The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton.
The New York Times
Opinion: Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy
Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers.
After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm. In the cities that the data file covers, it tracks people from nearly every neighborhood and block, whether they live in mobile homes in Alexandria, Va., or luxury towers in Manhattan.
Christianity Today
Editorial: Trump Should Be Removed from Office
In our founding documents, Billy Graham explains that Christianity Today will help evangelical Christians interpret the news in a manner that reflects their faith. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a significant event in the story of our republic. It requires comment. […]
But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral. […]
Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.
The Washington Post
Pelosi’s delay sparks standoff with Senate Republicans over Trump impeachment trial
Congress was paralyzed Thursday over … Trump’s impeachment as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed acting to initiate the Senate trial that will determine whether Trump remains in office — a dramatic procedural move that places the two chambers at a bitter standoff.
One day after the House voted to impeach Trump, Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced she would refrain from transmitting the articles of impeachment to the Senate until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sets rules for the trial that are accepted by Senate Democrats.
The House voted Thursday to adjourn for the holidays until Jan. 7, throwing into doubt when the Senate might be able to begin its trial, potentially pushing it further into an election year and threatening to deny Trump the satisfaction of a swift acquittal.
To avoid removal, Trump needs senators representing only 7 percent of the country to support him
[…] Consider, for example, that it requires 67 votes in the Senate to oust Trump from office. That means that 34 votes are needed to preserve his position. Even if he were deeply unpopular, if Trump maintained support from senators in 17 states, he could keep his job. Meaning, in the most extreme scenario, that he could be impeached but not removed from office if senators from the 17 least-populous states — representing about 7 percent of the population — decided to stand by him.
Putin suggests altering constitution to limit presidential term
Russian leader Vladimir Putin triggered a flurry of speculation Thursday when he suggested he was open to a constitutional change that would limit any president to no more than two terms.
In his traditional end-of-year news conference — lasting four hours and 19 minutes — Putin also came down on … Trump’s side in the impeachment battle…
“It’s unlikely they will want to remove from power a representative of their party based on what are, in my opinion, completely fabricated reasons,” Putin said.
AP News
Report: Washington state lawmaker engaged in ‘domestic terrorism’
A Washington state lawmaker took part in “domestic terrorism” against the United States during a 2016 standoff at a wildlife refuge in Oregon and traveled throughout the West meeting with far-right extremist groups, according to an investigative report released Thursday.
The report prepared for the state Legislature said Rep. Matt Shea, a Republican from Spokane Valley in eastern Washington, also found that he trained young people to fight a “holy war,” condoned intimidating opponents and promoted militia training by the Patriot Movement for possible armed conflict with law enforcement.
Gabbard faces heat back home for present vote on impeachment
Longshot presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is facing some heat in her heavily Democratic home state of Hawaii for voting “present” on two articles of impeachment against … Donald Trump.
Kai Kahele, a Democratic state senator who is running to succeed Gabbard in Congress, said the two most consequential votes that a member of Congress will ever cast are on whether to send troops into harm’s way and whether to impeach a president. He said her decision to vote “present” was disappointing and unacceptable. […]
According to the website govtrack.us, Gabbard missed 88.7% of the 141 House votes taken in the past three months.
1,200 detained in India amid ban on citizenship law protests
Police detained more than 1,200 protesters in some of India’s biggest cities Thursday after they defied bans on assembly that authorities imposed to stop widespread demonstrations against a new citizenship law that opponents say threatens the country’s secular democracy.
At least three people were reported killed as protests raged around the country despite the bans as opposition increased to the law, which excludes Muslims. The legislation has sparked anger at what many see as the government’s push to bring India closer to a Hindu state.
Los Angeles Times
PG&E and Southern California Edison can’t raise profit margins, regulators decide
The California Public Utilities Commission ruled Thursday that profit margins will remain the same at the state’s major utilities, denying the companies the higher shareholder returns they had sought.
Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric had argued that higher profits were necessary to keep attracting sufficient capital to fund their operations. They pointed to the billions of dollars in wildfire liabilities that prompted PG&E to file for bankruptcy protection, saying that investors may need larger returns to justify funding the companies, which provide electricity to a majority of Californians.
In a unanimous vote, the utilities commission rejected those arguments.
The Atlantic
The 5 Years That Changed Dating
[…] Dating apps originated in the gay community; Grindr and Scruff, which helped single men link up by searching for other active users within a specific geographic radius, launched in 2009 and 2010, respectively. With the launch of Tinder in 2012, iPhone-owning people of all sexualities could start looking for love, or sex, or casual dating, and it quickly became the most popular dating app on the market. But the gigantic shift in dating culture really started to take hold the following year, when Tinder expanded to Android phones, then to more than 70 percent of smartphones worldwide. Shortly thereafter, many more dating apps came online.
