The Seattle Times
Inslee proposes $9 trillion in spending nationally over a decade for clean energy transition
Offering up his version of a Green New Deal, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is proposing $9 trillion in public and private spending over a decade to shift the U.S. away from fossil fuels to a clean energy-based economy.
Inslee rolled out his sweeping plan as part of a weeklong cross-country campaign swing in support of his bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. He was scheduled to formally announce it during a visit Thursday to a Washington, D.C., wastewater treatment plant.
The so-called Evergreen Economy Plan — a name that boasts of clean-power and jobs policies Inslee has enacted in Washington — is laid out in a 38-page blueprint that calls for $300 billion a year in increased federal spending to leverage $600 billion a year in private investment.
The package envisions a rapid national transformation from coal and gasoline-based energy and transportation to solar panels, wind turbines, mass transit and domestically manufactured electric cars.
The Trump administration has been on high alert in response to what military and intelligence officials have deemed specific and credible threats from Iran against U.S. personnel in the Middle East.
But … Trump is frustrated with some of his top advisers, who he thinks could rush the United States into a military confrontation with Iran and shatter his long-standing pledge to withdraw from costly foreign wars, according to several U.S. officials. Trump prefers a diplomatic approach to resolving tensions and wants to speak directly with Iran’s leaders.
Disagreements over assessing and responding to the recent intelligence… are also fraying alliances with foreign allies, according to multiple officials in the United States and Europe.
A massive Gulf oil spill is finally being contained after more than 14 years
The U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday that it is finally containing and collecting oil from a massive 14-year spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the longest offshore disaster in U.S. history.
More than 30,000 gallons of oil have been collected over several weeks since a containment system was installed about 12 miles off the coast of Louisiana, the Coast Guard said. Capt. Kristi Luttrell, who is overseeing work performed by a contractor, the Couvillion Group, called the containment a major milestone that could significantly reduce the impact of the spill, which will enter its 15th year in September.
Luttrell entered into a contract with Couvillion last year after the company responsible for the spill, Taylor Energy, failed to follow her orders to do so on its own.
Los Angeles Times
Trump administration ends $929-million pact to build California high-speed rail project
The looming threats by the Trump Administration against the California bullet train project became a sour reality Thursday, when federal transportation officials terminated a $929 million grant for construction in the Central Valley.
Loss of the money poses a potentially “devastating” hit to the project, state officials said, but it will not immediately change construction plans and could yet be reversed in future legal action.
The termination of the 2010 grant was based on the state’s multiple failures to forecast accurate schedules, report key milestones and show that it can meet milestones to complete work by a 2022 milestone under the agreement, the Federal Railroad Administration, a part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, said in a 25-page letter announcing its decision.
New far-reaching abortion bans too extreme for some Republican leaders
Republican leaders have begun distancing themselves from new, far-reaching state abortion restrictions that don’t allow exceptions in the cases of rape or incest. […]
Alabama this week approved a law to ban abortion at any stage of pregnancy, with no exceptions for rape or incest. That came on the heels of laws in other states — including Ohio, Kentucky and Mississippi — that ban the procedure when a fetal heartbeat is detected, at about six weeks of pregnancy, also with no exceptions for rape or incest. All of the legislation includes exceptions for abortions to preserve a woman’s life.
Republican lawmakers in Alabama and elsewhere have said their goal is to give the Supreme Court’s conservative majority an opportunity to reverse the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, which legalized abortion nationwide.
Bloomberg
Trump's Immigration Plan Faces Cold Reception Even Within GOP
Donald Trump’s plan to unite Republicans behind a comprehensive immigration overhaul -- a move to counter perceptions ahead of the 2020 elections that the GOP is anti-immigrant -- was showing signs of defeat even before it was formally unveiled.
