https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/09/this-land-was-our-land/594742/
The Great Land Robbery
The Shameful Story Of How 1 Million Black Families Have Been Ripped From Their Farms
Vann R. Newkirk II September 2019 Issue
I. Wiped Out
"You ever chop before?" Willena Scott-White was testing me. I sat with her in the cab of a Chevy Silverado pickup truck, swatting at the squadrons of giant, fluttering mosquitoes that had invaded the interior the last time she opened a window. I was spending the day with her family as they worked their fields just outside Ruleville, in Mississippi's Leflore County. With her weathered brown hands, Scott-White gave me a pork sandwich wrapped in a grease-stained paper towel. I slapped my leg. Mosquitoes can bite through denim, it turns out.
Cotton sowed with planters must be chopped—thinned and weeded manually with hoes—to produce orderly rows of fluffy bolls. The work is backbreaking, and the people who do it maintain that no other job on Earth is quite as demanding. I had labored long hours over other crops, but had to admit to Scott-White, a 60-something grandmother who'd grown up chopping, that I'd never done it.
"Then you ain't never worked," she replied.
The fields alongside us as we drove were monotonous. With row crops, monotony is good. But as we toured 1,000 acres of land in Leflore and Bolivar Counties, straddling Route 61, Scott-White pointed out the demarcations between plots. A trio of steel silos here. A post there. A patch of scruffy wilderness in the distance. Each landmark was a reminder of the Scott legacy that she had fought to keep—or to regain—and she noted this with pride. Each one was also a reminder of an inheritance that had once been stolen.
Drive Route 61 through the Mississippi Delta and you'll find much of the scenery exactly as it was 50 or 75 years ago. Imposing plantations and ramshackle shotgun houses still populate the countryside from Memphis to Vicksburg. Fields stretch to the horizon. The hands that dig into black Delta dirt belong to people like Willena Scott-White, African Americans who bear faces and names passed down from men and women who were owned here, who were kept here, and who chose to stay here, tending the same fields their forebears tended.
But some things have changed. Back in the day, snow-white bolls of King Cotton reigned. Now much of the land is green with soybeans. The farms and plantations are much larger—industrial operations with bioengineered plants, laser-guided tractors, and crop-dusting drones. Fewer and fewer farms are still owned by actual farmers. Investors in boardrooms throughout the country have bought hundreds of thousands of acres of premium Delta land. If you're one of the millions of people who have a retirement account with the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association, for instance, you might even own a little bit yourself.
TIAA is one of the largest pension firms in the United States. Together with its subsidiaries and associated funds, it has a portfolio of more than 80,000 acres in Mississippi alone, most of them in the Delta. If the fertile crescent of Arkansas is included, TIAA holds more than 130,000 acres in a strip of counties along the Mississippi River. And TIAA is not the only big corporate landL-rd in the region. Hancock Agricultural Investment Group manages more than 65,000 acres in what it calls the "Delta states." The real-estate trust Farmland Partners has 30,000 acres in and around the Delta. AgriVest, a subsidiary of the Swiss bank UBS, owned 22,000 acres as of 2011. (AgriVest did not respond to a request for more recent information.)
Unlike their counterparts even two or three generations ago, black people living and working in the Delta today have been almost completely uprooted from the soil—as property owners, if not as laborers. In Washington County, Mississippi, where last February TIAA reportedly bought 50,000 acres for more than $200 million, black people make up 72 percent of the population but own only 11 percent of the farmland, in part or in full. In Tunica County, where TIAA has acquired plantations from some of the oldest farm-owning white families in the state, black people make up 77 percent of the population but own only 6 percent of the farmland. In Holmes County, the third-blackest county in the nation, black people make up about 80 percent of the population but own only 19 percent of the farmland. TIAA owns plantations there, too. In just a few years, a single company has accumulated a portfolio in the Delta almost equal to the remaining holdings of the African Americans who have lived on and shaped this land for centuries.
This is not a story about TIAA—at least not primarily. The company's newfound dominance in the region is merely the topsoil covering a history of loss and legally sanctioned theft in which TIAA played no part. But TIAA's position is instrumental in understanding both how the crimes of Jim Crow have been laundered by time and how the legacy of ill-gotten gains has become a structural part of American life. The land was wrested first from Native Americans, by force. It was then cleared, watered, and made productive for intensive agriculture by the labor of enslaved Africans, who after Emancipation would come to own a portion of it. Later, through a variety of means—sometimes legal, often coercive, in many cases legal and coercive, occasionally violent—farmland owned by black people came into the hands of white people. It was aggregated into larger holdings, then aggregated again, eventually attracting the interest of Wall Street.
Owners of small farms everywhere, black and white alike, have long been buffeted by larger economic forces. But what happened to black landowners in the South, and particularly in the Delta, is distinct, and was propelled not only by economic change but also by white racism and local white power. A war waged by deed of title has dispossessed 98 percent of black agricultural landowners in America. They have lost 12 million acres over the past century. But even that statement falsely consigns the losses to long-ago history. In fact, the losses mostly occurred within living memory, from the 1950s onward. Today, except for a handful of farmers like the Scotts who have been able to keep or get back some land, black people in this most productive corner of the Deep South own almost nothing of the bounty under their feet.
II. "Land Hunger"
Land has always been the main battleground of racial conflict in Mississippi. During Reconstruction, fierce resistance from the planters who had dominated antebellum society effectively killed any promise of land or protection from the Freedmen's Bureau, forcing masses of black laborers back into de facto bondage. But the sheer size of the black population—black people were a majority in Mississippi until the 1930s—meant that thousands were able to secure tenuous footholds as landowners between Emancipation and the Great Depression.
Driven by what W. E. B. Du Bois called "land hunger" among freedmen during Reconstruction, two generations of black workers squirreled away money and went after every available and affordable plot they could, no matter how marginal or hopeless. Some found sympathetic white landowners who would sell to them. Some squatted on unused land or acquired the few homesteads available to black people. Some followed visionary leaders to all-black utopian agrarian experiments, such as Mound Bayou, in Bolivar County.
[From March 1901: W. E. B. Du Bois's 'The Freedmen's Bureau']
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1901/03/the-freedmens-bureau/308772/
It was never much, and it was never close to just, but by the early 20th century, black people had something to hold on to. In 1900, according to the historian James C. Cobb, black landowners in Tunica County outnumbered white ones three to one. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there were 25,000 black farm operators in 1910, an increase of almost 20 percent from 1900. Black farmland in Mississippi totaled 2.2 million acres in 1910—some 14 percent of all black-owned agricultural land in the country, and the most of any state.
The foothold was never secure. From the beginning, even the most enterprising black landowners found themselves fighting a war of attrition, often fraught with legal obstacles that made passing title to future generations difficult. Bohlen Lucas, one of the few black Democratic politicians in the Delta during Reconstruction (most black politicians at the time were Republicans), was born enslaved and managed to buy a 200-acre farm from his former overseer. But, like many farmers, who often have to borrow against expected harvests to pay for equipment, supplies, and the rent or mortgage on their land, Lucas depended on credit extended by powerful lenders. In his case, credit depended specifically on white patronage, given in exchange for his help voting out the Reconstruction government—after which his patrons abandoned him. He was left with 20 acres.
In Humphreys County, Lewis Spearman avoided the pitfalls of white patronage by buying less valuable wooded tracts and grazing cattle there as he moved into cotton. But when cotton crashed in the 1880s, Spearman, over his head in debt, crashed with it.
Around the turn of the century, in Leflore County, a black farm organizer and proponent of self-sufficiency—referred to as a "notoriously bad Negro" in the local newspapers—led a black populist awakening, marching defiantly and by some accounts bringing boycotts against white merchants. White farmers responded with a posse that may have killed as many as 100 black farmers and sharecroppers along with women and children. The fate of the "bad Negro" in question, named Oliver Cromwell, is uncertain. Some sources say he escaped to Jackson, and into anonymity.
Like so many of his forebears, Ed Scott Sr., Willena Scott-White's grandfather, acquired his land through not much more than force of will. As recorded in the thick binders of family history that Willena had brought along in the truck, and that we flipped through between stretches of work in the fields, his life had attained the gloss of folklore. He was born in 1886 in western Alabama, a generation removed from bondage. Spurred by that same land hunger, Scott took his young family to the Delta, seeking opportunities to farm his own property. He sharecropped and rented, and managed large farms for white planters, who valued his ability to run their sprawling estates. One of these men was Palmer H. Brooks, who owned a 7,000-acre plantation in Mississippi's Leflore and Sunflower Counties. Brooks was uncommonly progressive, encouraging entrepreneurship among the black laborers on his plantation, building schools and churches for them, and providing loans. Scott was ready when Brooks decided to sell plots to black laborers, and he bought his first 100 acres.
Unlike Bohlen Lucas, Scott largely avoided politics. Unlike Lewis Spearman, he paid his debts and kept some close white allies—a necessity, since he usually rejected government assistance. And unlike Oliver Cromwell, he led his community under the rules already in place, appearing content with what he'd earned for his family in an environment of total segregation. He leveraged technical skills and a talent for management to impress sympathetic white people and disarm hostile ones. "Granddaddy always had nice vehicles," Scott-White told me. They were a trapping of pride in a life of toil. As was true in most rural areas at the time, a new truck was not just a flashy sign of prosperity but also a sort of credit score. Wearing starched dress shirts served the same purpose, elevating Scott in certain respects—always within limits—even above some white farmers who drove into town in dirty overalls. The trucks got shinier as his holdings grew. By the time Scott died, in 1957, he had amassed more than 1,000 acres of farmland.
Scott-White guided me right up to the Quiver River, where the legend of her family began. It was a choked, green-brown gurgle of a thing, the kind of lazy waterway that one imagines to be brimming with fat, yawning catfish and snakes. "Mr. Brooks sold all of the land on the east side of this river to black folks," Scott-White told me. She swept her arm to encompass the endless acres. "All of these were once owned by black families."
III. The Great Dispossession
That era of black ownership, in the Delta and throughout the country, was already fading by the time Scott died. As the historian Pete Daniel recounts, half a million black-owned farms across the country failed in the 25 years after 1950. Joe Brooks, the former president of the Emergency Land Fund, a group founded in 1972 to fight the problem of dispossession, has estimated that something on the order of 6 million acres was lost by black farmers from 1950 to 1969. That's an average of 820 acres a day—an area the size of New York's Central Park erased with each sunset. Black-owned cotton farms in the South almost completely disappeared, diminishing from 87,000 to just over 3,000 in the 1960s alone. According to the Census of Agriculture, the racial disparity in farm acreage increased in Mississippi from 1950 to 1964, when black farmers lost almost 800,000 acres of land. An analysis for The Atlantic by a research team that included Dania Francis, at the University of Massachusetts, and Darrick Hamilton, at Ohio State, translates this land loss into a financial loss—including both property and income—of $3.7 billion to $6.6 billion in today's dollars.
This was a silent and devastating catastrophe, one created and maintained by federal policy. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal life raft for agriculture helped start the trend in 1937 with the establishment of the Farm Security Administration, an agency within the Department of Agriculture. Although the FSA ostensibly existed to help the country's small farmers, as happened with much of the rest of the New Deal, white administrators often ignored or targeted poor black people—denying them loans and giving sharecropping work to white people. After Roosevelt's death, in 1945, conservatives in Congress replaced the FSA with the Farmers Home Administration, or FmHA. The FmHA quickly transformed the FSA's programs for small farmers, establishing the sinews of the loan-and-subsidy structure that undergirds American agriculture today. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy's administration created the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service, or ASCS, a complementary program to the FmHA that also provided loans to farmers. The ASCS was a federal effort—also within the Department of Agriculture—but, crucially, the members of committees doling out money and credit were elected locally, during a time when black people were prohibited from voting.
Through these programs, and through massive crop and surplus purchasing, the USDA became the safety net, price-setter, chief investor, and sole regulator for most of the farm economy in places like the Delta. The department could offer better loan terms to risky farmers than banks and other lenders, and mostly outcompeted private credit. In his book Dispossession, Daniel calls the setup "agrigovernment." Land-grant universities pumped out both farm operators and the USDA agents who connected those operators to federal money. Large plantations ballooned into even larger industrial crop factories as small farms collapsed. The mega-farms held sway over agricultural policy, resulting in more money, at better interest rates, for the plantations themselves. At every level of agrigovernment, the leaders were white.
Major audits and investigations of the USDA have found that illegal pressures levied through its loan programs created massive transfers of wealth from black to white farmers, especially in the period just after the 1950s. In 1965, the United States Commission on Civil Rights uncovered blatant and dramatic racial differences in the level of federal investment in farmers. The commission found that in a sample of counties across the South, the FmHA provided much larger loans for small and medium-size white-owned farms, relative to net worth, than it did for similarly sized black-owned farms—evidence that racial discrimination "has served to accelerate the displacement and impoverishment of the Negro farmer."
In Sunflower County, a man named Ted Keenan told investigators that in 1956, local banks had denied him loans after a bad crop because of his position with the NAACP, where he openly advocated for voting rights. The FmHA had denied him loans as well. Keenan described how Eugene Fisackerly, the leader of the White Citizens' Council in Sunflower County, together with representatives of Senator James Eastland, a notorious white supremacist who maintained a large plantation there, had intimidated him into renouncing his affiliation with the NAACP and agreeing not to vote. Only then did Eastland's man call the local FmHA agent, prompting him to reconsider Keenan's loan.
A landmark 2001 investigation by the Associated Press into extortion, exploitation, and theft directed against black farmers uncovered more than 100 cases like Keenan's. In the 1950s and '60s, Norman Weathersby, a Holmes County Chevrolet dealer who enjoyed a local monopoly on trucks and heavy farm equipment, required black farmers to put up land as collateral for loans on equipment. A close friend of his, William Strider, was the local FmHA agent. Black farmers in the area claimed that the two ran a racket: Strider would slow-walk them on FmHA loans, which meant they would then default on Weathersby's loans and lose their land to him. Strider and Weathersby were reportedly free to run this racket because black farmers were shut out by local banks.
Analyzing the history of federal programs, the Emergency Land Fund emphasizes a key distinction. While most of the black land loss appears on its face to have been through legal mechanisms—"the tax sale; the partition sale; and the foreclosure"—it mainly stemmed from illegal pressures, including discrimination in federal and state programs, swindles by lawyers and speculators, unlawful denials of private loans, and even outright acts of violence or intimidation. Discriminatory loan servicing and loan denial by white-controlled FmHA and ASCS committees forced black farmers into foreclosure, after which their property could be purchased by wealthy landowners, almost all of whom were white. Discrimination by private lenders had the same result. Many black farmers who escaped foreclosure were defrauded by white tax assessors who set assessments too high, leading to unaffordable tax obligations. The inevitable result: tax sales, where, again, the land was purchased by wealthy white people. Black people's lack of access to legal services complicated inheritances and put family claims to title in jeopardy. Lynchings, police brutality, and other forms of intimidation were sometimes used to dispossess black farmers, and even when land wasn't a motivation for such actions, much of the violence left land without an owner.
In interviews with researchers from the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in 1985, Henry Woodard Sr., an African American who had bought land in the 1950s in Tunica County, said he had managed to keep up for years through a combination of his own industry, small loans from the FmHA and white banks, and the rental of additional land from other hard-pressed black landowners. Then, in 1966, the activist James Meredith—whose 1962 fight to integrate Ole Miss sparked deadly riots and a wave of white backlash—embarked on the famous March Against Fear. The next planting season, Woodard recalled, his white lenders ignored him. "I sensed that it was because of this march," he said. "And it was a lady told me—I was at the post office and she told me, she said, 'Henry, you Negroes, y'all want to live like white folks. Y'all don't know how white folks live. But y'all are gonna have to be on your own now.' "
Woodard's story would have been familiar to countless farmers in the Delta. In Holmes County, a crucible of the voting-rights movement, a black effort to integrate the local ASCS committees was so successful that it was subject to surveillance and sabotage by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an official agency created by Governor J. P. Coleman in 1956 to resist integration. Black landowners involved in running for the committees or organizing for votes faced fierce retaliation. In 1965, The New Republic reported that in Issaquena County, just north of Vicksburg, the "insurance of Negroes active in the ASCS elections had been canceled, loans were denied to Negroes on all crops but cotton, and ballots were not mailed to Negro wives who were co-owners of land." Even in the decades after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, formal and informal complaints against the USDA poured out of the Delta.
These cases of dispossession can only be called theft. While the civil-rights era is remembered as a time of victories against disenfranchisement and segregation, many realities never changed. The engine of white wealth built on kleptocracy—which powered both Jim Crow and its slave-state precursor—continued to run. The black population in Mississippi declined by almost one-fifth from 1950 to 1970, as the white population increased by the exact same percentage. Farmers slipped away one by one into the night, appearing later as laborers in Chicago and Detroit. By the time black people truly gained the ballot in Mississippi, they were a clear minority, held in thrall to a white conservative supermajority.
Mass dispossession did not require a central organizing force or a grand conspiracy. Thousands of individual decisions by white people, enabled or motivated by greed, racism, existing laws, and market forces, all pushed in a single direction. But some white people undeniably would have organized it this way if they could have. The civil-rights leader Bayard Rustin reported in 1956 that documents taken from the office of Robert Patterson, one of the founding fathers of the White Citizens' Councils, proposed a "master plan" to force hundreds of thousands of black people from Mississippi in order to reduce their potential voting power. Patterson envisioned, in Rustin's words, "the decline of the small independent farmer" and ample doses of "economic pressure."
