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The Washington Post
Attorney General Merrick Garland vowed to hold all those responsible for the Jan. 6 riot accountable — whether they were at the Capitol or committed other crimes surrounding the day’s events — saying investigators are methodically building more complicated and serious cases and would prosecute people “at any level.”
“The actions we have taken thus far will not be our last,” Garland said Wednesday, speaking in the Justice Department’s Great Hall in an address that was broadcast live online and by cable news channels. “The Justice Department remains committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law — whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy. We will follow the facts wherever they lead.”
Garland’s remarks came on the eve of the anniversary of the Capitol breach and as he faces intensifying pressure to do and say more about the investigation, and to focus more acutely on the actions of … Donald Trump and his associates.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse
Whitehouse statement on Attorney General Garland’s speech on January 6th investigation
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a former U.S. Attorney, released the following statement on Attorney General Merrick Garland’s remarks today on the status of the Justice Department’s investigation of the January 6th attack:
“Sweeping up low-level players while ignoring the kingpins upstream isn’t a full investigation.
“The Attorney General committed today to a fearless investigation that ‘follows the money’ and those responsible upstream. That is good. Investigative steps may be underway behind the proper screen of law enforcement and grand jury secrecy. That would be good.
“We must have a thorough inquiry that extends beyond the individuals who stormed the Capitol to the planners and funders who stoked the violence. The House’s January 6th Committee is doing that work, including a hard look at members of Congress and those in the White House. The Committee is also moving swiftly, which is important. The Department must do the same.”
The Washington Post
The Jan. 6 committee: What it has done and where it is headed
[…] The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol … is made up of seven Democrats and the two Republicans who voted to establish the committee, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois. They joined at the request of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) after House GOP leaders decided not to participate in the inquiry because Pelosi rejected two of their proposed members. […]
In a little less than six months, the committee has taken in a massive amount of data — interviewing more than 300 witnesses, announcing more than 50 subpoenas, obtaining more than 35,000 pages of records and receiving hundreds of telephone tips provided through the Jan. 6 tip line.
The task of wading through this torrent of information has been divided among five teams that the committee initially put together for its staff of about 40. […]
Each of the panel’s staff groups has made progress, according to people familiar with their work. The “Inside the Fence” team has developed questions about possible law enforcement and intelligence failures. The “Stop the Steal” group has studied the pressure applied on federal as well as state and local officials to overturn the election results. These include calls made by Trump to state leaders as well as the effort to press Vice President Mike Pence to intervene in the counting of electoral votes.
Some of these efforts — what Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) has referred to as the “political coup” — took place just a block away from the White House in a set of rooms and suites at the Willard hotel, where Trump’s outside legal team camped out in the weeks and days leading up to Jan. 6.
Bloomberg
Biden’s Jan. 6 Speech to Lay ‘Singular Responsibility’ on Trump
President Joe Biden will mark the first anniversary of the deadly Capitol insurrection seeking to rally Democrats around voting rights legislation, with a warning that inaction risks emboldening extremist followers of … Donald Trump before the crucial midterm elections. […]
He’ll also take on Trump himself, aides say. The former president has turned Jan. 6 into a fealty test for fellow Republicans by obliging them to reject the new administration and accept his revisionist account of the deadly attack waged by his supporters to disrupt certification of his electoral defeat.
“I would expect President Biden will lay out the significance of what happened at the Capitol and the singular responsibility President Trump has for the chaos and carnage that we saw,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday. “And he will forcibly push back on the lies spread by the former president and attempt to mislead the American people and his own supporters, as well as distract from his role in what happened.”
NY Governor Hochul Made Big Equality Promises in Her First State of the State
When New York Governor Kathy Hochul gave her first annual state policy address on Wednesday, she acknowledged both her status as the first woman to deliver the speech in the state’s history, as well as the double standard she faces as the state’s first female governor.
In a remarkably honest assessment of women in leadership positions across government and business, Hochul said, “We know that women are always held to a higher standard. So I know that I must not just meet but exceed expectations for this to no longer be an historic achievement but rather the norm.” She pledged, like many politicians before her, to “do things differently,” but added a somewhat unique caveat -- at least in the bare-knuckle battleground of New York politics: “From now on, we will share success.”