There’s been plenty of hand-wringing and gnashing of teeth over how Tinder could reinvent dating: Maybe it would transform the dating scene into an endless virtual marketplace where singles could shop for each other (like an Amazon for human companionship), or perhaps it would turn dating into a minimal-effort, transactional pursuit of on-demand hookups (like an Uber for sex). But the reality of dating in the age of apps is a little more nuanced than that. The relationship economy has certainly changed in terms of how humans find and court their potential partners, but what people are looking for is largely the same as it ever was: companionship and/or sexual satisfaction. Meanwhile, the underlying challenges—the loneliness, the boredom, the roller coaster of hope and disappointment—of being “single and looking,” or single and looking for something, haven’t gone away. They’ve simply changed shape.
Sick Migrant Children Are at the Whims of U.S. Border Guards
Until this week, a 7-year-old Honduran girl had been living at a makeshift refugee camp in Matamoros, Mexico, with an infected opening in her groin known as a fistula—an aperture through which excrement seeped from her colon to the surface of her skin. […]
Known officially as Migrant Protection Protocols, the policy prevents asylum seekers from awaiting court dates inside the U.S., a practice that … Donald Trump has long derided as “catch and release.” Since MPP was announced in January, federal officials have sent some 55,000 asylum seekers to wait in Mexico, leading to the creation of unsafe, unsanitary camps like the one in Matamoros.
Under MPP, the grant rate for asylum has plummeted to 0.1 percent, down from about 11 percent in the 2018 fiscal year. Federal officials at ports of entry can use discretion, however, to grant exceptions for medical emergencies, effectively allowing vulnerable children and families to sidestep the policy and enter the United States. But advocates say the rules are vague and seem to change every day, making it almost impossible to predict who will be allowed across to seek care. “It is arbitrary and capricious,” said Charlene D’Cruz, a lawyer representing the girl, whose name she asked The Atlantic to withhold because she is a minor.
History’s Largest Mining Operation Is About to Begin
[…] Today, many of the largest mineral corporations in the world have launched underwater mining programs. On the west coast of Africa, the De Beers Group is using a fleet of specialized ships to drag machinery across the seabed in search of diamonds. In 2018, those ships extracted 1.4 million carats from the coastal waters of Namibia; in 2019, De Beers commissioned a new ship that will scrape the bottom twice as quickly as any other vessel. Another company, Nautilus Minerals, is working in the territorial waters of Papua New Guinea to shatter a field of underwater hot springs lined with precious metals, while Japan and South Korea have embarked on national projects to exploit their own offshore deposits. But the biggest prize for mining companies will be access to international waters, which cover more than half of the global seafloor and contain more valuable minerals than all the continents combined.
Regulations for ocean mining have never been formally established. The United Nations has given that task to an obscure organization known as the International Seabed Authority, which is housed in a pair of drab gray office buildings at the edge of Kingston Harbour, in Jamaica. Unlike most UN bodies, the ISA receives little oversight. It is classified as “autonomous” and falls under the direction of its own secretary general, who convenes his own general assembly once a year, at the ISA headquarters. For about a week, delegates from 168 member states pour into Kingston from around the world, gathering at a broad semicircle of desks in the auditorium of the Jamaica Conference Centre. Their assignment is not to prevent mining on the seafloor but to mitigate its damage—selecting locations where extraction will be permitted, issuing licenses to mining companies, and drafting the technical and environmental standards of an underwater Mining Code.
Vox
The real differences between the 2020 Democrats’ health care plans, explained
If you want to understand each major Democratic candidate’s theory of how they could win the nomination, look at their health care platform. […]
Every plan would represent a significant expansion of the government’s role in guaranteeing Americans access to affordable health care. The Democrats running agree on a few key themes: Everybody should have health insurance; health insurance should cover most medical services; and people should pay less money for health care, both for premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, than they do now.
All of their health care plans would achieve those overarching goals to different degrees. But the fight over Medicare-for-all has become a proxy battle for the biggest disagreement in the Democratic primary: Is the bigger risk too much disruption, or not doing enough?
The extraordinary danger of being pregnant and uninsured in Texas
[…] From 2012 through 2015, at least 382 pregnant women and new mothers died in Texas from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, according to the most recent data available from the Department of State Health Services; since then, hundreds more have likely perished. While their cases reflect the problems that contribute to maternal mortality across the United States — gross medical errors, deeply entrenched racism, structural deficiencies in how care is delivered — another Texas-size factor often plays a significant role: the state’s vast, and growing, problem with health insurance access.
