The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton and the effort to build back better to reverse it.
275,280 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S.
Los Angeles Times
Scientists solve mystery of mass coho salmon deaths. The killer? A chemical from car tires
When officials in Seattle spent millions of dollars restoring the creeks along Puget Sound — tending to the vegetation, making the stream beds less muddy, building better homes for fish — they were thrilled to see coho salmon reappear.
But when it rained, more than half, sometimes all, of the coho in a creek would suffer a sudden death.
These mysterious die-offs — an alarming phenomenon that has been reported from Northern California to British Columbia — have stumped biologists and toxicologists for decades. Numerous tests ruled out pesticides, disease and other possible causes, such as hot temperatures and low dissolved oxygen.
Now, after 20 years of investigation, researchers in Washington state, San Francisco and Los Angeles say they have found the culprit: a very poisonous yet little-known chemical related to a preservative used in car tires.
Among first acts, Biden to call for 100 days of mask wearing
Joe Biden said Thursday that he will ask Americans to commit to 100 days of wearing masks as one of his first acts as president, stopping just short of the nationwide mandate he’s pushed before to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
The move marks a notable shift from … Trump, whose own skepticism of mask wearing has contributed to a politicization of the issue. That’s made many people reticent to embrace a practice that public health experts say is one of the easiest ways to manage the pandemic, which has killed more than 276,000 Americans.
The president-elect has frequently emphasized mask wearing as a “patriotic duty” and during the campaign floated the idea of instituting a nationwide mask mandate, which he later acknowledged would be beyond the ability of the president to enforce.
The Washington Post
Pace of climate change shown in new report has humanity on ‘suicidal’ path, U.N. leader warns
This year will be one of the three hottest on record for the globe, as marine heat waves swelled over 80 percent of the world’s oceans, and triple-digit heat invaded Siberia, one of the planet’s coldest places. These troubling indicators of global warming are laid out in a U.N. State of the Climate report published Wednesday.
To mark the report’s release and to build momentum toward new climate action under the Paris accord, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres summarized the findings in unusually stark terms.
“To put it simply,” he said in a speech at Columbia University, “the state of the planet is broken.”
“Dear friends, humanity is waging war on nature. This is suicidal,” Guterres said. “Nature always strikes back, and it is already doing so with growing force and fury.”
Vaccines offer hope for end to pandemic, but brutal months lie ahead
Coronavirus vaccines are poised to be approved and distributed in the coming weeks in the United States, but that promising news comes amid record levels of infections and hospitalizations, with experts warning that the most brutal period of the pandemic lies ahead.
This is a split-screen moment: Progress on vaccines means people can now plausibly talk about what they will do when the pandemic is over. But with new infections topping 212,000 Thursday — another daily record, topping one set Wednesday — it won’t be over in a snap. This remains a dismal slog.
“The vaccine has not come in time to do much about the winter wave,” said Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “Vaccination is coming too late even if we do a really great job of scale-up. It’s coming too late to do much by March 1, or really by April 1.” Only at that point, he added, will the widespread distribution of vaccines begin to crush the virus.
With hospitals slammed by Covid-19, doctors and nurses plead for action by governors
With few options left, overwhelmed doctors and other caregivers are appealing directly to governors for relief from the staggering increases in hospitalized covid-19 patients as the virus surges across the country.
In Connecticut, Tennessee, Missouri and Mississippi, physicians have issued unusually public pleas for stronger responses to the pandemic as hospitals and their staffs near a breaking point. The number of hospitalized covid-19 patients surpassed 100,000 on Wednesday, placing enormous strain on the nation’s acute care hospitals, where there are roughly 730,000 beds.
The efforts have achieved little in the way of tangible relief so far, and in one case drew a rebuke from Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R).
BuzzFeed News
Inside a Xinjiang Detention Camp
Nestled in the mountains along the border between China and Kazakhstan, a remote rural county conceals an appalling secret: a high-tech, rapidly growing mass internment camp for the area’s Muslim minorities, capable of detaining thousands of people.