“The days of three men in a room are clearly over,” she added, a nod to the old custom of the governor and heads of the state Assembly and Senate gathering together to pass the annual budget. Today, there’s a female governor and female Senate Majority Leader.
Toronto Star
Donald Trump’s supporters couldn’t overturn the election, but they still might destroy America
A year ago on Capitol Hill, it felt like the end of something. Or of some things.
The long, unbroken tradition of the peaceful transfer of power that George Washington invented and Ronald Reagan had memorably bragged was central to America’s greatness was an obvious casualty amid the violence and chaos and screaming lunatic weirdness of Jan. 6, 2021. And with it, maybe, the smug sense of exceptionalism that has long made Americans so certain that their democracy could never be seriously threatened by wannabe strongmen and the mobs they inspire.
But as the riot ended, it felt like the end of still more than that. As the tear gas and smoke bombs dissipated, the riot was put down, the insurrectionists dispersed and Congress resumed its historic business of certifying the election, a fever seemed to have broken. A kind of twisted, howling madness that had gripped American politics through the vector of Donald Trump’s takeover of the Republican party — a stew of white resentment, cartoonish conspiracy theories and thuggishly authoritarian impulses — had shown what it was capable of becoming: not just a personality-driven political phenomenon, but an actual threat to American democracy.
AP News
Pelosi says ‘democracy won’ on Jan. 6
[…] “Make no mistake, our democracy was on the brink of catastrophe,” Pelosi told the AP.
“Democracy won that night,” she said. “These people, because of the courageous work of the Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police and others, they were deterred in their action to stop the peaceful transfer of power. They lost.” […]
“I think now people are alerted to the fact that there can be rogue presidents.”
Republicans are mostly staying away from the remembrance events. They downplay the assault and blame Democrats for not fortifying the Capitol.
Man whose arrest led to ‘separate but equal’ is pardoned
Louisiana’s governor on Wednesday posthumously pardoned Homer Plessy, the Black man whose arrest for refusing to leave a whites-only railroad car in 1892 led to the Supreme Court ruling that cemented “separate but equal” into U.S. law for half a century.
The state Board of Pardons last year recommended the pardon for Plessy, who boarded the rail car as a member of a small civil rights group hoping to overturn a state law segregating trains. Instead, the protest led to the 1896 ruling known as Plessy v. Ferguson, which solidified whites-only spaces in public accommodations such as transportation, hotels and schools for decades.
At a ceremony held near the spot where Plessy was arrested, Gov. John Bel Edwards said he was “beyond grateful” to help restore Plessy’s “legacy of the rightness of his cause … undefiled by the wrongness of his conviction.”
The Atlantic
We Are Living Through a Democratic Emergency
Donald Trump could subvert the next election—and his second coup attempt has already begun, Barton Gellman warns in our latest cover story.
Ahead of the anniversary of the insurrection at the Capitol, Gellman joined Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance for a live virtual conversation about the threats to American democracy.
“Once you have a true believer that the election was stolen last time, you have given yourself permission to steal the next one,” Gellman says. The events of January 6, 2021, were evidence of a movement prepared to use violence to get, and maintain, power. But how did it come to this? And what can be done to safeguard democracy? Read the full conversation…
How Ivy League Elites Turned Against Democracy
One of the most indelible images from the January 6 Capitol riot was of Josh Hawley, junior senator for Missouri, graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, raising his fist in support of a riotous mob that would shortly endanger his own life and the life of the institution to which he belonged. Almost immediately after he encouraged the rioters, he found himself in a secured room, being defended from them.
At that moment of supreme crisis, Hawley represented one of the deepest mysteries of the current American predicament: why some of the best-educated men and women in the country, the most invested in its power, the luckiest, have overseen the destruction of their institutions like spoiled teenagers smashing up their parents’ house on a weekend bender.
