The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series chronicling the eschaton
Pelosi calls Trump’s actions ‘bribery’ as Democrats sharpen case for impeachment
Escalating her case for impeachment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday accused … Trump of committing bribery by seeking to use U.S. military aid as leverage to persuade the Ukrainian government to conduct investigations that could politically benefit Trump.
The shift toward bribery as an impeachable offense, one of only two crimes specifically cited in the Constitution, comes after nearly two months of debate over whether Trump’s conduct amounted to a “quid pro quo” — a lawyerly Latin term describing an exchange of things of value.
Wednesday’s public testimony from two senior diplomats, Pelosi (D-Calif.) said, “corroborated evidence of bribery uncovered in the inquiry and that the president abused power and violated his oath by threatening to withhold military aid and a White House meeting in exchange for an investigation into his political rival.”
How Adam Schiff avoided a circus
[…] The California Democrat kept control of the hearing, just as he’s kept the inquiry on track. Schiff, a former prosecutor, has earned a reputation as both a more effective questioner than Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, who held the gavel during Lewandowski’s appearance, and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel. Both are New Yorkers.
Schiff, 59, exudes a more-in-sadness-than-in-anger demeanor than his counterparts, which makes it harder to paint the inquiry as overzealous. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a strong Schiff supporter and fellow Californian, has tried to set what she calls a “prayerful” tone. “I do think that we need to have a common narrative,” she told her members yesterday morning before the hearing, according to someone in the room. “This is a very serious event in our country. We wish it could have been avoided. None of us came here to impeach a president.”
Republicans are eager to paint impeachment as highly partisan and portray Democrats as obsessed with impeachment since Trump won the 2016 election
Los Angeles Times
Santa Clarita shooting: Students heard shots and ran. ‘When I go home, I’m going to cry’
The message flashed across the screen on Joy Songcuan’s phone just after 8 a.m., prompting confusion, and then fear.
“I’m OK,” the text from his son read, “don’t worry.”
At first, Songcuan didn’t know what his son, Karl, a freshman at Saugus High School, was talking about. Then another text came through.
“There’s a shooting.”
Trump asks Supreme Court to shield his tax returns from investigators
… Trump asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to shield him from a New York grand jury’s demand to see his tax returns and other financial records, setting the stage for a constitutional clash over whether the president has “absolute immunity” from being investigated or prosecuted.
It is the first of two appeals from Trump that seek to protect his tax returns from investigators. The House Oversight Committee has been seeking the same records, and on Wednesday, the full U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington refused to block the subpoena. Trump’s lawyers said they would appeal that case to the Supreme Court as well.
The justices are not required to hear Trump’s appeal or to decide the cases. But the pair of appeals when put together raise significant questions about the constitutional separation of powers and whether the president has a privacy right to shield his personal records from congressional investigators or state prosecutors.
If the justices vote to hear Trump’s plea, it could result in a major election-year ruling on whether a president is above the law while in office.
The Seattle Times
Boeing abandons its failed fuselage robots on the 777X, handing the job back to machinists
After enduring a manufacturing mess that spanned six years and cost millions of dollars as it implemented a large-scale robotic system for automated assembly of the 777 fuselage, Boeing has abandoned the robots and will go back to relying more on its human machinists.
Boeing said Wednesday it is adopting a different approach that “has proven more reliable, requiring less work by hand and less rework, than what the robots were capable of.”
The robotic system entailed holding the large curved metal panels that make up the 777 fuselage sections right-side up in a cradle as the moving robots stitched the panels together, drilling holes and adding tens of thousands of fasteners.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Sugar beet harvest is the worst in decades in parts of Minnesota, North Dakota
This fall’s sugar beet harvest is the worst in decades in northwestern Minnesota and North Dakota, another blow in a difficult year for American farmers and one that is quickly rippling through the nation’s food supply.