The compound in China’s Mongolküre County, which has been under construction since 2017, is mostly hidden from the outside world. It has even been edited out of much of the satellite imagery that appears on China’s Baidu Maps. But through interviews with former detainees and an in-depth architectural analysis of the site’s development, BuzzFeed News can reveal the true nature of this secretive facility — from its crowded cells where detainees were forbidden from gazing out the window to its solitary confinement rooms — and open its walls to scrutiny.
This massive detention center, the size of 13 football fields, is a cog in the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities in the world since World War II, in which 1 million or more Muslims, including Uighurs, Kazakhs, and others, have been rounded up and detained in China’s western region of Xinjiang. Publicly, China has claimed that Muslim detainees have been freed. Yet an ongoing BuzzFeed News investigation, based on dozens of interviews with survivors and thousands of satellite images, has exposed how China has built a vast and permanent infrastructure for mass detention in Xinjiang, marking a radical shift away from the government’s makeshift use of preexisting public buildings at the beginning of the campaign.
Loeffler Donated Her Salary To Anti-LGBTQ And Anti-Abortion Organizations
Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who will fight to retain her seat during a Georgia runoff election in January, donated large portions of her Senate salary to anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ rights organizations.
Among these organizations are several “crisis pregnancy centers” that often pose as abortion clinics in order to dissuade people from getting the procedure, and an adoption agency that has a strong anti-LGBTQ ethos and bans same-sex couples from using it.
Loeffler is the wealthiest member of Congress. She and her husband hold a roughly $500 million stake in the New York Stock Exchange’s parent company, Intercontinental Exchange, Forbes reported, estimating that the couple’s net worth is at least $800 million.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Abrams’ Fair Fight raises $34.5 million in a little more than a month
The voting rights organization Stacey Abrams founded in 2018 after losing a close gubernatorial election raised $34.5 million in just 39 days from late October to the last week of November, funneling a chunk of the money into helping Democratic candidates in key races.
The $34.5 million is about what the group had raised the previous two years.
Abrams and the organization have spent much of its time and money helping making sure people vote in almost two-dozen states, with a large investment in Georgia, where the former Democratic Georgia House leader is credited with helping Joe Biden win the state’s presidential contest.
Republican senators say they’ll push election changes in 2021
Georgia Republican senators said after what happened in the 2020 election they will seek to make changes in state voting laws during the upcoming legislative session.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden beat Republican President Donald Trump in Georgia. Trump has spent the past month claiming fraud, putting pressure on GOP officials who run the state to do something about it because many of his supporters believe his unproven allegations.
“I’m going to try to build this statement based on a consensus of what I’m hearing from the people that I represent: We have totally lost confidence in our election system this year,” Senate Republican Whip Steve Gooch of Dahlonega said during a committee hearing Thursday. “I’m here on behalf of those citizens. I have a duty to let you know that this issue isn’t going to go away unless we make some changes.”
NBC News
Legal advocates tasked by a federal judge with helping to find migrant families separated at the U.S. border in 2017 and 2018 say that after months of pleas, the government last week handed over new data that could be critical to helping them find the families.
In a federal court filing in California late Wednesday, the lawyers said Justice Department data from the Executive Office of Immigration Review, which includes information for parents and children in immigration court proceedings, was released to them last week.
"Among other things, the information includes phone numbers that had not previously been known," the lawyers said in the filing.
Biden's inauguration will look unlike any other. That's only partly because of Covid
Four years ago, Barack Obama shook … Donald Trump’s hand, boarded a helicopter and lifted off over the Capitol to the delight of thousands of onlookers on the National Mall who had traveled from across the country to witness the inauguration of a new president.
President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next month will most likely look nothing like that, nor any other in recent memory, thanks to a once-in-a-century pandemic and Trump, who does not want to give up power and plans to skip his successor’s swearing-in.
Biden had to reinvent campaigning for the pandemic, then his national convention, and now he'll have to re-imagine his inauguration as well, and there's less than seven weeks to go.
“It’s not going to necessarily look like what people are used to, but welcome to 2020 — or in this case 2021,” Addisu Demissie, a Democratic strategist who helped plan this year’s largely virtual Democratic National Convention, said.
