Chutkan’s stark admonition came at the conclusion of her first courtroom session in the newest criminal case against the former president. The aim of the hearing was for special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors and Trump’s attorneys to hash out disputes about the handling of evidence in the case. Once Chutkan enters a so-called “protective order” governing evidence, prosecutors say they’re prepared to share millions of pages of documents with Trump’s team, jumpstarting the case and setting it on a path to trial.
Friday Reads
Posted: September 8, 2023 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, Elon Musk, just because | Tags: Climate change, extreme heat, floating barriers, Georgia special grand jury report, Greg Abbott, IRS, Lindsey Graham, Russia, Starlink internet, Ukraine, Walter Isaacson 3 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
We in the Boston area are finally getting a taste of the extreme heat that much of the rest of the country has been experiencing. Yesterday and today, there were heat emergencies declared, and many schools sent kids home early because of the heat and no air conditioning. Obviously, we aren’t used to 100 degree heat indexes in September in this part of the country. I don’t know how Dakinikat has survived months of this heat. Republicans need to wake up and realize that their children and grandchildren are going to suffer from climate change, whether their ancestors believed in it or not.
From Scientific American: Half the World’s Population Faced Extreme Heat for at Least 30 Days This Summer.
It has been a grueling summer, with relentless heat breaking multiple records in many places around the world. In fact, June through August was the planet’s hottest documented three-month period, with July ranking as the hottest month ever recorded. A new analysis by the nonprofit organization Climate Central finds that more than 3.8 billion people were exposed to extreme heat that was worsened by human-caused climate change from June through August, and at least 1.5 billion experienced such heat every day of that period. Nearly every person on Earth saw high temperatures that were made at least twice as likely by global warming.
People cool off in fountains in Rome to deal with the heat.
It has been a grueling summer, with relentless heat breaking multiple records in many places around the world. In fact, June through August was the planet’s hottest documented three-month period, with July ranking as the hottest month ever recorded. A new analysis by the nonprofit organization Climate Central finds that more than 3.8 billion people were exposed to extreme heat that was worsened by human-caused climate change from June through August, and at least 1.5 billion experienced such heat every day of that period. Nearly every person on Earth saw high temperatures that were made at least twice as likely by global warming.
“It really is everywhere,” says Andrew Pershing, Climate Central’s vice president for science. “On a single day, the fact that more than half the people on the planet were experiencing climate-altered heat—that’s just really, really remarkable to me.”
More frequent, longer-lasting and more intense heat waves are among the clearest outcomes of rising global temperatures driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Numerous studies have found the fingerprints of climate change in heat waves from the Pacific Northwest to Europe. A study released by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) research group in July had already found that the heat waves in North America, Europe and China that month were made hotter—and many times more likely—by climate change. In fact, the North American and European events likely would not have occurred without climate change.
The new analysis was produced using Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index (CSI) attribution system, which estimates how much climate change has shifted the local odds of events such as extreme heat. The system, which is based on peer-reviewed science, scores global warming’s influence using the ratio of how often a given temperature occurs in the current climate, compared with a world without climate change. A CSI of 1 means there is a discernable influence from climate change, and CSIs between 2 and 5 mean it made those conditions two to five times more likely.
The organization’s worldwide temperature analysis during this year’s Northern Hemisphere summer found 48 percent of the world’s population experienced at least 30 days of extreme heat that was made at least three times more likely by climate change, and at least 1.5 billion people experienced heat at that level or higher for the entire summer. Many of those people were in areas closer to the equator, such as the Caribbean, northern Africa and Southeast Asia.
Read more at the link.
That asshole Greg Abbott won a temporary stay on his murderous barriers. CNN: Federal appeals court says Texas’ floating barriers can remain in Rio Grande for now.
The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay Thursday night allowing the state of Texas to keep floating barriers in the Rio Grande.
A lower court judge had ordered Texas to take down the barriers by September 15 at its own expense. The panel’s decision Thursday puts that order on hold while the appeals court considers the case. It means that Texas does not have to start the process of removing the barriers, for now.
A worker helps deploy a string of large buoys to be used as a border barrier at the center of the Rio Grande near Eagle Pass, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
The swift ruling by the 5th Circuit comes a day after US District Judge David Ezra wrote that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott needed permission to install the barriers, as dictated by law – a win for the Biden administration.