Details of the proposal -- and particularly the decision by presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner to sidestep what to do about those in the country illegally -– have already doomed its legislative prospects among Democrats. But some members of Trump’s own party are also throwing cold water on the plan, a sign it could backfire, deepening perceptions that he’s a radical on immigration while exposing GOP policy rifts.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who oversees immigration legislation, said Kushner’s bill isn’t going to become law. “We all know you’re not going to pass this without dealing with the other aspects of immigration,” he said on Wednesday.
As Suicides Rise, Insurers Find Ways to Deny Mental Health Coverage
The U.S. is in the midst of a mental health crisis. In 2017, 47,000 Americans died by suicide and 70,000 from drug overdoses. And 17.3 million adults suffered at least one major depressive episode. The Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, a landmark law passed more than a decade ago, requires insurers to provide comparable coverage for mental health and medical treatments. Even so, insurers are denying claims, limiting coverage, and finding other ways to avoid complying with the law.
Americans are taking to the courts to address what they see as an intrinsic unfairness. DeeDee Tillitt joined one lawsuit in 2016, months after she lost her son Max. He’d been an inpatient for three weeks at a treatment center to recover from a heroin addiction and seemed to be making progress. His addiction specialist wanted him to stay. United Behavioral Health, a unit of UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest insurer, declined to cover a longer stay for Max. Reluctantly, his family brought him home. Ten weeks later, Max was dead of an overdose. He was 21.
Tillitt soon discovered that Max’s death wasn’t an isolated tragedy. Across the country, people who need mental health and addiction treatment encounter roadblocks to care that could save their lives. United Behavioral Health was already the target of a class action alleging that it improperly denied coverage for such treatment. UnitedHealth’s headquarters is in the Minneapolis suburbs, not far from where Tillitt lived. She says she spent hours on the phone getting passed from one rep to another in her quest to find Max care the insurer would cover. “I felt like, God, could I just drive down to the lobby and scream at them?’ ” she says.
Chicago Tribune
Rahm Emanuel leaves office Monday. Here's a look at his top controversies and accomplishments as Chicago's mayor.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel leaves office Monday. As he wraps up his second term at the helm of the nation’s third-largest city, here’s a look back at some of the controversies and accomplishments he encountered along the way.
Youngstown Business Journal
Ohio Soybean Farmers Call for End to Trade War
[…] “Farmers have been patient and supportive,” said Ryan Rhoades, association vice president and farmer from Marion County. “That patience is wearing very thin. These are not hypothetical losses we’re talking about, this is real. This is our livelihood and how we support our families, and the ripple effect is going to touch all of rural America.”
The Ohio Soybean Association and its national affiliate, the American Soybean Association, say they support the Trump administration’s overall goal of negotiating with China to achieve structural changes to the way it conducts trade business. But they cannot support the use of tariffs as a tactic to achieve that goal.
“We ask the administration to end this back and forth escalation of tariffs and pursue other options,” said Metzger. “Farmers and the rural economy are not winning right now.”
Montgomery Advertiser
She had an illegal abortion after being raped as a 13-year-old. To her, Alabama's abortion ban 'an abomination'
Maralyn Mosley remembers life in Alabama before abortion was legal.
Twenty-two years before the passage of Roe v. Wade, Mosley had her first illegal abortion at the age of 13 after being raped by a tenant at her aunt’s Birmingham boarding house. Mosley's mother made the decision to take her to a woman the community went to for clandestine terminations of pregnancy. Mosley was turned away because of her age.
That’s how, in 1951, a young Mosley found herself being taken through a nondescript door in an alley off 4th Avenue. There she got an abortion in the back of a barbershop from a man who asked for sex before he would do the procedure.
"I had been raped, and this made me feel like I was useless, like I was violated," Mosley said.
Mosley said she doesn't remember much of the procedure itself, that she blocked out the memory because it was too painful. She said she clearly remembers her second illegal abortion, one she performed on herself seven years later with knitting needles.
After Alabama abortion ban bill passes, donations roll in for local advocacy groups
A Tuscaloosa-based group which provides financial assistance to women seeking reproductive health care in Alabama has raised tens of thousands of dollars in the wake of a new law, which could effectively ban abortion in the state.
