The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton and the fall of the Republic.
USA Today
Bumblebees could face extinction due to climate change
Climate change has contributed to drastic declines in the population and diversity of bumblebees across North America and Europe, according to a new long-term study of more than 60 bee species published Thursday in the journal Science.
In fact, the researchers discovered that bumblebees are disappearing at rates "consistent with a mass extinction."
The scientists said that North America's bumblebee populations fell by 46 percent between the two time periods the study used – from 1901 to 1974 and from 2000 to 2014. […]
"If declines continue at this pace, many of these species could vanish forever within a few decades," said study lead author Peter Soroye, a PhD student at the University of Ottawa, in a statement.
Chinese doctor censured for warning about coronavirus dies of the illness; death toll hits 636
A Chinese doctor who was reprimanded by security police for warning fellow doctors about the initial coronavirus outbreak has died of the illness, according to Wuhan Central Hospital.
Li Wenliang, 34, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, was “unfortunately infected during the fight against the pneumonia epidemic of the new coronavirus infection,” the hospital said on its social media account. “We deeply regret and mourn this.”
He died early Friday despite an "all-effort rescue" after contracting the virus Jan. 30, according to The People's Daily, the newspaper of China's Communist Party.
The Guardian
Largest maker of pesticide linked to brain damage in kids to stop producing chemical
The world’s largest manufacturer of chlorpyrifos, an agricultural pesticide linked to brain damage in children, has announced that it will stop producing the chemical by the end of the year.
The announcement on Thursday by Corteva, the corporation formed from a Dow Chemical and DuPont merger, comes after the Trump administration reversed regulatory plans to ban the pesticide and rejected the scientific conclusions of US government experts.
Chlorpyrifos has been widely used on corn, soybeans, almonds, citrus, cotton, grapes, walnuts and other crops, but research has repeatedly found serious health effects in children, including impaired brain development.
10 US oil refineries exceeding limits for cancer-causing benzene, report finds
At least 10 US oil refineries have been emitting cancer-causing benzene above the federal government’s limits, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project.
The group reviewed a year of air monitoring data recorded at the fence lines of 114 refineries, as reported to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The facilities are not breaking the law, but they are required by EPA to analyze the causes of the emissions and try to reduce them.
The Washington Post
Trump rips critics and considers ways to target his perceived enemies
Trump ripped into his critics on Thursday, making clear he plans to use his bully pulpit to exact at least some verbal revenge on Democrats and Republicans who crossed him during his impeachment and subsequent Senate trial. […]
Trump and his allies are also considering doing more than just launching verbal fusillades at his perceived enemies over impeachment. Some of the president’s aides are discussing whether to remove or reassign administration officials who testified during the impeachment inquiry, according to aides and advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the plans. Meanwhile, Senate committee chairmen are ramping up their investigation into Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine while his father, Joe, was vice president. […]
Stephanie Grisham, the president’s press secretary, said making people pay for their conduct was a reason Trump held an event Thursday in the East Room of the White House, which Trump later said was not a speech but a “celebration” of his acquittal by the Senate a day earlier.
Canada’s oil bust has left thousands of abandoned wells, and not enough money for cleanup
Greg Latimer’s ranch near Sounding Lake, Alberta, has 4,000 acres, 350 head of cattle — and more than a dozen idle or abandoned oil and gas wells.
Latimer, who took over the family ranch in the southeastern part of the oil-rich province in 2011, worries about leaks contaminating the groundwater and soil. He believes his cows have fallen ill after drinking from puddles near the wells. He and his partner, Marva Coltman, get headaches from the odors that some of those wells emit.
Neither Latimer nor his father or grandfather was given a choice about whether to let oil and gas companies onto their property. With rare exceptions, landowners in Alberta own rights to the surface, but not to the minerals that lie beneath.
Final Iowa Democratic caucus results show Buttigieg, Sanders on top
Three days after the Iowa caucuses, the state Democratic Party at last released all of the results, showing the tightest of races between Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Ind., and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Buttigieg held a narrow lead of 26.2 percent in state delegate equivalents, the traditional metric by which an Iowa winner has been determined. Sanders had 26.1 percent. […]
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) finished third, with 18 percent of state delegate equivalents. Former vice president Joe Biden earned 15.8 percent, a disappointing fourth-place finish that he described as a “gut punch.”
Bloomberg
Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why
The simulators used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time.
There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations.
Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5°C, a nightmare scenario.
White House Weighs Ouster of Aide Who Testified Against Trump
The White House is weighing a plan to dismiss Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council after he testified in … Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry, preparing to position the move as part of a broader effort to shrink the foreign policy bureaucracy, two people familiar with the matter said. […]
Vindman was one of the Democrats’ most crucial witness in their impeachment proceedings -- a decorated Army lieutenant colonel, who raised the alarm over the president’s July 25 telephone call with Ukraine’s leader. Before Vindman’s testimony, the only account of that call came from an anonymous whistle-blower whose identity has remained largely hidden to this day, and a partial transcript released by the White House.
Some of the officials being targeted for removal from the NSC would be reassigned because they’re perceived as being disloyal to the president, three people familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity owing to the sensitivity of personnel moves.