“Governor Abbott announced that he was not ‘asking for permission’ for Operation Lone Star, the anti-immigration program under which Texas constructed the floating barrier. Unfortunately for Texas, permission is exactly what federal law requires before installing obstructions in the nation’s navigable waters,” Ezra wrote in his ruling. The judge also found Texas’ self-defense argument – that the barriers have been placed in the face of invasion – “unconvincing.”
The controversial border buoys were deployed in the Rio Grande as part Operation Lone Star, Abbott’s border security initiative. In July, the Justice Department sued the state of Texas claiming that the buoys were installed unlawfully and asking the judge to force the state to remove them.
Let’s hope the stay is just so the judges can get up to speed on the issues. Those barriers are utterly monstrous and inhumane.
The report from the Fulton County, Georgia special grand jury has been released. This was the jury that was just investigative. They recommended people who should be charged, and the official grand jury issued final indictments.
CNN reports: Fulton County special grand jury recommended charges against Lindsey Graham, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler.
The special grand jury in Fulton County investigating the 2020 presidential election in Georgia recommended charges against Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and former GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, according to the special counsel grand jury report released Friday.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis did not charge the lawmakers when she returned an indictment last month against former President Donald Trump and 18 co-defendants in the sprawling racketeering case. It was up to the district attorney to decide how closely to stick to the special grand jury’s recommendations….
Graham, who appeared before the special grand jury last year after a court battle over his testimony, spoke with Georgia election officials after the 2020 election. His phone calls with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his staff related to the possibility of finding enough fraud in the state that it could’ve tipped the election to Trump.
Raffensperger testified to the House January 6 committee thahis phone call with Graham made him “uncomfortable” because some of Graham’s suggestions could have led to “disenfranchising voters.”
Graham repeatedly prodded Raffensperger and his colleagues on the phone about the signature-matching of ballots in the Atlanta area. Raffensperger told CNN in November 2020 that he believed Graham “implied” that he should try to “throw out” some ballots in the heavily Democratic county….
Perdue, who lost his Senate run-off election in January 2021 while Trump was pushing his false claims of fraud, personally urged Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to convene a special session of the legislature to help Trump’s quest to overturn the election. Loeffler, who also lost her runoff election in January 2021, was also at the meeting….
Special grand juries in Georgia cannot issue indictments and instead serve as an investigative tool. This special grand jury began hearing evidence in June 2022, and Willis used it to investigate efforts to overturn the 2020 election, an investigation sparked by Trump’s January 2021 phone call with Raffensperger where Trump asked him to “find” the votes he needed to win the state. The panel ultimately heard from 75 witnesses.
News has broken about Elon Musk’s interference in Ukraine, based on a new biography by Walter Isaacson.
CNN Exclusive: ‘How am I in this war?’: New Musk biography offers fresh details about the billionaire’s Ukraine dilemma.
Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.”
As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.
Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to turn the satellites back on, was driven by an acute fear that Russia would respond to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea with nuclear weapons, a fear driven home by Musk’s conversations with senior Russian officials, according to Isaacson, whose new book is set to be released by Simon & Schuster on September 12.
Musk’s concerns over a “mini-Pearl Harbor” as he put it, did not come to pass in Crimea. But the episode reveals the unique position Musk found himself in as the war in Ukraine unfolded. Whether intended or not, he had become a power broker US officials couldn’t ignore.
Why is this monster still getting government money?
“There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” Musk posted on X, the platform formally known as Twitter that he owns. Sevastopol is a port city in Crimea. “The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” [….]
A Ukrainian soldier disconnects a Starlink satellite dish near Kreminna, Ukraine. Credit…Clodagh KilcoyneReuters
After Russia disrupted Ukraine’s communications systems just before its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Musk agreed to provide Ukraine with millions of dollars of SpaceX-made Starlink satellite terminals, which became crucial to Ukraine’s military operations. Even as cellular phone and internet networks had been destroyed, the Starlink terminals allowed Ukraine to fight and stay connected.
But once Ukraine began to use Starlink terminals for offensive attacks against Russia, Musk started to second-guess that decision.
“How am I in this war?” Musk asks Isaacson. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”
Musk was soon on the phone with President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, the chairman of the joint chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley, and the Russian ambassador to the US to address anxieties from Washington, DC, to Moscow, writes Isaacson.