The Yellowhammer Fund said it will be able to provide for triple the amount of clients it served in 2018 — paying for medical costs, gas money, sometimes transportation out of state — with the tidal wave of donations.
The fund also plans to expand with a community "resource center" this summer in Birmingham to provide essential everyday items such as menstrual products or baby diapers to families in need, with aims to launch a similar project in Montgomery later this year.
Amanda Reyes, president of the fund, said the public response to the relatively new reproductive justice group was unprecedented. Reyes observed the Alabama Senate debate before it voted on the bill Tuesday, criminalizing the performance of abortions in nearly all cases. A Republican supermajority rejected exceptions for rape and incest, marking it as one of the most restrictive abortion bills in the nation.
The Hill
Harris raises $160K for abortion rights groups after fundraising push
Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) said Thursday that her campaign raised more than $160,000 for abortion rights groups after the Alabama Senate passed a measure banning almost all abortions in the state.
“Incredibly proud that together we were able to raise over $161K yesterday for women’s rights groups who are on the front lines of the fight to defend women’s health care & access to abortion,” the Democratic presidential hopeful wrote on Twitter.
Harris launched the fundraising push on Wednesday hours after Alabama lawmakers approved a measure to outlaw nearly all abortions, with no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. The bill also imposes criminal penalties on doctors who perform the procedure.
Houston Chronicle
Ted Cruz not laughing about space pirate jabs on MSNBC, Twitter
Ted Cruz has had enough of the media mocking him for his concerns about space pirates.
At a hearing this week in Washington, the Republican U.S. Senator from Texas delivered an introductory speech at a subcommittee he chairs in which he endorsed … Donald Trump’s call for a Space Force to defend American interest in space.
“Since the ancient Greeks first put to sea, nations have recognized the necessity of naval forces and maintaining a superior capability to protect waterborne travel and commerce from bad actors,” Cruz said. “Pirates threatened the open seas and the same is possible in space. In this same way, we too must now recognize the necessity of a Space Force to defend the nation and to protect space commerce and civil space exploration.”
A Bush, a Yeltsin and a Blair turn up heat on Kuwait over CEO’s imprisonment
Neil Bush, son of the late former president, is deeply involved in a legal fight playing out in the Middle East over the fate of an imprisoned Russian woman, a battle featuring a cast of global characters and an unusual alliance of American and Russian interests.
Bush, of Houston, made his fourth trip to Kuwait this month on behalf of Marsha Lazareva, a U.S.-educated investment manager who was convicted of embezzlement and faces other charges related to alleged financial crimes.
As a consultant to a company run by Lazareva, Bush invokes the Gulf War and George H.W. Bush’s success in freeing Kuwait from Saddam Hussein-led Iraq, warning that keeping Lazareva locked up threatens Kuwait’s standing in the world.
Reuters
Five more U.S. states sue OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma over opioid epidemic
Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, West Virginia and Wisconsin joined 39 states to file lawsuits targeting Purdue Pharma and its leaders, including former president Richard Sackler and his family.
Officials accused Purdue Pharma of repeatedly making false and deceptive claims that opioids, including OxyContin, were safe for a wide range of patients seeking to reduce pain.
“This is a bipartisan effort,” Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, a Democrat, said on a conference call.
The lawsuits were announced six days after a North Dakota judge dismissed that state’s lawsuit accusing Purdue Pharma of overstating the benefits and trivializing the addiction risks of prolonged opioid use. North Dakota is expected to appeal.
Flynn gave info on attempts to obstruct Mueller probe: court filing
Former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller information about multiple attempts by people to obstruct the Russia investigation, according to court documents made public on Thursday.
The attempts to obstruct Mueller’s probe were made by people associated with the administration of … Donald Trump or with Congress, according to the filings, which were unsealed at prosecutors’ request.
Flynn “informed the government of multiple instances, both before and after his guilty plea, where either he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could have affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation,” Mueller wrote in a memo originally submitted under seal ahead of Flynn’s planned sentencing on Dec. 18, 2018.