AP News
Trump administration moves ahead on shrinking Utah monuments
The U.S. government implemented final management plans Thursday for two national monuments in Utah… The lands have generated little interest from energy companies in the two years since … Donald Trump cut the size of Bears Ears National Monument by 85% and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by nearly half, said Casey Hammond, acting Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management with the U. S. Department of the Interior.
Hammond said the department had a duty to work on the management plans after Trump signed his proclamations in December 2017, despite the pending lawsuits by conservation, tribal and paleontology groups aiming to restore the monuments to their original sizes.
“If we stopped and waited for every piece of litigation to be resolved we would never be able to do much of anything around here,” he said.
Trump seeks to delay woman’s suit after request for his DNA
Donald Trump’s lawyers want to put the brakes on a lawsuit filed by an advice columnist who has accused him of raping her in the 1990s and is seeking his DNA as possible evidence.
Trump attorneys argued in legal papers this week that E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit and “extensive and burdensome” information-gathering requests should be delayed until New York’s highest court rules on whether another woman can proceed with a somewhat similar suit.
Deutsche Welle
Brazil's Bolsonaro proposes bill allowing mining on indigenous land
Brazil's President Jair Bolsonaro introduced a bill on Wednesday to open up indigenous lands to mining, agricultural work and hydraulic energy production.
The measure would permit both indigenous and third-party developers to take part in the new development. The president described the act, which still needs parliamentary approval, as a "dream" while indigenous leaders have labeled it a "genocide bill."
"I hope that this dream ... comes true," the 64-year-old president said of the plans. "This big step depends on Congress."
Poland adopts controversial judicial law
Undeterred by countrywide protests, criticism from Brussels and the Council of Europe (CoE), Poland's governing Law and Justice (PiS) party adopted a controversial law that restricts the judiciary's independence.
Although the bill was rejected in December by the Senate, the upper house of the Polish parliament, it was later approved by the lower house, or Sejm. Polish President Andrzej Duda — who holds a PhD in law — signed the legislation into law on Tuesday.
The Atlantic
The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President
One day last fall, I sat down to create a new Facebook account. I picked a forgettable name, snapped a profile pic with my face obscured, and clicked “Like” on the official pages of Donald Trump and his reelection campaign. Facebook’s algorithm prodded me to follow Ann Coulter, Fox Business, and a variety of fan pages with names like “In Trump We Trust.” I complied. I also gave my cellphone number to the Trump campaign, and joined a handful of private Facebook groups for MAGA diehards, one of which required an application that seemed designed to screen out interlopers.
The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside.
[…] Biden and his aides have long insisted that they were totally fine with how few people were showing up to see him. They were not. They tried to fill the rooms. It didn’t work. They learned to accept that the crowds would never come, and tried to build a campaign around never getting them.
They failed.
Neither the disaster of the Iowa Democrats’ caucus app nor the reporting delays change the reality: The former vice president of the United States and the front-runner in nearly all the national and Iowa polls came in a distant fourth, behind Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren… It’s now an open question whether Biden will have the cash to pay for his charter plane to fly him around the 14 Super Tuesday states that vote on March 3.
Mother Jones
A New Report on Russia’s Election Interference Leaves a Lot Out
The Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday released the third volume in its review of Russian interference in the 2016 election. It’s a weird document. The report, which focuses on how the US government reacted to Russian activities, criticizes the Obama administration for its tentative and ineffective response to the election interference. The committee notes that the “heavily politicized environment” faced by the previous administration was one reason for these failures. But the report it avoids the elephant in the room.
Former Obama administration officials have previously faulted Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other GOP lawmakers for blocking their September 2016 request that Congress issue a bipartisan warning about Russian interference in 2016. McConnell reportedly threatened to allege that the White House was misusing intelligence to hurt Donald Trump’s presidential campaign—exactly the kind of fight Obama officials wanted to avoid. These allegations suggest that McConnell feared news that Russia was seeking to aid Trump would hurt Republicans, and that he chose partisan interest over national interest. McConnell has disputed these accounts and attacked the Obama administration for doing too little to respond to Russia’s actions.
Thursday’s report does confirm that McConnell and others Republicans pushed back against the Obama administration’s request for a bipartisan condemnation of Russian interference. But the discussion of those incidents is brief and does not delve into the details of that controversy.
Ars Technica
New estimate of how much thawing permafrost will worsen warming
Arctic permafrost has long had a sort of “here there be dragons” status when it comes to climate change. The thawing of permafrost represents a positive feedback that amplifies warming by releasing more greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. But characterizing plausible future scenarios in which that release takes place hasn’t been easy.
Making careful measurements of local permafrost thawing has enabled scientists to simulate the general behavior and incorporate that into models. So far, however, those models have been limited to the gradual change that occurs as warming temperatures allow the thawing to reach slightly greater depths each successive summer. But a new study led by Merritt Turetsky at the University of Colorado, Boulder, simulates something different, based on a recent data-gathering effort: abrupt-thaw processes.
Dear Trolls. You really think I look like "Mr. Clean" ? Please. He never looked THIS clean. Sorry not sorry my unapologetically rockin' my crown triggers you. Proud #alopecianpic.twitter.com/rcVTRsuply
— Ayanna Pressley (@AyannaPressley) February 6, 2020