Forbes
How Attorney General Bill Barr Built A $40 Million Fortune
William Barr made his name serving as attorney general for two presidents, George H. W. Bush and Donald J. Trump. But he made his fortune out of office, collecting more than $50 million in compensation as an executive and director for some of America’s largest companies.
Today Barr, who did not comment for this story, has an estimated net worth of $40 million, after accounting for taxes, personal spending and modest investment returns. That figure is more precise than what’s on Barr’s public financial disclosure report, a document that deals only in broad ranges and shows assets worth somewhere between $24 million and $74 million.
The money started piling up around 1993, when Bush left the White House and Barr reentered the private sector. The next year, Barr became general counsel at telephone giant GTE Corporation. When GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon in 2000, Barr stayed onboard as executive vice president and general counsel. From 2001 to 2007, he raked in an average of $1.7 million in annual salary and bonuses, according to documents filed with the Securities & Exchange Commission. Barr also received valuable stock options, some of which he traded while at the company, collecting an estimated $3 million after taxes from 2003 to 2007.
Bloomberg
Chinese Scientists Claim Breakthrough in Quantum Computing Race
Chinese scientists claim to have built a quantum computer that is able to perform certain computations nearly 100 trillion times faster than the world’s most advanced supercomputer, representing the first milestone in the country’s efforts to develop the technology.
The researchers have built a quantum computer prototype that is able to detect up to 76 photons through Gaussian boson sampling, a standard simulation algorithm, the state-run Xinhua news agency said, citing research published in Science magazine. That’s exponentially faster than existing supercomputers.
The breakthrough represents a quantum computational advantage, also known as quantum supremacy, in which no traditional computer can perform the same task in a reasonable amount of time and is unlikely to be overturned by algorithmic or hardware improvements, according to the research.
Biden, Harris Vow to Keep Their Justice Department Independent
President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris declared the Justice Department in their administration would operate independently of the White House.
“We will not tell the Justice Department how to do its job,” Harris said in a joint interview with CNN on Thursday, adding that the Biden White House would assume “that any decision coming out of the Justice Department, in particular the United States Department of Justice, should be based on facts, should be based on the law, should not be influenced by politics. Period.”
Biden chimed in, “I guarantee you that that’s how it will be run.”
Vox
Joe Biden should do everything at once
[…] Here we return to the lesson that Trump has to teach Biden about life in hyperpolarized politics. To wit: blitz. Do everything at once.
No matter what the Biden administration does, it will be accused of socialism and corruption by the right. And the past several years have richly demonstrated that conservative parts of the country, particularly rural areas and low-density suburbs, are almost completely captured by right-wing media, from Fox on the TV to AM conservative radio to Sinclair-owned local news to the profusion of shady Facebook sources and groups, where misinformation is rapid and rampant.
Democrats badly need to address this media asymmetry. Despite what conservatives have convinced themselves, mainstream media outlets like CNN are not analogous to Fox, and Democrats have no comparable radio, local TV, or social media operations to carry their messages and narratives straight to voters where they live.
But that is long-term work, and 2022 is right around the corner.
The only thing Biden will have real control over is his administration and what it does. And his North Star, his organizing principle, should be doing as much good on as many fronts as fast as possible. Blitz.
AI has cracked a problem that stumped biologists for 50 years. It’s a huge deal.
DeepMind, an AI research lab that was bought by Google and is now an independent part of Google’s parent company Alphabet, announced a major breakthrough this week that one evolutionary biologist called “a game changer.”
“This will change medicine,” the biologist, Andrei Lupas, told Nature. “It will change research. It will change bioengineering. It will change everything.”
The breakthrough: DeepMind says its AI system, AlphaFold, has solved “the protein folding problem” — a grand challenge of biology that has vexed scientists for 50 years.
NPR News
Democrats Push 'Abolition Amendment' To Fully Erase Slavery From U.S. Constitution
As the nation grapples with issues of racial injustice and social inequality, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are pushing to remove the so-called slavery loophole from the United States Constitution.