Climate change climbs up U.S. voters' list of concerns
Climate change is rising up the list of voter concerns in the United States with nearly 40% saying the issue will be crucial in how they cast their ballots in the 2020 presidential election, according to a poll released on Thursday.
The results of the poll showed Democratic candidates in particular are under pressure to offer solutions to climate change, said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
“This is truly a top-tier issue for the Democratic base,” said Leiserowitz, whose program, along with George Mason University, put out the poll.
Vox
Elizabeth Warren’s new policy rollout targets Pentagon corruption
Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to bring her long record of railing against corporate greed and corruption to the Pentagon.
On Thursday, Warren, who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, unveiled a proposal — yes, another one — with House Armed Services Chair Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) that aims to limit the influence corporations on the government’s defense agenda.
The proposal would essentially establish four-year noncompetes between the Department of Defense and major defense contractors, extend federal open records laws to private defense contracting companies, and limit national security officials from working for foreign governments, according to a blog post Warren published Thursday morning.
Rod Rosenstein’s replacement has officially been confirmed by the Senate
Jeffrey Rosen, an attorney who’s never served at the Department of Justice or as a prosecutor, just became Attorney General William Barr’s second-in-command.
Rosen was most recently deputy secretary at the Transportation Department, and while he’s not the first to take on this role with little DOJ background, he was widely panned by Democrats for his inexperience at the agency. Given solid backing from Republicans, however, he was confirmed by the Senate 52-45 in a vote on Thursday. […]
Democrats’ primary concerns about his appointment to that role centered on Rosen’s approach to environmental policy. And some of these certainly proved warranted: While at the Transportation Department, Rosen has undone prior regulations established during President Barack Obama’s administration and helped roll back rules on fuel efficiency.
The Missoulian
Where'd they go? Half of elk herd missing from spring survey
Most elk hunters know the feeling of seeking but not finding their quarry.
Liz Bradley doesn’t take such failures lightly. As the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks biologist overseeing elk populations in west-central Montana she gets to count them by air every spring. The North Hills-Evaro herd that wanders north of Missoula usually has about 300 members.
“The spring green up pulls the elk out into the open where they’re easy to count,” Bradley said. “I did my first survey in April, and the count was really low — lower than expected. So I flew it a second time a week later and got the same thing. That’s how I double-check myself, and it’s not an area where it’s easy for elk to hide.”
Bradley counted 146 elk in the North Hills-Evaro herd. That’s about half what was counted last year. The herd has a population objective of 300, and FWP Region 2 has spent years trying to get down to that goal through liberal hunting opportunities.
“We don’t think what we’re seeing can be attributed to just harvest,” Bradley said. “It’s more likely displacement, although we’re not seeing them in adjacent hunting districts. We don’t know where they went. That’s the mystery.”
The Atlantic
The Moderate House Women Who Want Voters to Know They Exist Too
Elsewhere in the Capitol, another cabal of freshmen Democrats is hoping to remind voters that there are still pragmatists in Congress. Their efforts underscore a major challenge for the party ahead of its fight to retake the Senate and maintain its House majority. Five female military veterans, who represent one-eighth of the seats Democrats flipped from red to blue during the 2018 midterm elections, have launched a joint fundraising effort, the Service First Women’s Victory Fund, to highlight their experiences in the military and to raise money collectively for their reelection campaigns. The five lawmakers participating in the joint fundraising agreement—Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Elaine Luria of Virginia, and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey—are veterans of the CIA, the Navy, and the Air Force.
The lawmakers want to position themselves as problem-solving moderates and paint a “new” portrait of the Democratic Party for their constituents. “When I’m in my community, I think a lot of times people have read the news, and they are concerned because they see one message about what’s happening in Washington, and then they see me,” Houlahan, an Air Force veteran, told me this week.
“From my perspective, there has been an overwhelming focus on a small number of members in our caucus who did not flip seats, who did not help win the House,” Slotkin said at a recent breakfast announcing the effort in Washington, D.C.
