Overnight News Digest: Exxon ensures global climate goals will fail

Exxon says global climate goals are destined to fail

Grist

Exxon Mobil projected that greenhouse-gas emissions and the efforts to keep the planet’s temperature from rising beyond an increase of 2 degrees Celsius by 2050 is destined to fail in a report released by the oil giant on Monday.

Oil and natural gas are projected to meet more than half of the world’s energy needs in 2050, or 54 percent, because of their “utility as a reliable and lower-emissions source of fuel for electricity generation, hydrogen production, and heating,” according to the Houston-based company.

The report stated carbon emissions stemming from burning fossil fuels and energy consumption will drop to 25 billion metric tons in 2050, due to the rise of renewable energy sources, decline of coal, and improvements in energy efficiency. This is expected to bring down energy consumption by 26 percent from a peak of 34 billion metric tons projected sometime in the current decade. But despite that decline in emissions, the worldwide carbon output is predicted to rise well above the levels the United Nations’ climate-science advisory body says would limit the effects of climate change.

Climate-changing human activity may cause 1 billion deaths

Western University

If global warming reaches or exceeds two degrees Celsius by 2100, Western University’s Joshua Pearce says it is likely mainly richer humans will be responsible for the death of roughly one billion mainly poorer humans over the next century.

The oil and gas industry, which includes many of the most profitable and powerful businesses in the world, is directly and indirectly responsible for more than 40 per cent of carbon emissions – impacting the lives of billions of people, many living in the world’s most remote and low-resourced communities.

A Western-led study proposes aggressive energy policies that would enable immediate and substantive decreases to carbon emissions and recommends a heightened level of government, corporate and citizen action to accelerate the decarbonization of the global economy, aiming to minimize the number of projected human deaths.

“Such mass death is clearly unacceptable. It’s pretty scary really, especially for our children,” said Pearce, Western’s John M. Thompson Chair in Information Technology and Innovation and lead author of the study. “When climate scientists run their models and then report on them, everybody leans toward being conservative, because no one wants to sound like Doctor Doom. We’ve done that here too and it still doesn’t look good.”

When Plants Can No Longer Stand the Heat, We’re in Trouble

Mother Jones

Around the world, leaves play a critical central role in staving off the worst impacts of climate change. Their ability trap CO2 and combine it with water and sunlight to make food and oxygen is a critical part of what keeps life on Earth going. But according to a new study published in Nature, some tropical forests—including the Amazon rainforest—could become too hot for leaves to photosynthesize.

The Amazon rainforest was once one of the world’s most powerful carbon sinks, largely a result of its uniquely dense tree cover. But deforestation has slowly eaten away at its edges, and drought and fire have limited rainforests’ ability to withstand extreme temperatures. The Amazon was even a net carbon emitter for the first time in 2021. Still, the Amazon covers a land area roughly twice the size of India, and is among the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, with over 3 million species of flora and fauna.

All that could be lost if temperatures continue to increase, potentially turning once-lush tropical forests into a savannah-like plain. According to the study, photosynthesis in tropical trees begins to fail at about 116 degrees F.

We could be 16 years into a methane-fueled 'termination' event significant enough to end an ice age

Live Science

A dramatic spike in atmospheric methane over the past 16 years may be a sign that Earth's climate could flip within decades, scientists have warned.

Large amounts of methane wafting from tropical wetlands into Earth's atmosphere could trigger warming similar to the "termination" events that ended ice ages — replacing frosty expanses of tundra with tropical savanna, a new study finds. Researchers first detected a strange peak in methane emissions in 2006, but until now, it was unclear where the gas was leaking from and if it constituted a novel trend.

"A termination is a major reorganization of the Earth's climate system," study lead author Euan Nisbet, a professor emeritus of Earth sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London, told Live Science. "These repeated changes have taken the world from ice ages into the sort of interglacial we have now."

'Couldn't believe it': Floridians emerge from Idalia's destruction with hopes to recover

Tallahassee Democrat

Deborah Green wept when describing what Hurricane Idalia did to her town.

"I saw all the power lines down and the trees and buildings. ... I just didn't know what we were coming back to," she said. Green, her husband and six children had fled as the ferocious storm approached Perry, a small mill town located just inland from the coast where Idalia made landfall.

