The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton and the decline of the Republic.
243,551 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S.
The Washington Post
Biden’s agenda may rest on centrist Republicans — and the return of a bygone Senate era
President-elect Joe Biden has promised to take dramatic action to address the most pressing issues of American life. But the degree that Congress will be part of that effort is likely to depend on a small group of Republican senators and the improbable return of a bygone era of bipartisan cooperation. […]
Many on Capitol Hill are already gaming out scenarios for at least two years of divided government, with Biden forced to wrangle with his former colleague, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). […]
To many Democrats — who vividly remember McConnell’s efforts to block President Barack Obama’s legislative priorities as both minority and majority leader — there is simply no hope of progress as long as he sets the Senate agenda.
“We saw that horror film play out in the Obama years, and we don’t want to see it again,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) said. “Unless there’s a group secretly meeting within the Republican caucus that says, ‘We really want to see the Senate work as a legislative body again,’ then my hopes are dim if Leader McConnell’s in charge.”
In Trump’s final days, a 30-year-old aide purges officials seen as insufficiently loyal
Over the past week, … Trump has axed his defense secretary and other top Pentagon aides, his second-in-command at the U.S. Agency for International Development, two top Homeland Security officials, a senior climate scientist and the leader of the agency that safeguards nuclear weapons.
Engineering much of the post-election purge is Johnny McEntee, a former college quarterback who was hustled out of the White House two years ago after a security clearance check turned up a prolific habit for online gambling.
A staunch Trump loyalist, McEntee, 30, was welcomed back into the fold in February and installed as personnel director for the entire U.S. government. Since the race was called for President-elect Joe Biden, McEntee has been distributing pink slips, warning federal workers not to cooperate with the Biden transition and threatening to oust people who show disloyalty by job hunting while Trump is still refusing to acknowledge defeat, according to six administration officials.
U.S. Naval Institute News
No Margin Left: Overworked Carrier Force Struggles to Maintain Deployments After Decades of Overuse
Navy aircraft carrier operations are up 40 percent this year over last year, even as the service has fewer available for tasking due to maintenance and acquisition challenges.
From January through Oct. 31, U.S. carriers had spent a combined total of 855 days at sea – 258 days more than all of 2019, according to a USNI News analysis of carrier deployments over the last five years.
That heavy carrier usage makes 2020 the busiest year for the carrier fleet since the Arab Spring, forcing some carriers to stay on station for record-length deployments and conduct double-pumps even as others are sidelined and can’t contribute to the workload.
Bloomberg
Trump to Rush Drilling Leases in Arctic Before Biden Takes Over
The Trump administration is advancing plans to auction drilling rights in the U.S. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who has vowed to block oil exploration in the rugged Alaska wilderness.
The Interior Department is set to issue a formal “call for nominations” as soon as Monday, kick-starting a final effort to get input on what tracts to auction inside the refuge’s 1.56-million-acre coastal plain. The plans were described by two people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named detailing administration strategy.
Biden has pledged to permanently protect the refuge, saying drilling there would be a “big disaster.” But those efforts could be complicated if the Trump administration sells drilling rights first. Formally issued oil and gas leases on federal land are government contracts that can’t be easily yanked.
Philippines’ Typhoon Death Toll Rises as Rescue Continues
The death toll in the Philippines from Typhoon Vamco has increased to at least 32, according to the disaster monitoring agency, as rescue operations on the main Luzon island continue.
Dozens remain missing or injured, the agency’s spokesman Mark Timbal said. Typhoon Vamco barreled through Luzon from Wednesday, triggering some of the capital’s worst floods in years. Spilling dams have also submerged farms and towns in provinces north of the capital, where rescuers are still trying to reach stranded individuals.
The 21st storm to hit the Philippines this year is now making its way to Vietnam. It passed regions already battered about two weeks ago by Super Typhoon Goni, which killed at least 25 people.
AP News
Progressives look to make early mark on Biden White House
Leading progressives are pressuring President-elect Joe Biden to embrace their policy agenda even as more centrist Democrats argue such proposals prevented the party from retaking full control of Congress.
For now, much of the lobbying centers on who Biden should — or should not — appoint to key posts as he builds out the administration that will take office in January.
The left-leaning think tank Progressive Change Institute partnered with more than 40 activist groups and on Friday released a detailed list of 400 progressive policy experts they want Biden to bring on. That follows a separate effort from more than half a dozen progressive groups this week that signed letters urging the president-elect against naming anyone with ties to major corporate interests to key Cabinet posts.
Democrats keep winning the popular vote. That worries them.
Democrats won the popular vote in this year’s presidential election yet again, marking seven out of eight straight presidential elections that the party has reached that milestone. […]
But what alarms many Democrats is a growing gap between their popular vote tallies and their political power. Democrats may be winning over more supporters, but as long as those votes are clustered on the coasts or in cities and suburbs, they won’t deliver the congressional victories the party needs to enact its policies.
That power gap is especially clear this year. While Biden was racking up those historic margins, Democrats lost at least eight seats in the House of Representatives and failed to gain a single statehouse — in fact, they lost control of New Hampshire’s legislature. They also fell short of taking back control of the U.S. Senate, with their hopes now resting on winning two run-off elections in Georgia that are considered an uphill climb for the party.