An upheaval of this scale and speed—the destruction of black farming, an occupation that had defined the African American experience—might in any other context be described as a revolution, or seen as a historical fulcrum. But it came and went with little remark.
IV. The Catfish Boom
World War II transformed America in many ways. It certainly transformed a generation of southern black men. That generation included Medgar Evers, a future civil-rights martyr, assassinated while leading the Mississippi NAACP; he served in a segregated transportation company in Europe during the war. It included Willena's father, Ed Scott Jr., who also served in a segregated transportation company. These men were less patient, more defiant, and in many ways more reckless than their fathers and grandfathers had been. They chafed under a system that forced them to relearn how to bow and scrape, as if the war had never happened. In the younger Scott's case, wartime service sharpened his inherited land hunger, pushing him to seek more land and greater financial independence, both for himself and for his community. One of his siblings told his biographer, Julian Rankin, that the family's deepest conviction was that "a million years from now … this land will still be Scotts' land."
Upon his return to the Delta, Scott continued down his father's hard path, avoiding any interface with the FmHA and the public portions of the agrigovernment system, which by that time had spread its tendrils throughout Sunflower and Leflore Counties. He leaned on the friendships he and his father had made with local business owners and farmers, and secured credit for growing his holdings from friendly white bankers. Influenced by the civil-rights movement and its emphasis on community solidarity and activism, Scott borrowed from Oliver Cromwell's self-sufficiency playbook too. He used his status to provide opportunities for other black farmers and laborers. "Daddy said that everyone who worked for us would always be able to eat," Willena Scott-White told me. He made sure of more than that. Scott sent relatives' and tenants' children to school, paid for books, helped people open bank accounts and buy their own land. When civil-rights activists made their way down for Mississippi's Freedom Summer, in 1964, he packed up meals and brought them to rallies.
When Scott-White thinks of her father, who died in 2015, she seems to become a young girl again. With allowances for nostalgia, she recalls a certain kind of country poorness-but-not-poverty, whereby children ran barefoot and worked from the moment they could walk, but ate well, lived in houses with solid floors and tight roofs, and went to high school and college if they showed skill. "We lived in something like a utopia," Scott-White told me. But things changed at the tail end of the 1970s. Plummeting commodity prices forced highly leveraged farmers to seek loans wherever they could find them. Combined with the accelerating inflation of that decade, the beginnings of the farm-credit crisis made farming at scale without federal assistance impossible. Yet federal help—even then, two decades after the Civil Rights Act—was not available for most black farmers. According to a 2005 article in The Nation, "In 1984 and 1985, at the height of the farm crisis, the USDA lent a total of $1.3 billion to nearly 16,000 farmers to help them maintain their land. Only 209 of those farmers were black."
As Rankin tells it in his biography, Catfish Dream, Scott made his first visit to an FmHA office in 1978. With the assistance of Vance Nimrod, a white man who worked with the black-owned Delta Foundation, a nonprofit promoting economic advancement for black Mississippians, Scott secured an operating loan for a season of soybeans and rice from the FmHA agent Delbert Edwards. The first time was easy—although, crucially, Nimrod accompanied him to the Leflore County office, in Greenwood. When Scott returned the next year without Nimrod, driving a shiny new truck the way his father used to, Edwards asked where Nimrod was. According to Rankin, Scott told the agent that Nimrod had only come to help secure that first loan; he wasn't a business partner. When Edwards saw Scott's vehicle, he seemed perplexed. "Who told you to buy a new truck?" he asked. Edwards ended up denying the requested loan amount.
At the same time, Edwards and the FmHA were moving to help local white farmers weather the storm, often by advising them to get into raising catfish. Commercial catfish farming was a relatively new industry, and it had found a home in the Delta as prices for row crops crashed and new legislation gave the USDA power and incentive to build up domestic fish farming. FmHA agents pushed white farmers to convert wide fields on the floodplain into giant catfish ponds, many of which would become contract-growing hubs for Delta Pride Catfish, a cooperative that quickly evolved into a local monopoly. The federal government poured millions of dollars into the catfish boom by way of FmHA loans, many of which were seized on by the largest white landowners, and kept those white landowners solvent. Mississippi became the catfish capital of the world in the 1970s. But the FmHA did not reach out to Scott, nor is there evidence that it supported the ambitions of any black farmers who might have wanted to get into catfish.
Scott decided to get into catfish anyway, digging eight ponds in fields where rice had grown the season before. He found his own catfish stocks and learned the ins and outs of the industry pretty much on his own. Scott finished digging his ponds in 1981, at which point, according to Rankin, Edwards of the FmHA visited the property and told him point-blank: "Don't think I'm giving you any damn money for that dirt you're moving." The Mississippi FmHA would eventually compel Edwards to provide loans for Scott's catfish operation for 1981 and 1982. But as court records show, the amount approved was far less than what white catfish farmers usually got—white farmers sometimes received double or triple the amount per acre that Scott did—and enough to stock only four of the eight ponds. (Edwards could not be reached for comment on any of the episodes recounted here.)
Scott's Fresh Catfish opened in 1983. As a marker outside the old processing shed now indicates, it was the first catfish plant in the country owned by an African American. But discrimination doomed the enterprise before it really began. Without enough capital, Scott was never able to raise fish at the volume he needed. He claimed in court and later to Rankin that he had also been denied a chance to purchase stock in Delta Pride—a requirement to become a contract grower—because he was black. Without access to a cooperative, he had to do the processing and packaging himself, adding to the cost of his product. In 2006, Delta Pride and Country Select Catfish were combined into a new business entity, Consolidated Catfish Producers. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Consolidated Catfish said that no employee at the new company could "definitively answer" questions about Scott or alleged discrimination against him.
Scott was in his 60s by the time his plant got off the ground. The effort took a toll. He slowly went blind. Arthritis claimed his joints. His heart began to fail. The plant limped quietly through the '80s and then shut down. Lenders began the process of foreclosing on some of Scott's cropland as early as 1983. In 1995, the FmHA approved a request from Scott to lease most of his remaining acres. The USDA itself had claimed most of his land by the late 1980s.
The downfall of the Scott catfish enterprise was proof of the strength and endurance of what the federal government would later state could be seen as a federally funded "conspiracy to force minority and disadvantaged farmers off their land through discriminatory loan practices." The Scotts were not small-timers. They had the kind of work ethic and country savvy that are usually respected around the Delta. When the powers that be finally prevailed over Ed Scott Jr., they had completed something decisive, something that even today feels as if it cannot be undone.
V. Farmers in Suits
But land is never really lost, not in America. Twelve million acres of farmland in a country that has become a global breadbasket carries immense value, and the dispossessed land in the Delta is some of the most productive in America. The soil on the alluvial plain is rich. The region is warm and wet. Much of the land is perfect for industrialized agriculture.
Some white landowners, like Norman Weathersby, themselves the beneficiaries of government-funded dispossession, left land to their children. Some sold off to their peers, and others saw their land gobbled up by even larger white-owned farms. Nowadays, as fewer and fewer of the children of aging white landowners want to continue farming, more land has wound up in the hands of trusts and investors. Over the past 20 years, the real power brokers in the Delta are less likely to be good ol' boys and more likely to be suited venture capitalists, hedge-fund managers, and agribusiness consultants who run farms with the cold precision of giant circuit boards.
One new addition to the mix is pension funds. Previously, farmland had never been a choice asset class for large-scale investing. In 1981, what was then called the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office) released a report exploring a proposal by a firm seeking pension-investment opportunities in farmland. The report essentially laughed off the prospect. The authors found that only about one dollar of every $4,429 in retirement funds was invested in farmland.
But commodity prices increased, and land values rose. In 2008, a weakened dollar forced major funds to broaden their search for hedges against inflation. "The market in agricultural land in the U.S. is currently experiencing a boom," an industry analyst, Tom Vulcan, wrote that year. He took note of the recent entry of TIAA-CREF, which had "spent some $340 million on farmland across seven states." TIAA, as the company is now called, would soon become the biggest pension-fund player in the agricultural real-estate game across the globe. In 2010, TIAA bought a controlling interest in Westchester Group, a major agricultural-asset manager. In 2014, it bought Nuveen, another large asset-management firm. In 2015, with Nuveen directing its overall investment strategy and Westchester and other smaller subsidiaries operating as purchasers and managers, TIAA raised $3 billion for a new global farmland-investment partnership. By the close of 2016, Nuveen's management portfolio included nearly 2 million acres of farmland, worth close to $6 billion.
Investment in farmland has proved troublesome for TIAA in Mississippi and elsewhere. TIAA is a pension company originally set up for teachers and professors and people in the nonprofit world. It has cultivated a reputation for social responsibility: promoting environmental sustainability and respecting land rights, labor rights, and resource rights. TIAA has endorsed the United Nations–affiliated Principles for Responsible Investment, which include special provisions for investment in farmland, including specific guidelines with regard to sustainability, leasing practices, and establishing the provenance of tracts of land.
The company has faced pushback for its move into agriculture. In 2015, the international nonprofit Grain, which advocates for local control of farmland by small farmers, released the results of an investigation accusing TIAA's farmland-investment arm of skirting laws limiting foreign land acquisition in its purchase of more than half a million acres in Brazil. The report found that TIAA had violated multiple UN guidelines in creating a joint venture with a Brazilian firm to invest in farmland without transparency. The Grain report alleges that when Brazil tightened laws designed to restrict foreign investment, TIAA purchased 49 percent of a Brazilian company that then acted as its proxy. According to The New York Times, TIAA and its subsidiaries also appear to have acquired land titles from Euclides de Carli, a businessman often described in Brazil as a big-time grileiro—a member of a class of landL-rds and land grabbers who use a mix of legitimate means, fraud, and violence to force small farmers off their land. In response to criticism of TIAA's Brazil portfolio, Jose Minaya, then the head of private-markets asset management at TIAA, told WNYC's The Takeaway: "We believe and know that we are in compliance with the law, and we are transparent about what we do in Brazil. From a title perspective, our standards are very focused around not displacing individuals or indigenous people, respecting land rights as well as human rights … In every property that we have acquired, we don't just do due diligence on that property. We do due diligence on the sellers, whether it's an individual or whether it's an entity."
https://www.grain.org/
https://www.grain.org/article/entries/5336-foreign-pension-funds-and-land-grabbing-in-brazil
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/17/world/americas/tiaa-cref-us-investment-giant-accused-of-land-grabs-in-brazil.html
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/tiaa-cref-accused-illegaly-investments-brazil
TIAA's land dealings have faced scrutiny in the United States as well. In 2012, the National Family Farm Coalition found that the entry into agriculture of deep-pocketed institutional investors—TIAA being an example—had made it pretty much impossible for smaller farmers to compete. Institutional investment has removed millions of acres from farmers' hands, more or less permanently. "Pension funds not only have the power to outbid smaller, local farmers, they also have the long-term goal of retaining farmland for generations," the report noted.
https://www.nffc.net/Issues/Corporate%20Control/TIAA-CREF%20Backgrounder_2.3.13.pdf
Asked about TIAA's record, a spokesperson for Nuveen maintained that the company has built its Delta portfolio following ethical-investment guidelines: "We have a long history of investing responsibly in farmland, in keeping with our corporate values and the UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). As a long-term owner, we bring capital, professional expertise, and sustainable farming practices to each farm we own, and we are always looking to partner with expansion-minded tenants who will embrace that approach and act as good stewards of the land." The company did not comment on the history of any individual tract in its Delta portfolio.
https://www.tiaa.org/public/pdf/how_we_invest_in_farmland.pdf
But even assuming that every acre under management by big corporate interests in the Delta has been acquired by way of ethical-investment principles, the nature of the mid-century dispossession and its multiple layers of legitimation raise the question of whether responsible investment in farmland there is even possible. As a people and a class, black farmers were plainly targets, but the deed histories of tax sales and foreclosures don't reveal whether individual debtors were moved off the land because of discrimination and its legal tools.
In addition, land records are spotty in rural areas, especially records from the 1950s and '60s, and in some cases it's unclear exactly which records the investors used to meet internal requirements. According to Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau, a campaigner and organizer at ActionAid, an anti-poverty and food-justice nonprofit, "It's been a struggle to get this information." The organization has tried to follow the trails of deeds and has asked TIAA—which manages ActionAid's own pension plan—for an analysis of the provenance of its Delta portfolio. Such an analysis has not been provided.
What we do know is that, whatever the specific lineage of each acre, Wall Street investors have found a lucrative new asset class whose origins lie in part in mass dispossession. We know that the vast majority of black farmland in the country is no longer in black hands, and that black farmers have suffered far more hardships than white farmers have. The historian Debra A. Reid points out that "between 1920 and 1997, the number of African Americans who farmed decreased by 98 percent, while white Americans who farmed declined by 66 percent." Referring to the cases studied in their 2001 investigation, Dolores Barclay and Todd Lewan of the Associated Press observed that virtually all of the property lost by black farmers "is owned by whites or corporations." The foundation of these portfolios was a system of plantations whose owners created the agrigovernment system and absorbed thousands of small black-owned farms into ever larger white-owned farms. America has its own grileiros, and they stand on land that was once someone else's.
VI. A Deeper Excavation
As we drove through the patchwork remnants of the Scotts' land, Willena Scott-White took me to the site of Scott's Fresh Catfish. Gleaming steel silos had turned into rusting hulks. The ponds were thick with weeds and debris. The exterior walls of the plant itself had collapsed. Rusted beams lay atop ruined machinery. Fire ants and kudzu had begun nature's reclamation.
Late in Ed Scott Jr.'s life, as he slipped into Alzheimer's, Willena and his lawyer, Phil Fraas, fought to keep his original hopes alive. In the Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit of 1997, thousands of black farmers and their families won settlements against the USDA for discrimination that had occurred between 1981 and the end of 1996; the outlays ultimately reached a total of $2 billion. The Scotts were one of those families, and after a long battle to prove their case—with the assistance of Scott-White's meticulous notes and family history—in 2012 the family was awarded more than $6 million in economic damages, plus almost $400,000 in other damages and debt forgiveness. The court also helped the Scotts reclaim land possessed by the department. In a 1999 ruling, Judge Paul L. Friedman of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia acknowledged that forcing the federal government to compensate black farmers would "not undo all that has been done" in centuries of government-sponsored racism. But for the Scotts, it was a start.
"The telling factor, looking at it from the long view, is that at the time of World War I there were 1 million black farmers, and in 1992 there were 18,000," Fraas told me. The settlements stemming from Pigford cover only specific recent claims of discrimination, and none stretching back to the period of the civil-rights era, when the great bulk of black-owned farms disappeared. Most people have not pushed for any kind of deeper excavation.
Any such excavation would quickly make plain the consequences of what occurred. During my drive with Scott-White, we traveled through parts of Leflore, Sunflower, and Washington Counties, three of the counties singled out by Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University research group, as among the worst in the country in terms of a child's prospects for upward mobility. Ten counties in the Delta are among the poorest 50 in America. According to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on all 74,000 U.S. census tracts, four tracts in the Delta are among the lowest 100 when it comes to average life expectancy. More than 30 tracts in the Delta have an average life expectancy below 70. (The national average is 79.) In some Delta counties, the infant mortality rate is more than double the nationwide rate. As if to add gratuitous insult to injury, a new analysis from ProPublica finds that, as a result of the Internal Revenue Service's intense scrutiny of low-income taxpayers, the Delta is audited by the IRS more heavily than any other place in the country. In sum, the areas of deepest poverty and under the darkest shadow of death are the ones where dispossession was the most far-reaching.
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/eitc-audit
The consequences of dispossession had long been predicted. Fannie Lou Hamer, a Sunflower County activist whose 1964 speech to a Democratic National Convention committee galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act, spoke often of the need for land reform as a precondition for true freedom. Hamer's utopian Freedom Farm experiment stressed cooperative landownership, and she said the concentration of land in the hands of a few landowners was "at the base of our struggle for survival." In her analysis, mass dispossession should be seen as mass extraction. Even as the U.S. government invested billions in white farmers, it continued to extract wealth from black farmers in the Delta. Each black farmer who left the region, from Reconstruction onward, represented a tiny withdrawal from one side of a cosmic balance sheet and a deposit on the other side. This dynamic would only continue, in other ways and other places, as the Great Migration brought black families to northern cities.
http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/sayitplain/flhamer.html
This cosmic balance sheet underpins the national conversation—ever more robust—about reparations for black Americans. In that conversation, given momentum in part by the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations" in this magazine in 2014, I hear echoes of Mississippi. I hear echoes of Hamer, the Scotts, Henry Woodard Sr., and others who petitioned the federal government to hold itself accountable for a history of extraction that has extended well beyond enslavement. But that conversation too easily becomes technical. How do we quantify discrimination? How do we define who was discriminated against? How do we repay those people according to what has been defined and quantified? The idea of reparations sometimes seems like a problem of economic rightsizing—something for the quants and wonks to work out.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
Economics is, of course, a major consideration. According to the researchers Francis and Hamilton, "The dispossession of black agricultural land resulted in the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars of black wealth. We must emphasize this estimate is conservative … Depending on multiplier effects, rates of returns, and other factors, it could reach into the trillions." The large wealth gap between white and black families today exists in part because of this historic loss.