The reason: rain and snow kept farmers in much of the region out of fields until the sugar beet crop had been damaged by frost. And the problem for sugar supplies broadly was made worse by the cold snap earlier this week that extended deep into the southern U.S., where sugar cane harvests were also harmed.
As a result, sugar prices have been rising in commodity trading this week on expectations that U.S. farmers won’t be able to meet demand and food producers will have to turn to imports.
The Denver Post
Colorado Republican Ken Buck: “It’s not impeachable” to request foreign investigation of political rival
U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, a Windsor Republican and chair of the Colorado Republican Party, says it’s not an impeachable offense for the president of the United States to ask a foreign government to investigate his political rival, and he doubts that is what … Donald Trump asked of Ukraine.
“Whether it’s appropriate or not, the voters can decide. It’s not impeachable,” the congressman said in a phone interview Thursday morning, a day after public hearings in the impeachment inquiry began.
The congressman declined to say whether he believes it’s appropriate for a president to ask such a favor, calling that a hypothetical scenario.
CNN
Russian spies likely intercepted ambassador's cell phone call with Trump
US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland's cell phone call to … Donald Trump from a restaurant in Ukraine this summer appears to be a shocking security breach that raises significant counterintelligence concerns, according to several former officials, who told CNN there is a high probability that intelligence agencies from numerous foreign countries, including Russia, were listening in on the conversation.
"If true, the cell phone call between Ambassador Sondland and … Trump is an egregious violation of traditional counterintelligence practices that all national security officials -- to include political appointee ambassadors such as Sondland -- are repeatedly made aware of," according to Marc Polymeropoulos, a former CIA officer who oversaw operations in Europe and Russia before retiring this summer.
"I cannot remember in my career any time where an ambassador in a high counterintelligence environment like Kiev would have such an unsecure conversation with a sitting president. This just should not happen," he said.
Trump hikes price tag for US forces in Korea almost 500% as Seoul questions alliance
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper landed in South Korea on Thursday to navigate renewed threats from an "enraged" North Korea and newly heightened strain in the alliance with Seoul that congressional aides, lawmakers and Korea experts say has been caused by … Donald Trump.
Trump is demanding that South Korea pay roughly 500% more in 2020 to cover the cost of keeping US troops on the peninsula, a congressional aide and an administration official confirmed to CNN.
The price hike has frustrated Pentagon officials and deeply concerned Republican and Democratic lawmakers, according to military officials and congressional aides. It has angered and unnerved Seoul, where leaders are questioning US commitment to their alliance and wondering whether Trump will pull US forces if they don't pay up.
Houston Chronicle
Don't expect Houston to budge on tougher floodplain rules, recovery czar says
Houston’s proposal to tighten development rules in flood-prone areas should be thoroughly discussed, but is not necessarily likely to change, the city’s Hurricane Harvey recovery czar said Friday.
Mayor Sylvester Turner’s administration has proposed that new buildings within the 500-year floodplain be placed two feet above the projected water level in a 500-year flood. Current rules, which apply only within the riskier 100-year floodplain, stipulate that buildings be constructed one foot above the flood level in a 100-year storm.
Industry groups and some residents have pushed back on the changes, with some saying the city should provide more data to justify its proposals.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Voters say support for David Perdue depends on Democratic opponent
Many Georgia voters are waiting to see which Democrat is nominated to run against U.S. Sen. David Perdue before deciding if they will back him for another term, according to a recent poll conducted exclusively for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
About 35% of voters said they support Perdue, a Republican, and 21% would back a generic Democratic opponent. However, another 41% said it depends on who the Democratic nominee is. […]
Zoa Hepburn, a 32-year-old bartender who lives in Atlanta, is a Democrat who says she has “zero interest” in voting for Perdue.
“I don’t think he’s a great person,” she said. “I obviously don’t personally know him, but he seems to echo a lot of what Trump says, which sort of disgusts me. ... I guess I just can’t imagine standing behind anybody who stands behind Trump, basically.”