Meanwhile, Mykhailo Fedorov, a deputy prime minister of Ukraine, was pleading with Musk to restore connectivity for the submarine drones by telling Musk about their capabilities in a text message, according to Isaacson. “I just want you—the person who is changing the world through technology—to know this,” Fedorov told Musk.
Read more at CNN.
The New York Times: Elon Musk Acknowledges Withholding Satellite Service to Thwart Ukrainian Attack.
A top adviser to Ukraine’s president accused Elon Musk of enabling Russian aggression, after the billionaire entrepreneur acknowledged denying satellite internet service in order to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack on a Russian naval fleet last year.
The Starlink satellite internet service, which is operated by Mr. Musk’s rocket company SpaceX, has been a digital lifeline in Ukraine since the early days of the war for both civilians and soldiers in areas where digital infrastructure has been wiped out.
On Thursday, CNN reported on an excerpt from Walter Isaacson’s upcoming biography “Elon Musk,” later published by The Washington Post, that said the billionaire had ordered the deactivation of Starlink satellite service near the coast of Crimea last September to thwart the Ukrainian attack. The excerpt said that Mr. Musk had conversations with a Russian official that led him to worry that an attack on Crimea could spiral into a nuclear conflict.
I remember when Musk claimed he had spoken directly with Putin.
Later on Thursday, Mr. Musk responded on his social media platform to say that he hadn’t disabled the service but had rather refused to comply with an emergency request from Ukrainian officials to enable Starlink connections to Sevastopol on the occupied Crimean peninsula. That was in effect an acknowledgment that he had made the decision to prevent a Ukrainian attack.
“The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
That drew an angry response from Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. Mr. Musk’s “interference,” he said, had allowed Russia’s naval fleet to continue firing cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities.
“As a result, civilians, children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego,” he wrote on X.
Elon Musk and Walter Isaacson
The account in the biography further confirms the ways in which Mr. Musk’s control over Starlink appears to be affecting Ukraine’s military. In July, The New York Times reported on Mr. Musk’s refusal to allow the service to work near Crimea, and the broader challenges Ukrainian officials were facing because of the country’s huge dependence on Starlink.
The more than 42,000 Starlink terminals are also in use by hospitals, businesses and aid organizations across Ukraine.
But Mr. Musk has repeatedly stoked controversy around access to Starlink, saying last October that he could not “indefinitely” finance Ukraine’s use of Starlink, then abruptly reversing course. The near-total control that he wields over connectivity in the war zone has prompted concern about his influence.
In February, Ukrainian officials were angered after a SpaceX executive said that Starlink had taken steps to curtail the Ukrainian military’s use of the technology to control drones, a week after Mr. Musk said the company was “not allowing Starlink to be used for long-range drone strikes.” SpaceX has also used a process called geofencing to restrict where Starlink is available on the front lines.
Because Starlink is a commercial product rather than a traditional defense contractor, Mr. Musk is able to make decisions that may not be aligned with U.S. interests, analysts have said.
One more and then I’ll wrap this up. It appears that the IRS is actually going after superrich people.
The New York Times: I.R.S. Deploys Artificial Intelligence to Target Rich Partnerships.
The Internal Revenue Service has started using artificial intelligence to investigate tax evasion at multibillion-dollar partnerships as it looks for ways to better police hedge funds, private equity groups, real estate investors and large law firms.
The announcement on Friday demonstrated how a more muscular I.R.S. is using some of the $80 billion allocated through last year’s Inflation Reduction Act to target the wealthiest Americans and tackle the kinds of cases that had become too complex and cumbersome for the beleaguered agency to handle.
The agency’s new funding is intended to help the I.R.S. raise more federal revenue by cracking down on tax cheats and others who use sophisticated accounting maneuvers to avoid paying what they owe. But the allocation has been politically contentious, with Republicans claiming that the I.R.S. will use the funding to harass small businesses and middle-class taxpayers. Earlier this year, Republicans succeeded in clawing back $20 billion as part of an agreement to raise the nation’s borrowing cap.
That political fight has put the onus on Democrats and the Biden administration to show that the funding is primarily enabling the I.R.S. to target the rich.
“These are complex cases for I.R.S. teams to unpack,” Daniel Werfel, the I.R.S. commissioner, said in a briefing with reporters. “The I.R.S. has simply not had enough resources or staffing to address partnerships; in a real sense, we’ve been overwhelmed in this area for years.”
