The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton and the fall of the Republic.
194,362 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S.
45 DAYS UNTIL ELECTION DAY
The Guardian
Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust
Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.
According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.
Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.
‘Steady drumbeat of misinformation’: FBI chief warns of Russian interference in US elections
Christopher Wray, the FBI director, on Thursday warned that Russia is interfering in the 2020 US presidential elections with a steady stream of misinformation aimed at undermining Democrat Joe Biden as well as sapping Americans’ confidence in the election process.
Moscow is also attempting to undercut what it sees as an anti-Russian US establishment, Wray told the Democratic-led House of Representatives’ homeland security committee in a hearing on Capitol Hill.
He said his biggest concern was a “steady drumbeat of misinformation” that he said he feared could undermine confidence in the result of the 2020 election.
AP News
At town hall, Biden blasts Trump’s ‘criminal’ virus response
Joe Biden on Thursday went after … Donald Trump again and again over his handling of COVID-19, calling Trump’s downplaying of the pandemic “criminal” and his administration “totally irresponsible.”
“You’ve got to level with the American people — shoot from the shoulder. There’s not been a time they’ve not been able to step up. The president should step down,” the Democratic presidential nominee said to applause from a CNN drive-in town hall crowd in Moosic, outside his hometown of Scranton.
Speaking about Trump’s admission that he publicly played down the impact of the virus while aware of its severity, Biden declared: “He knew it and did nothing. It’s close to criminal.”
Belarus president closes some borders, puts army on alert
Belarus’ president, beleaguered by six weeks of mass protests demanding his resignation, on Thursday announced he was putting troops on high alert and closing the country’s borders with Poland and Lithuania.
President Alexander Lukashenko’s decision underlines his repeated claim that the wave of protests is driven by the West. He faces increasing criticism from the United States and the European Union.
Protests began after the Aug. 9 presidential election that official results say gave the authoritarian leader a sixth term in office; opponents say the results were manipulated.
The Washington Post
A federal judge in Washington state on Thursday granted a request from 14 states to temporarily block operational changes within the U.S. Postal Service that have been blamed for a slowdown in mail delivery, saying … Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy are “involved in a politically motivated attack” on the agency that could disrupt the 2020 election.
Stanley A. Bastian, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, said policies put in place under DeJoy “likely will slow down delivery of ballots” this fall, creating a “substantial possibility that many voters will be disenfranchised and the states may not be able to effectively, timely, accurately determine election outcomes.”
“The states have demonstrated that the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service,” Bastian said in brief remarks after a 2½-hour hearing in Yakima. “They have also demonstrated that this attack on the Postal Service is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election.”
Former model accuses Trump of assault during 1990s tennis tournament
A former model on Thursday became the latest woman to accuse … Trump of assault, telling the Guardian that Trump groped and kissed her against her will outside a bathroom at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in 1997.
Amy Dorris, who was 24 at the time of the alleged incident, told the Guardian that her encounter with Trump left her feeling “sick” and “violated” and that she has struggled for years with whether she should speak publicly, including before the 2016 election. […]
Bernstein, who also worked as a model, said Dorris first told her 12 or 13 years ago about the episode, in which she said Trump grabbed her when she came out of a bathroom, stuck his tongue down her throat and groped her body.
The Atlantic
An Experiment in Wisconsin Changed Voters’ Minds About Trump
Changing voters’ minds is famously difficult, but a recent progressive effort found real success.
No state has haunted the Democratic Party’s imagination for the past four years like Wisconsin. While it was not the only state that killed Hillary Clinton’s presidential hopes in 2016, it was the one where the knife plunged deepest. Clinton was so confident about Wisconsin that she never even campaigned there. This year, it is one of the most fiercely contested states. The Democrats planned to hold their convention in Milwaukee, before the coronavirus pandemic forced its cancellation. Donald Trump is also making a strong play for Wisconsin.
Trump’s weaknesses with the electorate are familiar: Voters find him coarse, and they deplore his handling of race, the coronavirus, and protests. One recent YouGov poll found that just 42 percent of Americans approved of his performance as president, while 54 percent disapproved. But when the pollsters asked about Trump’s handling of the economy, those attitudes reversed: 48 percent approved and 44 percent disapproved, despite the havoc wreaked by the pandemic.
Bloomberg
Violent Protesters Can Face Sedition Charge, U.S. Top Prosecutor Says
Federal prosecutors should consider charging violent protesters under a criminal sedition law, which doesn’t require proof that they were plotting to overthrow the government, the Justice Department said in a memo on Thursday.
The federal statute governing sedition charges applies to other acts, including preventing law enforcement officers from carrying out their duties and forcibly taking property belonging to the government, according to the memo issued by Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen.