“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected?” Abraham Lincoln asked in his Lyceum Address. “I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.” America is approaching the fulfillment of this calamitous prediction. But Lincoln could never have predicted that America’s destruction would come from its most privileged people, that it would be a suicide of the elites.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jimmy Carter says American democracy in peril
On the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, former President Jimmy Carter, in a strongly worded op-ed piece for The New York Times, decried renewed efforts to thwart American democracy.
“Our great nation now teeters on the brink of a widening abyss,” Carter wrote. “Without immediate action, we are at genuine risk of civil conflict and losing our precious democracy. Americans must set aside differences and work together before it is too late.”
Carter wrote that each of the four former living presidents last January, including Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama, condemned the actions of “a violent mob, guided by unscrupulous politicians,” who “stormed the Capitol and almost succeeded in preventing the democratic transfer of power.”
“There followed a brief hope that the insurrection would shock the nation into addressing the toxic polarization that threatens our democracy,” Carter wrote. “However, one year on, promoters of the lie that the election was stolen have taken over one political party and stoked distrust in our electoral systems.”
Investigators uncovered ‘modern-day slavery’ on Georgia farms. What’s next for victims?
Many victims of a large-scale South Georgia labor trafficking ring regained their freedom on the same day: Nov. 17, 2021. On that Wednesday, law enforcement rescued 26 migrant farmworkers from the living quarters they were held in and took them to a victims’ center set up in Douglas, a town of 12,000 in rural Coffee County.
There, a team of government workers, paralegals, medical personnel and social services providers were on hand to help the workers through just the first stage of a recovery process that can stretch for years. […]
In Douglas, the initial priority for case workers was to assess victims’ physical health. Rescued farmworkers arrived at the victims’ center with cuts, bruises and infections caused by work conditions that prosecutors would go on to describe as akin to “modern-day slavery” in an indictment unsealed later in November. The victims were migrants from Latin America who came to Georgia with legal visas before being allegedly abused by their employers.
NPR News
The oldest living American veteran of World War II dies at 112
Lawrence Brooks, the oldest known living American veteran of World War II, died early Wednesday morning, according to the National World War II Museum. He was 112.
"He was a beloved friend, a man of great faith and had a gentle spirit that inspired those around him," said Stephen Watson, the museum's president and chief executive. "He proudly served our country during World War II, and returned home to serve his community and church. His kindness, smile and sense of humor connected him to generations of people who loved and admired him."
Brooks had been in and out of the local veterans' hospital in New Orleans in recent months, and while still mentally sharp, his body had grown weak, according to the Associated Press.
The James Webb Space Telescope deploys its sunshield and mirror without a hitch
Mission operators cheered late Wednesday morning after NASA's James Webb Space Telescope successfully deployed its secondary mirror, one day after setting up its enormous sunshield without a hitch.
Team members in face masks clapped and fist-bumped each in the wake of the maneuver.
Webb project manager Bill Ochs called it "another banner day for JWST."
"You guys did a heck of a job," he told the team assembled at the Mission Operations Control at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Houston Chronicle
Fast-moving omicron catches Texas flat-footed as feds move to bolster testing, treatment supplies
The highly contagious omicron variant has left Texas scrambling to keep up with new infections, overwhelming local and state officials as they look to the federal government for aid.
The new variant is spreading at lightning speed, infecting people at a rate seven times higher than the delta mutation before it and creating more breakthrough cases among vaccinated individuals. Within a month, Texas has skyrocketed from an average of less than 5,000 new cases per day to more than 25,000, and COVID hospitalizations have more than doubled in a 10-day window. […]
The strain at the local and state levels has pushed Texas officials to ask for outside help. On Friday, the state requested additional resources from the federal government, including six new testing sites in major metro areas, extra medical personnel and more allocations of sotrovimab, the only type of monoclonal antibody treatment known to work on omicron.
Texas Tribune
Ted Cruz says Joe Biden could be impeached if Republicans take U.S. House
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz predicted Republicans will impeach President Joe Biden as political payback if they win back the U.S. House this year in the midterm elections.