With the adoption and ratification of the 13th Amendment 155 years ago, the practice of slavery formally ended in this country, but it did not strip away all aspects of involuntary servitude.
A joint resolution dubbed the Abolition Amendment, introduced by Democrats in the House and Senate Wednesday, seeks to correct that. It would remove the "punishment" clause from the amendment, which effectively allows members of prison populations to be used as cheap and free labor.
In His Final Weeks, Trump Could Dole Out Many Pardons To Friends, Allies
On more than one occasion, … Trump has demonstrated his willingness to use his pardon power to pluck a political ally or associate out of legal trouble.
In July, he commuted the sentence of his longtime friend and informal adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress. Last week, he pardoned his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
That has set the stage for a possible run on pardons in the closing weeks of the Trump administration. The list of Trump associates who are facing or could face federal charges is long.
Westchester & Fairfield County Business Journal
NY AG James vows to continue Trump investigation
New York Attorney General Letitia James has vowed to continue her office’s investigation into … Donald Trump’s businesses that are based in the state.
James issued a statement following a speech made by Trump at the White House yesterday in which he quoted James without providing a source for the quotes attributed to her and blasted investigations into his business affairs. […]
In her statement issued shorty before 8 last night, James said: “As the independently elected attorney general of New York, I have a sworn duty to protect and uphold state law. Last year, after Michael Cohen’s testimony, our office opened an investigation into the financial dealings of the Trump Organization. That investigation continues today. Unlike the president and the unfounded accusations he hurled today, we are guided by the facts and the law, and the politics stop at the door. Period.”
Reuters
$908 billion coronavirus aid bill draws conservative backing in U.S. Congress
A bipartisan, $908 billion coronavirus aid plan gained momentum in the U.S. Congress on Thursday as conservative lawmakers expressed their support and Senate and House of Representatives leaders huddled.
Still unclear, however, was how far beyond $500 billion in spending Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would agree to after months of insisting that anything approaching $1 trillion was unnecessary.
Trump unveils $207 million fundraising haul since election as he tries to overturn results
Donald Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee have raised a combined $207.5 million since Election Day, according to a statement on Thursday, as Trump has sought donations to fund his efforts to overturn Democrat Joe Biden’s win in the Nov. 3 poll.
The post-election fundraising haul brought the combined fundraising of Trump committees between Oct. 15 and Nov. 23 to $495 million, the Trump campaign said.
AP News
Trump aide banned from Justice after trying to get case info
The official serving as … Donald Trump’s eyes and ears at the Justice Department has been banned from the building after trying to pressure staffers to give up sensitive information about election fraud and other matters she could relay to the White House, three people familiar with the matter tell The Associated Press.
Heidi Stirrup, an ally of top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, was quietly installed at the Justice Department as a White House liaison a few months ago. She was told within the last two weeks to vacate the building after top Justice officials learned of her efforts to collect insider information about ongoing cases and the department’s work on election fraud, the people said.
Stirrup is accused of approaching staffers in the department demanding they give her information about investigations, including election fraud matters, the people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.
Chinese spacecraft carrying lunar rocks lifts off from moon
A Chinese spacecraft lifted off from the moon Thursday night with a load of lunar rocks, the first stage of its return to Earth, the government space agency reported.
Chang’e 5, the third Chinese spacecraft to land on the moon and the first to take off from it again, is the latest in a series of increasingly ambitious missions for Beijing’s space program, which also has a orbiter and rover headed to Mars.
Deutsche Welle
World food prices hit 6-year high amid COVID pandemic
World food prices jumped to an almost six-year high in November, according to the United Nations food agency. An index published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on Thursday said prices for several food products had risen significantly.
The index, which measures monthly changes for a basket of food products, averaged 105 points in November compared with the previous month when it stood at 101 according to an adjusted figure.
The monthly increase was the sharpest since July 2012, putting the index at its "highest level since December 2014," the Rome-based agency said.
Trier mourns victims of car rampage with minute's silence
The city of Trier has mourned the deaths of five people, including a baby, who were killed after a car plowed into pedestrians on a busy shopping street.
