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Overnight News Digest: Capitol Follies [1]
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Date: 2023-01-05
AP News
Pressure mounting, divided Republicans left the speaker’s chair of the U.S. House sitting empty for a third day Thursday, as party leader Kevin McCarthy failed anew in an excruciating string of ballots to win enough GOP votes to seize the chamber’s gavel. McCarthy lost a seventh round and was gaining no ground in an eighth. With his supporters and foes seemingly stalemated, feelings of both boredom and desperation seemed increasingly evident, with no end in sight. One McCarthy critic, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, cast his vote for Donald Trump, symbolic but pointed.
NBC News
For a third consecutive day, a bloc of ultraconservative bomb throwers denied GOP leader Kevin McCarthy the speaker’s gavel Thursday, even after he caved on a set of concessions the right-wing Republicans were demanding. It marked the eighth straight defeat for McCarthy, who has vowed not to drop his bid for the top job. While he still maintained support from roughly 90% of his GOP colleagues, the conservative rebels on Thursday banded together and were able to block McCarthy from securing the simple majority of the House needed to be elected speaker (a number that can shift). Thursday was a repeat of the previous two days when the small group of rebels rejected McCarthy during six consecutive floor votes — all of them televised. Because Republicans won a paper-thin majority in November, it will take nearly all of their 222 members agreeing on a pick for speaker before any other House business can move forward.
Bloomberg
The US and Germany will send armored vehicles and an additional Patriot air defense system to Ukraine, a significant upgrade in firepower urgently sought by President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the fight against Russia’s invasion. The US will provide its Bradley Fighting Vehicles while Germany is sending its Marder vehicles, the leaders said Thursday in a joint statement. Germany also will provide Ukraine a Patriot battery — the second headed to the country after the US said last month that it would send one of the powerful air-defense systems.
The Kyiv Independent
It’s the last days of December and the heat of the holiday season. But an artillery battalion with Ukraine’s 24th Mechanized Infantry just couldn’t care less. For them… just another day of war that keeps repeating over and over. From their place in an abandoned village in Donetsk Oblast, they support Ukrainian infantry repelling Russian frontal attacks in Bakhmut. The site of the most grueling battle of Russia’s war in Ukraine so far, Bakhmut has been drawing comparisons with World War I’s deadly Battle of Verdun. A 122-millimeter 2S1 self-propelled howitzer Gvozdika is … on standby. The artillerymen are in an abandoned house nearby, where they try to keep close to the cellar. The radio buzzes: A warning comes that Russians counter-shot some of this battery’s guns this morning, “so you guys better watch out.”
Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin called on Thursday for a 36-hour ceasefire in Ukraine to mark Orthodox Christmas, a move rejected by Kyiv which said there could be no truce until Russia withdraws its troops from occupied land. The Kremlin said Putin had ordered Russian troops to cease firing from midday on Friday along the entire front, in response to a call for a Christmas truce from Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, a close Putin ally. […] Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhailo Podolyak tweeted that Russia "must leave the occupied territories - only then will it have a 'temporary truce'. Keep hypocrisy to yourself." The Secretary of Ukraine's Security and Defence Council, Oleksiy Danylov, tweeted: "A ceasefire? Lies and hypocrisy. We will bite you in the singing silence of the Ukrainian night."
Der Spiegel
Thomas Haldenwang, the head of Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), the country’s domestic intelligence agency, had clear words when he spoke about Russian intelligence services before the federal parliament, the Bundestag, in mid-October. He called Russia an "aggressive actor with dishonest means and motives." Two years earlier, he had already warned of an "alarming brutalization" of its methods. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, he said, represented an "aggravation of all previous factors." To the left of Haldenwang, wearing a blue shirt with a purple tie and rimless glasses, sat Bruno Kahl, the president of the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence service. He seemed relaxed on October 17, likely unaware at that time that his own agency had probably become a victim of that Russian aggression. Or he didn't let on about it. On December 21, officers of the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) arrested Carsten L., the head of a BND unit, in Berlin. German Federal Prosecutor Peter Frank has accused him of providing Russia with classified intelligence information.