But money does not define every dimension of land theft. Were it not for dispossession, Mississippi today might well be a majority-black state, with a radically different political destiny. Imagine the difference in our national politics if the center of gravity of black electoral strength had remained in the South after the Voting Rights Act was passed.
Politics aside, how can reparations truly address the lives ruined, the family histories lost, the connection to the land severed? In America, land has always had a significance that exceeds its economic value. For a people who were once chattel themselves, real property has carried an almost mystical import. There's a reason the fabled promise that spread among freedmen after the Civil War was not a check, a job, or a refundable tax credit, but 40 acres of farmland to call home. The history of the Delta suggests that any conversation about reparations might need to be more qualitative and intangible than it is. And it must consider the land.
Land hunger is ineffable, an indescribable yearning, and yet it is something that Americans, perhaps uniquely, feel and understand. That yearning tugged at me hardest as Willena Scott-White rounded out her tour of the fields, the afternoon slipping away. Out among the Scotts' fields is a clearing with a lone, tall tree. In the clearing is a small cemetery. A handful of crooked, weathered tombstones stand sentinel. This is where Ed Scott Jr. is buried, and where some of Willena's older siblings now rest. Willena posed for a picture beside her parents' grave. She told me that this is where her own bones will rest after her work on Earth is done.
"This is our land," she said.
This article appears in the September 2019 print edition with the headline "This Land Was Our Land."
Thursday, August 15, 2019
Wednesday, August 14, 2019
Antonio Basco's wife of 22 years was killed in the mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart this month, and her passing means that Basco has no relatives left. Basco, who runs a mobile car wash business in El Paso, told the funeral home planning the service for his late spouse, Margie Reckard, that he wanted to invite members of the public to attend her visitation.
https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1161790387473833984
https://www.npr.org/2019/08/14/751223404/his-only-relative-died-in-el-paso-now-wifes-funeral-may-draw-hundreds-of-strange
Light News Dump
Emma Lazarus "wrote 'The New Colossus' to argue that aiding the poor and oppressed of all lands was the mission of all Americans, the mission of America itself."
https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/1161699136917430272
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected House Democrats' effort to put two key legal cases the Judiciary Committee is pursuing in its impeachment investigation before the same judge. The decision from DC District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell is a procedural setback for the House Judiciary Committee in its effort to use the courts to obtain information while the panel considers whether to bring forward articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/14/politics/house-democrats-lawsuit-don-mcgahn-judge/index.html
More than half of world’s forest wildlife lost in 40 years | The amount of wildlife in the world’s forests has plummeted by more than half (53 per cent) in just over 40 years, conservationists have found.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife-forest-climate-change-wwf-a9056516.html
https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2019-08/BelowTheCanopyReport.pdf
Residents told to evacuate after rise in radiation levels near Russian blast site
https://www.france24.com/en/20190813-russia-nuclear-blast-explosion-accident-missile-radiation-severodvinsk-residents-leave
China denies Hong Kong port visit for U.S. Navy ships amid tensions
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-usa-navy/china-denies-hong-kong-port-visit-for-u-s-navy-ships-amid-tensions-idUSKCN1V31Z3
Jeffrey Epstein Death: 2 Guards Fell Asleep, Failed to Do Checks
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-jail-officers.html
Oregon passes law requiring eggs sold there to come from cage-free hens
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/457341-oregon-passes-law-requiring-eggs-sold-in-the-state-to-come-from-cage
U.S. taxpayers repeatedly paid a Trump hotel in Canada: The Secret Service stayed at a Trump hotel in Vancouver while protecting Donald Trump Jr. on a hunting trip to Canada.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/14/secret-service-donald-trump-jr-canada-hotel-1459051
The Republican politician Matt Shea connected close allies with a group offering training to young men in “biblical warfare” that includes how to use knives, pistols and rifles, with lessons based in part on the teachings of a Georgia-based neo-Confederate pastor, emails obtained by the Guardian reveal. Shea, who is an elected Washington state representative, later made videos in support of the group, and appeared alongside them at a gathering at a religious community in remote eastern Washington. He also paid the founder of the group money from his campaign fund in 2018.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/13/matt-shea-biblical-war-washington-team-rugged
Beto O’Rourke’s Finest Hour Came Off the Presidential Campaign Trail, in El Paso - In the absence of a fully functioning president, he filled a void and, in the process, reminded people of the man who caught the imagination of his state. | From the moment the Walmart became a morgue, O’Rourke was back where he belonged, amid 680,000 residents of a community that is among the safest in the country. He stopped campaigning immediately, not to make a video of himself at a staged hospital visit, but to live among the mourners, some his neighbors, many his constituents when he served them in Congress. Vigils? He was there. A soccer fundraiser? He and his family were at the one to make up for the one outside Walmart that ended last Saturday with two coaches wounded. He donated blood, hugged everyone, spent time with those wounded while trying to save a child or spouse. He skipped the Iowa State Fair, the nation’s premier political event (and dining event too, if you like deep-fried Twinkies), where 16 other candidates bucking to win the first-in-the-nation caucuses appeared. | When O’Rourke looks back, at the end of his life, at what he did in his public career that made a difference, more than when he was a congressman, more than when he ran a race for the Senate that fell just short, and more than his so-far underwhelming presidential campaign, he will have 11 days, and counting, in El Paso. He showed up. He didn’t send his thoughts and prayers. He gave them himself.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/beto-orourkes-finest-hour-came-off-the-presidential-campaign-trail-in-el-paso
Austin Tice was abducted in Syria seven years ago today. No words can describe his family's suffering, or our awe of their determination and perseverance. Please read their open letter about the efforts to bring him home, and some things we can all do to help. #FreeAustinTice
https://twitter.com/JohnKerry/status/1161679157895618560
An heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement. She bankrolled the founding and operation of the nation’s three largest restrictionist groups — the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — as well as dozens of smaller ones, including some that have promulgated white nationalist views. Today, 14 years after Mrs. May’s death, her money remains the lifeblood of the movement, through her Colcom Foundation. It has poured $180 million into a network of groups that spent decades agitating for policies now pursued by President Trump: militarizing the border, capping legal immigration, prioritizing skills over family ties for entry and reducing access to public benefits for migrants, as in the new rule issued just this week by the administration. From 2005 to 2017, the Colcom Foundation gave millions to anti-immigration and population-control groups, some with close ties to the Trump administration. | In many ways, the Trump presidency is the culmination of Mrs. May’s vision for strictly limiting immigration. Groups that she funded shared policy proposals with Mr. Trump’s campaign, sent key staff members to join his administration and have close ties to Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda to upend practices adopted by his Democratic and Republican predecessors. | Mrs. May faced criticism even from within her family for the groups she supported. A young cousin asked whether her causes weren’t discriminatory, racist or, as Mrs. May recalled in a letter, “the one that really puts my teeth on edge … ‘elitist.’” She produced a five-page typed response, rife with comments about Filipinos “pouring” into Hawaii and “Orientals and Indians” sneaking across “long stretches of unmanned border” with Canada. She compared medical science’s success in reducing infant mortality rates to veterinarians prolonging the lives “of useless cattle.” Birthrates had dropped in a few areas, she noted, and millions died of starvation every year, but population growth rates continued to climb. “Even wars no longer make much dent; during 11 years of conflict, both North and South Vietnam showed a net increase in population,” she wrote. Legal and illegal immigration led to overpopulation, she said, “the root cause of unemployment, inflation, urban sprawl, highway (and skyway) congestion, shortages of all sorts (not the least of which is energy), vanishing farmland, environmental deterioration and civil unrest.” | Mrs. May left almost everything to the Colcom Foundation. In 2005, $215 million from her family trust poured into the foundation’s coffers, along with another $30 million from her personal estate. As her affairs were wound up, another $176 million transferred from her estate in 2006. In all, since Mrs. May’s death, the anti-immigration groups have received $180 million. The market value of Colcom’s assets is $500 million, more than she bequeathed it in the first place.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html
Fracking in U.S. And Canada Linked to Worldwide Atmospheric Methane Spike
https://www.newsweek.com/fracking-u-s-canada-worldwide-atmospheric-methane-spike-1454205
Ocean-surface garbage bins come to B.C.'s West Coast. They can collect about one and half tons of waste per year. They float and gently pump water into a catchment bin, filtering out pollutants like petroleum-based oils, plastics, and Styrofoam before pumping the water back into the ocean.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ocean-surface-garbage-bins-come-to-b-c-s-west-coast-1.5246117
The remains of a giant penguin the size of a human have been discovered in New Zealand. The fossilised bones are of an animal thought to have been about 1.6m (5ft 3in) tall, weighing up to 80kg (176lb).
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49340715?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world&link_location=live-reporting-story
Russia said on Wednesday it had flown two nuclear-capable TU-160 bombers to a far eastern Russian region opposite Alaska as part of a training exercise that state media said showed Moscow’s ability to park nuclear arms on the United States’ doorstep.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-bombers/russia-flies-nuclear-capable-bombers-to-region-facing-alaska-idUSKCN1V420D
(LOL.....) The Clippers are closing in on the hiring of Tyronn Lue as a top assistant to Coach Doc Rivers, league sources say
https://twitter.com/TheSteinLine/status/1161704194425802752
100,000 sign petition to rename 5th Avenue in front of Trump Tower after Barack Obama | What started out as a joke to rename Trump Tower's address to 725 President Barack H. Obama Avenue now has more than 100,000 signatures, but don't expect a name change any time soon. The petition, posted on the left-leaning moveon.org, addresses New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council, asking for the block of Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets to be renamed after the former president. It asks that all addresses would be changed accordingly, meaning Trump Tower's new address would be 725 President Barack H. Obama Ave. | She says the petition will be delivered to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York City Council for their consideration, but it fails to meet one of the key guidelines for co-naming streets in the city. Individual prospective honorees must be deceased for at least two years prior to consideration.
https://abc7ny.com/politics/petition-rename-portion-of-5th-ave-near-trump-tower-after-obama/5467121/
Dow drops 800 points as Wall Street suffers worst day of year on recession fears | The market selloff was a response to the yield curve inversion in government bonds, triggered by ongoing geopolitical turmoil and sluggish economic growth worldwide. | The market selloff was the result of an inverted yield curve in government bonds, when the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note falls below the 2-year rate — a phenomenon that has preceded every recession for the past 50 years.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/wall-street-slides-inverted-yield-curve-rings-recession-alarm-bells-n1042211
Hispanic people “are what is wrong with this country,” a man who allegedly threatened to shoot up a Walmart in the Orlando area told a police officer just days after the El Paso shooting massacre left 22 people dead, according to newly surfaced documents on his arrest and online postings. Richard Dean Clayton, 26, allegedly threatened to pee in his arresting officer’s car until the officer told him he wasn’t Hispanic, according to newly revealed police reports. Clayton was “very uncooperative and belligerent” while in custody, Winter Park Police Officer Greg Gerardi noted in his report. | According to the reports, first surfaced by the journalist Nick Martin on Tuesday, Clayton’s affinity for Nazism and desire to create a white ethnostate had long been evident online.
The police report cites Clayton’s Facebook posts, revealing what’s become a common thread among certain mass shooters and those who threaten mass violence: ultranationalism, racism, and an obsession with guns and violence. For example, in one picture posted on a Facebook page allegedly controlled by Clayton, as described in a police report, a white male is seen wearing a stars and stripes bandana is holding an AR-15 style rifle and a bottle labeled Knob Creek. There’s a Trump banner on the wall. Another post, the report says, displays a swastika. Another asks readers to “imagine for a moment that we’ve established out [sic] enthostate, physically removed all the commies and degenerates, and white birthrates are back in the positives. Who would there be left to make fun of?”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fl-man-who-threatened-walmart-attack-had-racist-fb-posts-threatened-to-pee-in-cruiser
Federal officials are investigating two shootings that they say targeted facilities housing Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in San Antonio. Numerous shots were fired into two ICE facilities in private commercial buildings around 3 a.m. on Tuesday, Christopher Combs, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s San Antonio division, said at a news conference later in the day. It was unknown how many individuals might be involved in the shootings, he said. As a result, the F.B.I. opened an investigation as an “assault on a federal official case,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/ice-san-antonio-shooting.html
The House Homeland Security Committee has issued a subpoena to force the owner of fringe social network 8chan, which has been linked to mass shootings, to testify at a deposition on any efforts his platform has made to combat racist and violent content.
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1161750614801571840
The president of the NYPD's second largest police union shared a wildly racist video this weekend likening black people to monsters. He told me this morning that he shouldn't face consequences because it was an "honest mistake" and he does not see color.