Vox
Coverage of the first impeachment hearing illustrates how the media is falling short
The first public impeachment hearing on Wednesday featured testimony from two State Department officials, Bill Taylor and George Kent, who detailed why they concluded that … Donald Trump’s Ukraine policy was not about the national interest, but about digging up dirt on his political opponents. It also included a new revelation about a July phone call involving Trump that indicated just how focused the president was on cajoling the Ukrainian government into undertaking politically beneficial investigations.
The proceedings got to the very core of what the office of the presidency is supposed to be about in our country. It was the stuff of history. But to hear Reuters and NBC tell it, one of the major faults of the hearing was that it simply lacked pizzazz.
Both outlets were roundly dragged for posting news analysis stories that focused on the entertainment value (or purported lack thereof) of the hearing. NBC’s piece, authored by Jonathan Allen, claimed that the hearing “lacked the pizazz necessary to capture public attention” — a turn of phrase that quickly became a meme and echoed the talking points Trump family members and administration officials used.
America’s wilderness is for sale
Northeastern Minnesota is home to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), a network of thousands of pristine lakes that have been federally protected since 1968. The protections are so strong that you can’t build a road inside the 1 million acres of wilderness. You also can’t fly a plane over it without federal approval and you can’t drive a boat with a motor. The experience of being in a place without a human footprint draws more than 200,000 visitors a year to the region.
But just outside of this wilderness area is one of the largest untapped sources of copper in the world. A 2018 decision by the Trump administration to remove a ban on mineral extraction within the Superior National Forest paved the way for a Chilean copper mining company (whose CEO is also Ivanka Trump’s landlord) to open a mine near the BWCAW.
The policy shift has mired the region in the age-old jobs vs environment debate. On the one hand, the prospect of well-paying mining jobs for this economically depressed region is alluring. But if the mine opens it could threaten another industry that depends on the wilderness staying intact: recreation and tourism.
The Trump administration’s decision to remove protections from the Superior National Forest is part of a broader policy shift away from conservation and in favor of extractive industries.
AP News
Court rules Trump EPA unlawfully ignored dangerous chemicals
The Trump administration unlawfully excluded millions of tons of some of the most dangerous materials in public use from a safety review, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency must consider dangers posed by asbestos, lead and other toxins regardless of whether they’re still being manufactured.
Millions of tons of those chemicals are in the marketplace, in products ranging from home insulation and fire retardant to house paint and plumbing pipes.
Nielsen says 13.8 million watched impeachment hearing
An estimated 13.8 million people watched live coverage of diplomats William Taylor and George Kent on the first day of the House’s public impeachment hearings on … Donald Trump.
The Nielsen company said 10 different networks aired live or taped coverage of the hearing, which stretched nearly six hours on Wednesday. A second hearing is scheduled for Friday.
That compares to the 20.4 million people who watched Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing for his Supreme Court nomination following sexual misconduct allegations in September 2018. Congressional testimony by James Comey (19.5 million) and Michael Cohen (13.8 million) also had more viewers. Former special counsel Robert Mueller had 12.9 million viewers in July.
Bloomberg
Giuliani Faces U.S. Probe on Campaign Finance, Lobbying Breaches
Rudy Giuliani, … Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is being investigated by federal prosecutors for possible campaign finance violations and a failure to register as a foreign agent as part of an active investigation into his financial dealings, according to three U.S. officials.
The probe of Giuliani, which one official said could also include possible charges on violating laws against bribing foreign officials or conspiracy, presents a serious threat to Trump’s presidency from a man that former national security adviser John Bolton has called a “hand grenade.”
A second official said Giuliani’s activities raise counterintelligence concerns as well, although there probably wouldn’t be a criminal charge related to that. The officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, provided the first indication of the potential charges under investigation.
Goldman Eyes Real Estate Investments Away From Coastal Cities
Institutional investors see opportunities in real estate in mid-size U.S. cities away from the coasts.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is eyeing markets including Denver, Austin and Nashville, Jeffrey Fine, a managing director at the firm’s merchant-banking division, said Thursday at a conference hosted by the NYU School of Professional Studies.
