The Good News Roundup is where we come to restore ourselves, to remember that we are winning battles, to cheer ourselves up for the fight, and to encourage ourselves to keep going. There is plenty of bad news and we haven’t forgotten that, but there is light in the darkness, too, and a good news story may inspire us to take even further action.
On to the good news!
Nothing but Stormy Weather for Trump:
Today is [yesterday was] a major deadline for Donald Trump and this legal team, who must either disclose the debts Donald Trump owed his attorney Michael Cohen for his agreement with Stormy Daniels and any other similar hush-money pay-outs or double-down on a dicey legal strategy. The Ethics in Government Act establishes May 15 as the deadline for reporting any “liabilities that exceeded $10,000 at any time during calendar year 2017.”
Read the article. Trump isn’t getting out of this one. There’s no escape route for him.
Manafort loses in court, again:
A federal judge Tuesday rejected former Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's bid to dismiss a criminal indictment against him.
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecution of Manafort on charges of money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent for Ukraine was within the authority that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein granted to Mueller in May.
Mystery inauguration gift traced: (we can only hope Mueller spoke to them six months ago)
One of the largest contributions to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee in 2016 appears to have been orchestrated by a set of powerful conservative legal activists who have since been put in the driver’s seat of the administration’s push to select and nominate federal judges.
The $1 million inaugural gift came from a Northern Virginia company called BH Group, LLC. Unlike other generous corporate inaugural donors, like Bank of America and Dow Chemical, though, BH Group was a cipher, and likely was set up solely to prevent disclosure of the actual donor’s name.
[…]
“The public doesn’t know who is behind this million-dollar donation,” Brendan Fischer of the Campaign Legal Center wrote in an email, “but the Trump administration very likely does. Special interests tend to give to an inauguration in order to buy influence, so whomever is behind this $1 million check presumably made their identity known to the incoming administration.”
“It is hard to imagine,” he went on, “that this anonymous donor funded the inauguration simply because they were dying to see 3 Doors Down perform at the Lincoln Memorial.”
Cambridge Analytica under microscope at FBI:
After earning the ire of Facebook's 2 billion users, political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica is now under investigation from the FBI and Justice Department, according to a report.
The consultancy, which worked for Republicans including Sen. Ted Cruz and President Trump, has swirled around the edges of the investigation into alleged Russian meddling, though the New York Times reported Tuesday that there is a probe into Cambridge itself.
It was not immediately clear why the firm was being investigated, though the Times report said that witnesses have been questioned and told there is an open investigation into the firm and "associated U.S. persons."
The report added that questions to banks that dealt with the company suggest it is centered around its financial dealings.
Cohen caught in contradiction:
President Donald Trump's longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, claimed in a January 2017 interview that the Trump Organization had no recent relationship with Russia, months before admitting he had personally pursued a business deal there on behalf of the company during the 2016 presidential campaign.
[…]
Cohen told CNN that Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov did not respond to his emails. He also said that, before the proposal was abandoned, he discussed it with Trump three times and Trump signed a preliminary agreement for it in October 2015, well into his run for the presidency.
The owner of I.C. Expert Investment Company, a Russian company, also signed the document. Cohen said in a September 2017 statement to Congress the proposal "was not related in any way to Mr. Trump's presidential campaign."
Allies upset over Iran pact violation:
Even though the sides were reportedly close to an agreement in April, Trump decided to tear up the pact anyway, much to European leaders’ annoyance.
To make matters worse, the Post reports that French President Emanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson all believed Trump hadn’t even bothered to understand their concerns.
“When Macron, Merkel and Johnson traveled to Washington in the days and weeks before Trump’s announcement, all came away with the feeling Trump had not read the five-page document they had prepared and perhaps was even unaware of the effort,” the publication reports. “In Brussels, where the E.U. is headquartered, many are skeptical that any further discussion is possible with the United States.”
Grassley breaks ranks:
Republican Senator Chuck Grassley on Tuesday said Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt must scale back the use of biofuels waivers for small refineries, or else he will join other lawmakers calling for Pruitt’s resignation.
Wilbur Ross says no mad cow disease in U.S. beef:
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross offered up himself and President Trump as prime evidence that there’s no reason to be concerned about the safety of US beef.
Ross shot down concerns raised by the Chinese in recent trade talks that American beef was tainted with mad cow disease and hailed Trump’s mental health as proof the meat is safe.
“I pointed out to them that both the president and I eat quite a lot of American beef,” Ross said at the National Press Club Monday.
“And other than the fact that we’re in public office, there are no signs of mental instability as a result.”
Irony: a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character's words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character.
Elections: Pennsylvania flipped a house seat to the Democrats!
Republicans lose suit to have 127 Democratic candidates thrown off the ballot in Texas.