Like many Florida residents whose homes and towns felt the brunt of Idalia's winds and storm surge, the Greens saw tough evidence of the storm's power. Idalia arrived as a high-end Category 3 hurricane with maximum sustained winds near 125, splitting trees in half, ripping roofs off hotels and turning small cars into boats before sweeping into Georgia and South Carolina.

When they came back to Perry on Wednesday afternoon, Green family members were happy that their home was still largely intact. But the sight of the destruction in many other parts of town was overwhelming.

Climate change, warming oceans causing more rapid intensification in hurricanes

CBC News

Hurricane Idalia slammed into the area of Big Bend, Fla., early Wednesday morning as a Category 3 storm, bringing high winds, extreme storm surge and tornadoes to cities along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

But what was more surprising is that it took just over 24 hours for it to strengthen from a Category 1 hurricane to a Category 4, before it finally lost some steam as it ran into the Florida Panhandle.

Hurricanes get their fuel mainly from warm ocean waters, and as more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, both the Earth's temperature and the sea surface temperature (SST) rise.

This Hurricane Season Is Unprecedented

The Atlantic

[…] This hurricane season has been a weird one, because two opposing trends are driving storm dynamics. The planet is in an El Niño year, a natural, periodic climate phenomenon that tends to suppress hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin. (That doesn’t mean zero hurricanes; this Atlantic season has already witnessed more hurricanes than is normal for this time of year, though none of them caused major damage in the United States prior to Idalia.)

But we’re also in a very hot year, on track to becoming the warmest on record. Earth’s oceans have been warmer this summer than at any other time in modern history. The Gulf of Mexico has been particularly hot; climate experts have described recent temperatures there as “surreal.” Global temperatures are usually higher during El Niño events, but “all of these marine heat waves are made warmer because of climate change,” Dillon Amaya, a research scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Physical Sciences Laboratory, told me earlier this summer. And hot seawater tends to supercharge hurricanes that do form by warming up the air above the ocean’s surface.

We’ve never seen a year quite like this, with its particular mix of extreme ocean temperatures and El Niño conditions—which means no one knew exactly how bad this season’s storms could be.

Climate change makes wildfires in California more explosive

NPR News

During some of the worst hours in Camp Fire, which in 2018 burned the town of Paradise, California to the ground, the fire was growing so fast it ate up 10,000 acres within just 90 minutes.

Wildfires like the Camp Fire that intensify and spread enormously within a single day, hour, or even minutes, keep fire experts up at night. Now a new study, published Wednesday in Nature, uses a machine-learning model to show that climate change has nudged the risk of  fast-spreading fires up by about 25% on average in California. That's compared to a time before humans heated up Earth's atmosphere by burning vast amounts of fossil fuels.

"We're seeing the impact of climate change for the first time on that high-resolution fire behavior," says Patrick Brown, the study's lead author and a climate scientist at Berkeley's Breakthrough Institute.

Our forests have reached a tipping point

Canada’s National Observer

This year's coast-to-coast wildfires in Canada have already emitted an estimated one-and-a-half billion tonnes of CO2. That's triple the annual climate pollution from burning fossil fuels in Canada. It's more than the combined emissions from 100 nations. And there are still months of fire season looming ahead. […]

Any guesses on how many Canadian gasoline-burning cars we must take off the road to offset that much CO2? All of them. Plus all our heavy-duty freight trucks and every other form of fossil-fuelled road transport. Oh, and we also must stop burning natural gas in every Canadian home.

Even that might not be enough. Because, as the chart shows, average emissions from our managed forest are running even higher so far in the current decade. The first time Canada's forest carbon emissions exceeded 300 MtCO2 in a single year was in 2021. And this year's emissions are already double that record.

There is this feel-good myth in Canada that our massive forest is offsetting some of our massive fossil fuel emissions. That might have been true decades ago under our old, stable climate. But we’ve so weakened our forest — through decades of business-as-usual industrial logging and fossil-fuelled climate shifts — that it has switched to hemorrhaging CO2 instead of absorbing it.

B.C. extends fire state of emergency, says drought could continue into next year

The Canadian Press via Toronto Star

British Columbia is extending its provincial state of emergency over devastating wildfires that are burning across the province while warning that drought conditions could last into 2024.