“Yeah, I do think there’s a chance of that, whether it’s justified or not,” he said on the latest episode of his podcast “Verdict with Ted Cruz.”
“Democrats weaponized impeachment,” he said, referring to House Democrats twice voting to impeach … Donald Trump. “They used it for partisan purposes to go after Trump because they disagreed with him. And one of the real disadvantages of doing that … is the more you weaponize it and turn it into a partisan cudgel, you know, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.” […]
On Tuesday, Cruz said that impeachment shouldn’t be used as a political tool.
“That’s not how impeachment is meant to work,” he said.
But the junior Texas senator also said there were “multiple grounds to consider for impeachment” against Biden.
The Philadelphia Inquirer
Fairmount house fire that killed 12 is one of the nation’s deadliest in decades
A catastrophic fire tore through a rowhouse in Philadelphia’s Fairmount neighborhood before sunrise Wednesday and killed 12 people, including eight children, in one of the nation’sdeadliest residential fires in decades.
Authorities did not identify the victims, but relatives and friends said they included two mothers and their children, some who attended a nearby elementary school and one possibly as young as 2. Together, they occupied the top unit of a three-story brick home in which at least four smoke detectors weren’t working.
Investigators couldn’t say what sparked the 6:30 a.m. blaze or why it became so deadly so swiftly. Federal agents were expected to join Philadelphia fire marshals in what is likely to be a complex and lengthy probe.
The Denver Post
Human remains discovered during search for 2 people still missing after Marshall fire
Investigators searching for two people missing in last week’s devastating Marshall fire found partial human remains in unincorporated Boulder County on Wednesday.
The discovery of the adult remains came as searchers worked in the 5900 block of Marshall Road, according to the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office.
The Boulder County Coroner’s Office will identify the remains and determine the cause and manner of the person’s death. The sheriff’s and coroner’s offices continued to work at the scene Wednesday evening.
Authorities have not publicly identified the two people still missing since the wind-blasted wildfire burned across 6,219 acres of unincorporated Boulder County, Superior and Louisville on Thursday, destroying nearly 1,000 homes and businesses.
Is Colorado’s Front Range prepared for the next Marshall fire?
When the Marshall fire burned through a record number of homes and businesses in Boulder County last week, Richard Skorman’s mind jumped to the Ivywild and Broadmoor neighborhoods and the rest of southwest Colorado Springs.
The recently retired City Council president calls the southwest side home and, alongside many others, considers the massive swathe of land at risk for another devastating wildfire.
Should a blaze spark on the southwest side during a high-wind day, there are only a few two-lane roads leading in and out of the neighborhoods there, Skorman noted.
“All bets are off,” he said.
Des Moines Register
John Deere introduces Iowa-built driverless tractor, touted as the next revolution in agriculture
Touting it as the next revolution in agriculture, John Deere this week unveiled an autonomous tractor, slated to go into production later this year in Iowa.
Deere & Co. unveiled the driverless tractor Tuesday at the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The agricultural equipment giant didn't immediately say how much the tractors would cost or when production would start at the Waterloo Works, the company's largest production complex, employing about 5,000 workers.
Initially, the self-guided row crop tractors will be programmed for tillage. Deanna Kovar, Deere's precision ag production systems vice president, said it's the same job company founder John Deere tackled 185 years ago when he built one of the nation's first steel plows. […]
Kovar said farmers need autonomous tractors because of a growing labor shortage. At the same time, a rising global population is increasing demand for food.
Los Angeles Times
California adopts drought rules outlawing water wasting, with fines of up to $500
In an effort to discourage wasteful water practices such as hosing off driveways or allowing irrigation water to run down streets, California water officials have imposed new drought rules for cities and towns throughout the state.
The regulations, adopted Tuesday by the State Water Resources Control Board, prohibit overwatering yards, washing cars without a shutoff nozzle, hosing down sidewalks or watering grass within 48 hours after rainfall.
Even after December brought downpours across California and record snow in parts of the Sierra Nevada, state water officials stressed that a drought remains and that efforts to conserve water should continue.