Nope, this isn’t a link. That’s not a mistake. I heard this on Monday night directly from the Democratic party chair involved and her lead lawyer.
The Dallas County Republican Party sued the Dallas County Democratic Party in Texas because they wanted to get 127 Democratic candidates thrown off the ballot. Their excuse was that the County Chair, Carol Donovan, did not personally sign the ballot applications. Unfortunately for the Republican Party, Texas election code doesn’t require the County Chair to sign the ballot applications, so the case was dismissed, and the Dallas County Republican Party is required to pay the $50,000 attorneys’ fees to the Dallas County Democratic Party, and the Republican County Chair, Missy Shorey, is also “jointly and severably liable” for the attorneys’ fees. Thus endeth the frivolous lawsuit.
Also in Texas, the state has only until tomorrow to come up with a way to fix their voter registration problem:
The issue of online voter registration came back into focus this year with Garcia’s May 10 ruling on a 2016 case alleging that Texas is violating the decades-old national voting rights law. Texans can already register in person at Department of Public Safety offices, but not when they renew their licenses online.
The state's "excuse for noncompliance" — including purported technological difficulties associated with online voter registration — "is not supported by the facts or the law," Garcia wrote last week in a 61-page opinion, giving the state until Thursday to propose a detailed fix for the system.
That fix could mark Texas’ first avenue for online voter registration — one advocates say should be expanded to include the rest of the state's eligible voters.
North Carolina teachers go on strike today:
Thousands of teachers are set to hit the streets of North Carolina's capital on Wednesday, determined to force a political showdown over wages and funding priorities for public school classrooms in this conservative, tax-cutting state.
As many as 15,000 teachers were expected to defy forecasts of rain for a rally in Raleigh as the Republican-dominated state legislature begins its annual session. Previous strikes, walkouts and protests in West Virginia, Arizona, Kentucky, Colorado and Oklahoma have led legislators in each state to improve pay, benefits or overall school funding.
The state's main teacher advocacy group, the North Carolina Association of Educators, demands that legislators increase per-pupil spending to the national average in four years, increase school construction for a growing state, and approve a multiyear pay raise for teachers and school support staff that would raise incomes to the national average.
Uber gets woke:
Uber will no longer force customers, drivers or employees who claim they were sexually assaulted or harassed when using the ride-hailing service to pursue their cases behind closed doors, a move meant to make the company’s safety issues more transparent.
Scientists use renewable energy to make ammonia:
A UCF research team with collaborators at Virginia Tech have developed a new "green" approach to making ammonia that may help make feeding the rising world population more sustainable.
"This new approach can facilitate ammonia production using renewable energy, such as electricity generated from solar or wind," said physics Assistant Professor Xiaofeng Feng. "Basically, this new approach can help advance a sustainable development of our human society."
Tesla’s big battery wows Australia: (go read the whole article; it’s jaw-dropping)
“So, I thought I’d give you a few numbers from the market data,” [Co partner Godart] van Gendt said.
“In the first four months of operations of the Hornsdale Power Reserve (the official name of the Tesla big battery, owned and operated by Neoen), the frequency ancillary services prices went down by 90 per cent, so that’s 9-0 per cent.
“And the 100MW battery has achieved over 55 per cent of the FCAS revenues in South Australia. So it’s 2 per cent of the capacity in South Australia achieving 55 per cent of the revenues in South Australia. . . .”
New lead test will allow people to check drinking water at home:
A research team from the Department of Chemistry of Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) has invented a portable device for one-stop detection of lead concentration in drinking water. The DNA-based device, which works together with a smartphone, can accurately detect lead concentration in less than 10 minutes. Compared with traditional detection methods, it is much quicker, lower in cost, and highly accurate.
[…]
Currently, the only way for people to check if water is contaminated with lead is via remote laboratories equipped with detection technology. This method is expensive, and takes three to four days to get a result. The new method invented by the team enables users to check their drinking water without prior training. The user simply takes a drop from the sample, puts it on the test strip and slides it into the device, then checks the signal result (brightness) with a smartphone app.
Facebook deletes fake accounts:
The social network released its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the first time on Tuesday, detailing how many spam posts it's deleted and how many fake accounts it's taken down in the first quarter of 2018. In a blog post on Facebook, Guy Rosen, Facebook's vice president of product management, said the social network disabled about 583 million fake accounts during the first three months of this year -- the majority of which, it said, were blocked within minutes of registration.
That's an average of over 6.5 million attempts to create a fake account every day from Jan. 1 to March 31. Facebook boasts 2.2 billion monthly active users, and if Facebook's AI tools didn't catch these fake accounts flooding the social network, its population would have swelled immensely in just 89 days.
That’s all for today. Stay strong!