Emergency Management Minister Bowinn Ma said the extension of the state of emergency until Sept. 14 is needed in case additional extraordinary orders are required to respond to the more than 400 fires.

“I'd like to stress one more time that we are still in peak wildfire season. The rain that we experienced over the last couple of days has brought some relief to the south but the wildfire season continues," Ma said Thursday. […]

Approximately 80 per cent of B.C. is under a level four or five drought, the two highest designations.

The indiscriminate devastation of Canada's raging wildfires

BBC News

Joanna Kelly is a lawyer in Kelowna, and this week she's been given permission to appear in legal cases by video-link partly because she has very few formal clothes to wear. They, and most of her other possessions, went up in flames last week.

On her mobile phone, Joanna watches a grainy video of what used to be her house with Duncan Vickers - her friend and neighbour for decades. They're now evacuees in Canada's worst ever wildfire season.

Joanna says they had never seen anything like the inferno that tore through their Okanagan valley community, in the western province of British Columbia, destroying almost everything in its path, including their homes.

"It was blindingly bright and then it would get into a house," says Joanna, as she describes watching the wall of fire from a vantage point on the other side of the lake. "There was a raging fire going through a skeleton-like building and it went from one to the next until there were dozens of destroyed structures."

Scientists say study found a direct link between greenhouse gas emissions and polar bear survival

AP News

Fifteen years after polar bears were listed as threatened, a new study says researchers have overcome a roadblock in the Endangered Species Act that prevented the federal government from considering climate change when evaluating impacts of projects such as oil and gas drilling.

The act requires agencies to ensure projects they approve don’t further harm listed species. But a 2008 Department of Interior legal opinion said greenhouse gas emissions didn’t have to be considered because the impact from specific projects couldn’t be distinguished from that of all historic global emissions.

A study published Thursday in Science’s Policy Forum says scientists for the first time are able to directly quantify the impact of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions from specific sources on polar bear cub survival.

Falsehoods Follow Close Behind This Summer’s Natural Disasters

The New York Times

As natural disasters and extreme environmental conditions became more commonplace around the world this summer, scientists pointed repeatedly to a shared driver: climate change.

Conspiracy theorists pointed to anything but. […]

The claims can start with blog posts paid for by the oil and gas industry, or from rumors shared among neighbors. Online forums are filled with comments in multiple languages that reject both the science behind fossil fuel emissions and the scientists’ authority. Sometimes, they are amplified by top politicians and pundits — the Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, called climate change a “hoax” during the first primary debate last week.

“It’s really one of the worst challenges we have to deal with,” said Eleni Myrivili, the chief heat officer for the United Nations human settlements program, who also works on heat issues for the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center.

Amid record heat, even indoor factory workers enter dangerous terrain

The Washington Post

When temperatures in Thailand shot past 112 degrees earlier this year, the government issued extreme heat warnings for large swaths of the country. It wasn’t safe, officials said, to be outdoors.

But Rungnapa Rattanasri, 51, didn’t work outdoors.

She worked inside, on the second floor of a dilapidated garment factory with no fans or air-conditioning. For $10 a day, she cut and trimmed bolts of rayon in rooms where the ambient temperature regularly exceeded 100 degrees. One evening in May, near the end of what climatologists said was probably Southeast Asia’s longest and most brutal heat wave on record, Rungnapa said it felt as though the engine that kept her running had been emptied. “Inside here,” she said, circling her head and her chest with her palms, “Nothing left.”

Extreme heat caused by human-induced climate change has wreaked havoc on the bodies of outdoor workers, from delivery drivers in India to construction workers in Qatar. Now, heat scientists and labor researchers say even those who labor indoors are not safe. Across Southeast Asia’s manufacturing hubs, rising temperatures, mixed with high humidity, are leaving workers like Rungnapa baking in poorly ventilated sweatshops.

Climate change raising risks of financial disaster for homeowners, insurers and bankers

The Hill

The rising weather-related risks from climate change, from coastal hurricanes to western wildfires, are increasingly pinching insurance companies, which are raising rates and pulling back from parts of the country in an effort to stay in business. […]

Banks could be next, said Dennis Kelleher of public interest nonprofit Better Markets.