About one in six Texans — just over 5 million people — had no health insurance last year. That’s almost a sixth of all uninsured Americans, more than the entire population of neighboring Louisiana. After trending lower for several years, the Texas rate has been rising again — to 17.7 percent in 2018, or about twice the national average.
The numbers for women are even worse. Texas has the highest rate of uninsured women of reproductive age in the country; a third were without health coverage in 2018, according to a State Health Services survey. In some counties, mainly along the Mexico border, that estimate approaches 40 percent.
The Guardian
Queen's speech: PM points to harder Brexit and 10-year rule
Boris Johnson has set out his vision for the Tories to govern for the next decade as he published a Queen’s speech that points the way towards a harder Brexit and sweeping constitutional reforms.
The prime minister claimed that he wanted his programme for government to last for more than one parliament, describing it as a “blueprint for the future of Britain”. […]
The new legislation has stripped out protections for workers’ rights, watered down a commitment to take unaccompanied refugee children from Europe, and removed parliament’s say on the future relationship. It also inserted a ban on the government extending the Brexit transition period beyond the end of 2020.
True meanings of words of emotion get lost in translation, study finds
The true meaning of words may be lost in translation, according to research suggesting the way people understand terms such as “anger” or “love” differs between languages.
For example, while the concept of “love” is closely linked to “like” and “want” in Indo-European languages, it is strongly linked to “pity” in Austronesian languages – a family that includes Vietnamese and the Mon language spoken in parts of Myanmar.
“Even though we might say there is a word for anger in hundreds of languages, these words actually might not mean the same thing,” said Joshua Conrad Jackson, co-author of the research from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
Deutsche Welle
Russia: Shooting near FSB intelligence offices in Moscow
An unknown gunman opened fire near the headquarters of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) in Moscow on Thursday evening, Russian media reported.
In a statement, the FSB said that the gunman had been "neutralized" and that authorities are working to identify him, the Russian news agency Interfax reported.
At least one FSB officer was killed during the shooting, Russia's top security agency said. Five people were wounded in the shooting, the Health Ministry said. Two of the wounded are FSB officers who were "severely injured," the ministry added.
The Sydney Morning Herald
'The monster': a short history of Australia's biggest forest fire
On the afternoon of October 26, an unseasonably warm Saturday following a run of hot days, the wind picked up over the Blue Mountains and lightning stabbed at the ranges. One bolt made ground near a disused airstrip at Gospers Mountain, a densely grown area of the Wollemi National Park, and prickled the kindling into life. It would become the epicentre of the biggest forest fire to have started from a single ignition point that Australia has ever known.
Ken Mackett observed a plume of smoke curl above the ridge line from his home in Putty, about 30 kilometres north-east of the lightning strike, with a sense of unease. A volunteer with the Rural Fire Service, he knew that initially the National Parks and Wildlife Service would be responsible for putting it out. He also knew how difficult that task would be. Deep into the mountains, in country fractured by creeks, chasms and vertiginous escarpments, it was virtually inaccessible by land, and the bush had never been so brittle. After 10 years of below average rainfall, the soil had become so dry that gum trees were keeling over and stacking up like a giant bonfire waiting to be lit.
Reuters
Australian leader curtails holiday as firefighters killed in huge blazes
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison issued a rare public apology as he cut short a Hawaiian vacation on Friday after two volunteer firefighters were killed battling blazes that are ravaging much of the country’s east coast.
Australia has been fighting wildfires in the east for weeks, with blazes destroying more than 700 homes and nearly 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of bushland.
Fishermen cry foul as China bids to fix drought-hit lake
[…] On Jan. 1 2020, China will ban fishing in environmentally sensitive regions along the Yangtze, China’s longest river, and by the start of 2021, fishing throughout the Poyang itself will be prohibited for at least 10 years. […]
Residents blame the Three Gorges Project for the problems facing the lake, with its vast 660km-long (410 mile-long) reservoir storing huge volumes of water behind a giant dam for power generation. […]
But the primary cause of problems is the two decades of intensive sand mining in the Poyang, said David Shankman, professor at the University of Alabama, who studies the lake.
NPR News
Senate Approves $1.4 Trillion Spending Agreement Ahead of Shutdown Deadline
The Senate voted 81-11 to approve a $1.4 trillion spending package that will fund the federal government through the end of September 2020. The broad spending agreement was broken into two separate bills that passed the House earlier this week. […]
Democrats are celebrating an equal pay increase for federal workers, $425 million for election security spending and full funding for the upcoming 2020 census. The bill also includes $25 million for gun violence research, the first time in 20 years Congress has approved any such spending.