https://twitter.com/jangelooff/status/1161685903942791168
The banana as we know it could become extinct: A deadly fungus is on the verge of wiping out the banana forever |For decades a deadly fungus has ravaged Asia's banana plantations. Now it's been found in Latin America, where almost all of the world's export bananas are grown | The banana – or at least the fruit as we know it – is facing an existential crisis. A deadly fungus that has decimated banana plantations in southeast Asia for 30 years has finally done what scientists have long been fearing, and made its way to Latin America – the heart of the global banana export market. On August 8 the Colombian Agricultural Institute announced that it had confirmed that the fungus – a strain of Fusarium oxysporum called Tropical Race 4 (TR4) – had been found in plantations in the north of the country. The country declared a national state of emergency, destroying crops and quarantining plantations in an attempt to avert the spread of the fungus. “What we’re having is an almost apocalyptic scenario where we’ll probably lose Cavendish as well,” says Sarah Gurr, Exeter University’s chair in food security. Initially discovered in Taiwan in 1989, TR4 is rife throughout southeast Asia and has since been found in Lebanon, Israel, India and Australia. But until now, Latin America had avoided the pathogen altogether. “Once it’s in a country it’s very hard to get rid of it,” says Dan Bebber, a senior lecturer in biosciences also at Exeter University. TR4 lives in the soil and can be transmitted on unclean tyres or boots, or spread from banana plants when they are replanted in different farms. Once present in soil, it can stay dormant for years before infecting banana plants through their roots, spreading to the water- and nutrient-conducting tissue and starving them of nourishment. Now it’s in Latin America – and is likely more widespread than is currently understood – it’s a matter of controlling the spread of the fungus, says Bebber. Making sure any plantation employees or visitors disinfect boots and tyres before entering or leaving the site helps, as will trying to maintain the health of the soil, but no countries have managed to successfully contain TR4. In 1997, TR4 was detected in Australia’s Northern Territory, but vigorous quarantine efforts couldn’t prevent the pathogen from spreading to north Queensland in 2015. “We would expect a pretty rapid spread [in Latin America]” says Bebber. In the extremely low-margin banana industry, relatively little funding is directed towards research into new banana varieties that might be resistant to the disease. Over the past decade, the price of bananas in the UK has stayed steady at £0.94 per kilogram. In the same time period, the price of apples went from £1.51 to £2.08 per kilogram – an increase of nearly 40 per cent. This relentless demand for extremely cheap fruit produced thousands of miles away has driven the industry to concentrate on only a single banana crop, as that allows for more standardised, and thus cheaper, farming and transportation. But growing only a single variety of banana has serious drawbacks. “Monocultures are divine feeding grounds for pathogens,” says Gurr. When a pathogen arrives that infects a certain variety, such as the Cavendish, there is no reprieve in sight. | While things in Latin America look dire, there is a little hope on the horizon. Work is already underway to use CRISPR gene-editing to create Cavendish bananas that are resistant to TR4. In 2018, the plant biologist James Dale demonstrated that it’s possible to modify the Cavendish genome using CRISPR, and in Norwich a firm called Tropic Biosciences is also experimenting with using CRISPR to engineer resistant bananas.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/banana-disease-tr4-latin-america
Statue of Liberty shown cuffed and arrested by immigration officials in new mural
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/14/statue-of-liberty-mural-las-vegas-ice-immigration-arrest
https://twitter.com/Acosta/status/1161699136917430272
A federal judge on Wednesday rejected House Democrats' effort to put two key legal cases the Judiciary Committee is pursuing in its impeachment investigation before the same judge. The decision from DC District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell is a procedural setback for the House Judiciary Committee in its effort to use the courts to obtain information while the panel considers whether to bring forward articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/14/politics/house-democrats-lawsuit-don-mcgahn-judge/index.html
More than half of world’s forest wildlife lost in 40 years | The amount of wildlife in the world’s forests has plummeted by more than half (53 per cent) in just over 40 years, conservationists have found.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/wildlife-forest-climate-change-wwf-a9056516.html
https://www.wwf.org.uk/sites/default/files/2019-08/BelowTheCanopyReport.pdf
Residents told to evacuate after rise in radiation levels near Russian blast site
https://www.france24.com/en/20190813-russia-nuclear-blast-explosion-accident-missile-radiation-severodvinsk-residents-leave
China denies Hong Kong port visit for U.S. Navy ships amid tensions
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-usa-navy/china-denies-hong-kong-port-visit-for-u-s-navy-ships-amid-tensions-idUSKCN1V31Z3
Jeffrey Epstein Death: 2 Guards Fell Asleep, Failed to Do Checks
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-jail-officers.html
Oregon passes law requiring eggs sold there to come from cage-free hens
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/457341-oregon-passes-law-requiring-eggs-sold-in-the-state-to-come-from-cage
U.S. taxpayers repeatedly paid a Trump hotel in Canada: The Secret Service stayed at a Trump hotel in Vancouver while protecting Donald Trump Jr. on a hunting trip to Canada.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/14/secret-service-donald-trump-jr-canada-hotel-1459051
The Republican politician Matt Shea connected close allies with a group offering training to young men in “biblical warfare” that includes how to use knives, pistols and rifles, with lessons based in part on the teachings of a Georgia-based neo-Confederate pastor, emails obtained by the Guardian reveal. Shea, who is an elected Washington state representative, later made videos in support of the group, and appeared alongside them at a gathering at a religious community in remote eastern Washington. He also paid the founder of the group money from his campaign fund in 2018.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/13/matt-shea-biblical-war-washington-team-rugged
Beto O’Rourke’s Finest Hour Came Off the Presidential Campaign Trail, in El Paso - In the absence of a fully functioning president, he filled a void and, in the process, reminded people of the man who caught the imagination of his state. | From the moment the Walmart became a morgue, O’Rourke was back where he belonged, amid 680,000 residents of a community that is among the safest in the country. He stopped campaigning immediately, not to make a video of himself at a staged hospital visit, but to live among the mourners, some his neighbors, many his constituents when he served them in Congress. Vigils? He was there. A soccer fundraiser? He and his family were at the one to make up for the one outside Walmart that ended last Saturday with two coaches wounded. He donated blood, hugged everyone, spent time with those wounded while trying to save a child or spouse. He skipped the Iowa State Fair, the nation’s premier political event (and dining event too, if you like deep-fried Twinkies), where 16 other candidates bucking to win the first-in-the-nation caucuses appeared. | When O’Rourke looks back, at the end of his life, at what he did in his public career that made a difference, more than when he was a congressman, more than when he ran a race for the Senate that fell just short, and more than his so-far underwhelming presidential campaign, he will have 11 days, and counting, in El Paso. He showed up. He didn’t send his thoughts and prayers. He gave them himself.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/beto-orourkes-finest-hour-came-off-the-presidential-campaign-trail-in-el-paso
Austin Tice was abducted in Syria seven years ago today. No words can describe his family's suffering, or our awe of their determination and perseverance. Please read their open letter about the efforts to bring him home, and some things we can all do to help. #FreeAustinTice
https://twitter.com/JohnKerry/status/1161679157895618560
An heiress to the Mellon banking and industrial fortune with a half-billion dollars at her disposal, Mrs. May helped create what would become the modern anti-immigration movement. She bankrolled the founding and operation of the nation’s three largest restrictionist groups — the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and the Center for Immigration Studies — as well as dozens of smaller ones, including some that have promulgated white nationalist views. Today, 14 years after Mrs. May’s death, her money remains the lifeblood of the movement, through her Colcom Foundation. It has poured $180 million into a network of groups that spent decades agitating for policies now pursued by President Trump: militarizing the border, capping legal immigration, prioritizing skills over family ties for entry and reducing access to public benefits for migrants, as in the new rule issued just this week by the administration. From 2005 to 2017, the Colcom Foundation gave millions to anti-immigration and population-control groups, some with close ties to the Trump administration. | In many ways, the Trump presidency is the culmination of Mrs. May’s vision for strictly limiting immigration. Groups that she funded shared policy proposals with Mr. Trump’s campaign, sent key staff members to join his administration and have close ties to Stephen Miller, the architect of his immigration agenda to upend practices adopted by his Democratic and Republican predecessors. | Mrs. May faced criticism even from within her family for the groups she supported. A young cousin asked whether her causes weren’t discriminatory, racist or, as Mrs. May recalled in a letter, “the one that really puts my teeth on edge … ‘elitist.’” She produced a five-page typed response, rife with comments about Filipinos “pouring” into Hawaii and “Orientals and Indians” sneaking across “long stretches of unmanned border” with Canada. She compared medical science’s success in reducing infant mortality rates to veterinarians prolonging the lives “of useless cattle.” Birthrates had dropped in a few areas, she noted, and millions died of starvation every year, but population growth rates continued to climb. “Even wars no longer make much dent; during 11 years of conflict, both North and South Vietnam showed a net increase in population,” she wrote. Legal and illegal immigration led to overpopulation, she said, “the root cause of unemployment, inflation, urban sprawl, highway (and skyway) congestion, shortages of all sorts (not the least of which is energy), vanishing farmland, environmental deterioration and civil unrest.” | Mrs. May left almost everything to the Colcom Foundation. In 2005, $215 million from her family trust poured into the foundation’s coffers, along with another $30 million from her personal estate. As her affairs were wound up, another $176 million transferred from her estate in 2006. In all, since Mrs. May’s death, the anti-immigration groups have received $180 million. The market value of Colcom’s assets is $500 million, more than she bequeathed it in the first place.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html
Fracking in U.S. And Canada Linked to Worldwide Atmospheric Methane Spike
https://www.newsweek.com/fracking-u-s-canada-worldwide-atmospheric-methane-spike-1454205
Ocean-surface garbage bins come to B.C.'s West Coast. They can collect about one and half tons of waste per year. They float and gently pump water into a catchment bin, filtering out pollutants like petroleum-based oils, plastics, and Styrofoam before pumping the water back into the ocean.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ocean-surface-garbage-bins-come-to-b-c-s-west-coast-1.5246117
The remains of a giant penguin the size of a human have been discovered in New Zealand. The fossilised bones are of an animal thought to have been about 1.6m (5ft 3in) tall, weighing up to 80kg (176lb).
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-49340715?intlink_from_url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world&link_location=live-reporting-story
Russia said on Wednesday it had flown two nuclear-capable TU-160 bombers to a far eastern Russian region opposite Alaska as part of a training exercise that state media said showed Moscow’s ability to park nuclear arms on the United States’ doorstep.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-bombers/russia-flies-nuclear-capable-bombers-to-region-facing-alaska-idUSKCN1V420D
(LOL.....) The Clippers are closing in on the hiring of Tyronn Lue as a top assistant to Coach Doc Rivers, league sources say
https://twitter.com/TheSteinLine/status/1161704194425802752
100,000 sign petition to rename 5th Avenue in front of Trump Tower after Barack Obama | What started out as a joke to rename Trump Tower's address to 725 President Barack H. Obama Avenue now has more than 100,000 signatures, but don't expect a name change any time soon. The petition, posted on the left-leaning moveon.org, addresses New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council, asking for the block of Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets to be renamed after the former president. It asks that all addresses would be changed accordingly, meaning Trump Tower's new address would be 725 President Barack H. Obama Ave. | She says the petition will be delivered to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York City Council for their consideration, but it fails to meet one of the key guidelines for co-naming streets in the city. Individual prospective honorees must be deceased for at least two years prior to consideration.
https://abc7ny.com/politics/petition-rename-portion-of-5th-ave-near-trump-tower-after-obama/5467121/
Dow drops 800 points as Wall Street suffers worst day of year on recession fears | The market selloff was a response to the yield curve inversion in government bonds, triggered by ongoing geopolitical turmoil and sluggish economic growth worldwide. | The market selloff was the result of an inverted yield curve in government bonds, when the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note falls below the 2-year rate — a phenomenon that has preceded every recession for the past 50 years.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/wall-street-slides-inverted-yield-curve-rings-recession-alarm-bells-n1042211
Hispanic people “are what is wrong with this country,” a man who allegedly threatened to shoot up a Walmart in the Orlando area told a police officer just days after the El Paso shooting massacre left 22 people dead, according to newly surfaced documents on his arrest and online postings. Richard Dean Clayton, 26, allegedly threatened to pee in his arresting officer’s car until the officer told him he wasn’t Hispanic, according to newly revealed police reports. Clayton was “very uncooperative and belligerent” while in custody, Winter Park Police Officer Greg Gerardi noted in his report. | According to the reports, first surfaced by the journalist Nick Martin on Tuesday, Clayton’s affinity for Nazism and desire to create a white ethnostate had long been evident online.
The police report cites Clayton’s Facebook posts, revealing what’s become a common thread among certain mass shooters and those who threaten mass violence: ultranationalism, racism, and an obsession with guns and violence. For example, in one picture posted on a Facebook page allegedly controlled by Clayton, as described in a police report, a white male is seen wearing a stars and stripes bandana is holding an AR-15 style rifle and a bottle labeled Knob Creek. There’s a Trump banner on the wall. Another post, the report says, displays a swastika. Another asks readers to “imagine for a moment that we’ve established out [sic] enthostate, physically removed all the commies and degenerates, and white birthrates are back in the positives. Who would there be left to make fun of?”
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/fl-man-who-threatened-walmart-attack-had-racist-fb-posts-threatened-to-pee-in-cruiser
Federal officials are investigating two shootings that they say targeted facilities housing Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in San Antonio. Numerous shots were fired into two ICE facilities in private commercial buildings around 3 a.m. on Tuesday, Christopher Combs, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s San Antonio division, said at a news conference later in the day. It was unknown how many individuals might be involved in the shootings, he said. As a result, the F.B.I. opened an investigation as an “assault on a federal official case,” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/ice-san-antonio-shooting.html
The House Homeland Security Committee has issued a subpoena to force the owner of fringe social network 8chan, which has been linked to mass shootings, to testify at a deposition on any efforts his platform has made to combat racist and violent content.
https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1161750614801571840
The president of the NYPD's second largest police union shared a wildly racist video this weekend likening black people to monsters. He told me this morning that he shouldn't face consequences because it was an "honest mistake" and he does not see color.
https://twitter.com/jangelooff/status/1161685903942791168
The banana as we know it could become extinct: A deadly fungus is on the verge of wiping out the banana forever |For decades a deadly fungus has ravaged Asia's banana plantations. Now it's been found in Latin America, where almost all of the world's export bananas are grown | The banana – or at least the fruit as we know it – is facing an existential crisis. A deadly fungus that has decimated banana plantations in southeast Asia for 30 years has finally done what scientists have long been fearing, and made its way to Latin America – the heart of the global banana export market. On August 8 the Colombian Agricultural Institute announced that it had confirmed that the fungus – a strain of Fusarium oxysporum called Tropical Race 4 (TR4) – had been found in plantations in the north of the country. The country declared a national state of emergency, destroying crops and quarantining plantations in an attempt to avert the spread of the fungus. “What we’re having is an almost apocalyptic scenario where we’ll probably lose Cavendish as well,” says Sarah Gurr, Exeter University’s chair in food security. Initially discovered in Taiwan in 1989, TR4 is rife throughout southeast Asia and has since been found in Lebanon, Israel, India and Australia. But until now, Latin America had avoided the pathogen altogether. “Once it’s in a country it’s very hard to get rid of it,” says Dan Bebber, a senior lecturer in biosciences also at Exeter University. TR4 lives in the soil and can be transmitted on unclean tyres or boots, or spread from banana plants when they are replanted in different farms. Once present in soil, it can stay dormant for years before infecting banana plants through their roots, spreading to the water- and nutrient-conducting tissue and starving them of nourishment. Now it’s in Latin America – and is likely more widespread than is currently understood – it’s a matter of controlling the spread of the fungus, says Bebber. Making sure any plantation employees or visitors disinfect boots and tyres before entering or leaving the site helps, as will trying to maintain the health of the soil, but no countries have managed to successfully contain TR4. In 1997, TR4 was detected in Australia’s Northern Territory, but vigorous quarantine efforts couldn’t prevent the pathogen from spreading to north Queensland in 2015. “We would expect a pretty rapid spread [in Latin America]” says Bebber. In the extremely low-margin banana industry, relatively little funding is directed towards research into new banana varieties that might be resistant to the disease. Over the past decade, the price of bananas in the UK has stayed steady at £0.94 per kilogram. In the same time period, the price of apples went from £1.51 to £2.08 per kilogram – an increase of nearly 40 per cent. This relentless demand for extremely cheap fruit produced thousands of miles away has driven the industry to concentrate on only a single banana crop, as that allows for more standardised, and thus cheaper, farming and transportation. But growing only a single variety of banana has serious drawbacks. “Monocultures are divine feeding grounds for pathogens,” says Gurr. When a pathogen arrives that infects a certain variety, such as the Cavendish, there is no reprieve in sight. | While things in Latin America look dire, there is a little hope on the horizon. Work is already underway to use CRISPR gene-editing to create Cavendish bananas that are resistant to TR4. In 2018, the plant biologist James Dale demonstrated that it’s possible to modify the Cavendish genome using CRISPR, and in Norwich a firm called Tropic Biosciences is also experimenting with using CRISPR to engineer resistant bananas.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/banana-disease-tr4-latin-america
Statue of Liberty shown cuffed and arrested by immigration officials in new mural
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/14/statue-of-liberty-mural-las-vegas-ice-immigration-arrest
Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus to argue that aiding the poor and oppressed of all lands was the mission of all Americans, the mission of America itself.
The New Colossus
By Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Tuesday, August 13, 2019
Light News Dump
Multiple lightning strikes have been detected within 300 miles of the North Pole, in the latest extraordinary weather event amid an escalating climate change emergency.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/arctic-weather-forecast-latest-climate-change-thunder-lightning-north-pole-a9055241.html
22 states sue Trump over repeal of Obama-era power plant rules
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/457252-22-states-sue-trump-over-repeal-of-obama-era-power-plant-rules
Beef banned by London University in bid to fight climate change.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/12/beef-banned-university-bid-fight-climate-change/
Illinois Becomes Third State to Ban Sale of Animal-Tested Cosmetics | Animal Welfare Institute
https://awionline.org/press-releases/illinois-becomes-third-state-ban-sale-animal-tested-cosmetics
"Beto believed in all of us before we even believed in ourselves" | Why Beto Must Continue Running For The Presidency.
https://twitter.com/dieterich_mk/status/1161319749004996609
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday slammed the Trump administration's new immigration rule that links an immigrant's ability to secure residency or a path to citizenship to their use of public programs, predicting it will be defeated in court.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/457274-pelosi-predicts-trump-public-charge-rule-will-be-swiftly-challenged-and
https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1161329941943861248
Two California counties sued the Trump admin over its regulation that would make it easier for the gov't to deny entry or green cards to immigrants who use public programs, calling it a "new front" on Trump's "aggressive, foolish" attacks on immigrants.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/public-charge-rule-california-santa-clara-and-san-francisco-counties-sue-to-block-trumps-immigration-rule/
We've been tracking press coverage all primary long and Sanders has consistently been at or near the top of the field in terms of the volume of news coverage he's received
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-democratic-presidential-candidate-was-mentioned-most-in-the-news-last-week-5/
A six-month investigation into an 18-year-old in Ohio has resulted in his arrest on charges of threatening to assault a federal law enforcement officer. The investigation started in February, according to WJW, when agents found online comments from the teen supporting mass shootings. According to court documents, the user posted a threat to assault federal law enforcement officers writing, “…shoot every agent on sight,” in a discussion about the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco in 1993. Agents met with Justin Olsen, who gave written consent for a search of his car and bedroom, according to a probable cause warrant. On August 7th, agents report they found 10,000 rounds of ammunition, camouflage clothing, camouflaged backpacks, 15 rifles and shotguns and 10 semi-automatic pistols. Olsen faces one charge for the threat posted online.
https://wgntv.com/2019/08/13/fbi-agents-find-25-guns-10000-rounds-of-ammunition-in-teens-bedroom-following-threat/
Top Democrat urges foreign governments to stop using Trump hotels, paying his businesses | House Foreign Affairs chair Eliot Engel told staffers to inform foreign officials that such transactions could violate the Constitution.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/top-democrat-urges-foreign-governments-stop-paying-trump-s-company-n1042031?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_np
Seven years ago today, U.S. freelance photojournalist Austin Tice emailed his father to say he was wrapping up his reporting in #Syria. He was detained the next day and has not been heard from him since. Tice turned 38 on Sunday. It's time to #FreeAustinTice. #AustinTice
https://twitter.com/pressfreedom/status/1161259859326754817
Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos Are Scheduled to Speak at a Conference Organized by a QAnon Supporter
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/08/michael-flynn-and-george-papadopoulos-are-scheduled-to-speak-at-a-conference-organized-by-a-qanon-supporter/
"AG" Barr said there must be 'zero tolerance for resisting police' and went after 'social justice reformers' in a heated speech to the US' largest law enforcement organization
https://www.businessinsider.com/william-barr-zero-tolerance-fraternal-order-police-speech-2019-8
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/arctic-weather-forecast-latest-climate-change-thunder-lightning-north-pole-a9055241.html
22 states sue Trump over repeal of Obama-era power plant rules
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/457252-22-states-sue-trump-over-repeal-of-obama-era-power-plant-rules
Beef banned by London University in bid to fight climate change.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/12/beef-banned-university-bid-fight-climate-change/
Illinois Becomes Third State to Ban Sale of Animal-Tested Cosmetics | Animal Welfare Institute
https://awionline.org/press-releases/illinois-becomes-third-state-ban-sale-animal-tested-cosmetics
"Beto believed in all of us before we even believed in ourselves" | Why Beto Must Continue Running For The Presidency.
https://twitter.com/dieterich_mk/status/1161319749004996609
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Tuesday slammed the Trump administration's new immigration rule that links an immigrant's ability to secure residency or a path to citizenship to their use of public programs, predicting it will be defeated in court.