“The banking crisis is only right behind the climate and insurance crisis,” Kelleher told The Hill. “Every time an insurance company sounds an alarm, the banks ought to be shaking in their boots, because they’re getting the bill.”

Australian government acknowledges risk of climate change to bonds after court case

ABC News (Australia)

The federal government has agreed to settle a world-first court case accusing it of misleading investors by failing to disclose the risk climate change poses to its bonds.

In 2020, Melbourne woman Katta O'Donnell, then a 23-year-old law student, sued the federal government for allegedly deceiving investors, as part of a class action representing current and potential investors in government bonds.

The class action called for a public declaration that the Commonwealth had breached its duty to investors, by not disclosing information about how climate change could hurt the value of government bonds.

However, in the proposed settlement terms published today, the government has agreed to publish a statement acknowledging that climate change is a "systemic risk" that may affect the value of its bonds.

In return, Ms O'Donnell will drop the request for a declaration of misleading conduct.

"The settlement is an important first step in realising the risks of climate change," Ms O'Donnell said.

There’s been a shift in how we think about climate change

Vox

Our actions today will determine just how bad climate change will become. But which emotions best drive a person to become politically active? Hope? Anger? Persevering through complacency? What if the fundamental challenge is actually our attention?

This last question gets at a particular theory in psychology that has undergone a revolution in the past few years. It’s a hypothesis called the “finite pool of worry,” coined in 2006 by Elke Weber, a psychologist and Princeton University professor. It states that people can only handle so many negative events at a time. So when public concern about one issue rises, another concern should fall. The theory gained attention after the 2008 financial crisis for explaining why heightened economic worries led the public to tune out on climate.

But in the last few years, something wonkier has been going on. Polling did not find that concern about climate change shrank when the global Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, as theorists would have expected; it actually grew. According to researchers at Yale University and George Mason University, public understanding of the science that human activity is warming the planet increased in 2020, and has roughly maintained those levels since. The issue has especially risen in importance among Democratic voters, who overwhelmingly view climate change as a major threat.

Europe’s favourite wines could be wiped out by climate change

EuroNews

Climate change could wipe out Prosecco and other popular European wines, new research has warned. Prosecco - a sparkling white wine produced in Italy’s mountainside vineyards - is one of the continent’s most beloved drinks.

But grape yields are dwindling, devastated by a deadly combination of extreme weather and soil degradation. A new analysis - published in the iScience journal last month - describes the harvest as “fragile and under threat.’ […]

Other vintages like Burgundy, Grand Cru and Cabernet Sauvignon could also be under threat.

Wildfires force Sicilian winemakers to grapple with climate change

The Washington Post

The deadly wildfires raging in Sicily in July put the effects of climate change on tourism into high relief, as thousands struggled to flee the island while firefighters took on what they estimated were some 650 fires over a three-day period in late July. The fires also shined a light on another industry affected by climate change: wine. […]

In recent decades, Sicily has become Italy’s largest wine-producing region by landmass. Its Mediterranean climate and volcanic soil make it an ideal home to over 98,000 hectares of vineyards. […]

Rising temperatures in southern Italy linked to climate change, however, pose a growing risk to wine production. Extreme dry heat — including recent heat waves across the Mediterranean — and increasingly powerful wildfires, such as the ones in Catania and Palermo this summer, threaten to derail the still-developing industry and represent an obstacle to business as usual.

Maui fires could taint the island’s waters — scientists are investigating

Nature

As search crews wrap up the hunt for people missing after fires swept the Hawaiian island of Maui, scientists are gearing up for a challenge facing survivors: water contamination. Early indications suggest that the local water system has been compromised in places, and the sheer scale of the damage could pose unprecedented threats to Maui’s diverse coastal ecosystem.

So far, more than 100 people in Maui have been confirmed dead, making the wildfire that devastated the city of Lahaina the deadliest in modern US history. Hundreds more people are still unaccounted for. The fire damaged or destroyed an estimated 2,200 buildings, creating a toxic environment that is likely to affect water quality. The carcinogenic chemical benzene has turned up in the public water system in Lahaina, and local officials have advised residents not to drink tap water. Scientists also fear that contaminated runoff will flow onto the island’s sensitive coral reefs.

