The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton.
Vox
Democrats’ opening arguments demonstrate the overwhelming case for impeachment
The House opening arguments in the impeachment trial of … Trump mark the first time lawmakers have explicitly presented the entirety of their evidence about Trump’s handling of Ukraine aid — and thus far, they’ve been nothing short of damning.
While the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees have compiled comprehensive reports about what they’ve found during the impeachment inquiry, the trial provided a platform and format they simply haven’t had yet. Over seven hours of painstaking arguments that featured video clips of witness testimony, screen captures of text messages, and excerpts of additional documents, Democratic impeachment managers detailed the facts they had obtained on Wednesday.
The story built to one clear takeaway: Trump conditioned $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, along with a White House meeting, on the announcement of investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and alleged election interference.
It’s Steven Mnuchin who should listen to economists on climate change
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took time out of his day at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Thursday to suggest that Greta Thunberg should stop speaking out on climate change policy, adding, “After she goes and studies economics in college, she can come back and explain that to us.” […]
[William] Nordhaus, who recently won a Nobel Prize for his work on climate economics, created an integrated assessment model based on the interplay between economies, social impact, and the environment. (Such models are used to calculate the “social cost of carbon,” or the economic consequences of the release of more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.) Nordhaus champions a view that the social cost of carbon is about $36 per ton in present-dollar terms.
Economist Paul Romer shared the Nobel with Nordhaus, winning for his work on the role of technology and ideas in economic growth. At the press conference announcing his win, Romer spoke about climate and argued for investments in innovation.
“It is entirely possible for humans to produce less carbon,” Romer said. “Once we start to try to reduce emissions, we’ll be surprised that it wasn’t as hard as we anticipated.”
Los Angeles Times
Trump shows anxiety as Democrats lay out case against him in Senate impeachment trial
Trump on Wednesday hardened his opposition to allowing former national security advisor John Bolton to testify in his Senate impeachment trial, as House Democrats began their methodical arguments for removing the president from office for having abused his power to “cheat an election.”
The president cited national security concerns in explaining why Bolton, who was ousted in September, shouldn’t be a Senate witness. But he added a note of apprehension about what his former advisor might tell senators: “I don’t know if we left on the best of terms.”
“You don’t like people testifying when they didn’t leave on good terms,” Trump said at a news conference before departing from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And that was due to me, not him.”
Adam Schiff’s role in Trump impeachment trial draws usual fire, but also unlikely praise
House prosecutors began their second day of arguments in the Senate impeachment trial of … Trump on Thursday, as lead manager Rep. Adam B. Schiff drew some unexpected praise from Republicans for his steady performance so far during the hours-long, often tedious presentations.
“Good job,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C), a staunch Trump ally and critic of the impeachment, told Schiff (D-Burbank) as they passed each other in the Capitol the previous evening. “Very well-spoken.”
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) told reporters Schiff has been “very eloquent” in presenting the case.
x.@RepAdamSchiff in his forceful close asks rhetorically: "yes he's guilty, but does he really need to be removed?" Asks if Senators think Trump can be trusted to protect the next election from foreign intervention, from Russia, China or others and answers: "you know you can't."
— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) January 24, 2020
Children as young as 6 are taking up arms in Mexico
In a lawless stretch of western Mexico, children as young as 6 are taking up arms against organized crime.
This week, 19 children were conscripted into a vigilante group that for years has been battling drug gangs in restive Guerrero state. Images published by local journalists of the initiation ceremony — in which uniformed, rifle-wielding boys performed military-style maneuvers — drew outrage across Mexico, with human rights officials condemning the exercise as child abuse.
A leader of the vigilante group said in a phone interview Thursday that an increase in violence in the region and the absence of government intervention have left the community with no choice but to arm even its children.
The Washington Post
Democrats detail abuse-of-power charge against Trump as Republicans complain of repetitive arguments
House impeachment managers laid out the heart of their abuse-of-power case against … Trump on Thursday — charging that his efforts to pressure Ukraine into political investigations were precisely what the nation’s founders wanted to guard against when they empowered Congress to remove a president from office.