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/457274-pelosi-predicts-trump-public-charge-rule-will-be-swiftly-challenged-and
https://twitter.com/SpeakerPelosi/status/1161329941943861248
Two California counties sued the Trump admin over its regulation that would make it easier for the gov't to deny entry or green cards to immigrants who use public programs, calling it a "new front" on Trump's "aggressive, foolish" attacks on immigrants.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/public-charge-rule-california-santa-clara-and-san-francisco-counties-sue-to-block-trumps-immigration-rule/
We've been tracking press coverage all primary long and Sanders has consistently been at or near the top of the field in terms of the volume of news coverage he's received
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-democratic-presidential-candidate-was-mentioned-most-in-the-news-last-week-5/
A six-month investigation into an 18-year-old in Ohio has resulted in his arrest on charges of threatening to assault a federal law enforcement officer. The investigation started in February, according to WJW, when agents found online comments from the teen supporting mass shootings. According to court documents, the user posted a threat to assault federal law enforcement officers writing, “…shoot every agent on sight,” in a discussion about the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco in 1993. Agents met with Justin Olsen, who gave written consent for a search of his car and bedroom, according to a probable cause warrant. On August 7th, agents report they found 10,000 rounds of ammunition, camouflage clothing, camouflaged backpacks, 15 rifles and shotguns and 10 semi-automatic pistols. Olsen faces one charge for the threat posted online.
https://wgntv.com/2019/08/13/fbi-agents-find-25-guns-10000-rounds-of-ammunition-in-teens-bedroom-following-threat/
Top Democrat urges foreign governments to stop using Trump hotels, paying his businesses | House Foreign Affairs chair Eliot Engel told staffers to inform foreign officials that such transactions could violate the Constitution.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/top-democrat-urges-foreign-governments-stop-paying-trump-s-company-n1042031?cid=sm_npd_nn_tw_np
Seven years ago today, U.S. freelance photojournalist Austin Tice emailed his father to say he was wrapping up his reporting in #Syria. He was detained the next day and has not been heard from him since. Tice turned 38 on Sunday. It's time to #FreeAustinTice. #AustinTice
https://twitter.com/pressfreedom/status/1161259859326754817
Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos Are Scheduled to Speak at a Conference Organized by a QAnon Supporter
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/08/michael-flynn-and-george-papadopoulos-are-scheduled-to-speak-at-a-conference-organized-by-a-qanon-supporter/
"AG" Barr said there must be 'zero tolerance for resisting police' and went after 'social justice reformers' in a heated speech to the US' largest law enforcement organization
https://www.businessinsider.com/william-barr-zero-tolerance-fraternal-order-police-speech-2019-8
3.6-Degrees Fahrenheit: Beyond The Limit | Extreme Climate Change Has Arrived In America [washingtonpost] [read article on washingtonpost to access interactive data]
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/climate-environment/climate-change-america/
3.6-Degrees Fahrenheit: Beyond The Limit
Extreme Climate Change Has Arrived In America
By Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens
Photography by Salwan Georges Aug. 13, 2019
LAKE HOPATCONG, N.J. — Before climate change thawed the winters of New Jersey, this lake hosted boisterous wintertime carnivals. As many as 15,000 skaters took part, and automobile owners would drive onto the thick ice. Thousands watched as local hockey clubs battled one another and the Skate Sailing Association of America held competitions, including one in 1926 that featured 21 iceboats on blades that sailed over a three-mile course.
In those days before widespread refrigeration, workers flocked here to harvest ice. They would carve blocks as much as two feet thick, float them to giant ice houses, sprinkle them with sawdust and load them onto rail cars bound for ice boxes in New York City and beyond.
"These winters do not exist anymore," says Marty Kane, a lawyer and head of the Lake Hopatcong Foundation.
That's because a century of climbing temperatures has changed the character of the Garden State. The massive ice industry and skate sailing association are but black-and-white photographs at the local museum. And even the hardy souls who still try to take part in ice fishing contests here have had to cancel 11 of the past dozen competitions for fear of straying onto perilously thin ice and tumbling into the frigid water.
New Jersey may seem an unlikely place to measure climate change, but it is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation. Its average temperature has climbed by close to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895 — double the average for the Lower 48 states.
Over the past two decades, the 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit number has emerged as a critical threshold for global warming. In the 2015 Paris accord, international leaders agreed that the world should act urgently to keep the Earth's average temperature increases "well below" 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100 to avoid a host of catastrophic changes.
The potential consequences are daunting. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if Earth heats up by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, virtually all the world's coral reefs will die; retreating ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could unleash massive sea level rise; and summertime Arctic sea ice, a shield against further warming, would begin to disappear.
But global warming does not heat the world evenly.
A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 3.6-degree Fahrenheit mark.
— Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans — 34 million people — are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 3.6-degree Fahrenheit mark.
— Alaska is the fastest-warming state in the country, but Rhode Island is the first state in the Lower 48 whose average temperature rise has eclipsed 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Other parts of the Northeast — New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts — trail close behind.
— While many people associate global warming with summer's melting glaciers, forest fires and disastrous flooding, it is higher winter temperatures that have made New Jersey and nearby Rhode Island the fastest warming of the Lower 48 states.
The average New Jersey temperature from December through February now exceeds 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which water freezes. That threshold, reached over the past three decades, has meant lakes don't freeze as often, snow melts more quickly, and insects and pests don't die as they once did in the harsher cold.
The freezing point "is the most critical threshold among all temperatures," said David A. Robinson, New Jersey state climatologist and professor at Rutgers University's department of geography.
The uneven rise in temperatures across the United States matches what is happening around the world.
In the past century, the Earth has warmed 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. But that's just an average. Some parts of the globe — including the mountains of Romania and the steppes of Mongolia — have registered increases twice as large. It has taken decades or in some cases a century. But for huge swaths of the planet, climate change is a present-tense reality, not one looming ominously in the distant future.
To find the world's 2C hot spots, its fastest-warming places, The Post analyzed temperature databases, including those kept by NASA and NOAA; peer-reviewed scientific studies; and reports by local climatologists. The global data sets draw upon thousands of land-based weather stations and other measurements, such as ocean buoys armed with sensors and ship logs dating as far back as 1850.
In any one geographic location, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit may not represent global cataclysmic change, but it can threaten ecosystems, change landscapes and upend livelihoods and cultures.
In Lake Hopatcong, thinning ice let loose waves of aquatic weeds that ordinarily die in the cold. This year, a new blow: Following one of the warmest springs of the past century, harmful bacteria known as blue-green algae bloomed in the lake just as the tourist season was taking off in June.
New Jersey closed Lake Hopatcong after the state Department of Environmental Protection detected a toxic bacteria caused in part by one of the warmest springs in the past century.
New Jersey's largest lake was shut down after the state's environmental agency warned against swimming or fishing "for weeks, if not longer."
The nation's hot spots will get worse, absent a global plan to slash emissions of the greenhouse gases fueling climate change. By the time the impacts are fully recognized, the change may be irreversible.
Daniel Pauly, an influential marine scientist at the University of British Columbia, says the 3.6-degree Fahrenheit hot spots are early warning sirens of a climate shift.
"Basically," he said, "these hot spots are chunks of the future in the present."
America's hot spots
Nationwide, trends are clear. Starting in the late 1800s, U.S. temperatures began to rise and continued slowly up through the 1930s. The nation then cooled slightly for several decades. But starting around 1970, temperatures rose steeply.
At the county level, the data reveals isolated 3.6-degree Fahrenheit clusters: high-altitude deserts in Oregon; stretches of the western Rocky Mountains that feed the Colorado River; a clutch of counties along the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan — home to the famed Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore near Traverse City.
Along the Canadian border, a string of counties from eastern Montana to Minnesota are quickly heating up.
The topography of warming varies. It is intense at some high elevations, such as in Utah and Colorado, and along some highly populated coasts: Temperatures have risen by 2C in Los Angeles and three neighboring counties. New York City is also warming rapidly, and so are the very different areas around it, such as the beach resorts in the Hamptons and leafy Westchester County.
The smaller the area, the more difficult it is to pinpoint the cause of warming. Urban heat effects, changing air pollution levels, ocean currents, events like the Dust Bowl, and natural climate wobbles such as El Niño could all be playing some role, experts say.
The only part of the United States that has not warmed significantly since the late 1800s is the South, especially Mississippi and Alabama, where data in some cases shows modest cooling. Scientists have attributed this "warming hole" to atmospheric cycles driven by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, along with particles of soot from smokestacks and tailpipes, which have damaging health effects but can block some of the sun's intensity. Those types of pollutants were curtailed by environmental policies, while carbon dioxide remained unregulated for decades.
Since the 1960s, however, the region's temperatures have been increasing along with the rest of the country's.
The Northeast is warming especially fast.
Anthony Broccoli, a climate scientist at Rutgers, defines an unusually warm or cold month as ranking among the five most extreme in the record going back to the late 1800s. In the case of New Jersey, he says, "since 2000, we've had 39 months that were unusually warm and zero that were unusually cold."
Scientists do not completely understand the Northeast hot spot. But fading winters and very warm water offshore are the most likely culprits, experts say. That's because climate change is a cycle that feeds on itself.
Warmer winters mean less ice and snow cover. Normally, ice and snow reflect solar radiation back into space, keeping the planet relatively cool. But as the ice and snow retreat, the ground absorbs the solar radiation and warms.
NOAA data shows that in every Northeast state except Pennsylvania, the temperatures of the winter months of December through February have risen by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895-1896. And U.S. Geological Survey data shows that ice breaks up in New England lakes nine to 16 days earlier than in the 19th century.
This doesn't mean the states can't have extreme winters anymore. Polar vortex events, in which frigid Arctic air descends into the heart of the country, can still bring biting cold. But the overall trend remains the same and is set to continue. One recent study found that by the time the entire globe crosses 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the Northeast can expect to have risen by about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, with winter temperatures higher still.
Losing three feet of beach a year
Climate change plays havoc differently in different places.
In Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay has warmed as much as 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years, and for want of cooler water, the state's lobster catch has plummeted 75 percent in the past two decades.
Along the shoreline, the hotter and higher sea is shuffling the lineup of oceanfront homes.
Roy Carpenter's Beach is a collection of summer cottages along a quarter-mile stretch that is eroding faster than any other part of the state — an average of 3.3 feet a year.
Rob Thoresen's great-grandfather bought the property nearly a century ago, and residents living in 377 cottages there now lease the land from the family business.
About a decade ago, the family tried — in vain — to persuade residents to move away from the encroaching ocean. Their reluctance was no surprise; the back of the property features a view of cornfields.
But then the coast took an indirect hit from Hurricane Sandy. It damaged 11 homes in the community's front row, with three of them washing out to sea. The surf laps over the remains of concrete foundations and wooden pylons, knocking over construction fences.
In 2013, 28 families in the first and second rows started moving to the back of the development — roughly 1,000 feet away. The community is planning to move another 20 houses.
It is expensive. Homeowners pay to physically move their cottages or demolish them and rebuild. Matunuck Beach Properties, the management company, must survey the properties and prepare new locations, laying out new roads and sewer pipes.
Tony Loura, who has summered in Roy Carpenter's Beach for 15 years, is philosophical about his predicament. He is on the fourth row, where he has an unobstructed view of the ocean from his rocking chair. He estimates that he used to be 1,000 feet from the water. Now, the ocean is only about 150 feet away.
"I'm hoping that I'm back far enough that I won't have to move to the back," said Loura, 66. "Every time they say there's a storm, I get worried."
With 420 miles of coastline, Rhode Island is particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of the Gulf Stream, a massive warm current that travels up the East Coast from the Gulf of Mexico before making a right turn toward Greenland and Europe.
The Gulf Stream is enormous, encompassing more water than "all of the world's rivers combined," according to NOAA. It is one part of an even larger global "conveyor belt" of currents that transport heat around the world.
A slowing of these currents, which scientists think is caused by the melting of Arctic ice, has pushed the Gulf Stream closer to the East Coast, bringing more warm water and, perhaps, hotter temperatures onshore. Offshore, it has become its own hot spot, helping to boost water temperatures by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or more in some regions.
If the slowing continues, seas could rise farther and faster. That's because when the current slows, water it was driving toward Europe drifts back across the Atlantic to the U.S. coastline. Scientists are trying to determine whether the Gulf Stream is already contributing to rapid sea level rise on the East Coast.
Tidal gauges show sea levels have risen roughly nine inches since 1930, and researchers at the University of Rhode Island have determined that the rate has quickened by about a third in recent years.
By 2030, sea level rise will flood 605 buildings six times a year, according to the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council's executive director, Grover Fugate.
Roy Carpenter's Beach is especially vulnerable.
Some residents want the beach's owners to fight off the sea, Loura said.
"They think they should build a sea wall, they should bring in tons of sand," he said. "Last year, they spent a lot of money on sand. Guess what? It's all gone."
Thoresen's family is moving a convenience store and office for the second time in a decade — this time all the way back to the 18th row.
"We moved it back 100 feet, and it only bought us 10 years," Thoresen said. "That's crazy."
That's what people who live in 3.6-degree Fahrenheit zones are discovering: that climate change seems remote or invisible, until all of a sudden it is inescapable.
'The ice is not safe anymore'
Here at Lake Hopatcong, Tim Clancy, 65, a ruddy-faced fisherman and retiree, has helped run the annual ice fishing contests for years. He has a photo of himself taken in 2015, standing in the middle of the frozen lake, a string of four perch dangling from one hand, his 400-pound all-terrain buggy parked on the ice behind him.
"It was like a tailgate party. Midnight madness. People camped out with their snowmobiles," he says. "But the ice is not safe anymore."
At the Lake Hopatcong Foundation offices, director Kane recalls that the lake used to freeze over by Thanksgiving and now rarely does so before January.
According to records kept by the local Knee Deep Club, a fishing group, 26 fishing contests were canceled because of poor ice conditions from 1998 through 2019. Only 19 were held successfully.
Nine miles long, Lake Hopatcong sits between two counties — Sussex and Morris — in the state's northwest. Both have been warming fast, especially in winter. According to The Post's review of New Jersey data, winter temperatures in Sussex have increased 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit since the winter of 1895-1896. For Morris, the winter increase has been slightly sharper 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit.
Robinson, the state climatologist, found that January temperatures in Sussex County generally need to average around 25 to 26 degrees Fahrenheit for successful ice fishing.
Instead, average winter temperatures are moving closer to the freezing point, with some winters now exceeding 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
It is not just the lake that is being wracked by climate changes.
From the Jersey Shore to the shopping malls of Paramus, from hiking trails in the northwest to the Bayway oil refinery, the state faces exceptionally heavy and unpredictable rainfall — even for New Jersey. Last year, it was inundated by a record 64.77 inches of rainfall statewide, 40 percent above average.
Pests, no longer eradicated by cold winters, are attacking people, crops and landscapes alike.
The ⅛ -inch-long southern pine beetle had been largely confined to southern U.S. forests — hence its name. But the warmer temperatures have spurred the beetle's migration north, where it has damaged more than 20,000 acres of the state's Pine Barrens, a vast coastal forested plain that Congress has defined as a national reserve.
"They are changing the Pinelands," says Matthew Ayres, a Dartmouth researcher who has studied the beetle. "It may not be too long before people are driving through the Pinelands saying, 'Why do they call it the Pinelands?'"
Mosquitoes, once dubbed on postcards as New Jersey's "air force," have longer seasons. The Warren County Mosquito Control Commission, whose records date to 1987, uses fixed-wing aircraft to drop a granular, naturally occurring soil microbe on swamps to kill the mosquito larvae.
But the bugs may be winning the air war. The commission's flights are more frequent, and the past eight years, led by 2018, have had the highest numbers of acres treated annually. Mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus came up from the South 20 years ago. Last year, Warren became the last county in the state to register human cases of the disease.
"Mosquito season used to start on June 1 and end on Sept. 30," said Rutgers professor Dina Fonseca, an expert on insect-borne disease. But unless the air war starts earlier in the spring, "you're not going to address the mosquito problem."
'Completely dead'
On a cool but sunny day in May, Fred Lubnow, director of aquatic programs at Princeton Hydro, and Katie Walston, a senior scientist there, pulled up their anchor in Lake Hopatcong to find it covered with aquatic weeds. The culprit? Fertilizer runoff combined with winters too warm to kill them off.
"The plants start growing earlier and linger around longer, as well," Lubnow said. The thick ice blocked sunlight from nurturing the weeds. But "in some of these shallow areas, as early as February, we're looking through the ice seeing the plants growing."
By summer, the weeds become a nuisance, forcing the state government to "harvest" them with large paddles and toss them onto a conveyor belt, then onto barges. Some years, funding has been hard to get, delaying harvesting and angering homeowners.
"If this area is not harvested, you can't get a boat through it," Lubnow says. Swimming isn't possible, either. Fishing becomes difficult.
In late June, disaster struck.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection detected toxic bacteria known as blue-green algae. Aerial photos showed the telltale large streaks of "pea soup" across the lake. The agency urged people to avoid swimming, wading and watersport activities such as jet-skiing, kayaking, windsurfing and paddleboarding.
"It's almost put us out of business," says John Clark, co-owner of Little Nicki's Italian restaurant, which looks out onto the lake. Little Nicki's does nearly a tenth of its business over the first two weekends in July and is usually jammed the afternoon before July 4. Yet there were only three people there that day. Clark estimated that business was down by half.
"It's completely dead. Everyone was having a banner year. Then you hit a wall."