Mr. Werfel explained that artificial intelligence is helping the I.R.S. identify patterns and trends, giving the agency greater confidence that it can find where larger partnerships are shielding income. That is leading to the kinds of major audits that the I.R.S. might not have previously tackled.
The agency said it would open examinations of 75 of the nation’s largest partnerships, which were identified with the help of artificial intelligence, by the end of the month. The partnerships all have more than $10 billion in assets and will receive audit notices in the coming weeks.
Sounds good to me.
That’s all I have today. Have a great weekend everyone!!
Lazy Caturday Reads: The Heat Is On
Posted: August 12, 2023 Filed under: Cats, caturday, Crime, Donald Trump, just because | Tags: extreme heat, first amendment, freedom of the press, Hawaii wildfires, January 6 case, Judge Tanya Chutkan, limits on free speech, Maui 10 Comments
Happy Caturday!!
Sadly, I’m unable to post cat art today because WordPress has made it very difficult to resize images to manageable dimensions. Dakinikat seems to have figured out how to do it, but I’m still confused. I’m hoping I’ll be able to master the technique or learn to use one of WordPress’s other god-awful methods of posting. Today I’m reposting Tweets from Lorenzo the Cat.
(Dakinikat note: testing the images thing, so there are a few popping up here now.)
We haven’t talked much about the awful wildfires in Hawaii. Here’s the latest news.
Washington Post Live Updates: Maui death toll reaches 80 amid questions over emergency response.
The death toll from the Hawaii wildfires has risen to 80, Maui county officials said in an update late Friday, as firefighters continued work to contain fires on the island. Government officials are launching a review of the state’s emergency response, as residents criticized relief efforts as insufficient and records indicated that emergency sirens weren’t activated at the state or county level during the wildfires, though alerts were sent to cellphones and broadcast networks.
Here’s what to know
Read more recent updates at the WaPo.
Pre-Raphaelite Cats, Susan Herbert
From The New York Times, an opinion piece by writer and editor Lawrence Downes, who grew up in Hawaii: After the Shock and Grief, Hawaii Will Reinvent Itself Again.
The disaster that erased the beloved West Maui town of Lahaina this week comes with the bitter taste of bewilderment. Brush fires met high winds whipped by a far-off hurricane, and overnight a historic town was gone, a pile of smoke and ashes. A lush watercolor landscape is redrawn in gray and black. At least 55 people are dead, and many more are missing.
A hurricane just burned down a town. It’s all so weird and horrifying.
Living in Hawaii long enough gives you a familiarity with sudden catastrophes, the kind that can obliterate a community in a week, a day or an instant. To live in my home state or to love it from a distance is to know the continual threat of hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanoes.
But a lethal wildfire? That was new for Hawaii. And everything is changed.
We may not get a definitive verdict on whether Lahaina died for humanity’s environmental sins, but we know that climate change is making Hawaii hotter and drier and that invasive grasses have been allowed to run rampant. Drought on Maui turned the grass into ready fuel and heightened the risk of wildfires, and then a hurricane brushed by.
The planetary crisis is hardly Hawaii’s fault, but like other island areas in our rising oceans, it is unusually imperiled, and it has to do something. And when wildfires swept over Maui and the Big Island, it was a brutal reminder that Hawaii needs to be a serious climate leader, to nurture and spread the environmental consciousness that too many other states lack.
Hawaii will surely find ways to lower the risk of wildfires and get better at fighting them. Lahaina will rebuild, and residents will return. But climate resiliency is a far bigger challenge than adding fire trucks and subduing invasive grasses. It’s an expensive mess of problems across the state.
Will the communities on Oahu’s North Shore be able to retreat from the rising ocean before they are washed away? How will flower and fruit growers on Maui and the Big Island cope with extended drought? What happens if or when the coral reefs die, the native trees and forest birds are gone, weather patterns shift and the cooling trade winds disappear?
All good questions, and we all must “do something.” Climate change is happening. We can see it all around us.
JJ passed along this article about the extreme heat affecting so many people this year.
TechTimes: How Much Heat Can Your Body Take? Scientists Reveal the Maximum Limit.
According to AFP, new research shows the limit, known as the “wet bulb temperature,” representing the maximum combination of heat and humidity before sweat no longer evaporates from the skin, leading to heatstroke, organ failure, and death.