The Democrats also detailed their defense of former vice president Joe Biden’s actions regarding Ukraine in anticipation that it will be a major portion of the White House’s defense later this week, saying Biden’s actions were in line with official U.S. policy at the time and not done to benefit an energy company connected to his son.
But a significant number of Senate Republicans remained unmoved and downplayed the case from House managers, dismissing it as repetitive and unpersuasive as they sought to counter Democrats’ narrative at a time when Trump’s lawyers must stay silent in the Senate Chamber.
Major Chinese cities, including Beijing and quarantine-blocked Wuhan, banned all large gatherings over the coming Lunar New Year festival, the most important holiday on the Chinese calendar, in an expanding effort to contain a rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak.
The announcement Thursday came as authorities expanded travel restrictions imposed on Wuhan to surrounding municipalities, shutting down travel networks and attempting to quarantine about 25 million people — more than the population of Florida.
Trump creates new hurdles for pregnant women seeking U.S. tourist visas
The Trump administration says it is cracking down on what it calls “birth tourism” and will instruct consular officers to assess whether women requesting visas to visit the United States are hoping to give birth here to obtain U.S. citizenship for the child.
Starting Friday, the State Department will no longer issue temporary visitor visas to women hoping to travel to the United States for the purposes of having a child, White House officials said in a statement Thursday. The visas — known as B-1/B-2 visas — provide for temporary travel to the United States for tourism, business or medical care.
The State Department said Thursday that consular officers cannot require pregnancy tests to make the determination but would not rule out that a woman’s physical appearance could be taken into consideration.
On Australia’s Kangaroo Island, a fight to stay alive
The bend in the eucalyptus branch seemed like a custom home-design feature given how perfectly it fit his tiny form. There in the crook of the tree was a koala, mildly burned and all alone.
His patch of wood, shared once by hundreds of other koalas, kangaroos and the occasional wombat, had been scorched black in the recent wildfires. For the moment, he was safe there about 50 feet up. But there was no water or food; the eucalyptus leaves that koalas eat had vanished in the flames.
On the ground, there was only black earth and carcasses. Dozens of carcasses, babies and adults, teens and what a rescuer said looked like twins — all so burned even the carrion birds would not touch them.
Morning Consult
Sanders’ Favorability Declines Amid Clash With Warren
Democratic primary voters’ perception of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) fell amid his clash with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) over whether he said a woman cannot win the presidency, but it has not trickled down to their supporters.
The latest Morning Consult polling tracking the Democratic primary found Sanders’ net favorability among likely primary voters — the share with favorable views minus those with unfavorable views — fell 6 points since before his clash with Warren, but that didn’t affect his overall first-choice support outside the survey’s margin of error. Seventy-three percent of primary voters view Sanders favorably, down 3 points from the Jan. 7-13 survey, while 20 percent view him unfavorably, up 3 points in the Jan. 15-19 polling.
Bloomberg
Biden, Sanders Are Running Neck and Neck in Nationwide Poll
Rudy Giuliani Sidekick Lev Parnas Traces Part of Money Trail to UkraineJoe Biden and Bernie Sanders lead the Democratic field in a national poll released Thursday.
The 7 News/Emerson College Poll shows the former vice president with 30% support, followed closely by the Vermont senator at 27%.
The rest of the field is much farther down, with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren at 13%…
From fine whiskey to European flights to cigar bars, the tab for the Ukraine mission was starting to add up.
Even one of … Donald Trump’s wealthiest contributors sounded peeved. “Just becoming expensive flying u guys everywhere LEV,” wrote Harry Sargeant III, a Florida energy tycoon, in a pointed text to Lev Parnas, Rudy Giuliani’s advance man on the Ukraine operation.
A trove of documents recently released by Parnas, including that text from April, provides some new details about the money web that helped support Giuliani’s work in Ukraine as President Trump’s personal lawyer.
The Guardian
Australian bushfires will cause jump in CO2 in atmosphere, say scientists
The devastating bushfires in Australia are likely to cause a jump in carbon concentrations in the atmosphere this year, a forecast suggests, bringing the world closer to 1.5C of global heating.