How we analyzed the data
To analyze warming temperatures in the United States, The Washington Post used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Divisional Database (nClimDiv), which provides monthly temperature data at the national, state and county level between 1895 and 2018 for the Lower 48 states. NOAA does not provide this data for Hawaii, and its data for Alaska begins in 1925.
https://data.nodc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/iso?id=gov.noaa.ncdc:C00005
We calculated annual mean temperature trends in each state and county in the Lower 48 states using linear regression — analyzing both annual average temperatures and temperatures for the three-month winter season (December, January and February). While not the only approach for analyzing temperature changes over time, this is a widely used method.
County population numbers are the U.S. Census Bureau's estimate of resident total population for July 2018.
Annual temperature averages in the interactive county feature are displayed as departures from the 1895-2018 average temperature for each county. These departures from the average are referred to as "temperature anomalies" by climate scientists.
To make the maps, we applied the same linear regression method for annual average temperatures to NOAA's Gridded 5km GHCN-Daily Temperature and Precipitation Dataset (nClimGrid), which is the basis for nClimDiv. For mapping purposes, the resolution of the data was increased using bilinear interpolation.
https://data.nodc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/iso?id=gov.noaa.ncdc:C00332
The warming of Alaska was treated separately, after consulting with Rick Thoman, an expert on the state's climate at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Thoman said that a linear trend does not apply in the case of this state because the warming has been so extreme in the most recent years — something that such a trend would understate. So Thoman used a smoothed curve to plot Alaska's warming trend, calculating about 2.2 degrees Celsius (4 degrees Fahrenheit) just since 1925.
Kenneth Kunkel of the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, who developed climate analyses for all 50 U.S. states during the 2013 National Climate Assessment, provided an initial analysis of the Lower 48 states' temperature trends from 1895 through 2018 at The Post's request.
Credits
Project and story editing by Trish Wilson. Graphics editing by Monica Ulmanu. Design and development by Madison Walls. Copy editing by Emily Morman and Brian Malasics. Photo editing and research by Olivier Laurent. Project management by Julie Vitkovskaya.
Steven Mufson
Steven Mufson covers the business of climate change. Since joining The Washington Post in 1989, he has covered economic policy, China, diplomacy, energy and the White House. Earlier he worked for The Wall Street Journal in New York, London and Johannesburg.
Chris Mooney
Chris Mooney covers climate change, energy, and the environment. He has reported from the 2015 Paris climate negotiations, the Northwest Passage, and the Greenland ice sheet, among other locations, and has written four books about science, politics and climate change.
Juliet Eilperin
Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post's senior national affairs correspondent, covering the transformation of federal environmental policy. She's authored two books, "Demon Fish: Travels Through The Hidden World of Sharks" and "Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives." and has worked for The Post since 1998.
John Muyskens
John Muyskens is a graphics editor at the Washington Post specializing in data reporting.
Salwan Georges
Salwan Georges is a staff photographer for The Washington Post. He was a photographer on The Post's Murder with Impunity series, which was listed as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2019.
3.6-Degrees Fahrenheit: Beyond The Limit
Extreme Climate Change Has Arrived In America
By Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin and John Muyskens
Photography by Salwan Georges Aug. 13, 2019
LAKE HOPATCONG, N.J. — Before climate change thawed the winters of New Jersey, this lake hosted boisterous wintertime carnivals. As many as 15,000 skaters took part, and automobile owners would drive onto the thick ice. Thousands watched as local hockey clubs battled one another and the Skate Sailing Association of America held competitions, including one in 1926 that featured 21 iceboats on blades that sailed over a three-mile course.
In those days before widespread refrigeration, workers flocked here to harvest ice. They would carve blocks as much as two feet thick, float them to giant ice houses, sprinkle them with sawdust and load them onto rail cars bound for ice boxes in New York City and beyond.
"These winters do not exist anymore," says Marty Kane, a lawyer and head of the Lake Hopatcong Foundation.
That's because a century of climbing temperatures has changed the character of the Garden State. The massive ice industry and skate sailing association are but black-and-white photographs at the local museum. And even the hardy souls who still try to take part in ice fishing contests here have had to cancel 11 of the past dozen competitions for fear of straying onto perilously thin ice and tumbling into the frigid water.
New Jersey may seem an unlikely place to measure climate change, but it is one of the fastest-warming states in the nation. Its average temperature has climbed by close to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895 — double the average for the Lower 48 states.
Over the past two decades, the 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit number has emerged as a critical threshold for global warming. In the 2015 Paris accord, international leaders agreed that the world should act urgently to keep the Earth's average temperature increases "well below" 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100 to avoid a host of catastrophic changes.
The potential consequences are daunting. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that if Earth heats up by an average of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, virtually all the world's coral reefs will die; retreating ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica could unleash massive sea level rise; and summertime Arctic sea ice, a shield against further warming, would begin to disappear.
But global warming does not heat the world evenly.
A Washington Post analysis of more than a century of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration temperature data across the Lower 48 states and 3,107 counties has found that major areas are nearing or have already crossed the 3.6-degree Fahrenheit mark.
— Today, more than 1 in 10 Americans — 34 million people — are living in rapidly heating regions, including New York City and Los Angeles. Seventy-one counties have already hit the 3.6-degree Fahrenheit mark.
— Alaska is the fastest-warming state in the country, but Rhode Island is the first state in the Lower 48 whose average temperature rise has eclipsed 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Other parts of the Northeast — New Jersey, Connecticut, Maine and Massachusetts — trail close behind.
— While many people associate global warming with summer's melting glaciers, forest fires and disastrous flooding, it is higher winter temperatures that have made New Jersey and nearby Rhode Island the fastest warming of the Lower 48 states.
The average New Jersey temperature from December through February now exceeds 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which water freezes. That threshold, reached over the past three decades, has meant lakes don't freeze as often, snow melts more quickly, and insects and pests don't die as they once did in the harsher cold.
The freezing point "is the most critical threshold among all temperatures," said David A. Robinson, New Jersey state climatologist and professor at Rutgers University's department of geography.
The uneven rise in temperatures across the United States matches what is happening around the world.
In the past century, the Earth has warmed 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. But that's just an average. Some parts of the globe — including the mountains of Romania and the steppes of Mongolia — have registered increases twice as large. It has taken decades or in some cases a century. But for huge swaths of the planet, climate change is a present-tense reality, not one looming ominously in the distant future.
To find the world's 2C hot spots, its fastest-warming places, The Post analyzed temperature databases, including those kept by NASA and NOAA; peer-reviewed scientific studies; and reports by local climatologists. The global data sets draw upon thousands of land-based weather stations and other measurements, such as ocean buoys armed with sensors and ship logs dating as far back as 1850.
In any one geographic location, 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit may not represent global cataclysmic change, but it can threaten ecosystems, change landscapes and upend livelihoods and cultures.
In Lake Hopatcong, thinning ice let loose waves of aquatic weeds that ordinarily die in the cold. This year, a new blow: Following one of the warmest springs of the past century, harmful bacteria known as blue-green algae bloomed in the lake just as the tourist season was taking off in June.
New Jersey closed Lake Hopatcong after the state Department of Environmental Protection detected a toxic bacteria caused in part by one of the warmest springs in the past century.
New Jersey's largest lake was shut down after the state's environmental agency warned against swimming or fishing "for weeks, if not longer."
The nation's hot spots will get worse, absent a global plan to slash emissions of the greenhouse gases fueling climate change. By the time the impacts are fully recognized, the change may be irreversible.
Daniel Pauly, an influential marine scientist at the University of British Columbia, says the 3.6-degree Fahrenheit hot spots are early warning sirens of a climate shift.
"Basically," he said, "these hot spots are chunks of the future in the present."
America's hot spots
Nationwide, trends are clear. Starting in the late 1800s, U.S. temperatures began to rise and continued slowly up through the 1930s. The nation then cooled slightly for several decades. But starting around 1970, temperatures rose steeply.
At the county level, the data reveals isolated 3.6-degree Fahrenheit clusters: high-altitude deserts in Oregon; stretches of the western Rocky Mountains that feed the Colorado River; a clutch of counties along the northeastern shore of Lake Michigan — home to the famed Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore near Traverse City.
Along the Canadian border, a string of counties from eastern Montana to Minnesota are quickly heating up.
The topography of warming varies. It is intense at some high elevations, such as in Utah and Colorado, and along some highly populated coasts: Temperatures have risen by 2C in Los Angeles and three neighboring counties. New York City is also warming rapidly, and so are the very different areas around it, such as the beach resorts in the Hamptons and leafy Westchester County.
The smaller the area, the more difficult it is to pinpoint the cause of warming. Urban heat effects, changing air pollution levels, ocean currents, events like the Dust Bowl, and natural climate wobbles such as El Niño could all be playing some role, experts say.
The only part of the United States that has not warmed significantly since the late 1800s is the South, especially Mississippi and Alabama, where data in some cases shows modest cooling. Scientists have attributed this "warming hole" to atmospheric cycles driven by the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, along with particles of soot from smokestacks and tailpipes, which have damaging health effects but can block some of the sun's intensity. Those types of pollutants were curtailed by environmental policies, while carbon dioxide remained unregulated for decades.
Since the 1960s, however, the region's temperatures have been increasing along with the rest of the country's.
The Northeast is warming especially fast.
Anthony Broccoli, a climate scientist at Rutgers, defines an unusually warm or cold month as ranking among the five most extreme in the record going back to the late 1800s. In the case of New Jersey, he says, "since 2000, we've had 39 months that were unusually warm and zero that were unusually cold."
Scientists do not completely understand the Northeast hot spot. But fading winters and very warm water offshore are the most likely culprits, experts say. That's because climate change is a cycle that feeds on itself.
Warmer winters mean less ice and snow cover. Normally, ice and snow reflect solar radiation back into space, keeping the planet relatively cool. But as the ice and snow retreat, the ground absorbs the solar radiation and warms.
NOAA data shows that in every Northeast state except Pennsylvania, the temperatures of the winter months of December through February have risen by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895-1896. And U.S. Geological Survey data shows that ice breaks up in New England lakes nine to 16 days earlier than in the 19th century.
This doesn't mean the states can't have extreme winters anymore. Polar vortex events, in which frigid Arctic air descends into the heart of the country, can still bring biting cold. But the overall trend remains the same and is set to continue. One recent study found that by the time the entire globe crosses 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the Northeast can expect to have risen by about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, with winter temperatures higher still.
Losing three feet of beach a year
Climate change plays havoc differently in different places.
In Rhode Island, Narragansett Bay has warmed as much as 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years, and for want of cooler water, the state's lobster catch has plummeted 75 percent in the past two decades.
Along the shoreline, the hotter and higher sea is shuffling the lineup of oceanfront homes.
Roy Carpenter's Beach is a collection of summer cottages along a quarter-mile stretch that is eroding faster than any other part of the state — an average of 3.3 feet a year.
Rob Thoresen's great-grandfather bought the property nearly a century ago, and residents living in 377 cottages there now lease the land from the family business.
About a decade ago, the family tried — in vain — to persuade residents to move away from the encroaching ocean. Their reluctance was no surprise; the back of the property features a view of cornfields.
But then the coast took an indirect hit from Hurricane Sandy. It damaged 11 homes in the community's front row, with three of them washing out to sea. The surf laps over the remains of concrete foundations and wooden pylons, knocking over construction fences.
In 2013, 28 families in the first and second rows started moving to the back of the development — roughly 1,000 feet away. The community is planning to move another 20 houses.
It is expensive. Homeowners pay to physically move their cottages or demolish them and rebuild. Matunuck Beach Properties, the management company, must survey the properties and prepare new locations, laying out new roads and sewer pipes.
Tony Loura, who has summered in Roy Carpenter's Beach for 15 years, is philosophical about his predicament. He is on the fourth row, where he has an unobstructed view of the ocean from his rocking chair. He estimates that he used to be 1,000 feet from the water. Now, the ocean is only about 150 feet away.
"I'm hoping that I'm back far enough that I won't have to move to the back," said Loura, 66. "Every time they say there's a storm, I get worried."
With 420 miles of coastline, Rhode Island is particularly vulnerable to the vagaries of the Gulf Stream, a massive warm current that travels up the East Coast from the Gulf of Mexico before making a right turn toward Greenland and Europe.
The Gulf Stream is enormous, encompassing more water than "all of the world's rivers combined," according to NOAA. It is one part of an even larger global "conveyor belt" of currents that transport heat around the world.
A slowing of these currents, which scientists think is caused by the melting of Arctic ice, has pushed the Gulf Stream closer to the East Coast, bringing more warm water and, perhaps, hotter temperatures onshore. Offshore, it has become its own hot spot, helping to boost water temperatures by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit or more in some regions.
If the slowing continues, seas could rise farther and faster. That's because when the current slows, water it was driving toward Europe drifts back across the Atlantic to the U.S. coastline. Scientists are trying to determine whether the Gulf Stream is already contributing to rapid sea level rise on the East Coast.
Tidal gauges show sea levels have risen roughly nine inches since 1930, and researchers at the University of Rhode Island have determined that the rate has quickened by about a third in recent years.
By 2030, sea level rise will flood 605 buildings six times a year, according to the Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council's executive director, Grover Fugate.
Roy Carpenter's Beach is especially vulnerable.
Some residents want the beach's owners to fight off the sea, Loura said.
"They think they should build a sea wall, they should bring in tons of sand," he said. "Last year, they spent a lot of money on sand. Guess what? It's all gone."
Thoresen's family is moving a convenience store and office for the second time in a decade — this time all the way back to the 18th row.
"We moved it back 100 feet, and it only bought us 10 years," Thoresen said. "That's crazy."
That's what people who live in 3.6-degree Fahrenheit zones are discovering: that climate change seems remote or invisible, until all of a sudden it is inescapable.
'The ice is not safe anymore'
Here at Lake Hopatcong, Tim Clancy, 65, a ruddy-faced fisherman and retiree, has helped run the annual ice fishing contests for years. He has a photo of himself taken in 2015, standing in the middle of the frozen lake, a string of four perch dangling from one hand, his 400-pound all-terrain buggy parked on the ice behind him.
"It was like a tailgate party. Midnight madness. People camped out with their snowmobiles," he says. "But the ice is not safe anymore."
At the Lake Hopatcong Foundation offices, director Kane recalls that the lake used to freeze over by Thanksgiving and now rarely does so before January.
According to records kept by the local Knee Deep Club, a fishing group, 26 fishing contests were canceled because of poor ice conditions from 1998 through 2019. Only 19 were held successfully.
Nine miles long, Lake Hopatcong sits between two counties — Sussex and Morris — in the state's northwest. Both have been warming fast, especially in winter. According to The Post's review of New Jersey data, winter temperatures in Sussex have increased 4.7 degrees Fahrenheit since the winter of 1895-1896. For Morris, the winter increase has been slightly sharper 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit.
Robinson, the state climatologist, found that January temperatures in Sussex County generally need to average around 25 to 26 degrees Fahrenheit for successful ice fishing.
Instead, average winter temperatures are moving closer to the freezing point, with some winters now exceeding 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
It is not just the lake that is being wracked by climate changes.
From the Jersey Shore to the shopping malls of Paramus, from hiking trails in the northwest to the Bayway oil refinery, the state faces exceptionally heavy and unpredictable rainfall — even for New Jersey. Last year, it was inundated by a record 64.77 inches of rainfall statewide, 40 percent above average.
Pests, no longer eradicated by cold winters, are attacking people, crops and landscapes alike.
The ⅛ -inch-long southern pine beetle had been largely confined to southern U.S. forests — hence its name. But the warmer temperatures have spurred the beetle's migration north, where it has damaged more than 20,000 acres of the state's Pine Barrens, a vast coastal forested plain that Congress has defined as a national reserve.
"They are changing the Pinelands," says Matthew Ayres, a Dartmouth researcher who has studied the beetle. "It may not be too long before people are driving through the Pinelands saying, 'Why do they call it the Pinelands?'"
Mosquitoes, once dubbed on postcards as New Jersey's "air force," have longer seasons. The Warren County Mosquito Control Commission, whose records date to 1987, uses fixed-wing aircraft to drop a granular, naturally occurring soil microbe on swamps to kill the mosquito larvae.
But the bugs may be winning the air war. The commission's flights are more frequent, and the past eight years, led by 2018, have had the highest numbers of acres treated annually. Mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus came up from the South 20 years ago. Last year, Warren became the last county in the state to register human cases of the disease.
"Mosquito season used to start on June 1 and end on Sept. 30," said Rutgers professor Dina Fonseca, an expert on insect-borne disease. But unless the air war starts earlier in the spring, "you're not going to address the mosquito problem."
'Completely dead'
On a cool but sunny day in May, Fred Lubnow, director of aquatic programs at Princeton Hydro, and Katie Walston, a senior scientist there, pulled up their anchor in Lake Hopatcong to find it covered with aquatic weeds. The culprit? Fertilizer runoff combined with winters too warm to kill them off.
"The plants start growing earlier and linger around longer, as well," Lubnow said. The thick ice blocked sunlight from nurturing the weeds. But "in some of these shallow areas, as early as February, we're looking through the ice seeing the plants growing."
By summer, the weeds become a nuisance, forcing the state government to "harvest" them with large paddles and toss them onto a conveyor belt, then onto barges. Some years, funding has been hard to get, delaying harvesting and angering homeowners.
"If this area is not harvested, you can't get a boat through it," Lubnow says. Swimming isn't possible, either. Fishing becomes difficult.
In late June, disaster struck.
The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection detected toxic bacteria known as blue-green algae. Aerial photos showed the telltale large streaks of "pea soup" across the lake. The agency urged people to avoid swimming, wading and watersport activities such as jet-skiing, kayaking, windsurfing and paddleboarding.