Science
Most scientists believe China’s decision to end its zero-COVID policy was long overdue. But now they have a new worry: that the country is collecting and sharing far too little data about the rough transition to a new coexistence with the virus. China abruptly dropped virtually all controls a month ago, after protests, a sagging economy, and the extreme transmissibility of the virus’ latest variants made clinging to zero COVID untenable. Now, “SARS-CoV-2 has an open goal in front of it: a population with very low levels of standing immunity,” says evolutionary biologist Edward Holmes of the University of Sydney. But how the epidemic is unfolding is a mystery because the country has practically stopped collecting basic epidemiological data. Models that predicted a massive wave of infection and death if China ended zero COVID appear to have been correct. Press reports and social media posts have shown intensive care units stretched beyond capacity, with crowds of patients in wheelchairs and on gurneys in hallways. Doctors and nurses are reportedly working while sick. Crematoriums are overwhelmed. But China’s official COVID-19 death toll is widely considered laughably low. And some scientists worry a genomic monitoring plan unveiled last month doesn’t have the power to detect new SARS-CoV-2 variants arising as the virus works its way through one-fifth of the world population.
The Atlantic
[…] Going from surviving to thriving is crucial for healing and growth after a disaster, and scholars have shown that it can be a common experience. Often, the worst conditions bring out the best in people as they work together for their own recovery and that of their neighbors. COVID-19 appears to be resistant to this phenomenon, unfortunately. The most salient social feature of the pandemic was how it forced people into isolation; for those fortunate enough not to lose a loved one, the major trauma it created was loneliness. Instead of coming together, emerging evidence suggests that we are in the midst of a long-term crisis of habitual loneliness, in which relationships were severed and never reestablished. Many people—perhaps including you—are still wandering alone, without the company of friends and loved ones to help rebuild their life. […] This growing habitual loneliness is a public-health crisis. Research has consistently shown that isolation is linked to depression and anxiety. It has also been shown to lead to premature mortality, worsen cardiovascular health, increase inflammation, and disrupt hormones and sleep.
San Francisco Chronicle
The havoc of the overnight storm came into clear view Thursday morning throughout the Bay Area, with power outages, downed trees, flooded roadways and filled reservoirs threatening to flood neighborhoods. The storm, coming from a bomb cyclone over the Pacific Ocean and fueled by a persistent atmospheric river, was unleashed over a wide swath of California, killing two people — including a baby in Sonoma County — and injuring several others. […] The rain totals from recent storms was jaw-dropping, with nearly 8 inches falling on San Francisco in the past week, more than a third of the annual average the city expects to see and more than the typically inundated communities like Kentfield and Santa Rosa. More storms are expected off and on for the next week or so. The destruction from the onslaught was evident in nearly every Bay Area city Thursday.
Mother Jones
In 2021, on San Francisco’s wettest October day on record, an “atmospheric river” dumped a stunning 4.02 inches of rain downtown, causing highways and neighborhoods in the area to flood. Cars were stranded in standing water. And the city’s sewers, which carry both stormwater and sewage, overflowed in the low-lying Marina neighborhood. Officials estimated that 1.4 million gallons of untreated water could have escaped into the bay. For the approximately 700 municipalities in the United States with combined sewers, overflow can happen during periods of heavy rainfall and can lead to polluted waterways, closed beaches, and tainted drinking water. And with climate change, heavier storms are on the horizon. So about 10 years ago, San Francisco began to turn, in part, to a simple solution: planting dozens of public rain gardens. At the most basic level, rain gardens function like sponges. They are typically made by digging 5 or so feet into the ground, adding layers of rock and soil mixes designed to absorb and filter water, and topping the layers with flowers, trees, and shrubs. A finished rain garden should dip like a bowl about half a foot below ground level so that when it rains, the garden can temporarily fill up, allowing water to percolate into the ground rather than run into the street. And, research shows, the gardens are remarkably effective at capturing runoff.
E&E News ClimateWire
Europeans have feared for months about freezing this winter because of an energy crisis stemming from Russia’s war in Ukraine. They were not expecting a heat wave. On the first day of the year, weather stations across Europe saw their highest January temperatures of all time. Nearly a thousand records fell in Germany alone in the first few days of the year, according to climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who tracks extreme temperatures around the world. Thousands fell elsewhere across the continent. […] The temperature anomalies were “unprecedented,” Herrera said, with some weather stations hitting temperatures that were higher than July averages. Warsaw, Poland, which boasts a climatological record dating back 200 years, broke its January temperature record by more than 5 degrees Celsius.