CBS News
Most, but not all, corporations kept their post-January 6 PAC pledges
After the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, dozens of major corporations publicly pledged to pause their financial contributions to 147 Republican lawmakers who had voted to overturn the 2020 presidential election. A year later, most — but not all — of those companies have kept their word, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission filings.
Since the riot, corporate political action committee dollars flowing to Republican objectors fell by nearly two-thirds, progressive newsletter Popular Information found. Big-name companies like Allstate, American Express, Nike and Walgreens are among the 79 major corporations that have adhered to their commitment not to donate directly to Republican objectors or to political committees that support them, the newsletter reported.
"There has been a significant decrease in corporate support for Republican objectors," Popular Information founder and author Judd Legum told CBS MoneyWatch. "On the other hand, you do have a number of companies that made fairly strong statements on January 6 that are backsliding."
The backsliders, according to Popular Information's analysis of FEC filings, include Cigna, Eli Lilly, Exelon and PriceWaterhouseCoopers.
Orlando Sentinel
Resident of The Villages arrested, suspected of casting multiple ballots
A fourth Villages resident was arrested Tuesday and suspected of voter fraud in the 2020 election, according to authorities.
Charles Franklin Barnes, 64, was arrested and taken to Sumter County Jail; he faces a charge of fraud in casting more than one ballot during an election, according to the Sumter County Sheriff’s Office.
The New York Times
Prosecutors Move Quickly on Jan. 6 Cases, but One Big Question Remains
[…] While the Justice Department has called the inquiry one of the largest in its history, traditional law enforcement officials have not been acting alone. Working with information from online sleuths who style themselves as “Sedition Hunters,” the authorities have made more than 700 arrests — with little sign of slowing down.
The government estimates that as many as 2,500 people who took part in the events of Jan. 6 could be charged with federal crimes. That includes more than 1,000 incidents that prosecutors believe could be assaults.
As of this week, more than 225 people have been accused of attacking or interfering with the police that day. About 275 have been charged with what the government describes as the chief political crime on Jan. 6: obstructing Congress’s duty to certify the 2020 presidential vote count. A little over 300 people have been charged with petty crimes alone, mostly trespassing and disorderly conduct.
But a big question hangs over the prosecutions: Will the Justice Department move beyond charging the rioters themselves?
A Year After Capitol Riot, Trump’s Hold on G.O.P. Is Unrivaled
[…] Today, the Republican Party is very much still Mr. Trump’s, transforming his lies about a stolen 2020 election into an article of faith, and even a litmus test that he is seeking to impose on the 2022 primaries with the candidates he backs. He is the party’s most coveted endorser, its top fund-raiser and the polling front-runner for the 2024 presidential nomination.
Mr. Trump is also deeply divisive, unpopular among the broader electorate and under investigation for his business practices and his interference with election officials in Fulton County, Ga. He remains the same politician whose White House oversaw four years of devastating Republican losses, including of the House and Senate. And while a scattered few Republicans publicly warn about yoking the party to him, more fret in private about the consequences.
Yet his unrivaled power inside the G.O.P., one year after inciting the sacking of the Capitol to forcibly forestall the certification of the election, is a testament to his unrelenting hold on the loyalty of the party base.
The Charlotte Observer
Top Republican lawmaker relied on secret maps, later destroyed, NC gerrymandering trial reveals
A political trial that has mostly been dominated by math and academic research erupted in drama late Wednesday, when a top Republican redistricting leader said on the witness stand that he had used secret maps, drawn by someone else, to guide his work.
That statement, made under oath, appears to directly contradict what he told Democratic lawmakers at the legislature in November, shortly before the Republican-led legislature passed those maps into law over Democrats’ objections.
A Durham Democrat and former judge, Rep. Marcia Morey, asked the GOP redistricting leader, Rep. Destin Hall, at the time if he had used any outside materials to help in drawing the maps. Hall said no.
On Wednesday, on the witness stand, he said he did — although under cross-examination by attorney Allison Riggs, Hall denied relying on the maps too much. He called them “non-consequential.”