While this threshold occurs at around 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit), recent research suggests it could be even lower.
Colin Raymond from NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the wet bulb limit of human survival has been breached only around a dozen times, primarily in South Asia and the Persian Gulf.
Although none of these occurrences extended beyond two hours, they effectively averted widespread mortality events associated with this critical threshold.
Nonetheless, specialists stress that fatalities resulting from intense heat are feasible even at less severe levels. Factors such as age, health, and socio-economic circumstances play a role in determining an individual’s susceptibility.
In Europe last summer, for instance, more than 61,000 fatalities were linked to heat, even in regions where the perilous wet bulb temperature range is seldom attained.
Scientists warn that dangerous wet bulb events will become more frequent as global temperatures continue to rise. The frequency of such events has doubled over the last four decades, driven by human-caused climate change.
According to Raymond’s research, wet bulb temperatures exceeding 35 degrees Celsius could become common worldwide if global temperatures rise by 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
To test the wet bulb limit, researchers at Pennsylvania State University evaluated young, healthy participants in a heat chamber. They found that the “critical environmental limit,” where the body can’t prevent further core temperature increase, was reached at 30.6 degrees Celsius wet bulb temperature, lower than previously theorized.
Read the rest at TechTimes.
In other news, here’s a shocking small-town example of the assault on the First Amendment that is happening in red states.
Kansas Reflector: Police stage ‘chilling’ raid on Marion County newspaper, seizing computers, records and cellphones.
MARION — In an unprecedented raid Friday, local law enforcement seized computers, cellphones and reporting materials from the Marion County Record office, the newspaper’s reporters, and the publisher’s home.
Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: “Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.”
The city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have,” Meyer said, and it wasn’t clear how the newspaper staff would take the weekly publication to press Tuesday night.
The raid followed news stories about a restaurant owner who kicked reporters out of a meeting last week with U.S. Rep. Jake LaTurner, and revelations about the restaurant owner’s lack of a driver’s license and conviction for drunken driving.
Meyer said he had never heard of police raiding a newspaper office during his 20 years at the Milwaukee Journal or 26 years teaching journalism at the University of Illinois.
“It’s going to have a chilling effect on us even tackling issues,” Meyer said, as well as “a chilling effect on people giving us information.”
The search warrant, signed by Marion County District Court Magistrate Judge Laura Viar, appears to violate federal law that provides protections against searching and seizing materials from journalists. The law requires law enforcement to subpoena materials instead. Viar didn’t respond to a request to comment for this story or explain why she would authorize a potentially illegal raid.
A bit more:
Emily Bradbury, executive director of the Kansas Press Association, said the police raid is unprecedented in Kansas.
“An attack on a newspaper office through an illegal search is not just an infringement on the rights of journalists but an assault on the very foundation of democracy and the public’s right to know,” Bradbury said. “This cannot be allowed to stand.”
Meyer reported last week that Marion restaurant owner Kari Newell had kicked newspaper staff out of a public forum with LaTurner, whose staff was apologetic. Newell responded to Meyer’s reporting with hostile comments on her personal Facebook page.
A confidential source contacted the newspaper, Meyer said, and provided evidence that Newell had been convicted of drunken driving and continued to use her vehicle without a driver’s license. The criminal record could jeopardize her efforts to obtain a liquor license for her catering business.
A reporter with the Marion Record used a state website to verify the information provided by the source. But Meyer suspected the source was relaying information from Newell’s husband, who had filed for divorce. Meyer decided not to publish a story about the information, and he alerted police to the situation.
“We thought we were being set up,” Meyer said.
Police notified Newell, who then complained at a city council meeting that the newspaper had illegally obtained and disseminated sensitive documents, which isn’t true. Her public comments prompted the newspaper to set the record straight in a story published Thursday.
Sometime before 11 a.m. Friday, officers showed up simultaneously at Meyer’s home and the newspaper office. They presented a search warrant that alleges identity theft and unlawful use of a computer.
The paper didn’t even publish the information, but a magistrate judge approved a search warrant! This is the kind of behavior by law enforcement that Trump would promote if he gets back into a position of power.
Speaking of Trump, here are some reports on the hearing yesterday in the January 6 case.
CNN: Judge Chutkan says Trump’s right to free speech in January 6 case is ‘not absolute.’