Mongabay
In the first day of his third mandate as Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, issued measures to protect the Amazon and Indigenous people, acts highly celebrated by environmentalists and activists as a reversal of an anti-environment-and-Indigenous era from predecessor Jair Bolsonaro. Effective Jan. 2, six decrees revoked or altered measures imposed by Bolsonaro’s administration, including the annulment of a decree that encouraged mining in Indigenous lands and protected areas, the resumption of plans to combat deforestation in the Amazon and Cerrado biomes and the resumption of the Amazon Fund, a pool of funding provided to Brazil by developed nations to finance a variety of programs aimed at halting deforestation that was stalled under Bolsonaro. “Our goal is to achieve zero deforestation in the Amazon and zero emission of greenhouse gases in the electricity matrix, in addition to stimulating the reuse of degraded pastureland. Brazil does not need to deforest in order to maintain and expand its strategic agricultural frontier,” Lula said Jan. 1 during his inauguration speech before the National Congress. “We will not tolerate violence against minorities, deforestation and environmental degradation, which have already done so much harm to the country.” He noted that the government transition office diagnosed Bolsonaro’s government as “appalling,” stating, “They have destroyed the protection of the environment.”
Wired
Dozens of once crystal-clear streams and rivers in Arctic Alaska are now running bright orange and cloudy, and in some cases they are becoming more acidic. This otherwise undeveloped landscape now looks as if an industrial mine has been in operation for decades, and scientists want to know why. […] The prevailing hypothesis is that climate warming is causing underlying permafrost to degrade. That releases sediments rich in iron, and when those sediments hit running water and open air, they oxidize and turn a deep rusty orange color. The oxidation of minerals in the soil may also be making the water more acidic. The research team is still early in the process of identifying the cause in order to better explain the consequences. “I think the pH issue”—the acidity of the water—“is truly alarming,” said [Becky Hewitt, an environmental studies professor at Amherst College]. While pH regulates many biotic and chemical processes in streams and rivers, the exact impacts on the intricate food webs that exist in these waterways are unknown. From fish to stream bed bugs and plant communities, the research team is unsure what changes may result.
The Washington Post
A sweeping study of all the world’s glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has found that nearly half of them will melt by century’s end, even if the world meets its most ambitious global warming goal. The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, finds that even with just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming above preindustrial levels, some 104,000 of the world’s more than 215,000 mountain glaciers and ice caps will melt, raising global sea levels by a little shy of four inches. A rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius beyond preindustrial temperatures is now extraordinarily difficult to avoid, suggesting that a change of this magnitude may be nearly unstoppable. But with every additional increment of temperature increase, the study finds, the outlook becomes worse. Three degrees C (5.4 degrees F) of warming, the research finds, would translate into a loss of over 70 percent of global glaciers and result in around five inches of global sea-level rise. So, even if many losses are baked in, the authors say, it is still worth trying to avoid whatever warming we can.
Nature
The number of science and technology research papers published has skyrocketed over the past few decades — but the ‘disruptiveness’ of those papers has dropped, according to an analysis of how radically papers depart from the previous literature1. Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with the mid-twentieth century, research done in the 2000s was much more likely to incrementally push science forward than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend. “The data suggest something is changing,” says Russell Funk, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and a co-author of the analysis, which was published on 4 January in Nature. “You don’t have quite the same intensity of breakthrough discoveries you once had.”
Stars & Stripes
Military parents of newborns are entitled up to four times more parental leave, depending on their roles, under the recently authorized National Defense Authorization Act. Birth parents can now claim a maximum 18 weeks of nonchargeable leave, six more weeks than their previous benefit; non-birth parents are entitled to 12 weeks, up from three. The new policy also allows service members to take parental leave in seven-day increments, if permitted by their commander. “Commanders are encouraged to approve requests for incremental periods of parental leave,” the policy states. “If the unit commander does not approve taking incremental parental leave, they must allow the member to take the full 12 weeks of parental leave in one continuous period.”
El País
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