Today’s comic by Ruben Bolling is They were... Socialist invaders from the future:
• Cops investigating defaced poster of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a hate crime: The poster appearing on a Brooklyn subway platform is an advertisement for Antonia Felix’s book,The Unstoppable Ruth Bader Ginsburg: American Icon, published on the 25th anniversary of Ginsburg’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1993. Across her face, someone had written, in capital letters, “DIE JEW” together with a Nazi swastika. A photo of the poster was tweeted by a subway rider who captioned it "What is going to be done about this?" Officials used the subway’s Twitter account to respond with an apology to the rider and noted, “We have zero tolerance for hateful imagery anywhere in our system and will ensure that’s removed as soon as NYPD personnel have concluded their investigation." A subsequent tweeted said the poster had been cleaned.
• Liberal icon Birch Bayh dead at 91:
Birch Bayh, the liberal former senator from Indiana whose work in Congress had an enduring impact on American life — in protecting women from sex discrimination in education, guaranteeing 18-year-olds the right to vote and providing for the removal of a sitting president — died on Thursday at his home in Easton, Md.. He was 91.
The cause was pneumonia, the family said in a statement announcing his death.
Mr. Bayh, a Democrat who served in the Senate from 1963 to 1981, drove some of the most historic legislation of his era. He was the principal architect of two constitutional amendments: the 25th, which dealt with presidential disability and vice-presidential vacancies, and the 26th, which gave 18-year-olds the vote in both state and federal elections.
MIDDAY TWEET
• Solidarity! Iditarod musher loses his five-hour lead in the 1,000-mile contest when he yells at a sled dog for fighting and the whole team refuses to go any farther.
• Rising seas threaten more than a trillion dollars of U.S. coastal real estate:
Roughly $1.3 trillion in U.S. coastal real estate could be lost to climate change if the government takes no action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the atmosphere and driving up risk from sea-level rise, storm surge and flooding, researchers say.
Yet more than half of those property losses, $715 billion worth, could be avoided if the United States adheres to an emissions reduction strategy consistent with the goals outlined by the Paris climate agreement of 2015.
• California led in new solar installations in 2018: A study by Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables and the Solar Energy Industries Association found that the U.S. added 10.6 gigawatts of new solar photovoltaic capacity in 2018, with California again leading the pack with more than 3.3 GW. Texas was second with 996 megawatts and North Carolina third with 907 megawatts. The cumulative solar PV total nationwide is now 64 gigawatts, enough to power some 12 million average residences. A decade ago, the U.S. total was 1.16 gigawatts.
• VW CEO apologizes for evoking grim Nazi concentration-camp slogan: At a company event on Tuesday, Chief Executive Herbert Diess said "Ebit macht frei," Ebit being an accounting acronym for "earnings before interest and taxes." The phrase evoked "Arbeit Macht Frei"—meaning "work sets you free"—the infamous wrought-iron maxim placed over the entrance gates of the Auschwitz extermination camp during World War II. Captives there soon discovered that this was just another Nazi lie, one intended to calm new arrivals to the complex where between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, were murdered as part of the “Final Solution.”