"It's almost put us out of business," says John Clark, co-owner of Little Nicki's Italian restaurant, which looks out onto the lake. Little Nicki's does nearly a tenth of its business over the first two weekends in July and is usually jammed the afternoon before July 4. Yet there were only three people there that day. Clark estimated that business was down by half.
"It's completely dead. Everyone was having a banner year. Then you hit a wall."
How we analyzed the data
To analyze warming temperatures in the United States, The Washington Post used the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Divisional Database (nClimDiv), which provides monthly temperature data at the national, state and county level between 1895 and 2018 for the Lower 48 states. NOAA does not provide this data for Hawaii, and its data for Alaska begins in 1925.
https://data.nodc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/iso?id=gov.noaa.ncdc:C00005
We calculated annual mean temperature trends in each state and county in the Lower 48 states using linear regression — analyzing both annual average temperatures and temperatures for the three-month winter season (December, January and February). While not the only approach for analyzing temperature changes over time, this is a widely used method.
County population numbers are the U.S. Census Bureau's estimate of resident total population for July 2018.
Annual temperature averages in the interactive county feature are displayed as departures from the 1895-2018 average temperature for each county. These departures from the average are referred to as "temperature anomalies" by climate scientists.
To make the maps, we applied the same linear regression method for annual average temperatures to NOAA's Gridded 5km GHCN-Daily Temperature and Precipitation Dataset (nClimGrid), which is the basis for nClimDiv. For mapping purposes, the resolution of the data was increased using bilinear interpolation.
https://data.nodc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/iso?id=gov.noaa.ncdc:C00332
The warming of Alaska was treated separately, after consulting with Rick Thoman, an expert on the state's climate at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Thoman said that a linear trend does not apply in the case of this state because the warming has been so extreme in the most recent years — something that such a trend would understate. So Thoman used a smoothed curve to plot Alaska's warming trend, calculating about 2.2 degrees Celsius (4 degrees Fahrenheit) just since 1925.
Kenneth Kunkel of the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, who developed climate analyses for all 50 U.S. states during the 2013 National Climate Assessment, provided an initial analysis of the Lower 48 states' temperature trends from 1895 through 2018 at The Post's request.
Credits
Project and story editing by Trish Wilson. Graphics editing by Monica Ulmanu. Design and development by Madison Walls. Copy editing by Emily Morman and Brian Malasics. Photo editing and research by Olivier Laurent. Project management by Julie Vitkovskaya.
Steven Mufson
Steven Mufson covers the business of climate change. Since joining The Washington Post in 1989, he has covered economic policy, China, diplomacy, energy and the White House. Earlier he worked for The Wall Street Journal in New York, London and Johannesburg.
Chris Mooney
Chris Mooney covers climate change, energy, and the environment. He has reported from the 2015 Paris climate negotiations, the Northwest Passage, and the Greenland ice sheet, among other locations, and has written four books about science, politics and climate change.
Juliet Eilperin
Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post's senior national affairs correspondent, covering the transformation of federal environmental policy. She's authored two books, "Demon Fish: Travels Through The Hidden World of Sharks" and "Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives." and has worked for The Post since 1998.
John Muyskens
John Muyskens is a graphics editor at the Washington Post specializing in data reporting.
Salwan Georges
Salwan Georges is a staff photographer for The Washington Post. He was a photographer on The Post's Murder with Impunity series, which was listed as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting in 2019.
Monday, August 12, 2019
Light News Dump
"This effort to gut protections for endangered and threatened species has the same two features of most Trump administration actions: it's a gift to industry, and it's illegal. We'll see the Trump administration in court about it," Drew Caputo, a vice president of litigation for the conservation advocacy group Earthjustice.
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/457086-trump-administration-rolls-back-endangered-species-protections
Trump tore out magazine picture of Justin Trudeau, scrawled odd message and mailed it to Canadian embassy, report claims
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-justin-trudeau-magazine-message-canadian-embassy-bloomberg-a9053576.html
Trump Used Accents To Mock Japanese, Korean Allies At Hamptons Fundraiser
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-accent-japan-korea-hamptons-fundraiser
U.S. Officials Suspect New Nuclear Missile in Explosion That Killed 7 Russians
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/world/europe/russia-nuclear-accident-putin.html
Heather Heyer’s Mom: I Have to Hide Her Grave From Neo-Nazis
https://www.thedailybeast.com/heather-heyers-mom-im-starting-to-hold-trump-responsible-for-her-murder-in-charlottesville
Bayer gets help from Donald Trump as US regulators veto warnings its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer
http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-helps-bayer-regulators-nix-roundup-cancer-warnings-2019-8
1649
#TrumpsBodyCount pins blame on Trump for mass shooting and migrant deaths — ‘7 immigrant toddlers, countless immigrant adults, 19 in Philadelphia Synagogue, 9 in CA, 1 in Charlottesville, 22 in El Paso
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/trumpsbodycount-twitter/
From 2018: Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb4ezy/top-voting-machine-vendor-admits-it-installed-remote-access-software-on-systems-sold-to-states
Texas Latina progressive, Cristina Tzinztún Ramirez, launches Democratic Senate campaign. The founder of the group Jolt Initiative, which mobilizes young voters, wants to unseat Sen. John Cornyn.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/texas-latina-progressive-cristina-tzinztun-ramirez-launches-democratic-senate-campaign-n1041291
Trump And Republican Reviewing Illegal Unconstitutional Rule That Would Allow Drug Testing for Unemployment Benefits. Supreme Court Has Already Ruled On This.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/12/degrading-and-unconstitutional-trump-reviewing-rule-would-allow-drug-testing?amp
The people who backed Donald Trump for president in 2016 have largely continued to support him. In the previous election, many of them pointed to cultural anxiety as one of their main reasons for backing Trump’s pledge to “make America great again.” But as more Americans label the president a racist due to his worldview, the voters who continue to back him are becoming bolder in justifying their support, citing retaliation for being viewed as backing a racist. | But fear of being accused of backing a white supremacist worldview caused many Trump fans to remain silent about their support for the real estate developer or to publicly express support for someone else while privately backing Trump. Many Trump supporters express indignation at being labeled racist, but the worldview they admittedly embrace demonstrates a hostility to diversity. In a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, a D.C.-based nonpartisan research organization, more than 60 percent of Republicans said the shift of the United States to being a majority nonwhite country would be a mostly negative development. Six in 10 Republicans also said that they felt like strangers in their own country, and nearly 6 in 10 white evangelical Protestants — one of the most pro-Trump demographic groups in the country — said immigrants are a threat to American society.
While criticism of Trump is increasing, the president’s most loyal voters are not reconsidering their support for him but are doubling down and showing signs of continuing to do so as we move closer to the 2020 elections. But in 2020, cultural anxiety may no longer be cited as the reason for supporting Trump. Instead, an aversion to being labeled a racist appears to be a main motivator for those whose idea of a great America is more reminiscent of the past than the future.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/12/anger-being-labeled-racist-is-new-cultural-anxiety-trump-supporters/
https://www.prri.org/research/partisan-polarization-dominates-trump-era-findings-from-the-2018-american-values-survey/
https://www.prri.org/research/partisan-polarization-dominates-trump-era-findings-from-the-2018-american-values-survey/
ICE’s Raids Were a Win for Corporate Exploitation - Destroying families won't end migration. But it will make abused workers less likely to speak up.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154732/ices-raids-win-corporate-exploitation
Flights out of Hong Kong International Airport cancelled after protest sit-in
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3022411/after-woman-shot-eye-angry-protesters-descend-hong-kong
London Library rejects £1m Sackler family donation: Family owns Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, the controversial opioid prescription painkiller
https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/london-library-rejects-1m-sackler-family-donation-20190812
Investigating Trump family self-dealing, the D.C. A.G. has subpoenaed docs from Melania's former right-hand woman, Vanity Fair reports. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff has handed over a trove of docs related to her inauguration work with Trump family businesses.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/investigating-trump-family
The White House lifted its freeze on foreign aid spending, after pressure from Congress and Pompeo. But now the admin is trying a different tack to block the State Department and USAID from distributing several billion dollars in foreign aid: a daily cap.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/white-house-targets-foreign-aid-cash-with-caps-limiting-spending
A new New York law will enable Jeffrey Epstein's victims to sue for damages
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-new-york-law-will-enable-jeffrey-epstein-s-alleged-n1041446
U.S. Budget Deficit Already Exceeds Last Year’s Total Figure
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/u-s-budget-deficit-already-exceeds-last-year-s-total-figure
Top White House reporter asks if Trump will erase 'Give me your tired, your poor' from Statue of Liberty
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/top-white-house-reporter-asks-if-trump-will-erase-give-me-your-tired-your-poor-from-statue-of-liberty
San Diego’s city attorney is taking away hundreds of guns from those who shouldn’t have them | Under California’s red flag law, enacted in 2014, a law enforcement official or immediate family member can ask a judge to issue a Gun Violence Restraining Order if a gun owner is feared to be a danger to himself or others. If the order is issued — and it almost always is — the gun owner’s weapons will be seized by law enforcement for up to a year. After a year, the restraining order can be renewed.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-11/skelton-gun-control-california-san-diego-city-attorney
Dow sinks more than 450 points, loses grip on 26,000 as 10-year Treasury hits 1.63%
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-futures-down-200-points-on-us-china-trade-worries-hong-kong-unrest-2019-08-12
Federal charges filed against friend of Dayton gunman Connor Betts for allegedly lying on federal firearms forms
https://abcnews.go.com/US/federal-charges-filed-friend-dayton-gunman-connor-betts/story?id=64925831
US cities are losing 36 million trees a year. Here's why it matters and how you can stop it
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/20/health/iyw-cities-losing-36-million-trees-how-to-help-trnd/index.html
Democrat Galloway launches Missouri gubernatorial campaign
https://apnews.com/45aef9ef051a403f8889af884a4e2484
States vow suit over endangered species rollback
https://www.apnews.com/2050b9a895ba4e4fb266d5ba4852d284
FBI Searching Epstein's Virgin Island Mansion
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/Jeffrey-Epstein-Suicide-MCC-New-York-Prison-537408641.html
Beto O'Rourke: When President Trump visited University Medical Center in the aftermath of one of the deadliest mass shootings in history, instead of consoling our community, he bragged about how much people love him. That shows you how sick this guy is—and how unfit he is for office.
https://twitter.com/BetoORourke/status/1160572548809187328
Muslim women 'sterilised' in China detention camps, say former detainees
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/uighur-muslim-china-sterilisation-women-internment-camps-xinjiang-a9054641.html
What would happen if the entire US stopped eating meat? Research says it'd be like taking 60 million cars off the road and there’s no nutritional downside.
http://www.businessinsider.com/switch-from-meat-to-meatless-diet-environmental-benefits-2019-8
Trump says Kim Apologised for previous missile tests, though North Korea launched more missiles hours later
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-kim-missile-launches-south-korea-dmz-1453637
https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/457086-trump-administration-rolls-back-endangered-species-protections
Trump tore out magazine picture of Justin Trudeau, scrawled odd message and mailed it to Canadian embassy, report claims
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-justin-trudeau-magazine-message-canadian-embassy-bloomberg-a9053576.html
Trump Used Accents To Mock Japanese, Korean Allies At Hamptons Fundraiser
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-accent-japan-korea-hamptons-fundraiser
U.S. Officials Suspect New Nuclear Missile in Explosion That Killed 7 Russians
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/12/world/europe/russia-nuclear-accident-putin.html
Heather Heyer’s Mom: I Have to Hide Her Grave From Neo-Nazis
https://www.thedailybeast.com/heather-heyers-mom-im-starting-to-hold-trump-responsible-for-her-murder-in-charlottesville
Bayer gets help from Donald Trump as US regulators veto warnings its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer
http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-helps-bayer-regulators-nix-roundup-cancer-warnings-2019-8
1649
#TrumpsBodyCount pins blame on Trump for mass shooting and migrant deaths — ‘7 immigrant toddlers, countless immigrant adults, 19 in Philadelphia Synagogue, 9 in CA, 1 in Charlottesville, 22 in El Paso
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/trumpsbodycount-twitter/
From 2018: Top Voting Machine Vendor Admits It Installed Remote-Access Software on Systems Sold to States
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb4ezy/top-voting-machine-vendor-admits-it-installed-remote-access-software-on-systems-sold-to-states
Texas Latina progressive, Cristina Tzinztún Ramirez, launches Democratic Senate campaign. The founder of the group Jolt Initiative, which mobilizes young voters, wants to unseat Sen. John Cornyn.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/texas-latina-progressive-cristina-tzinztun-ramirez-launches-democratic-senate-campaign-n1041291
Trump And Republican Reviewing Illegal Unconstitutional Rule That Would Allow Drug Testing for Unemployment Benefits. Supreme Court Has Already Ruled On This.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/12/degrading-and-unconstitutional-trump-reviewing-rule-would-allow-drug-testing?amp
The people who backed Donald Trump for president in 2016 have largely continued to support him. In the previous election, many of them pointed to cultural anxiety as one of their main reasons for backing Trump’s pledge to “make America great again.” But as more Americans label the president a racist due to his worldview, the voters who continue to back him are becoming bolder in justifying their support, citing retaliation for being viewed as backing a racist. | But fear of being accused of backing a white supremacist worldview caused many Trump fans to remain silent about their support for the real estate developer or to publicly express support for someone else while privately backing Trump. Many Trump supporters express indignation at being labeled racist, but the worldview they admittedly embrace demonstrates a hostility to diversity. In a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute, a D.C.-based nonpartisan research organization, more than 60 percent of Republicans said the shift of the United States to being a majority nonwhite country would be a mostly negative development. Six in 10 Republicans also said that they felt like strangers in their own country, and nearly 6 in 10 white evangelical Protestants — one of the most pro-Trump demographic groups in the country — said immigrants are a threat to American society.
While criticism of Trump is increasing, the president’s most loyal voters are not reconsidering their support for him but are doubling down and showing signs of continuing to do so as we move closer to the 2020 elections. But in 2020, cultural anxiety may no longer be cited as the reason for supporting Trump. Instead, an aversion to being labeled a racist appears to be a main motivator for those whose idea of a great America is more reminiscent of the past than the future.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/12/anger-being-labeled-racist-is-new-cultural-anxiety-trump-supporters/
https://www.prri.org/research/partisan-polarization-dominates-trump-era-findings-from-the-2018-american-values-survey/
https://www.prri.org/research/partisan-polarization-dominates-trump-era-findings-from-the-2018-american-values-survey/
ICE’s Raids Were a Win for Corporate Exploitation - Destroying families won't end migration. But it will make abused workers less likely to speak up.
https://newrepublic.com/article/154732/ices-raids-win-corporate-exploitation
Flights out of Hong Kong International Airport cancelled after protest sit-in
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3022411/after-woman-shot-eye-angry-protesters-descend-hong-kong
London Library rejects £1m Sackler family donation: Family owns Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, the controversial opioid prescription painkiller
https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/london-library-rejects-1m-sackler-family-donation-20190812
Investigating Trump family self-dealing, the D.C. A.G. has subpoenaed docs from Melania's former right-hand woman, Vanity Fair reports. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff has handed over a trove of docs related to her inauguration work with Trump family businesses.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/08/investigating-trump-family
The White House lifted its freeze on foreign aid spending, after pressure from Congress and Pompeo. But now the admin is trying a different tack to block the State Department and USAID from distributing several billion dollars in foreign aid: a daily cap.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/white-house-targets-foreign-aid-cash-with-caps-limiting-spending
A new New York law will enable Jeffrey Epstein's victims to sue for damages
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/new-new-york-law-will-enable-jeffrey-epstein-s-alleged-n1041446
U.S. Budget Deficit Already Exceeds Last Year’s Total Figure
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-12/u-s-budget-deficit-already-exceeds-last-year-s-total-figure
Top White House reporter asks if Trump will erase 'Give me your tired, your poor' from Statue of Liberty
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/top-white-house-reporter-asks-if-trump-will-erase-give-me-your-tired-your-poor-from-statue-of-liberty
San Diego’s city attorney is taking away hundreds of guns from those who shouldn’t have them | Under California’s red flag law, enacted in 2014, a law enforcement official or immediate family member can ask a judge to issue a Gun Violence Restraining Order if a gun owner is feared to be a danger to himself or others. If the order is issued — and it almost always is — the gun owner’s weapons will be seized by law enforcement for up to a year. After a year, the restraining order can be renewed.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-08-11/skelton-gun-control-california-san-diego-city-attorney
Dow sinks more than 450 points, loses grip on 26,000 as 10-year Treasury hits 1.63%
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/dow-futures-down-200-points-on-us-china-trade-worries-hong-kong-unrest-2019-08-12
Federal charges filed against friend of Dayton gunman Connor Betts for allegedly lying on federal firearms forms
https://abcnews.go.com/US/federal-charges-filed-friend-dayton-gunman-connor-betts/story?id=64925831
US cities are losing 36 million trees a year. Here's why it matters and how you can stop it
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/20/health/iyw-cities-losing-36-million-trees-how-to-help-trnd/index.html
Democrat Galloway launches Missouri gubernatorial campaign
https://apnews.com/45aef9ef051a403f8889af884a4e2484
States vow suit over endangered species rollback
https://www.apnews.com/2050b9a895ba4e4fb266d5ba4852d284
FBI Searching Epstein's Virgin Island Mansion
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/investigations/Jeffrey-Epstein-Suicide-MCC-New-York-Prison-537408641.html
Beto O'Rourke: When President Trump visited University Medical Center in the aftermath of one of the deadliest mass shootings in history, instead of consoling our community, he bragged about how much people love him. That shows you how sick this guy is—and how unfit he is for office.
https://twitter.com/BetoORourke/status/1160572548809187328
Muslim women 'sterilised' in China detention camps, say former detainees
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/uighur-muslim-china-sterilisation-women-internment-camps-xinjiang-a9054641.html
What would happen if the entire US stopped eating meat? Research says it'd be like taking 60 million cars off the road and there’s no nutritional downside.
http://www.businessinsider.com/switch-from-meat-to-meatless-diet-environmental-benefits-2019-8
Trump says Kim Apologised for previous missile tests, though North Korea launched more missiles hours later
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-kim-missile-launches-south-korea-dmz-1453637
Saturday, August 10, 2019
Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell due to an apparent suicide
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/10/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-suicide.html
Friday, August 9, 2019
Light News Dump
Nadler: 'This is formal impeachment proceedings'. Expects formal vote by December.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/08/nadler-this-is-formal-impeachment-proceedings-1454360
Trump administration reauthorizes use of "cyanide bombs" to kill wild animals
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-reauthorizes-use-of-cyanide-bombs-to-kill-wild-animals/
Man detained after walking into Missouri Walmart armed with a rifle and wearing body armor - ABC News | It’s unclear what the man’s motive was, but police told ABC Springfield affiliate KSPR that the man was recording himself with his cellphone while walking through the store. | "All we know is the fact that he walked in here heavily armed, with body armor on, and military fatigues on, and caused a great amount of panic inside the store," said Lt. Mike Lucas with the Springfield Police Department. "He certainly had the capability and potential to harm people."
https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-detained-walking-missouri-walmart-armed-rifle-wearing/story?id=64870120
More than 200 mayors urge Senate to return to Washington for gun bill vote
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/more-than-200-mayors-urge-senate-to-return-to-washington-for-gun-bill-vote
Reminder about that 680 employee raid: Koch Foods plant raided by ICE owed its workers $3.75 million from a 2018 class action lawsuit over discriminatory/abusive working conditions. They hoped to deport as many peopkle as possible to avoid paying.
https://thinkprogress.org/ice-raids-follow-massive-sexual-harassment-settlement-mississippi-plant-koch-foods-d95eb2720f67/
If the Mississippi ICE Raids Were About 'The Law,' Why Were No Executives Marched Out in Cuffs?