Some 500 people gathered at the city's landmark Roman-era gate, the Porta Negra, to hold a minute's silence in remembrance of the victims. Mourners were asked to adhere to physical distancing measures ahead of the event.
People across the wider state of Rhineland-Palatinate also joined in the silent commemoration at 1:46 p.m. — the moment the car began veering through the city on Tuesday.
The Guardian
Atlas reveals birds pushed further north amid climate crisis
Europe’s breeding bird populations have shifted on average one kilometre north every year for the past three decades, likely driven by the climate crisis, according to one of the world’s largest citizen science projects on biodiversity.
The European Breeding Bird Atlas (Ebba2) provides the most detailed picture yet of the distribution of the continent’s birds after 120,000 volunteers and fieldworkers surveyed 11m square kilometres, from the Azores in the west to the Russian Urals in the east.
Trump kick-starts oil drilling licence sales in Arctic refuge
The Trump administration has formally announced the go-ahead for the fiercely opposed sale of controversial gas and oil drilling licences in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is a pristine wilderness and home to polar bears, caribou and many other wildlife species.
The sale of leases is planned for 6 January 2021, a few days before Trump leaves the White House.
While the Trump administration was known to be pushing ahead with the plans, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) confirmed in a press release on Thursday that it would publish a notice of the sale on Monday 7 December – timed to be just ahead of the inauguration of the US president-elect, Joe Biden, who opposes the move.
The Atlantic
Stop Scapegoating Progressives
Democrats handily won the White House, but unexpectedly failed to flip all 12 state legislative chambers they’d targeted. They lost at least 12 seats in the House of Representatives, and although they made gains in the U.S. Senate, they may still fall short of a majority. Moderate Democrats falling east and west began searching for explanations for these disappointing results in the postelection haze. They could not blame the other swing voters, those who swing between staying home and voting, as they normally do—the surge in turnout included many people who hadn’t cast ballots in 2016 voting for Democrats in 2020.
Moderate Democrats could have pointed to the unprecedented number of Republican voters and the difficulty of defending “very competitive and often Republican-leaning districts in a nationalized election,” an explanation the political scientists Ryan Williamson and Jamie L. Carson advanced. They could have pointed to GOP voter-subtraction policies or Republican gerrymandering, which prevents Democrats from translating their popular-vote edge into electoral victories in congressional and local districts. They could have highlighted all those split-ticket voters who voted for President-elect Joe Biden and congressional Republicans. They could have blamed Biden for not delivering down-ballot wins as he and his allies said he would in the primaries.
All of these factors are grounded in good evidence but not good politics. It appears politically untenable for moderate Democrats to criticize the president-elect or white swing voters in their districts, or to underscore the devastating reach of voter suppression.
Instead some, though certainly not all, moderate Democrats zeroed in on a different factor, one that deflected blame and made overtures toward conservatives in their districts. They blamed the party’s down-ballot losses (or narrow wins) on progressive policies like Medicare for All and slogans like “Defund the police,” which they believe alienated voters. Moderate Democrats generalized anecdotes from constituents and failed to provide any measurable proof to substantiate their claims (outside of perhaps South Florida).
The Supreme Court Is Colliding With a Less-Religious America
The Supreme Court’s decision last week overturning New York State’s limits on religious gatherings during the COVID-19 outbreak previewed what will likely become one of the coming decade’s defining collisions between law and demography.
The ruling continued the conservative majority’s sustained drive to provide religious organizations more leeway to claim exemptions from civil laws on the grounds of protecting “religious liberty.” These cases have become a top priority for conservative religious groups, usually led by white Christians and sometimes joined by other religiously traditional denominations. In this case, Orthodox Jewish synagogues allied with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn to oppose New York’s restrictions on religious services.
But this legal offensive to elevate “religious liberty” over other civic goals is coming even as the share of Americans who ascribe to no religious faith is steadily rising, and as white Christians have fallen to a minority share of the population.
Miami Herald
Disgraced Republican lawmaker planted no-party candidate in key Senate race, sources say
The confession came on election night. Over drinks at an Irish pub in Seminole County, as television screens began to show the latest election results for key state Senate races, former Miami state Sen. Frank Artiles was getting excited.