“Companies are moving there, young people are moving there, there’s an affordability component to it,” Fine said. “We’re looking at places in Texas where taxes are having a big, big, big impact.”
The Guardian
Outcry after Facebook sponsors gala featuring Brett Kavanaugh
Facebook is facing criticism for sponsoring the annual gala dinner of the Federalist Society, the powerful rightwing legal group behind the nomination of conservative supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The world’s largest social media company is listed as a “gold circle” sponsor of the 2019 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, and is featured in the guidebook app for the event, where Kavanaugh will be the keynote speaker on Thursday evening.
The Federalist Society has played a key role in the decades-long Republican strategy to pack US courts with conservatives, which has been advanced under Donald Trump’s administration. The group’s executive vice-president, Leonard Leo, advised the president on Kavanaugh’s controversial appointment.
Council leaders demand huge funding rise after floods
Leaders of councils across northern England have called for “massive” increases in funding to deal with major incidents, as the Guardian learned that around 1,800 homes and businesses have been badly flooded in the region.
Dozens of weather warnings remain in place around the country, from Oxfordshire to Yorkshire and across the West Midlands, where more than 100 schools were forced to close on Thursday.
The mayor of the Sheffield city region, Dan Jarvis, described the flood-stricken village of Fishlake, near Doncaster, as having “the feel of a disaster movie”.
As flood-affected families braced for further downpours, the leaders of six councils demanded immediate and long-term financial support to recover from the devastation.
Deutsche Welle
Israel-Gaza truce breaks down
A fragile cease-fire between Israel and militants in Gaza broke down early Friday less than 24 hours after a truce was declared to end one of the biggest flare ups in violence in years.
The Israeli Defense Forces said Friday they had struck Islamic Jihad targets in the costal enclave in response to cross-border rocket fire.
EU bank to stop fossil fuel lending
The European Investment Bank (EIB) said on Thursday that its new energy lending policy, which was approved with "overwhelming" support, will bar funding for fossil fuel projects from the end of 2021.
"We will launch the most ambitious climate investment strategy of any public financial institution anywhere," the EIB's president, Werner Hoyer, said in a statement.
Energy projects applying for EIB funding will need to show they can produce one kilowatt hour of energy while emitting less than 250 grams of carbon dioxide, a move which bans traditional gas-burning power plants.
The Sydney Morning Herald
'Australians don't want to die from fires': rising risk of poor health due to climate change
The federal government's failure to address the damaging health effects of climate change including extreme heatwaves and intense bushfires is putting lives at risk, the authors of a major report warn.
There was little evidence to suggest Australia is acting effectively to mitigate the multiple heat-related risks for physical and mental health, environmental and health experts wrote in the Medical Journal of Australia-Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change report.
Victims left homeless by the NSW bushfire crisis organised a snap protest in Sydney this morning to demanding the NSW government take stronger action on climate change.
Australian researchers from the international consortium of 120 experts from 35 institutions urged the government to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Hong Kong uni students improvise weapons, walls as they await police action
Polytechnic University student Peggy sat with her back to a box of petrol bombs, neatly covered in plastic wrap, with a bucket of arrows to her side.
The footbridge was armed to the teeth, as dozens of students slept on mats or watched their smartphones.
Below was the road to Hong Kong's cross harbour tunnel at Hung Hom. The toll booths were set on fire twice on Thursday, but riot police, who shot tear gas at students firing arrows in the morning, stayed away on Thursday evening.
In the hours after police spokesman John Tse condemned Chinese University for becoming a "weapons factory", crude bomb making carried on feverishly here inside Polytechnic University.
NPR News
Why Climate Change Poses A Particular Threat To Child Health
When it comes to global health, the world has made remarkable strides over the past two decades. There has been unprecedented progress vaccinating kids, treating diseases and lifting millions out of poverty. The childhood death rate has been slashed in half since 2000. Adults are living an average 5 1/2 years longer.
