Saturday Snippets is a regular weekend feature of Daily Kos
• Earth had its hottest January since good records have been kept: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday that last month was the warmest January ever recorded in the 141 years of climate records. This makes January 2020 the 44th January in a row and the 421st consecutive month whose average temperatures have been above the 20th Century average. The four warmest Januaries have all occurred since 2016, the 10 warmest since 2002. Making it still more of a big deal is that it marked the highest monthly temperature difference without the periodic warming of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation present in the Pacific Ocean. The global land and ocean surface temperature was 2.05°F (1.14°C) above the 20th Century average. Scientists are agreed that we face much more of this trend to come, with both expected and unexpected extreme impacts that we’ve only seen the beginnings of so far.
• U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein, 98, the longest-serving federal judge in the United States, has shifted to “inactive” status, which means focusing on administrative tasks.
• Another press giant, McClatchy, files for bankruptcy: Thirty newspapers—including the Miami Herald, The Charlotte Observer, The Sacramento Bee, and The Kansas City Star—are affected. For now, all operations will continue. But the trend, which has been going on for decades, and accelerated after 1990, is for financially beleaguered newspapers to keep being grabbed by conglomerates like Gannett, and then folding or staying alive only by slashing staffs to (or beyond) the bare bones. Consequently, the survivors provide far less local coverage than they previously have done as their news holes have shrunk from what three decades ago were Sunday papers across the country containing scores of pages of stories and features and tons of ads, including large classified sections. The California-founded McClatchy itself is one of those conglomerates, having bought Knight-Ridder in 2006, itself a merger of Ohio-based Knight and New York-based Ridder in 1974. As John Alsop wrote at the Columbia Journalism Review recently:
To simplify, the Wall Street types who increasingly control local news are playing with all their biggest chips at once. As Nieman Lab’s Ken Doctor told CNN last night, this week marks a “major turning point” for the industry. “At a time when local news is needed more than ever, it is the bankers who are deciding what will be defined as news, and who will be employed to report it.”
MIDDAY TWEET
• Scientists find fossil shell of a colossal Miocene turtle the size of a car: Ten million years ago, this giant reptile—Stupendemys geographicus—whose shell is nine-and-a-half feet long, roamed the swamps of northern Venezuela and Colombia. It was 100 times bigger than its nearest living relative today and went extinct about 5 million years ago, at the beginning of the Pliocene. That nearest relative is the leatherback turtle, which could be headed for extinction, too. Its global population has shrunk by about 75% since 1980.
• Los Angeles D.A. obliterates 66,000 marijuana convictions: One of the injustices of the War on (Some) Drugs took a hit Thursday when L.A. Democratic District Attorney Jackie Lacey dismissed tens of thousands of pot convictions that have had a disproportionate impact on black and brown people, ruining people’s lives for doing what 52% of living Americans admit to having tried at least once—72 million Americans. That disparity is true even though whites, blacks, and Latinos use and sell pot at similar rates. A study in 2016 concluded that although the California population comprises just 6% African Americans, nearly 25% of those incarcerated exclusively for marijuana offenses are black. These criminal records mean more difficulty going to school, getting public assistance, finding housing, and, of course, getting a job. Lacey’s effort is part of a partnership with Code for America, which has developed an algorithm for quickly determining who is eligible for conviction dismissal under Proposition 64, the 2016 referendum that legalized recreational marijuana in California. Cases date back to 1961. Judge Sam Ohta signed Lacey’s motion last week to dismiss 62,000 felony convictions and 4,000 misdemeanor convictions in 10 of L.A. County’s 88 cities.
• Target’s delivery app workers say they fear speaking out against Shipt’s new algorithmic pay model that has chopped their paychecks.