“We have had large fire events before, but this is a different beast,” says Chris Shuler, a hydrologist with the Water Resources Research Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, in Honolulu. “There’s no playbook for this. Everybody is just figuring it out as we go,” adds Shuler, who is based on Maui.

There’s Nothing Natural About Modern Meat

TruthDig

The culture war pitting plant-based meat against its animal-based counterpart rages on, it seems. Plant-based alternatives are called “ultra-processed,” “fake” and “synthetic” — juxtaposed against factory farmed animal meat that’s touted as “all natural” and “single ingredient.” […]

Those oft-invoked images of small family farms, rolling bucolic pastures and friendly neighborhood abattoirs are far from reality across most of today’s food system. More than 70 percent of the world’s meat comes from factory farms. The setting usually features massive windowless sheds and packed dusty lots run more by technology than humans — mechanized, production line-style slaughterhouses that use gas chambers and electricity to kill more animals per day than ever before. In other words, in most of the world, animal agriculture is anything but natural. […]

About a third of all corn grown in the U.S. (the nation’s top crop), is used for animal feed while about 60 percent of all soybean meal produced in the US also goes to feeding farmed animals. On a global scale nearly 80 percent of the world’s soybeans go to animals farmed for food.

A B.C. study gave 50 homeless people $7,500 each. Here's what they spent it on.

CTV News

A new B.C.-based study undercuts the persistent stereotype that homeless people can't be trusted with cash, according to the lead researcher who says it also highlights a different way to respond to the crisis.

Dr. Jiaying Zhao, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, was part of a team that gave 50 homeless people in Vancouver $7,500 and then followed them for a year. […]

"When we talk to these people, they know exactly what they need to do to get back to housing and they just don't have the money," Zhao said.

"They did not spend more money on alcohol or drugs, contrary to what people believe, and instead they spent the money on rent, food, housing, transit, furniture, a used car, clothes. It's entirely the opposite of what people think they're going to do with the money."

The participants who were given cash were compared with 65 homeless people who did not get the payment. Those who got the payment did not spend more money on "temptation goods," spent 99 fewer days homeless, increased their savings and spent less time in shelters which "saved society" $777 per person, according to a news release from UBC.

Texas National Guardsman fires into Mexico, wounds man

Army Times / The Texas Tribune

A National Guard member on duty at the Texas-Mexico border in El Paso fired across the Rio Grande, injuring a 37-year-old Mexican man in Ciudad Juárez on Saturday night, according to the Texas Military Department and Mexican news outlets.

“On the night of 26 August, a National Guard Servicemember assigned to Operation Lone Star discharged a weapon in a border-related incident,” a spokesperson for the military department said in a statement. “The incident is under investigation. More information will be made available as the investigation progresses.”

According to El Diario, a Spanish language newspaper in Juárez, Darwin José García of the southern Mexican state of Veracruz initially told authorities that he was seeking to enter the United States. At the hospital, however, he said he was practicing a sport on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande around 8:50 p.m. Saturday while a group of migrants were crossing the river. García said he then heard shots and realized he had been shot in the leg, the newspaper reported.

Counteroffensive critics can 'shut up

EuroNews

Naysayers about Ukraine's summer counteroffensive against Russian forces can "shut up", Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Thursday.

"Criticising the slowness of the counteroffensive amounts to spitting in the face of the Ukrainian soldiers who have sacrificed their lives", he said on the sidelines of a meeting between foreign ministers in Spain.

“I suggest everyone who criticises [us] to shut up, come to Ukraine and try to free up a square centimetre on your own,” Kuleba added. […]

Kyiv has encountered stiff resistance, with Moscow having many months to prepare its defences, including trenches, anti-tank traps and minefields stretching hundreds of kilometres.

Russia delivers tactical nukes to Belarus, says military intelligence chief

The Kyiv Independent

Russia recently delivered nuclear weapons to Belarus, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov said in an interview with 1+1 channel, published on Aug. 31.

Budanov also said the Russian Defense Ministry’s 12th Main Directorate responsible for nuclear weapons acknowledged Belarus's “complete unpreparedness for the operating” of these nukes.

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin claimed in mid-June that the first tactical nuclear weapons had arrived in Belarus.

"The first warheads were delivered just a few days ago. Prior to that, extensive exercises were conducted with nuclear simulators. I read the original documents regarding the exercise results. Quite unfavorable documents for Belarus," Budanov said, referring to Russia’s report on the nuclear simulators for the Iskander missile system exercise.