The guidance marks a move by the Justice Department to use federal prosecutions against violent demonstrators when state and local officials decline to bring charges.
Trump to Skip In-Person Role at United Nations General Assembly
Donald Trump has decided against going in person to address the United Nations General Assembly next week in New York, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said.
It’s likely Trump will address the world body remotely, but that wasn’t specified by Meadows, who spoke to reporters aboard Air Force One as the president made his way to a rally in Wisconsin Thursday.
With the coronavirus pandemic raging and New York quarantine rules still in place, UN leaders decided to hold the general assembly -- marking the world body’s 75th year anniversary -- virtually this year.
Los Angeles Times
Empty trucks, falsified records: How Louis DeJoy’s changes at the Postal Service brought chaos
For new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who wanted the U.S. Postal Service to operate more efficiently, it seemed like an obvious fix: Just run the trucks on time. So in July he ordered drivers to start leaving post offices and distribution centers exactly on schedule and curtailed extra trips to pick up any mail that missed earlier cutoffs.
The stricter deadlines sparked far less public outcry than the removal of more than 700 high-speed sorting machines at mail processing facilities around the country — but they were far more disruptive to the U.S. mail system, according to a Times investigation.
Weeks-long delays began to ripple through a system already reeling from COVID-19 absences and a surge in package delivery during the pandemic, shaking Americans’ faith in one of the country’s most popular services and raising concerns about how the Postal Service will handle mail-in ballots in November.
The Oregonian
Oregon wildfires: Officials cautiously optimistic ahead of expected rain
State officials in Oregon expressed cautious optimism about the state of massive wildfires burning throughout the state Thursday as a storm system was expected to bring up to an inch of rain to some of the areas that have seen the worst devastation.
But there were reasons to be wary as well, said Doug Grafe, chief of fire protection at the Oregon Department of Forestry, as the storm will likely be accompanied by lightning and strong winds and could cause landslides in areas that have burned.
“A good portion of moisture will fall on the west slope of the Cascades. That’s exactly where I would ask for it,” Grafe said. But he added that, if the wind arrives before the rain does, it could present challenges in some areas where crews have created containment lines around existing fires.
NPR News
'I Have To Work': Agricultural Workers In The West Harvest Crops Through Fire Smoke
Wildfires are ravaging large swaths of the West in the middle of the wine grape harvest, sending hazardous smoke through picturesque vineyards. It's forcing many agricultural workers to make a stark choice: Should they prioritize their health or earn badly needed money?
"The truth is that I have to work," said Maricela, 48, a team leader at a vineyard near Medford in southern Oregon. There are multiple fires blazing close to the town.
"It's not easy to work now," she said. "The smoke is so dense. ... I feel dizzy, my throat hurts and my head feels like it's going to explode."
Air quality is ranked as "very unhealthy" in this part of southern Oregon, according to the U.S. government air quality monitoring website Airnow.gov. Many of the agricultural areas in the West have seen plummeting air quality in recent weeks.
'A Very Serious Situation': WHO Says Coronavirus Cases Are Rising In Europe Again
The World Health Organization warned on Thursday that weekly coronavirus case numbers are rising in Europe at a higher rate than during the pandemic's peak in March.
At a virtual news conference, Dr. Hans Kluge, regional director of WHO in Europe, warned, "We do have a very serious situation unfolding before us."
"Weekly cases have exceeded those reported when the pandemic first peaked in Europe in March," he said. "Last week, the region's weekly tally exceeded 300,000 patients."
Sydney Morning Herald
New age of overlapping catastrophes: After our summer of hell, 'the fires will return'
The large billowing plumes of brown smoke in the distance were turning black against the dome of blue sky. Even as a boy of 12, standing in his front yard in Sydney on a hot, windy morning in October 1971, Greg Mullins knew that this meant trouble, that the flames were jumping into the tree canopies, igniting tinder-dry branches, leaves and bark, forming fiery mini-meteors that were propelling the blaze forward.
The evening before, a bushfire had broken out in Ku-ring-ai Chase National Park, about eight kilometres west of where Greg lived in Terrey Hills with his parents and three older siblings. Fanned by a westerly, the now 400-hectare blaze was torching its way towards Duffys Forest after jumping Cowan Creek.
For as many summers as he could remember, Greg had watched his dad Jack, a volunteer firefighter who worked full-time as a builder, head off in his overalls and heavy boots to fight fires. Young Greg would climb on top of Jack’s Vauxhall and survey the crimson glows dotting the horizon, trying to work out which blaze his dad might be battling, dreaming of the day he could join him.
Dallas Morning News
There have been 4,519 documented cases of COVID-19 in Texas public schools since the start of the 2020-21 school year, according to new state data released by the Texas Education Agency and the Department of State Health Services.