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan set the tone for how she would preside over the election subversion against Donald Trump in a hearing Friday focused on what limits would be placed on how the former president can handle the evidence prosecutors will be turning over to him.
Chutkan kicked off the hearing – the first in the case before her and one that took place in her courtroom at DC federal court house – noting that while Trump’s rights as a criminal defendant would be protected, his First Amendment right to free speech was “not absolute.”
“In a criminal case such as this one, the defendant’s free speech is subject to the rules,” she said.
The judge closed the hearing with a promise that the case would advance like any normal proceeding in the criminal justice system, but warned that the more “inflammatory” statements were made by a party, the quicker she would need to move toward a trial to preserve a fair jury.
“It is a bedrock principle of the judicial process in this country,” she said, while quoting precedent, “that legal trials are not like elections, to be won through the use of the meeting hall, the radio and the newspaper.”
“This case is no exception,” she said.
Kyle Cheney at Politico: Judge warns Trump: ‘Inflammatory’ statements about election case could speed trial.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan warned Donald Trump and his attorney Friday that repeated “inflammatory” statements about his latest criminal prosecution would force her to speed his trial on charges related to his bid to subvert the 2020 election.
“I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements about this case,” Chutkan told Trump lawyer John Lauro during a hearing. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of these proceedings.”
But Chutkan, aware of the national spotlight on her oversight of the explosive case, repeatedly emphasized that she intended to keep politics out of the courtroom and treat Trump like any other criminal defendant. That included potential consequences if he makes statements that could be construed as harassing or threatening witnesses.
“The fact that he’s running a political campaign has to yield to the orderly administration of justice,” Chutkan said. “If that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say about witnesses in this case, that’s how it has to be.”
“Even arguably ambiguous statements from parties or their counsel, if they can be reasonably interpreted to intimidate witnesses or to prejudice potential jurors, can threaten the process,” Chutkan added later. “The more a party makes inflammatory statements about this case which could taint the jury pool … the greater the urgency will be that we proceed to trial quickly.”
Judge Chutkan has obviously grokked that a speedy trial would be Trump’s worst nightmare.
Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer at The New York Times: Judge Limits Trump’s Ability to Share Jan. 6 Evidence.
The federal judge overseeing former President Donald J. Trump’s prosecution on charges of seeking to overturn the 2020 election rejected his request on Friday to be able to speak broadly about evidence and witnesses — and warned Mr. Trump she would take necessary “measures” to keep him from intimidating witnesses or tainting potential jurors.
The caution from the judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, came during a 90-minute hearing in Federal District Court in Washington to discuss the scope of a protective order over the discovery evidence in Mr. Trump’s case, a typically routine step in criminal matters. Later Friday, Judge Chutkan imposed the order but agreed to a modification requested by the Trump legal team that it apply only to “sensitive” materials and not all evidence turned over to the defense.
She concluded the hearing with a blunt warning to Mr. Trump, and an unmistakable reference to a recent social media post in which he warned, “If you go after me, I’m coming after you!” — a statement his spokesman later said was aimed at political opponents and not at people involved in the case.
“I do want to issue a general word of caution — I intend to ensure the orderly administration of justice in this case as I would in any other case, and even arguably ambiguous statements by the parties or their counsel,” she said, could be considered an attempt to “intimidate witnesses or prejudice potential jurors,” triggering the court to take action.
“I caution you and your client to take special care in your public statements in this case,” she added. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to protect the integrity of these proceedings.”
Have a great weekend, everyone!!
Thursday Reads: Extreme Heat and Other News
Posted: July 13, 2023 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, birth control, Climate change, just because | Tags: Chris Wray, cocaine in White House, extreme heat, Floods, heat dome, heat wave, House Judiciary Committee, January 6 prosecutions, Justice Department, Oath Keepers prison sentences, over the counter birth control pill, Secret Service, surfing sea otter, weather 11 CommentsGood Afternoon!!
Extreme Heat, by Ronda Breen
Today will be another boiling hot day for millions of people in the U.S. and Europe. There has also been record flooding in many places in recent days.
We’ve had a relatively cool summer here in New England, until recently. Now we are also experiencing an extended period 90+ degree heat, pouring rain, and floods.
Is this extreme weather the new normal, as Dakinikat has suggested? I’ve been looking around this morning to see what experts are saying about this situation.