The Guardian
More than 1,000 US public figures aided Trump’s effort to overturn election
More than 1,000 Americans in positions of public trust acted as accomplices in Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election result, participating in the violent insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January or spreading the “big lie” that the vote count had been rigged.
The startling figure underlines the extent to which Trump’s attempt to undermine the foundations of presidential legitimacy has metastasized across the US. Individuals who engaged in arguably the most serious attempt to subvert democracy since the civil war are now inveigling themselves into all levels of government, from Congress and state legislatures down to school boards and other local public bodies. […]
The Insurrection Index seeks to identify all those who supported Trump in his bid to hold on to power despite losing the election, in the hope that they can be held accountable and prevented from inflicting further damage to the democratic infrastructure of the country.
The next US civil war is already here – we just refuse to see it
[…] The United States today is, once again, headed for civil war, and, once again, it cannot bear to face it. The political problems are both structural and immediate, the crisis both longstanding and accelerating. The American political system has become so overwhelmed by anger that even the most basic tasks of government are increasingly impossible. […]
The consequences of the breakdown of the American system is only now beginning to be felt. January 6 wasn’t a wake-up call; it was a rallying cry. […]
The right is preparing for a breakdown of law and order, but they are also overtaking the forces of law and order. Hard right organization have now infiltrated so many police forces – the connections number in the hundreds – that they have become unreliable allies in the struggle against domestic terrorism. […]
The right has recognized what the left has not: that the system is in collapse. The right has a plan: it involves violence and solidarity. They have not abjured even the Oath Keepers. The left, meanwhile, has chosen infighting as their sport.
The Seattle Times
At a crucial moment during 2020’s racial justice protests, Seattle police exchanged a detailed series of fake radio transmissions about a nonexistent group of menacing right-wing extremists.
The radio chatter about members of the Proud Boys marching around downtown Seattle, some possibly carrying guns, and then heading to confront protesters on Capitol Hill was an improper “ruse,” or dishonest ploy, that exacerbated a volatile situation, according to findings released Wednesday by the city’s Office of Police Accountability.
The Proud Boys is a far-right group with a reputation for street violence and with several members — including one from South King County — who have been charged with terrorism for alleged actions related to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
The ruse happened on the night of June 8, 2020, hours after the Police Department had abandoned its East Precinct on Capitol Hill and just as protesters were starting to set up the zone that was later called the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, or CHOP.
EuroNews
Kazakhstan: Internet blackout and state of emergency as protests spread over fuel prices
The presidential residence in Kazakhstan's largest city was engulfed in flames on Wednesday as unrest sparked by a rise in fuel prices escalated sharply.
Armed protesters also reportedly stormed another government building in Almaty, despite harsh measures to quell the trouble.
Kazakhstan's president has dismissed the government and declared a state of emergency. News sites became inaccessible, and the country is said to be experiencing an internet blackout.
But Russia's Tass news agency reported that the presidential residence building in Almaty, where thousands of demonstrators had gathered outside, was on fire.
Further US sanctions against Bosnia's Dodik for 'destabilising and corrupt activity'
The Biden administration announced sanctions against Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik who has been at the centre of an escalating political crisis in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the most significant in the country since the end of the 1992-1995 war.
The statement accused him of “corrupt activities” that threaten to destabilise the region and undermine the 1995 Dayton agreement, a peace accord that doubles as the country’s constitution.
The US-sponsored Dayton Peace Accords created two main administrative units in Bosnia — the Serb-dominated entity of Republika Srpska, or RS, and the Bosniak-Croat majority Federation of BiH.
Deutsche Welle
German Rail operator Deutsche Bahn admits major drop in punctuality
It has become something of a national joke in Germany that the national train system does not exactly live up to its international reputation as a bastion of punctuality.On Wednesday, rail operator Deutsche Bahn published the statistics to prove it.
According to DB, only 75.2% of its inter-city services known as the ICE and IC trains reached their destinations on time. This represents a significant dip from 82% in 2020.
The 2020 numbers had marked a 15-year record high in punctuality. Many, however, speculated that the timeliness of trains in 2020 was due to the fact that trains ran less often and not as far during the first year of the pandemic, when many routine passengers began to work from home and skip unnecessary trips.
