from the 70-year-old North Atlantic alliance.
The Atlantic
[…] In his landmark 1981 book, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, Paul Hollander wrote of the hospitality showered on sympathetic Western visitors to the Communist world: the banquets in Moscow thrown for George Bernard Shaw, the feasts laid out for Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag in North Vietnam. But his conclusion was that these performances were not the key to explaining why some Western intellectuals became enamored of communism. Far more important was their estrangement and alienation from their own cultures: “Intellectuals critical of their own society proved highly susceptible to the claims put forward by the leaders and spokesmen of the societies they inspected in the course of these travels.”
Hollander was writing about left-wing intellectuals in the 20th century, and many such people are still around, paying court to left-wing dictators in Venezuela or Bolivia who dislike America. There are also, in our society as in most others, quite a few people who are paid to help America’s enemies, or to spread their propaganda. There always have been.
But in the 21st century, we must also contend with a new phenomenon: right-wing intellectuals, now deeply critical of their own societies, who have begun paying court to right-wing dictators who dislike America. And their motives are curiously familiar. All around them, they see degeneracy, racial mixing, demographic change, “political correctness,” same-sex marriage, religious decline. The America that they actually inhabit no longer matches the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America that they remember, or think they remember. And so they have begun to look abroad, seeking to find the spiritually unified, ethnically pure nations that, they imagine, are morally stronger than their own. Nations, for example, such as Russia.
In the End, the NFL Proved Colin Kaepernick Right
When the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, declared yesterday that the league had “moved on” from the embattled quarterback Colin Kaepernick, the finality of Goodell’s tone answered the question about whether Kaepernick would ever play professional football again. […]
“It was a unique opportunity—an incredible opportunity—and he chose not to take it. And we’ve moved on here,” Goodell said at an owners’ meeting in Irving, Texas.
But if Goodell believes that the Atlanta fiasco provided closure to this situation, he’s being horribly naive. The league’s clumsy treatment of Kaepernick only showed what the quarterback’s supporters have been saying all along: The NFL is unwilling to tolerate black athletes’ outrage, outspokenness, and desire to exercise their power—even though all three are entirely justified.
Lexington Herald Leader
Bevin pardons a KY man convicted of beheading a woman and stuffing her in a barrel
It’s not clear if Betty Carnes was killed by asphyxiation or by the eight blows to her head that Delmar Partin delivered with a metal pipe. The coroner couldn’t tell which killed the mother of three first, but it was very clear that her head was then chopped off and placed on her lap in a 55-gallon barrel that was destined for a toxic waste site.
On Monday, departing Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin pardoned and commuted the sentence of Partin, who was convicted of killing her at the factory where they both worked in Barbourville in 1994. […]
Jackie Steele, the current commonwealth’s attorney in Knox and Laurel counties, cited several other pardons in his jurisdiction that made him unhappy. […]
“This is a travesty of our justice system,” Steele said. “When you have law enforcement and prosecutors and families who sludge through this process.... when they do get justice and he turns around and does something like this? It’s a travesty.”
Beshear restores voting rights to more than 140,000 Kentuckians with felony records
Gov. Andy Beshear signed an executive order Thursday that will restore voting rights to more than 140,000 non-violent felons who have served their sentence, saying he believes in the law and redemption.
Beshear, in his third day as Kentucky’s top elected official, also said he will support an amendment to the Kentucky Constitution to preserve his order, which can be withdrawn by future governors. That would require legislative approval and a vote by Kentuckians at the polls.
House Speaker David Osborne, R-Prospect, released a statement shortly after Beshear signed the order, saying he has “concerns about the use of an executive order to effectively amend our state constitution.”
Gizmodo
Scientists Sequence the Genome of America's Famous Extinct Parakeet
Researchers have produced the first whole genome of the Carolina parakeet, a recently extinct parrot native to the United States. The bird’s DNA reveals that humans (and probably humans alone) brought about its abrupt extinction.
The Carolina parakeet was one of only two parrots native to the U.S., but it went extinct in 1918, when the last surviving individual died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Scientists still wonder what happened to this colorful bird, since there are various potential factors that might have caused it harm. But the parakeet’s genome shows little evidence of species decline before its extinction.
Hyper-Detailed Maps Reveal Seafloor Craters From Bikini Atoll Nuclear Tests
Seafloor mapping has revealed craters beneath the Pacific Ocean from nuclear weapons testing, scientists report.
From 1946 to 1958, the United States dropped 23 atomic bombs over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, including the famous Operation Crossroads and Castle Bravo tests. A team based at the University of Delaware used sonar to survey how these tests have permanently altered the islands and the seafloor in the area.
This research was an opportunity to “really illuminate the story of nuclear testing in ways that it hadn’t and couldn’t have been done before,” Art Trembanis, associate professor at the University of Delaware, told Gizmodo by phone.
NPR News
Congressional Negotiators Reach Tentative Deal On $1.3 Trillion Spending Package
Congressional negotiators have reached tentative agreement on a package of bills to fund the government through the end of September 2020. Lawmakers have until the end of next week to approve spending legislation to avert a government shutdown. The White House has not publicly weighed in on the agreement.
The deal covers all 12 regular spending bills, which total $1.3 trillion. This figure was agreed to in a bipartisan budget package that was enacted by the president this summer.
House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., confirmed the tentative agreement to reporters following a meeting with the other top Hill leaders from House and Senate spending panels.
44,000-Year-Old Indonesian Cave Painting Is Rewriting The History Of Art
Scientists say they have found the oldest known figurative painting, in a cave in Indonesia. And the stunning scene of a hunting party, painted some 44,000 years ago, is helping to rewrite the history of the origins of art. […]
"They are at least 40,000 years old, which was a very, very surprising discovery," says Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at Australia's Griffith University. He and his colleagues used a technique called uranium-series analysis to determine the paintings' age. The oldest figurative painting in those analyses was a striking image of a wild cow.
These works had been known for years by locals on the island of Sulawesi — but Brumm adds that "it was assumed they couldn't be that old."
Ars Technica
Russia’s only carrier, damaged in shipyard accident, now on fire
The Admiral Kuznetsov, Russia's only aircraft carrier, caught fire today during repairs in Murmansk. While officials of the shipyard said that no shipyard workers were injured, Russia's TASS news service reports that at least 12 people (likely Kuznetsov sailors) were injured, some critically. In addition, three people, possibly including the third-rank captain in charge of the ship's repairs, are unaccounted for. […]
The fire was caused when sparks from welding work near one of the ship's electrical distribution compartments set a cable on fire. The fire spread through the wiring throughout compartments of the lower deck of the ship, eventually involving 120 square meters (1,300 square feet) of the ship's spaces.
988 will be the new 911 for suicide prevention—by sometime in 2021
The Federal Communications Commission plans to designate 988 as the short dialing code for the United States' suicide-prevention hotline. Much like 911 for general emergencies, 988 could be dialed by anyone undergoing a mental health crisis and/or considering suicide.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can already be reached at 1-800-273-8255 (or 1-800-273-TALK), but the FCC today gave preliminary approval to a plan that would make 988 redirect to that hotline. The commission's unanimous vote approved a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that seeks public comment on the plan.