Miami Republican Ileana Garcia, a first-time candidate, was leading Democratic incumbent Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez in the race to represent Miami-Dade’s Senate District 37. It was tight, but she was winning. And Artiles wanted to brag.
“That is me, that was all me,” Artiles told a crowd at Liam Fitzpatrick’s restaurant in Lake Mary…
Artiles boasted that he planted a no-party candidate in the Miami-Dade Senate race, which Garcia won after a three-day recount by just 32 votes out of more than 215,000 cast. Artiles recruited Alexis (Alex) Rodriguez, a longtime acquaintance and Facebook friend. […]
The no-party candidate with the same surname as the incumbent Democrat had been a registered Republican until just before his qualifying papers were filed to make him a candidate for the Florida Senate. He received 6,382 votes in the election.
Slate
Former U.S. Attorney Asks Georgia to Investigate Lindsey Graham for Potential Election Crimes
A former U.S. attorney has asked Georgia to open an investigation into Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham’s potentially criminal interference in the state’s election.
Michael J. Moore, who served as U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Georgia from 2010 to 2015, sent his request to the Georgia State Board of Elections on Thursday. Moore cited multiple public interviews given by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, in which Raffensperger said that Graham pressured him to throw out valid mail ballots. According to the secretary of state, Graham asked whether he could toss all mail ballots from any county with a high rate of “signature mismatch”—signatures that don’t match those on a voter’s registration form. (Under a federal court order, Georgia is required to let voters cure a mismatched signature.) Signature mismatch disproportionately affects racial minorities, who lean Democratic overall. Graham requested that even ballots with matching signatures be rejected in precincts with large populations of Black voters. It thus appears that Graham wanted Raffensberger to throw enough Democratic ballots to swing the state toward Donald Trump.
In his letter, Moore noted that Graham’s alleged conduct might constitute a criminal offense under Georgia law. The state prohibits solicitation to commit election fraud, which occurs when an individual “solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause” another person to commit an election-related offense. Disqualifying valid ballots would constitute such an offense and constitute a crime in itself. State law also forbids interference with the performance of the secretary of state’s official election duties—by, for instance, asking him to falsify records. An individual is culpable even if they failed to induce fraud.
Ars Technica
Feds say Facebook broke US law offering permanent jobs to H-1B workers
The United States Department of Justice sued Facebook on Thursday arguing that the social media giant discriminated against US workers by giving preference to Facebook workers on H-1B visas who wanted to transition to permanent jobs at the company.
The H-1B visa program lets foreign workers work at a US company for three years. It can be renewed once. After that, an employer can ask for permission to offer the immigrant a permanent job under the Department of Labor's PERM certification program. But the employer is supposed to first advertise the job to see if any Americans are available. Only if no qualified Americans apply can the job go to the immigrant.
In its lawsuit, the Justice Department argues that Facebook's hiring practices made a mockery of these requirements. Most Facebook jobs are advertised online, and job seekers can apply online. In contrast, Facebook overwhelmingly placed its legally mandated ads for PERM jobs in print publications. Candidates were required to submit their applications by mail.
These jobs had an average salary of more than $156,000. Yet out of 1,128 jobs posted between July 2018 and April 2019, 81 percent didn't receive a single applicant, while another 18 percent received just one applicant.
Google illegally spied on and retaliated against workers, feds say
Google's actions amid workplace organizing efforts, including the high-profile firings of several employees, were illegal violations of the National Labor Relations Act, federal regulators said this week.
The National Labor Relations Board filed a formal complaint (PDF) against Google Wednesday, alleging that the company has been "interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees" to interfere with their protected concerted activity—workplace organization rights that are protected by law.
Google fired several different workers late last year amid apparent efforts to organize company employees. Four former employees who were let go last November—Laurence Berland, Paul Duke, Rebecca Rivers, and Sophie Waldman—filed complaints with the NLRB almost exactly a year ago alleging that Google's "draconian, pernicious, and unlawful conduct" was an unlawful attempt to prevent workplace organizing.