The Heat Wave and What it Means
Fortune Magazine: More than 1 in 3 Americans are under heat alert as there’s no relief in sight for the apocalyptic summer weather.
It’s hardly revelatory that summer is hot, but the summer of 2023 is standing out as records fall and thermometers push their breaking points. If you’re hoping for some sort of relief, it’s not coming anytime soon.
The South and Southwest will continue to face record temperatures for as much as the coming two weeks, forecasters have warned. A heat dome (another term for a ridge of high pressure) over Arizona, Nevada and parts of California could trap the hot air in place. Heat.gov, the government’s heat portal, says over 113 million Americans are under heat alerts. Given that the 2020 census put America’s population at about 331.5 million people, this heat alert means that you have a one in three chance of being under heat alert as an American this July.
It’s oppressive everywhere, but some areas are especially noteworthy. Phoenix has reported temperatures of over 110 degrees for 12 consecutive days. In the coming days, forecasters say that could climb to 118—and there’s no end in sight. Death Valley, Calif., meanwhile, is forecast to hit 123 degrees later this week.
Another heat dome over the South is keeping temperatures close to the 100-degree mark, with high humidity making it feel hotter. Heat indexes in the Lower Mississippi valley, for instance, are expected in the 110-115 range Thursday. That hazardous heat, in some regions, could last through July 20, forecasters say.
This is unreal news from Florida. Live Science: Florida waters now ‘bona fide bathtub conditions’ as heat dome engulfs state.
Coastal waters around Florida have reached alarming temperatures of 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) with no sign of cooling off anytime soon, experts say.
The Sunshine State is in the midst of its hottest year in modern history, with temperatures over land averaging in the mid 90s F (35 C) — 3 to 5 F (1.7 to 2.8 C) above normal for this time of year. Ocean waters have absorbed much of this heat, causing sea temperatures to soar to record highs, which could spell trouble for marine ecosystems and strengthen storms and hurricanes.
Józef Chełmoński, Indian Summer, 1875
“It’s an astounding, prolonged heat wave even for a place that’s no stranger to sultry weather,” Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami’s School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, told the Washington Post. “It’s not something we like to see near land simply because it would allow a storm to maintain a high intensity right up to landfall or rapidly intensify as it approaches landfall.” [….]
The current bath-like conditions are consistent with a “severe” marine heat wave, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The agency defines marine heat waves as “prolonged periods of anomalously high sea surface temperature” that can impact “a broad range of marine life.”
This includes coral bleaching, as reefs are “extremely sensitive to slight changes (just a few degrees) in water [temperature],” Berardelli wrote. NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch has designted an “Alert Level 1” area off the coast of Florida — the second-highest warning on the scale — with “significant bleaching likely.”
NBC News: Heat wave scorches millions as relief efforts strive to keep up.
Across a wide swath of the U.S. from Texas to Nevada, a major heat wave that is threatening to break temperature records continued to bake parts of the South and Southwest on Wednesday, sending people scrambling for relief and adding to what has become a series of weather extremes that researchers say fit the pattern of a warming environment.
Temperatures well into the triple digits are expected this weekend from California to Texas to Florida, with parts of Nevada forecast to reach 116 degrees Fahrenheit and cities in Arizona expected to hit a staggering 118 F.
“Today is Day 12 of 110-plus, and the exclamation on this event is yet to come,” said David Hondula, who directs the Phoenix Office of Heat Response and Mitigation, which was gearing up for a weekend spike in temperatures.
Last month was the warmest June globally since at least 1850, when record-keeping began, according to a new report by Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research organization that focuses on climate data analysis. The report found that June 2023 broke the previous record, set last year, by a “large margin,” putting the planet on track for one of the warmest years on record — if not the warmest….
Hondula said his primary concern was the city’s population of people experiencing homelessness.
“We know there will be hundreds of people living on the street during this heat event and at much, much higher risk than everybody else,” Hondula said.
Last year, heat played a role in 425 deaths in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is, according to a report released this June. About 56% of the heat deaths involved people experiencing homelessness.
My god. Imagine being homeless and spending day after day outdoors in this heat!
One more article on the likely meaning of this heat wave from Sarah Kaplan at The Washington Post: Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink.
The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing.
The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding.
Heat Stroke, by Weshon Hornsby
They’re shrilling from the scorching streets of Texas, Florida, Spain and China, with a severe heat wave also building in Phoenix and the Southwest in coming days.