The fires have not only released vast amounts of carbon dioxide and soot, but the unusual extent of the blazes means regrowth is likely to be slower than in previous years. That will reduce the amount of vegetation available to act as a carbon sink, meaning less carbon dioxide is removed from the air.
Experts at the UK’s Met Office have predicted that this year will see another large rise in the carbon content of the atmosphere, which has been measured at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii since 1958. They predict that carbon dioxide will peak at more than 417 parts per million in May, usually the highest point of the year for carbon concentrations, and settle to about 414ppm as the average for 2020.
The predicted year-on-year rise of about 2.74ppm would be one of the biggest on record.
Revealed: the true identity of the leader of an American neo-Nazi terror group
he Guardian has learned the true identity of the leader and founder of the US-based neo-Nazi terror network the Base, which was recently the target of raids by the FBI after an investigation into domestic terrorism uncovered their plans to start a race war. […]
But the Guardian can reveal that “Norman Spear” is in fact US-born Rinaldo Nazzaro, 46, who has a long history of advertising his services as an intelligence, military and security contractor. He has claimed, under his alias, to have served in Russia and Afghanistan. […]
While Nazzaro’s most recently used address is in New Jersey, there is evidence supporting his claims of being based in Russia, where he lives with his Russian wife.
Boris Johnson's Brexit bill becomes law
Boris Johnson’s Brexit deal has become law after it received royal assent from the Queen, having cleared all its stages in parliament.
Tory MPs cheered the deputy speaker Nigel Evans as he confirmed in the House of Commons on Thursday that there was now a European Union (Withdrawal Agreement) Act. […]
The royal assent for the bill means the UK is set to leave the EU on 31 January, as long as the European parliament approves the deal as well.
AP News
California’s monarch butterflies critically low for 2nd year
The western monarch butterfly population wintering along California’s coast remains critically low for the second year in a row, a count by an environmental group released Thursday showed.
The count of the orange-and-black insects by the Xerces Society, a nonprofit environmental organization that focuses on the conservation of invertebrates, recorded about 29,000 butterflies in its annual survey. That’s not much different than last year’s tally, when an all-time low 27,000 monarchs were counted. […]
By comparison, about 4.5 million monarch butterflies wintered in forested groves along the California coast in the 1980s. Scientists say the butterflies are at critically low levels in the Western United States due to the destruction of their milkweed habitat along their migratory route as housing expands into their territory and use of pesticides and herbicides increases.
Mexican guardsmen break up migrant caravan along highway
Eight hundred Central American migrants were rounded up and hauled onto buses by Mexican national guardsmen and immigration agents after crossing into the country early Thursday and walking for hours along a rural highway.
The migrants had stopped for the day at a shaded crossroads when hundreds of national guard troops advanced their lines to within 100 yards (meters) of the migrants.
A brief negotiation stalled after Mexican authorities said the migrants “demanded permits for free transit through Mexico to the United States.”
Deutsche Welle
Germany not immune to evil 75 years after Auschwitz liberation, Steinmeier saysPresident Frank-Walter Steinmeier underscored Germany's responsibility to combat anti-Semitism in a historic speech on Thursday in Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center.
"I wish I could say that we Germans have learned from our history once and for all, but I cannot say that when hatred is spreading," Steinmeier said at the start of the World Holocaust Forum (WHF).
Steinmeier, who is the first German president ever to give a speech at Yad Vashem, was joined by other heads of state for the start of the WHF to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
"I stand before you and wish I could say that our remembrance has made us immune to evil," he noted.
Mount Vesuvius eruption melted victim's brain to glass
The eruption of Mount Vesuvius turned an ancient victim's brain into glass, according to Italian anthropologists.
The finding, dubbed as "sensational" and published on Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine, marks the first time that scientists have verified such a phenomenon.
The verified fragment, which looks like a black and shiny piece of rock, is part of the brain of a victim that exploded in Italy in AD 79. The eruption of Vesuvius instantly killed all of the inhabitants of Pompeii and neighboring Herculaneum. It also buried an area over 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the explosion in up to 16 meters (50 feet) of ash, which solidified and preserved the remains resulting from the eruption.