Thursday’s announcement, which only included a statewide aggregate, is the first attempt to track novel coronavirus cases in Texas schools. A district-level breakdown will be available next week, TEA spokesperson Jake Kobersky said.
The total represents around 0.2% of the estimated number of staff and students currently on Texas campuses, according to the agency. For students, there are 2,344 cases from an estimated 1.1 million students who took part in on-campus instruction or activities since the start of August. Last week, 990 students tested positive, an increase of 48% from the previous week as more schools returned to in-person instruction. But 1.1 million students is only a fifth of the state’s 5.5 million public school students
‘Texas is going to be red forever,’ GOP leader says in rallying crowd at ‘MAGA Meetup’
Roughly 150 mostly maskless people filled spaced-out seats at the Georgetown Community Center as they eagerly awaited the arrival of Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel during a “MAGA Meetup” put on by the Trump Victory organization Wednesday. […]
McDaniel closed her remarks to another standing ovation after claiming that Texas will never turn blue again.
“I am so blessed to live in this country, as are all of you, but I also know that this country is at stake in this election; our future is at stake in this election,” McDaniel said. “This is the most important election of our lifetime, and I want to make sure that Joe Biden, after this election, knows that Texas is going to be red forever.”
Pensacola News Journal
West Pensacola residents left to pick up the pieces in Hurricane Sally's aftermath
Residents at Warrington's Forest Creek Apartments know that even a mild storm could — and has — resulted in several feet of standing water and extensive property damage.
So when a storm the magnitude of Hurricane Sally barreled through Pensacola, the renters at the flood-prone apartments on Patton Drive knew it would be a life-changing affair.
"In 2015, I lost everything and now I'm about to lose everything again," said 55-year-old Karen Robinson, who said she's experienced at least four floods at the Forest Creek complex since 2012.
Gizmodo
How Far-Right Extremists Are Using the Climate Crisis to Go Mainstream
Oregon has been a hot bed of far-right activity for years, but the wildfires have cast the militias in a new light. Misinformation has been rampant as unprecedented fires lit up the state. False rumors of “antifa” igniting fires and coming to loot people’s homes have raced across Facebook.
That led some communities to grab arms and stand in harm’s way as the flames approached, setting up checkpoints where they reportedly threatened journalists at gunpoint, and even getting a briefing from a sympathetic local law enforcement officer on the best way to gun people down and not face trial. (He’s since been placed on leave.) It’s an escalation of fringe ideologies to try and usurp power in chaos and shows another avenue the far-right could use the climate crisis for violent ends.
The right’s relationship with climate change is complicated. Rampant climate denial has been the norm for more than a decade, and any attempts at climate action have faced vehement opposition. In Oregon, state senators ran away to block quorum on a pretty milquetoast cap-and-trade bills. Twice. Militias offered their help, and at least one state senator threatened violence once Gov. Kate Brown dispatched the police to look for the legislators on the lam.
Scientific American / E&E News
Scientists often speak of a “new Arctic” to describe the region’s rapidly changing landscape. Temperatures are skyrocketing, sea ice is dwindling and many experts believe the far north is quickly transforming into something unrecognizable.
This week, new research confirms that a new Arctic climate system is, indeed, emerging.
In fact, some aspects of the Arctic climate have already changed beyond anything the region has experienced in the past century. Sea ice extent has shrunk by 31% since the satellite record began in 1979. Patterns in ice coverage today have dropped beyond the bounds of anything that would have been possible just a few decades ago.
Earthquake Sounds Could Reveal How Quickly the Ocean Is Warming
There may be a new way to take the oceans’ temperature: using sound. Like the atmosphere, they are warming because of climate change, and they have absorbed about 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases. This alteration contributes to sea-level rise, imperils marine species and influences weather patterns.
But tracking the warming is tricky. Ship-based observations capture only snapshots in time over a minuscule portion of the seas. Satellite observations cannot penetrate very deep below the surface. The most detailed picture of ocean heat comes from Argo, a flotilla of autonomous floats that have peppered the seas since the early 2000s. These devices bob down to depths as low as 2,000 meters every 10 days, measuring temperature and other parameters. But there are only about 4,000 floats, and they cannot sample deeper parts of the oceans.
Now scientists at the California Institute of Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences think they have a more widespread way to detect ocean warming. In a paper published on Thursday in Science, the researchers compare the speeds of sounds produced by undersea earthquakes. Because sound travels faster in water when it is warmer, differences in speed can reveal changing temperatures. “I am very impressed with the methods [the study’s authors are] using and the fact that they could pull this all off,” says Frederik Simons, a Princeton University geophysicist, who was not involved in the research. “They’re opening up a whole new area of study.”