Elizabeth Warren Has a Theory About Corporate Power
Elizabeth Warren has been talking a lot about small business, a constituency that hasn’t figured in Democratic Party politics in a long time. The senator from Massachusetts and Democratic presidential candidate has sparred with Amazon over how the tech giant treats the businesses that rely on its platform to sell their goods. She’s unveiled a plan to put small businesses on a more equal footing by closing tax loopholes that allow “the very largest companies to pay a lower effective corporate tax rate than smaller companies.” She’s pledged to reverse consolidation in the banking industry on the grounds that the decline of local banks has “made it more difficult for small businesses and farms to get loans.”
NPR News
I.M. Pei, Architect Of Some Of The World's Most Iconic Structures, Dies At 102
Crowds around the world flow through the buildings designed by architect I.M. Pei; in Paris, they stream into the Louvre's Pyramid entrance. In Cleveland, they wander through the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And in Hong Kong, they travel up and down the soaring Bank of China Tower.
Pei's death was confirmed by Thomas Guss, his press contact. He was 102.
His designs were widely praised — but not always at first. When his large glass pyramid opened at the entrance to the Louvre museum in 1988, it was not well received.
'Possible' More Counties Than Now Known Were Hacked In 2016, Fla. Delegation Says
Florida lawmakers were angry Thursday when they emerged from an FBI briefing that left them with unanswered questions about the two county election offices in their state that were breached by Russian cyberattacks in 2016.
The bipartisan group of members of Congress was most frustrated with not learning about the hacks sooner. The first word of at least one intrusion came from a single line in special counsel Robert Mueller's redacted report, which was released publicly in April.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis then confirmed on Monday, after his own briefing with the FBI, that Russian attackers actually breached two Florida counties.
EPA Watchdog Finds Ex-Chief Scott Pruitt Spent $124,000 On 'Excessive' Airfare
Scott Pruitt, the former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and his staff spent roughly $124,000 in excessive travel costs during a ten-month period, according to a new report from EPA's internal watchdog.
Pruitt, who resigned from EPA almost a year ago amidst a litany of ethics allegations, and his personal security detail flew in first or business class "without sufficient justification and, initially without appropriate approval authority," the report says.
The EPA's Office of the Inspector General recommended that the agency consider recovering the estimated $123,942 in excessive costs.
Gizmodo
A Quarter of West Antarctica's Ice Is Now Unstable, Study Finds
New findings released on Thursday reveal that a quarter of the ice sheets in West Antarctica, the most vulnerable part of the continent, have destabilized. Ice loss has sped up fivefold across the region’s most imperiled glaciers in just 25 years.
Scientists used 800 million satellite measurements taken since 1992 to reach their conclusions. The results, published in Geophysical Research Letters, underscore just how rapid the changes taking place are and the perils coastal communities could face if ice continues its runaway melt.
The ways that we know the West Antarctic is melting down are manifold. There’s measurements on the ground, flyovers by NASA scientists, and occasional visits by boat. But to get the big picture, satellites provide a crucial view from space. Researchers used data from a suite of European Space Agency satellites that have been monitoring Antarctica since 1992. Those satellite have lasers that measure how high the ice that covers Antarctica and extends out to sea is, and the 25 years of records in the analysis allowed the researchers to see how ice height has changed over time. The researchers identified areas where rapid thinning and ice loss occurred as unstable.
Ajit Pai Warned Lying to Congress Is Bad
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has been strongly urged by a Democratic lawmaker to make corrections to statements he made during a contentious oversight hearing on Wednesday while raising the possibility that he intentionally lied.
Warning FCC Chairman Ajit Pai that “lying to Congress is a federal crime,” Congresswoman Anna Eshoo wrote there existed a “chasm” between what Pai told the committee and what Eshoo herself heard from other FCC officials following the meeting.