Republicans are touting $1.375 billion for border fence construction and greater flexibility in the way they can spend that money. The figure is less than the more than $8 billion requested in Trump's most recent budget but equal to the amount available in 2019.
Obamacare Takes Another Hit In Federal Appeals Court Ruling
A federal appeals court panel in New Orleans has dealt another blow to the Affordable Care Act, agreeing with a lower-court judge that the portion of the health law requiring most people to have coverage is unconstitutional now that Congress has eliminated the tax penalty that was intended to enforce it.
But it is sending the case back to the lower court to decide how much of the rest of the law can stand in light of that ruling.
That likely means the fate of the law will not be settled before the 2020 election.
Al-Jazeera
14 months after stroke, Gabon's Bongo opens regional summit
Gabonese President Ali Bongo Ondimba has opened a central African summit, marking a return to the international scene nearly 14 months after suffering a stroke.
The 60-year-old gave a roughly four-minute speech on Wednesday to launch a gathering of the 11-nation Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS). […]
Bongo's health has become a closely-watched issue in Gabon, with critics insisting that his stroke has left him medically unfit to run the country.
US-Taliban Afghan peace talks at 'important stage': Khalilzad
Zalmay Khalilzad, US envoy for reconciliation in Afghanistan, has said the peace talks have reached an "important stage" amid a renewed push to reach an agreement with the Taliban to end the 18-year-old war in the country.
In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Khalilzad said he has wrapped up his two-day trip to Kabul, calling it a "productive trip", where he met President Ashraf Ghani, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, former President Hamid Karzai, women's rights activists and other political leaders.
India rejects green energy tech, leaving firms out of $2bn deals
Top Indian electricity generator NTPC has rejected the emissions-cutting technology of General Electric Co and other foreign firms for its coal-fired plants, documents show, shutting them out of an estimated $2bn in orders.
Despite struggling with some of the world's worst air pollution levels, India has already pushed back a deadline to cut emission levels to up to 2022, after extensive lobbying by power producers who cited high costs and technical difficulties.
CNN
Key impeachment witness told to leave Ukraine before Pompeo visit
A top State Department aide told acting US ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor -- a key witness in … Donald Trump's impeachment inquiry -- to hand over his duties just days before Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is expected visit Kiev in January, a source familiar with the situation told CNN.
The timing means that Pompeo will not have to meet, be seen or photographed with Taylor, who drew the President's ire after his damning House testimony that Trump demanded his appointees set up a quid pro quo with Ukraine, explicitly offering much-needed US military aid and an Oval Office meeting in exchange for personal political favors.
Senate removes phrase 'white nationalist' from measure intended to screen military enlistees
The Republican-controlled Senate quietly cut the phrase "white nationalist" from a measure in the National Defense Authorization Act, which was intended to explicitly address the threat of white nationalists in the military, altering the language of a House-passed amendment before passing the massive military spending bill Tuesday.
The House amendment, which was passed in July, was drafted to explicitly study the feasibility of screening for white nationalist beliefs in military enlistees.
But the final version of the bill passed by the Senate and sent to … Donald Trump for his signature now only requires the Department of Defense to monitor for "extremist and gang-related activity," rather than specifically referencing white nationalism.
Ars Technica
Nearly 1 in 4 adults in the US will be severely obese by 2030, study suggests
Nearly half of all adults in the US will be obese just 10 years from now, according to new projections published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Nearly a quarter will be severely obese.
Currently, about 40 percent of US adults are obese and about 20 percent are severely obese.
The new modeling study, led by public health researchers at Harvard, attempts to provide the most accurate projections yet for the country’s obesity epidemic, which is increasing at a concerning rate. “Especially worrisome,” the researchers write, “is the projected rise in the prevalence of severe obesity, which is associated with even higher mortality and morbidity and health care costs” than obesity.
Trump administration says employers can ban organizing via company email
Employers can ban employees from using work email for personal purposes, including union organizing, the National Labor Relations Board ruled on Monday. The board's three Trump-appointed members voted for the rule, which overturned an Obama-era rule reaching the opposite conclusion. The NLRB's lone Democratic member, Lauren McFerran, dissented from the decision.
Federal labor law protects employees' right to organize without interference from employers. That includes a limited right to engage in organizing activities in the workplace. For example, an off-duty employee has a right to distribute union literature in an employee break room or the parking lot. […]
The NLRB's three-member Republican majority took the case as an opportunity to overturn that rule. For the Republican board members, employer property rights are of paramount importance in the case. Employers own their email systems, the board reasoned in its Monday decision, and they have a right to decide how it's used.