Used clothes choke both markets and environment in Ghana
Each week, Ghana receives 15 million items of used clothing sent from the West. But 40% of the products get discarded due to poor quality. They end up at landfills and in bodies of water, polluting entire ecosystems. […]
While most of these secondhand clothes are typically donated with good intentions from industrialized countries, many have now become an environmental hazard in Ghana and beyond.
The OR Foundation, and NGO from the United States, has estimated that about 15 million individual items of used clothing now arrive in Ghana weekly, while 40% end up discarded due to poor quality. With no use for them, the discarded clothing items first end up at landfills and then travel further into the ocean.
Vox
[…] On Friday, the Supreme Court will hear two sets of cases that test the justices’ commitment to the idea that the right to govern flows from the will of the people, and both involve challenges to President Joe Biden’s efforts to encourage vaccination against Covid-19.
The first bloc of cases, which is likely to be consolidated under the case name Biden v. Missouri, challenges a federal rule requiring nearly all health care workers to become vaccinated. The second bloc, which is likely to be consolidated under the name NFIB v. Department of Labor, challenges a rule requiring workers at companies with 100 or more employees to either get vaccinated or be regularly tested for Covid-19.
Even on their faces, the stakes in Missouri and NFIB are enormous. These cases ask what steps the United States can realistically take to quell the spread of a disease that has already killed more than 820,000 Americans. But the full stakes in these cases are even higher.
South China Morning Post
[…] Over the weekend Jakarta temporarily halted coal exports to avoid outages at domestic electricity generators as local stockpiles hit critical lows.
Despite immediate concerns over energy security in the region, however, coal analysts said the ban was unlikely to last. But worries over supply disruptions prompted Japan to call for the ban to be revoked on Wednesday. Japan had been importing approximately 2 million tonnes of coal from Indonesia per month for power generation and manufacturing. […]
Other major importers like China and South Korea were able to shrug off the ban due to healthy local stockpiles and the availability of alternative sources. Indonesia is the world’s largest supplier of thermal coal, which is used for electricity generation.
Al Jazeera
Borrell vows EU’s ‘full support’ for Ukraine on front line visit
The European Union’s top diplomat has visited the front line of Ukraine’s war with Moscow-backed forces, promising “massive consequences and severe costs” for Russia if it launched a new military offensive against its neighbour.
Josep Borrell flew by helicopter to the easterly Luhansk region, the first EU High Representative to do so since the outbreak of the conflict in 2014, as part of a Western diplomatic push in support of Ukraine.
Kyiv and its allies have sounded the alarm about the build-up of tens of thousands of Russian troops and military equipment near Ukraine’s borders in recent weeks, raising fears of an open war between the two ex-Soviet neighbours.
Mexico sees rising COVID cases, especially in tourism hotspots
COVID-19 infections are rising across Mexico, especially in two coastal states home to major tourism destinations that were busy during the holiday season.
Mexican government data shows that Quintana Roo, where tourists flock to Cancun, Tulum and other spots along the Mayan Riviera, and Baja California Sur, which draws beachgoers to the twin Pacific resorts that make up Los Cabos, are experiencing some of their highest infection totals since the start of the pandemic.
Ars Technica
CDC muddles message on rapid tests while defending controversial guidance
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday offered mixed messages on the use of at-home rapid tests as the agency continued to defend its controversial recommendation that people with COVID-19 can leave isolation early without testing.
The CDC updated its guidance on isolation and quarantine periods last week. It shortened isolation periods for infected people from 10 days down to only five if their symptoms have cleared or are resolving by then and if they wear a mask for five days afterward. Notably, the agency did not hinge the recommendation on people getting tested after five days and only ending their isolation early if they receive a negative result.
The omission drew swift criticism from experts who argue that testing is vital to shortening isolation periods safely. Harvard epidemiologist and rapid-test advocate Dr. Michael Mina called the move "reckless," and virology expert Angela Rasmussen called the agency's reasoning "bullshit."