NBC News
QAnon's Dominion voter fraud conspiracy theory reaches Trump
For days after the election, adherents to the QAnon conspiracy movement had been trying to get … Donald Trump’s attention with constant false claims about voter fraud connected to a company that makes voting machines.
On Thursday, they celebrated. Trump tweeted in all-caps about a conspiracy theory that baselessly alleges that Dominion Voting Systems, a company that makes voting machines, “deleted” millions of Trump votes, citing a report on the far-right cable news outlet One America News Network.
While the theory has already been debunked — including by Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is tasked with national security related to the internet and technology — Trump's tweet offered a sliver of energy at a time when the QAnon movement had stalled, waiting for its leader, “Q,” to return with guidance from a hiatus that began on the morning of Election Day and lasted more than a week.
But QAnon is far from done. The movement's recent evolution and activity around the Dominion conspiracy theory highlight how even Joe Biden's election win and the disintegration of the broader QAnon narrative do not spell the end of the broader conspiracy ecosystem it has built.
FBI wanted to arrest Epstein at Virgin Islands beauty pageant months before plea deal cut
The FBI wanted to arrest Jeffrey Epstein while he was judging a beauty pageant in the Virgin Islands seven months before he signed a non-prosecution deal that shielded him from federal sex crime charges, a Justice Department report says.
The 347-page report obtained by NBC News expands on an executive summary released Thursday of a probe into a more than decade-old sex abuse investigation of Epstein. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility found that former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who oversaw the case when he was a top federal prosecutor in Florida in the mid-2000s, exercised “poor judgment” but did not engage in misconduct.
The full report quotes one prosecutor as telling a colleague that the FBI had “wanted to arrest [Epstein] in [the] Virgin Islands during a beauty pageant...where he is a judge.”
“The case agent recalled that she and her co-case agent were disappointed” about being denied the opportunity to make the arrest in May 2007, the report says, and an FBI supervisor overseeing the case was “extremely upset” about it.
Los Angeles Times
Young Kim defeats Gil Cisneros in another victory for Republicans in Orange County
Republican candidate Young Kim has won a congressional seat in Orange County, marking the second race in the county in which the GOP took back a district it had lost to Democrats during the 2018 “blue wave.”
Kim defeated incumbent Democrat Gil Cisneros in the 39th Congressional District, which spans Anaheim Hills to Buena Park and includes parts of Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties.
Kim, who has secured Orange County’s final congressional seat that had yet to be called, will be among the first Korean American women to serve in Congress, along with the newly elected Michelle Steel, an Orange County Republican, and Marilyn Strickland, a Washington Democrat. Steel defeated Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Laguna Beach), who conceded Tuesday, to take back a seat that the Democrats flipped in 2018.
Despite White House win, Democrats are squabbling over losing lower-level offices
Only days after dancing in the streets and uncorking champagne bottles to celebrate their White House victory, Democrats are in a funk — stewing over the unexpected losses for Congress and state legislatures as they ponder where to go from here.
In a year Democrats hoped to capture the Senate and bolster their House majority, the loss of so much ground in Congress has touched off an intense volley of finger-pointing, insults and plotting by each feuding faction to keep the other out of party leadership posts. The familiar ideological rift between the left and the center-left is intensifying after an election in which the message sent by voters was so muddled: embracing Joe Biden while spurning so many down-ballot Democrats.
An intraparty clash after Republicans exploited leftist slogans and alleged Democrats’ empathy for socialism is compounded by divisions over structural issues in a party still run by an aging old guard that campaigns in a way that proved ineffective in key races.
Reuters
Peru protests build as interim president calls for calm
Peruvian interim President Manuel Merino called for calm as he swore in his new cabinet on Thursday amid protests that have escalated around the country since the abrupt ouster of former leader Martin Vizcarra.
Merino, whose cabinet was filled with mostly technocrats, accused some critics planning to run in 2021 elections of inciting protests that have broken out in Lima and other cities and urged Peruvians to maintain peace.
“We respect those who have a dissenting opinion, but we call for calm and responsibility so that any political expression is given within the scope of tranquility and non-violence,” Merino said in a speech after the swearing-in of his cabinet of 18 officials.
Merino assumed office on Tuesday after the Andean nation’s fractured Congress voted to oust Vizcarra over bribery allegations. The political shakeup comes as Peru, pummeled by the coronavirus pandemic, is bracing for its worst economic contraction in a century.
Corpses and burnt-out cars line Karabakh road as Russian troops deploy
Corpses of ethnic Armenian soldiers lined stretches of a mountain road in Nagorno-Karabakh on Friday as Russian peacekeepers in trucks and armoured personnel carriers moved in after a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Russia is deploying almost 2,000 troops along with tanks and other armour to secure a truce agreed this week after a six-week war over the ethnic Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan and surrounding areas in which Turkey-backed Azeri forces captured swathes of territory.
The scale of the destruction on Friday showed how desperate the fighting had become.