BuzzFeed News
People In 43 US Cities Are Drinking Toxic "Forever Chemicals" In Their Tap Water, Tests Show
Dozens of cities nationwide — including Miami, Philadelphia, and New Orleans — have toxic “forever chemicals” in their drinking water, an environmental group reported on Wednesday.
Such long-lived "fluorinated" PFAS chemicals (short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) have emerged in the last decade as a wider pollution concern because of some evidence of links to cancer and lowered fertility. They are perhaps best known from the 2019 movie Dark Waters, about pollution from a DuPont facility in West Virginia.
Earlier surveys have linked water contamination with these chemicals to firefighting foams and Teflon, but the new independent lab results, which detected PFAS chemicals in 43 of 44 cities tested last year, point to a more widespread problem.
The Sydney Morning Herald
Three dead as air tanker fighting bushfires crashes near Snowy Mountains
Three American firefighters have died after a C-130 water tanker aircraft crashed while battling a blaze in southern NSW on Thursday.
ACT Emergency Services confirmed the large air tanker crashed while fighting a blaze near Cooma, north-east of the Snowy Mountains.
"It's just a ball of flames ... over," a nearby plane said in radio communications with flight control.
Firefighters remain on the ground after the plane crashed in what Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons described as "a large fireball associated with the impact of the plane as it hit the ground", in an area that remains an active fireground.
Prince Charles pleads for sweeping new economic model to avert climate 'catastrophe'
Prince Charles has pleaded with world leaders and businesses to rapidly shift to a new economic model that revolutionises the interaction between nature and global financial markets and saves the planet from "approaching catastrophe".
In an unprecedented royal intrusion on government policy, the heir to the British throne used a landmark speech in Switzerland on Wednesday to argue market-based solutions and tax reform were the best options to halt the damaging impacts of climate change.
CNN
Trump tapes help incriminate the President at his own trial
Republicans might be blocking new testimony in the Senate trial but Democratic impeachment managers keep returning to the person who makes their case better than anyone: [Trump] himself…
There's no better evidence with which to paint a picture of what they say is a self-dealing, obstructive leader with a kingly view of his own powers than the highlight reel already compiled by the most television-obsessed president in history.
"I have, in Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as President," Trump says in one clip aired on Tuesday by lead impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California.
Justin Trudeau finds himself deep in doughnut drama after photo takes off online
A photo of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a Winnipeg-based doughnut shop has proved to be a lightning rod among pastry-enthusiastic onlookers online.
The confectionery controversy began when Trudeau tweeted a photo of himself carrying boxes out of the Oh Doughnuts shop in Winnipeg.
xPicked up some of Winnipeg’s best to keep us going through another full day of Cabinet meetings. Thanks for the fuel, @OhDoughnuts. #shoplocalpic.twitter.com/9vrgWnUdxo
— Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) January 20, 2020
Ars Technica
Time check: Examining the Doomsday Clock’s move to 100 seconds to midnight
Today, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists released a statement that the group's Science and Security Board had moved the hands on the symbolic Doomsday Clock forward by 20 seconds to 100 seconds before midnight. Since the advent of the Doomsday Clock—even in the peak years of the Cold War—the clock's minute hand has never before been advanced past the 11:58 mark.
In a statement on the change, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists President and CEO Rachel Bronson said:
As far as the Bulletin and the Doomsday Clock are concerned, the world has entered into the realm of the two-minute warning, a period when danger is high and the margin for error low. The moment demands attention and new, creative responses. If decision makers continue to fail to act—pretending that being inside two minutes is no more urgent than the preceding period—citizens around the world should rightfully echo the words of climate activist Greta Thunberg and ask: "How dare you?"
Before 2017, the clock had not been at that mark since 1953—the year in which the United States and the Soviet Union both conducted atmospheric tests of their first thermonuclear bombs. Even during the Reagan years—during which the world came the closest it had ever come to a nuclear war—the clock was advanced only as far as three minutes before midnight. And in the fictional world of the original Watchmen comic books, the clock never advanced past five minutes to midnight.