EU reckons with Africa policy after wave of coups

Deutsche Welle

EU foreign and defense ministers meeting in Spain after the European summer break were preoccupied with a wave of coups in western African countries, notably in Niger but most recently in Gabon, that underline the bloc's waning influence and policy failures in the Sahel region and beyond.

"It's clear that the coup in Niger is opening a new era of instability in a region that was already very fragile," top EU diplomat Josep Borrell told reporters in Toledo on Wednesday, the first day of the two-day gathering.

While military coups were never a solution, the case of Gabon differed from that of Niger, the former Spanish foreign minister noted. In Gabon, which is not part of the Sahel and has been led by two members of the same family for over 50 years, there were doubts about the validity of the recent election, Borrell stressed.

Military Coup in Gabon Seen as Part of Broader Revolt Against France & Neo-Colonialism in Africa

Democracy Now

Military leaders in Gabon seized power on Wednesday shortly after reigning President Ali Bongo had been named the winner of last week’s contested election. Bongo and his family have led the country for close to 60 years, during which they have been accused of enriching themselves at the expense of the country.

The military junta announced General Brice Oligui Nguema would serve as transitional leader in what is the latest military coup in a former French colony, joining recent power shifts in Niger, Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Chad. “The independence of Gabon has never been real,” says Thomas Deltombe, French journalist and expert on the French African empire.

“I think we might be witnessing a second independence, a new decolonization process.”

Joburg fire: City still investigating what caused blaze that killed 74

News 24 (South Africa)

Officials have yet to determine what caused the blaze which ripped through a hijacked building in Marshalltown, Johannesburg, in the early hours of Thursday, killing at least 74 people.

Because of the maze of erected plots in the building, many residents could not escape when the fire started on the bottom floor. Rescue teams said most of the bodies were found piled up in front of a locked gate on the bottom floor. [...]

Council speaker Colleen Makhubele added around 200 families lived in the building, which once housed 100 women.

Suicide bomber targets army convoy in northwest Pakistan

Al Jazeera

At least nine soldiers have been killed and five wounded in a suicide attack on a security convoy in northwest Pakistan. The military said security forces had cordoned off the area.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack on Thursday in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province’s Bannu district.

A “motorcycle borne suicide bomber exploded himself” about 61km (37 miles) from the border with Afghanistan, the army’s media wing said.

Proud Boy Joe Biggs sentenced to 17 years, Zachary Rehl gets 15

Empty Wheel

[…] At the E. Barrett Prettyman courthouse in Washington, D.C. this afternoon, U.S. District Judge Tim Kelly sentenced Proud Boy and former InfoWars contributor convicted of seditious conspiracy, Joseph Biggs, to 17 years in prison.

Prosecutors called for 33 years for Biggs, so Kelly’s decision came considerably under that total but Kelly did find that Biggs’ tearing down of a metal fence with co-defendant Ethan Nordean that was meant to keep the mob at bay, constituted a terrorism enhancement. It was this deliberate effort, Kelly found, that allowed the Proud Boys to achieve their objective: to stop the certification of the 2020 election by force.

Proud Boy Zachary Rehl’s sentencing hearing began at 2:15 p.m ET. Prosecutors sought 30 years and on Thursday, the court found that because he committed perjury on the stand the guidelines would shift to 30 years to life. But in the end, Judge Kelly sentenced Rehl to 15 years in prison.

Trump pleads not guilty, says he can’t be ready for trial in October

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Donald Trump pleaded not guilty on Thursday to the 13 criminal charges recently handed up against him by a Fulton County grand juryand also a asked a judge to delay his trial until after the Oct. 23 start date set for at least one of his co-defendants.

The flurry of legal action came in in a pair of brief court filings from his new lead Atlanta attorney, Steve Sadow.

In asking for Trump’s case to be severed from that of lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who has demanded a speedy trial, Sadow said that he is already committed to another two-to-three week trial taking place in Florida during that window. He also said he did not have enough time to prepare.

Democrats Push to Subpoena Jared Kushner’s Saudi-Backed Investment Firm

RollingStone

House Oversight Democrats  are calling on committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) to use his subpoena power to investigate the foreign business dealings of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner— an investigation Comer has been personally stalling for more than a year.