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28648186/mississippi-ice-raids-immigration/
A USA TODAY analysis found Trump used words like 'invasion' and 'killer' at rallies more than 500 times since 2017
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/08/08/trump-immigrants-rhetoric-criticized-el-paso-dayton-shootings/1936742001/
California mayor orders flags to be kept at half-staff until Congress acts on gun legislation
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/456783-california-mayor-orders-flags-to-be-kept-at-half-staff-until-congress
Trump Admin killing off the science units at the Agriculture Dept. Decades of priceless high-level scientific expertise, all off-loaded indiscriminately. It's a blueprint to eliminate entire government.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/07/18/many-usda-workers-quit-research-agencies-move-kansas-city-brain-drain-we-all-feared/
Hundreds of USDA employees to be removed from their jobs in September
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/08/07/hundreds-usda-employees-be-removed-their-jobs-september/
IMF analysis finds Trump’s corporate tax cuts fail to boost investment,
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-08/trump-corporate-tax-cuts-fail-to-boost-investment-imf-finds
Grinning Trump gives thumbs-up with baby whose parents were shot dead in El Paso atrocity
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-melania-baby-el-paso-thumbs-up-hospital-parents-mass-shooting-a9049086.html
The FBI Needed Child Porn Charges to Arrest a Man with "Hunting Guides" for Jews, Muslims, and Refugees The FBI received a tip in January but couldn't arrest him until June.
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d3az3a/the-fbi-needed-child-porn-charges-to-arrest-a-man-with-hunting-guides-for-jews-muslims-and-refugees
Trump campaign ads targeted Texas Latinos less than 48 hours after El Paso shooting
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-campaign-ads-targeted-texas-latinos-el-paso-shooting-1453441
Mike Mullen, seventeenth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Stop the Slaughter of Our Children With These Weapons of War | Assault weapons are designed to kill as many people as possible in the shortest time possible. They are for war; they are not for sport.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/michael-mullen-stop-slaughter-our-children/595807/
Trump Names Maguire Acting DNI. The Appointment Violates Federal Law.
https://lawandcrime.com/opinion/trump-names-maguire-acting-dni-the-appointment-may-violate-federal-law/
Trump's Rollback of Fuel Economy Standards Could Cost Americans $460 Billion
https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-fuel-standards-cost-2639723241.html
El Paso Massacre Galvanizes Accelerationists:"The domestic terror incident this past weekend in El Paso has energized the growing “accelerationist” bloc of the white power movement, which argues violence is the only way to achieve its goal of creating a white, non-Jewish ethnostate."
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/08/05/el-paso-massacre-galvanizes-accelerationists
Alleged white supremacists were responsible for all race-based domestic terrorism incidents in 2018, according to a government document distributed earlier this year to state, local and federal law enforcement.”
https://news.yahoo.com/heres-the-data-the-trump-administration-wouldnt-give-congress-on-white-supremacist-terrorism-235254627.html
Think Texas’ potential competitiveness in 2020 is a media creation? Or a ploy by over-exuberant Democrats? Think again. Top Texas Republicans have been sounding the alarm since January, if not earlier.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/texas-republicans-fear-trump-could-lose-the-state-in-2020
Boris Johnson accused of 'unprecedented, unconstitutional and anti-democratic abuse of power' over plot to force general election after no-deal Brexit
https://www.businessinsider.com/corbyn-johnson-plotting-abuse-of-power-to-force-no-deal-brexit-2019-8
Funny how Sanders fans say they hate rigged systems but they always say “Clinton failed” instead of “the Electoral College is rigged.”
'We Won't Be Intimidated,' Declare Campaigners After ExxonMobil Accused of Pressuring Witnesses in New York Climate Case: "Exxon is polluting these proceedings just like it has polluted our communities."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/08/we-wont-be-intimidated-declare-campaigners-after-exxonmobil-accused-pressuring
House Democrats have begun impeachment proceedings against President Trump. A key Democrat admitted as much Thursday. “This is formal impeachment proceedings,” the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold E. Nadler (D-N.Y.), told CNN on Thursday, after weeks of dancing around whether his committee would formally consider impeaching Trump. “We are investigating all the evidence, gathering the evidence," Nadler added. "And we will [at the] conclusion of this — hopefully by the end of the year — vote to vote articles of impeachment to the House floor. Or we won’t. That’s a decision that we’ll have to make. But that’s exactly the process we’re in right now.” His statement makes clear what a lawsuit filed Wednesday by his committee states: That "[t]he Judiciary Committee is now determining whether to recommend articles of impeachment against the President based on the obstructive conduct described by the Special Counsel.” In fact, Democrats may have already begun an impeachment inquiry without most people noticing and without the fanfare (and potential political backlash) of a big announcement that it’s happening. In a court filing in late July to get the full, unredacted Mueller report, the Judiciary Committee argued that it needed the information because it “is conducting an investigation to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment.” Since then, Democrats’ language has only become stronger in court filings, culminating with Nadler’s statement that impeachment proceedings have begun.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/09/impeachment-inquiry-trump-has-feared-is-here/
The Trump administration on Friday unveiled an unconstitutional proposal that would illegally curb state powers to block pipelines and other energy projects, part of the Trump administration’s effort to boost domestic oil, gas and coal development.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-epa-energy/trump-administration-moves-to-limit-state-powers-to-block-pipelines-terminals-idUSKCN1UZ1QV
‘Never seen anything like this’: Devin Nunes lawsuits are confusing fellow Republicans. Republicans who typically support Rep. Devin Nunes are less willing to speak up for him since he filed a lawsuit against one of his own constituents. The lawsuit is Nunes’ third in which he alleges that political consultants conspired against him to damage his chances for re-election last year. Nunes, R-Tulare, won the race against Democratic challenger Andrew Janz, but by a closer margin than in his previous campaigns. The previous two cases targeted social media giant Twitter and McClatchy, the parent company of The Fresno Bee. They also named Liz Mair, a Republican political strategist. The new case names four California residents, one of whom is Paul Buxman, a retired farmer who says he voted for Nunes in the past. | “He has filed lawsuits against his own constituents,” Phil Arballo, a Democratic businessman in the district planning to challenge Nunes in 2020, said in a speech in front of Nunes’ district office Tuesday. “Let me repeat, a sitting member of congress is suing his own constituents. This is outrageous, Rep. Nunes is unhinged.”
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/politics-government/article233615947.html
Trump Organization uses construction company that employs undocumented workers | Will ICE be raiding his companies?
https://thehill.com/latino/456868-trump-org-uses-construction-company-that-hires-undocumented-workers-report
Viral Tweet Shows List of Fast Food Chains 'Supporting Trump's Reelection'
https://www.newsweek.com/viral-tweet-shows-list-fast-food-chains-that-are-reportedly-supporting-trumps-re-election-1453541
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/08/nadler-this-is-formal-impeachment-proceedings-1454360
Trump administration reauthorizes use of "cyanide bombs" to kill wild animals
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-reauthorizes-use-of-cyanide-bombs-to-kill-wild-animals/
Man detained after walking into Missouri Walmart armed with a rifle and wearing body armor - ABC News | It’s unclear what the man’s motive was, but police told ABC Springfield affiliate KSPR that the man was recording himself with his cellphone while walking through the store. | "All we know is the fact that he walked in here heavily armed, with body armor on, and military fatigues on, and caused a great amount of panic inside the store," said Lt. Mike Lucas with the Springfield Police Department. "He certainly had the capability and potential to harm people."
https://abcnews.go.com/US/man-detained-walking-missouri-walmart-armed-rifle-wearing/story?id=64870120
More than 200 mayors urge Senate to return to Washington for gun bill vote
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/more-than-200-mayors-urge-senate-to-return-to-washington-for-gun-bill-vote
Reminder about that 680 employee raid: Koch Foods plant raided by ICE owed its workers $3.75 million from a 2018 class action lawsuit over discriminatory/abusive working conditions. They hoped to deport as many peopkle as possible to avoid paying.
https://thinkprogress.org/ice-raids-follow-massive-sexual-harassment-settlement-mississippi-plant-koch-foods-d95eb2720f67/
If the Mississippi ICE Raids Were About 'The Law,' Why Were No Executives Marched Out in Cuffs?
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a28648186/mississippi-ice-raids-immigration/
A USA TODAY analysis found Trump used words like 'invasion' and 'killer' at rallies more than 500 times since 2017
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2019/08/08/trump-immigrants-rhetoric-criticized-el-paso-dayton-shootings/1936742001/
California mayor orders flags to be kept at half-staff until Congress acts on gun legislation
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/456783-california-mayor-orders-flags-to-be-kept-at-half-staff-until-congress
Trump Admin killing off the science units at the Agriculture Dept. Decades of priceless high-level scientific expertise, all off-loaded indiscriminately. It's a blueprint to eliminate entire government.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/07/18/many-usda-workers-quit-research-agencies-move-kansas-city-brain-drain-we-all-feared/
Hundreds of USDA employees to be removed from their jobs in September
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/08/07/hundreds-usda-employees-be-removed-their-jobs-september/
IMF analysis finds Trump’s corporate tax cuts fail to boost investment,
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-08-08/trump-corporate-tax-cuts-fail-to-boost-investment-imf-finds
Grinning Trump gives thumbs-up with baby whose parents were shot dead in El Paso atrocity
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-melania-baby-el-paso-thumbs-up-hospital-parents-mass-shooting-a9049086.html
The FBI Needed Child Porn Charges to Arrest a Man with "Hunting Guides" for Jews, Muslims, and Refugees The FBI received a tip in January but couldn't arrest him until June.
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d3az3a/the-fbi-needed-child-porn-charges-to-arrest-a-man-with-hunting-guides-for-jews-muslims-and-refugees
Trump campaign ads targeted Texas Latinos less than 48 hours after El Paso shooting
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-campaign-ads-targeted-texas-latinos-el-paso-shooting-1453441
Mike Mullen, seventeenth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: Stop the Slaughter of Our Children With These Weapons of War | Assault weapons are designed to kill as many people as possible in the shortest time possible. They are for war; they are not for sport.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/michael-mullen-stop-slaughter-our-children/595807/
Trump Names Maguire Acting DNI. The Appointment Violates Federal Law.
https://lawandcrime.com/opinion/trump-names-maguire-acting-dni-the-appointment-may-violate-federal-law/
Trump's Rollback of Fuel Economy Standards Could Cost Americans $460 Billion
https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-fuel-standards-cost-2639723241.html
El Paso Massacre Galvanizes Accelerationists:"The domestic terror incident this past weekend in El Paso has energized the growing “accelerationist” bloc of the white power movement, which argues violence is the only way to achieve its goal of creating a white, non-Jewish ethnostate."
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/08/05/el-paso-massacre-galvanizes-accelerationists
Alleged white supremacists were responsible for all race-based domestic terrorism incidents in 2018, according to a government document distributed earlier this year to state, local and federal law enforcement.”
https://news.yahoo.com/heres-the-data-the-trump-administration-wouldnt-give-congress-on-white-supremacist-terrorism-235254627.html
Think Texas’ potential competitiveness in 2020 is a media creation? Or a ploy by over-exuberant Democrats? Think again. Top Texas Republicans have been sounding the alarm since January, if not earlier.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/texas-republicans-fear-trump-could-lose-the-state-in-2020
Boris Johnson accused of 'unprecedented, unconstitutional and anti-democratic abuse of power' over plot to force general election after no-deal Brexit
https://www.businessinsider.com/corbyn-johnson-plotting-abuse-of-power-to-force-no-deal-brexit-2019-8
Funny how Sanders fans say they hate rigged systems but they always say “Clinton failed” instead of “the Electoral College is rigged.”
'We Won't Be Intimidated,' Declare Campaigners After ExxonMobil Accused of Pressuring Witnesses in New York Climate Case: "Exxon is polluting these proceedings just like it has polluted our communities."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/08/08/we-wont-be-intimidated-declare-campaigners-after-exxonmobil-accused-pressuring
House Democrats have begun impeachment proceedings against President Trump. A key Democrat admitted as much Thursday. “This is formal impeachment proceedings,” the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jerrold E. Nadler (D-N.Y.), told CNN on Thursday, after weeks of dancing around whether his committee would formally consider impeaching Trump. “We are investigating all the evidence, gathering the evidence," Nadler added. "And we will [at the] conclusion of this — hopefully by the end of the year — vote to vote articles of impeachment to the House floor. Or we won’t. That’s a decision that we’ll have to make. But that’s exactly the process we’re in right now.” His statement makes clear what a lawsuit filed Wednesday by his committee states: That "[t]he Judiciary Committee is now determining whether to recommend articles of impeachment against the President based on the obstructive conduct described by the Special Counsel.” In fact, Democrats may have already begun an impeachment inquiry without most people noticing and without the fanfare (and potential political backlash) of a big announcement that it’s happening. In a court filing in late July to get the full, unredacted Mueller report, the Judiciary Committee argued that it needed the information because it “is conducting an investigation to determine whether to recommend articles of impeachment.” Since then, Democrats’ language has only become stronger in court filings, culminating with Nadler’s statement that impeachment proceedings have begun.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/09/impeachment-inquiry-trump-has-feared-is-here/
The Trump administration on Friday unveiled an unconstitutional proposal that would illegally curb state powers to block pipelines and other energy projects, part of the Trump administration’s effort to boost domestic oil, gas and coal development.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-epa-energy/trump-administration-moves-to-limit-state-powers-to-block-pipelines-terminals-idUSKCN1UZ1QV
‘Never seen anything like this’: Devin Nunes lawsuits are confusing fellow Republicans. Republicans who typically support Rep. Devin Nunes are less willing to speak up for him since he filed a lawsuit against one of his own constituents. The lawsuit is Nunes’ third in which he alleges that political consultants conspired against him to damage his chances for re-election last year. Nunes, R-Tulare, won the race against Democratic challenger Andrew Janz, but by a closer margin than in his previous campaigns. The previous two cases targeted social media giant Twitter and McClatchy, the parent company of The Fresno Bee. They also named Liz Mair, a Republican political strategist. The new case names four California residents, one of whom is Paul Buxman, a retired farmer who says he voted for Nunes in the past. | “He has filed lawsuits against his own constituents,” Phil Arballo, a Democratic businessman in the district planning to challenge Nunes in 2020, said in a speech in front of Nunes’ district office Tuesday. “Let me repeat, a sitting member of congress is suing his own constituents. This is outrageous, Rep. Nunes is unhinged.”
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/politics-government/article233615947.html
Trump Organization uses construction company that employs undocumented workers | Will ICE be raiding his companies?
https://thehill.com/latino/456868-trump-org-uses-construction-company-that-hires-undocumented-workers-report
Viral Tweet Shows List of Fast Food Chains 'Supporting Trump's Reelection'
https://www.newsweek.com/viral-tweet-shows-list-fast-food-chains-that-are-reportedly-supporting-trumps-re-election-1453541
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