Eshoo has pressed Pai for details about a purportedly ongoing investigation at the commission into the apparently unlawful sale of phone-location data to individuals and organizations with no legitimate reason to have it; a black market comprised of public and private businesses known only thanks to reporting at Motherboard and the New York Times, which triggered alarms up and down Capitol Hill.
Ars Technica
The radio navigation planes use to land safely is insecure and can be hacked
Just about every aircraft that has flown over the past 50 years… is aided by radios to safely land at airports. These instrument landing systems (ILS) are considered precision approach systems, because unlike GPS and other navigation systems, they provide crucial real-time guidance about both the plane’s horizontal alignment with a runway and its vertical angle of descent. In many settings—particularly during foggy or rainy night-time landings—this radio-based navigation is the primary means for ensuring planes touch down at the start of a runway and on its centerline.
Like many technologies built in earlier decades, the ILS was never designed to be secure from hacking. Radio signals, for instance, aren’t encrypted or authenticated. Instead, pilots simply assume that the tones their radio-based navigation systems receive on a runway’s publicly assigned frequency are legitimate signals broadcast by the airport operator. This lack of security hasn’t been much of a concern over the years, largely because the cost and difficulty of spoofing malicious radio signals made attacks infeasible.
Now, researchers have devised a low-cost hack that raises questions about the security of ILS, which is used at virtually every civilian airport throughout the industrialized world. Using a $600 software defined radio, the researchers can spoof airport signals in a way that causes a pilot’s navigation instruments to falsely indicate a plane is off course. Normal training will call for the pilot to adjust the plane’s descent rate or alignment accordingly and create a potential accident as a result.
The Guardian
May agrees to set her exit date after Brexit bill vote
Theresa May has agreed to set a timetable for her departure as prime minister in the first week of June, leading MPs to believe she will trigger a leadership contest before the summer.
Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee of backbenchers, said she would agree a timetable for the election of a new leader after her Brexit legislation returned to parliament for a final attempt in the week of 3 June.
Another member of the 1922 Committee told the Guardian that May understood she would have to name a quick date for her departure if the withdrawal bill is voted down, with a leadership contest before the summer.
The MP said some Brexit supporters on the committee were disappointed that the prime minister was not forced to announce her departure immediately but this represented a “fair compromise”.
Brazil's Bolsonaro dismisses 'imbecile' students as he faces biggest protests yet
Tens of thousands of students and teachers have protested across Brazil against sharp cuts to education enacted by Jair Bolsonaro’s administration – the first mass protests since the far-right president took office in January.
Brazil’s National Student Union called for demonstrations after the education ministry said it was freezing up to 30% of discretionary spending due to the government’s precarious fiscal situation.
The rally in Rio de Janeiro turned violent when police fired teargas and percussion grenades and protestors set a bus on fire.
Protestors chanted “education is not a commodity” and “there will be no cuts, there will be fight” and referenced Bolsonaro’s alleged connections to paramilitary gangs.
Merkel: Europe must unite to stand up to China, Russia and US
Europe must reposition itself to stand up to the challenges posed by its three big global rivals, China, Russia and the US, Angela Merkel has said before her final European election as German chancellor.
Facing challenges that range from Russian interference in elections to China’s economic clout and the US’s monopoly over digital services, Europe needs to get better at putting up a united front, Merkel said in a wide-ranging interview shared with the Guardian.
“There is no doubt that Europe needs to reposition itself in a changed world,” Merkel said in a conversation in her office in Berlin. “The old certainties of the post-war order no longer apply.”
414 million pieces of plastic found on remote island group in Indian Ocean
On the beaches of the tiny Cocos (Keeling) Islands, population 600, marine scientists found 977,000 shoes and 373,000 toothbrushes.
A comprehensive survey of debris on the islands – among the most remote places on Earth, in the Indian Ocean – has found a staggering amount of rubbish washed ashore. This included 414m pieces of plastic, weighing 238 tonnes.
The study, published in the journal Nature, concluded the volume of debris points to the exponential increase of global plastic polluting the world’s oceans and “highlights a worrying trend in the production and discharge of single-use products”.