Since Republicans gained control of the House in 2022, Comer has focused the bulk of the Oversight Committee’s work on a sprawling probe into President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden.

But earlier this month, Comer himself acknowledged that Kushner had “crossed the line of ethics” in his foreign business dealings, a statement Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) is looking to capitalize on.

Justice Clarence Thomas discloses trips paid for by billionaire Harlan Crow

NBC News

Amid a renewed focus on Supreme Court ethics, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas disclosed trips that were paid for by his billionaire friend Harlan Crow, in his annual financial disclosure report Thursday.

Among his activities in 2022 that he reported on, Thomas noted that Crow paid for his travel to a conservative conference in Dallas in May last year. Thomas spoke at the event, which was held at a facility owned by Crow’s real estate company. Crow also provided a return flight from Dallas in February following an ice storm, Thomas reported.

Thomas also said Crow paid for a trip to the Adirondacks in New York state in July 2022.

Toot on August 31, 2023

Robert Reich

Thanks to the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling this May, the EPA was forced to remove protections from most of America's wetlands this week.

Harlan Crow's firm lobbied for the rollback while he secretly plied Justice Thomas with gifts.

Anyone see a problem here?

GOP senators weigh ‘special’ meeting on their leadership after McConnell’s freeze

Politico

A handful of GOP senators are weighing whether to force a fraught internal debate about their leadership’s future after Mitch McConnell’s second public freeze-up in a month.

Some rank-and-file Republicans have discussed the possibility of a broader conversation once senators return to Washington next week, according to a person directly involved in the conversations who confirmed them on condition of anonymity. Party leadership is not currently involved in those discussions, and nothing has been decided yet, this person added.

Texas AG Ken Paxton pursued perks beyond impeachment allegations, ex-staffers say

AP via The Dallas Morning News

Unexplained Caribbean and European trips that cost taxpayers more than $90,000. A $600 sports coat paid for by an event organizer. A $45 office Christmas cake taken as his own.

These are among the perks that Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton‘s former employees say he reveled in while using his office in ways that now have him facing a federal criminal investigation and potential ouster over allegations of corruption.

Paxton’s impeachment trial that starts Tuesday covers years of highly publicized scandal, criminal charges and whistleblower accounts from his inner circle.

California’s COVID comeback intensifies, but officials say there’s no cause for alarm

Los Angeles Times

[…] COVID-19 is making a comeback in California. Coronavirus levels in wastewater are on the rise in the state’s most populated areas, and hospitalizations continue to increase as residents return from trips and head back to school.

The latest rebound, seen both in public health data and at-home tests, has led some to question what — if any — new measures they should consider taking to protect themselves. With Labor Day weekend right around the corner, some may wonder whether they should scale back or alter their plans.

But though residents should be aware of current trends, and the steps they can take to reduce their risk of infection, the higher transmission rates aren’t “a cause for alarm,” said Los Angeles County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer.

Gardens blooming with endangered plants could prove a boon to conservation

Science

[…] Conservationists have heralded the benefits of growing native species in yards and gardens. But the potential for gardeners to help slow biodiversity loss by planting threatened species has received less attention, says Ingmar Staude, a botanist at the University of Leipzig. He and his colleagues now report in Scientific Reports that if more gardeners opted for conservation-relevant species, the overall threat level for plants—defined as the ratio of at-risk plant species to all species—could fall by 25% across Germany. They suggest other countries could see similar benefits.

Staude and colleagues began by consulting the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Threatened Species for each of Germany’s 16 federal states, which have varying habitats. Next, they compared the red-listed species with a popular gardening database and found that nearly half—a total of 988 different plants—could be feasibly grown in gardens, public green spaces, on green roofs, or even in pots on balconies. […]

Although gardeners could create refuges for at-risk species, it isn’t clear whether garden-planted specimens can contribute to self-sustaining populations, notes Steve Head, an ecologist and founder patron of the Wildlife Gardening Forum in the United Kingdom. “Even if you can get these plants to reproduce in your garden, how does that help unless they can get out of your garden and spread?”

Federal health dept. says marijuana should be downgraded to Schedule 3 drug

Ars Technica