Now scientists say these successes are under serious threat from climate change. The warning comes in a sweeping new study in the journal The Lancet. It's the latest in an annual — and evolving — effort by researchers from more than a dozen universities as well as the World Health Organization to track the health impacts of climate change.
They note that even as the world has been doing so much to improve health, climate change has also been underway — slowly pushing up the average temperatures experienced around the planet by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit compared with in preindustrial times, roughly around the mid-19th century.
'Deep, Dark Conspiracy Theories' Hound Some Civil Servants In Trump Era
After 43 years in the State Department, Anne Patterson got a plum job offer from the Pentagon and thought the opportunity would be an honorable way to cap her long career as a foreign service officer.
But then Patterson's nomination unleashed a torrent of articles in conservative media that painted her as a clandestine partisan or worse. And shortly after the headlines rocketed around the Internet, then-Defense Secretary Jim Mattis withdrew Patterson's nomination, and she eventually left government.
She was "trying to do her best to do her duty as she saw it, and in return just got these kind of nasty, baseless attacks," said Jerry Feierstein, who worked with Patterson for decades at the State Department.
Patterson's story showcases a growing trend in the Trump era: career civil servants enduring attacks on their credibility in conservative media. And it is more than just unflattering coverage. The campaigns against government workers have resulted in harassment, or in the case of the whistleblower at the heart of impeachment inquiry, death threats.
The Atlantic
The Second Moon Landing Was Much Rowdier
The journey was just as perilous. But the second American moon landing was less dramatic than the first, and there’s no better example of the change in mood than what the mission’s commander said as he stepped out onto the surface: “Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that’s a long one for me.”
That was Pete Conrad, the Neil Armstrong of Apollo 12. Conrad was indeed shorter than Armstrong, but the astronaut was trying to make a point. Back on Earth, a reporter had suggested that NASA told astronauts what to say, and Conrad was determined to prove her wrong.
Conrad could only get away with this because Apollo 12 was a sequel. The United States had pulled off the impossible feat four months earlier. The mission had been a massive success, and its crew members were deemed heroes.
All Great Civilizations Fall. Is America Next?
At its height, in the year A.D. 177, the Roman Empire seemed all but invincible. It was the most expansive political and social structure in Western civilization. Then it fell, in a manner so spectacular and swift as to belie its greatness.
Could the same fate be in store for America? In a new episode of The Idea File, staff writer James Fallows explores the possibility that the collapse of our superpower may be imminent—but that may not be a bad thing. “The end of America as we know it doesn’t necessarily mean the end of America,” Fallows says.
Ars Technica
Major fish nurseries are awash in microplastics
For a brief moment at the start of their lives, fish from different ocean ecosystems live side by side in gigantic fish nurseries, where surface waters converge and the prey is abundant.
Prey isn’t the only thing that’s abundant here. According to a paper published in PNAS this week, the same currents that make these regions appealing as nurseries mean that they’re awash with plastics. The consequences for commercial fisheries and the ocean's food webs are difficult to discern but could be significant.
Oceanographer Jamison Gove and his colleagues set out to understand more about how the features of the ocean affect the survival of larval fish—crucial information for the world’s fisheries. They didn’t expect to find a soup of microplastics in what looked like clear water.
FCC sued by dozens of cities after voting to kill local fees and rules
The Federal Communications Commission faces a legal battle against dozens of cities from across the United States, which sued the FCC to stop an order that preempts local fees and regulation of cable-broadband networks.
The cities filed lawsuits in response to the FCC's August 1 vote that limits the fees municipalities can charge cable companies and prohibits cities and towns from regulating broadband services offered over cable networks.
"At least 46 cities are asking federal appeals courts to undo an FCC order they argue will force them to raise taxes or cut spending on local media services, including channels that schools, governments, and the general public can use for programming," Bloomberg Law wrote Tuesday.