The Guardian
Boris Johnson boots out top adviser Dominic Cummings
Boris Johnson has ordered Dominic Cummings to leave Downing Street with immediate effect, in a dramatic end to a tumultuous era which leaves a void at the heart of Downing Street.
Cummings and his ally Lee Cain – both ardent Brexiters blamed by MPs for a macho culture and a series of communications crises – were asked to step down on Friday instead of staying in place until Christmas.
One source said the prime minister told Cummings to go following accusations he had briefed against Johnson. Special advisers were said to be delighted by his departure.
Green giants: the massive projects that could make Australia a clean energy superpower
The world’s largest power station is planned for a vast piece of desert about half the size of greater suburban Sydney in Australia’s remote north-west.
Called the Asian Renewable Energy Hub, its size is difficult to conceptualise. If built in full, there will be 1,600 giant wind turbines and a 78 sq km array of solar panels a couple of hundred kilometres east of Port Hedland in the Pilbara.
This solar-wind hybrid power plant would have a capacity of 26 gigawatts, more than Australia’s entire coal power fleet. The hub’s backers say the daytime sun and nightly winds blowing in from the Indian Ocean are perfectly calibrated to provide a near constant source of emissions-free energy around the clock.
Most of it will be used to run 14GW of electrolysers that will convert desalinated seawater into “green hydrogen” – a form of energy that analysts expect to be in increasing demand as a replacement for fossil fuels in the years and decades ahead.
Vox
I Am Greta is an intimate, vulnerable documentary about the teen behind the headlines
Greta Thunberg managed, at the age of 15, to do something few teenage girls have ever done: make grown men around the world incredibly mad at her.
The youthful activist — and subject of the new Hulu documentary I Am Greta — sparked a global movement when, in 2018, she went on strike from school in her native Sweden to protest humanity’s collective failure to appropriately confront climate change. Her actions were noticed, and by the next year young people around the world were holding their own Friday climate strikes and demanding their countries’ leaders take action.
In I Am Greta, director Nathan Grossman follows Thunberg (and, often, her father) through this remarkable two-year stretch, in which Thunberg went from sitting outside her school on the sidewalk with her backpack and a hand-lettered sign to addressing formidable bodies of world leaders at venues including the United Nations and the World Economic Forum.
The Atlantic
More people than ever are hospitalized with COVID-19. Health-care workers can’t go on like this.
On Saturday morning, Megan Ranney was about to put on her scrubs when she heard that Joe Biden had won the presidential election. That day, she treated people with COVID-19 while street parties erupted around the country. She was still in the ER in the late evening when Biden and Vice President–elect Kamala Harris made their victory speeches. These days, her shifts at Rhode Island Hospital are long, and they “are not going to change in the next 73 days,” before Biden becomes president, she told me on Monday. Every time Ranney returns to the hospital, there are more COVID-19 patients.
In the months since March, many Americans have habituated to the horrors of the pandemic. They process the election’s ramifications. They plan for the holidays. But health-care workers do not have the luxury of looking away: They’re facing a third pandemic surge that is bigger and broader than the previous two. In the U.S., states now report more people in the hospital with COVID-19 than at any other point this year—and 40 percent more than just two weeks ago.
Emergency rooms are starting to fill again with COVID-19 patients.
Trains
Former Amtrak president says Biden knows value of national network
President-elect Joseph Biden’s impact on Amtrak’s funding or management policies won’t be known until he articulates specific priorities in the weeks or months ahead.
But former Amtrak president Tom Downs, who met with Biden when he was a U.S. Senator for Delaware commuting between Washington and his home in Wilmington, Del., doubts that “Amtrak Joe” will endorse the current decision to reduce frequencies on long-distance routes to less than daily departures. […]
Downs thinks it may be some time before Biden gets around to addressing Amtrak, so he cautions, “My immediate concern is [management’s] dismemberment process of pulling apart the long-distance trains. You start with [downgrading] the dining car, reducing service to three days per week where you kill the network effect, and then for reasons I can’t begin to understand there are no online schedules available for all the trains — this is an intentional attempt to kill the long-distance train service.”
Downs believes the impact of the current cuts will be rapid and dramatic.
Ars Technica
Hackers sponsored by Russia and North Korea are targeting COVID-19 researchers
Hackers sponsored by the Russian and North Korean governments have been targeting companies directly involved in researching vaccines and treatments for COVID-19, and in some cases, the attacks have succeeded, Microsoft said on Friday.
In all, there are seven prominent companies that have been targeted, Microsoft Corporate VP for Customer Security & Trust Tom Burt said. They include vaccine makers with COVID-19 vaccines in various clinical trial stages, a clinical research organization involved in trials, and a developer of a COVID-19 test. Also targeted were organizations with contracts with or investments from governmental agencies around the world for COVID-19-related work. The targets are located in the US, Canada, France, India, and South Korea.
“Microsoft is calling on the world’s leaders to affirm that international law protects health care facilities and to take action to enforce the law,” Burt wrote in a blog post. “We believe the law should be enforced not just when attacks originate from government agencies but also when they originate from criminal groups that governments enable to operate—or even facilitate—within their borders. This is criminal activity that cannot be tolerated.”