Reuters
How a 'Hillbilly Brigade' saved an Oregon town from raging wildfires
Nicole West steered her bulldozer through the smoldering forest, pushing logs into the underbrush and away from the wildfires ripping through Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Her border collie, Oink, rode shotgun as West and a volunteer crew raced to clear a fire line.
Behind West, on the front lines of the 136,000-acre (55,000-hectare) Riverside fire, two young men pulled a water tank behind their pickup truck, struggling to douse the flames.
These are the men and women of the “Hillbilly Brigade” - about 1,200 in all who came together this past week to fight the state’s biggest fire in a century. They are credited with saving the mountain hamlet of Molalla, an hour’s drive south of Portland, after its 9,000 residents were forced to evacuate.
Former Pence aide who helped organize White House coronavirus response backs Biden
A former White House aide who helped coordinate the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic sharply criticized … Donald Trump in a video released on Thursday and said she planned to vote for Democrat Joe Biden.
Olivia Troye, who was an aide to Vice President Mike Pence, served as a top organizer for the White House Coronavirus Task Force that Pence leads.
A lifelong Republican, Troye, who left the White House in July, said in a video released by the group Republican Voters Against Trump that the administration knew around mid-February that COVID-19 would become a big pandemic in the United States.
“But the president didn’t want to hear that because his biggest concern was that we were in an election year and how was this going to affect what he considered to be his record of success,” she said.
Mongabay
New artificial intelligence could save both elephant and human lives
When the elephant arrived in the night, on the hunt for sugarcane, Uthorn Kanthong was waiting for him. Like many of his neighbors, the 69-year-old Thai farmer had taken to staying in his fields into the late hours, to try and scare off elephants that came to snack on his crop. He usually returned home by midnight. But that night in 2018, he didn’t come back. […]
Reported in the Bangkok Post, this story is all too familiar for anyone who lives in close proximity to elephants. Though people all over the world love elephants, farmers often fear and even loathe them for their habit of raiding local fields and entering small villages, especially as elephants’ habitat and food sources have dwindled.
Hundreds of humans and elephants alike die every year in these conflicts. And as deforestation and growing human populations push people and wildlife ever closer together, these conflicts are becoming more frequent. But what if a tiny, barely visible camera with a very smart brain could stop a conflict before it starts?
A new system called WildEyes AI may provide an early warning that could save the lives of both elephants and humans. The key to the WildEyes system, a collaboration between the environmental organization RESOLVE and software developer CVEDIA, is an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that lives on the camera’s SD memory card. This AI can identify what it sees instantaneously, without an internet connection.
BBC News
Alligator on gas snaps up Ig Nobel prize
Have you heard the one about the alligator that performed the party trick of breathing in helium so it could talk in a funny voice?
It's not that hilarious but then you'd be careful never to smile at a crocodilian.
Stephan Reber and colleagues performed the experiment to try to understand how alligators might communicate.
It was a serious piece of research but its slightly comedic aspects have just won the team an Ig Nobel Prize.
Barack Obama: Former president announces memoir release date
Former US President Barack Obama has announced the publication date of the first half of his memoirs.
Mr Obama - the first black president and husband of Michelle Obama - said the book would "try to provide an honest account of my presidency".
A Promised Land is set for release on 17 November, just two weeks after the US presidential election.
Ars Technica
AG Barr: COVID lockdowns are worst threat to civil liberties since slavery
US Attorney General William Barr yesterday compared lockdown orders to slavery, saying that measures to fight the COVID-19 pandemic are one of the biggest violations of civil liberties in US history.
"Putting a national lockdown, stay-at-home orders, is like house arrest. Other than slavery, which was a different kind of restraint, this is the greatest intrusion on civil liberties in American history," Barr said in a Q&A session after delivering a speech at Hillsdale College in Michigan. […]
"In recent years, the Justice Department has sometimes acted more like a trade association for federal prosecutors than the administrator of a fair system of justice based on clear and sensible legal rules," Barr said. "In case after case, we have advanced and defended hyper-aggressive extensions of the criminal law. This is wrong and we must stop doing it."
White House-CDC tensions explode as Trump contradicts its leadership
There was good news and then bad news for public health expertise yesterday. In the wake of increasingly unhinged behavior from a … Trump-appointed communications director at the US Department of Health and Human Services, he and one of his key appointees have left their posts—one for two months, one permanently. But any hopes that science might resume being the main driver of US health policy were short-lived. Earlier in the day, CDC head Robert Redfield and other Health and Human Services officials testified before a Senate panel. By the evening, the president himself was calling his own CDC director mistaken about everything from mask use to the schedule of vaccine availability.
By the end of the day, Redfield was tweeting statements that balanced ambiguity against seeming to support Trump's view.