They’re burbling up from the oceans, where temperatures have surged to levels considered “beyond extreme.”
And they’re showing up in unprecedented, still-burning wildfires in Canada that have sent plumes of dangerous smoke into the United States.
Scientists say there is no question that this cacophony was caused by climate change — or that it will continue to intensify as the planet warms. Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from burning fossil fuels, have raised Earth’s temperature by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Unless humanity radically transforms the way people travel, generate energy and produce food, the global average temperature is on track to increase by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — unleashing catastrophes that will make this year’s disasters seem mild.
The only question, scientists say, is when the alarms will finally be loud enough to make people wake up.
“This is not the new normal,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at the Imperial College London. “We don’t know what the new normal is. The new normal will be what it is once we do stop burning fossil fuels … and we’re nowhere near doing that.”
The arrival of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and the return of the El Niño weather pattern, which tends to raise global temperatures, are contributing to this season of simultaneous extremes, Otto said. But the fact that these phenomena are unfolding against a backdrop of human-caused climate change is making these disasters worse than ever before.
What might have been a balmy day without climate change is now a deadly heat wave, she said. What was once a typical summer thunderstorm is now the cause of a catastrophic flood.
And a day that is usually warm for the planet — July 4 — was this year the hottest ever recorded. Earth’s global average temperature of more than 17 degrees Celsius (62.6 Fahrenheit) may well have been the hottest it has gotten in the last 125,000 years.
When will governments and corporations begin to take climate change seriously?
Other News – Odds and Ends
New this morning from The New York Times: F.D.A. Approves First U.S. Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill.
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a birth control pill to be sold without a prescription for the first time in the United States, a milestone that could significantly expand access to contraception.
Summertime, by Mary Cassatt, 1804
The medication, called Opill, will become the most effective birth control method available over the counter — more effective at preventing pregnancy than condoms, spermicides and other nonprescription methods. Experts in reproductive health said its availability could be especially useful for young women, teenagers and those who have difficulty dealing with the time, costs or logistical hurdles involved in visiting a doctor to obtain a prescription.
The pill’s manufacturer, Perrigo Company, based in Dublin, said Opill would most likely become available from stores and online retailers in the United States in early 2024.
The company did not say how much the medication would cost — a key question that will help determine how many people will use the pill — but Frédérique Welgryn, Perrigo’s global vice president for women’s health, said in a statement that the company was committed to making the pill “accessible and affordable to women and people of all ages.” Ms. Welgryn has also said the company would have a consumer assistance program to provide the pill at no cost to some women.
“Today’s approval marks the first time a nonprescription daily oral contraceptive will be an available option for millions of people in the United States,” Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the F.D.A.’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement. “When used as directed, daily oral contraception is safe and is expected to be more effective than currently available nonprescription contraceptive methods in preventing unintended pregnancy.”
Read more at the NYT.
It looks like the right wing nuts will be able to continue ranting about the cocaine that was found in the White House. CNN: Secret Service concludes cocaine investigation, no suspect identified.
The Secret Service has concluded its investigation into the small bag of cocaine found at the White House and has been unable to identify a suspect, two sources familiar with the investigation told CNN.
Secret Service officials combed through visitor logs and surveillance footage of hundreds of individuals who entered the West Wing in the days preceding the discovery and were unable to identify a suspect, one of the sources said.
Investigators were also unable to identify the particular moment or day when the baggie was left inside the West Wing cubby near the lower level entrance where it was discovered.
The second source said that the leading theory remains that it was left by one of the hundreds of visitors who entered the West Wing that weekend for tours and were asked to leave their phones inside those cubbies.
The cubbies where the small bag of cocaine was found is a blind spot for surveillance cameras, according to a source familiar with the investigation. While there’s surveillance around where the bag was found, cameras are not trained directly on the West Wing cubbies near the lower-level entrance where it was discovered, the source said, making it difficult to identify who left the bag behind.
So Republicans will be able to continue creating insane conspiracy theories about this.
Extreme Heat by LENA
The DOJ wants Oath Keepers who were convicted of seditious conspiracy to receive longer sentences. Politico: Justice Department appeals Jan. 6 prison sentences for Stewart Rhodes, Oath Keepers.
The Justice Department on Wednesday appealed the sentences handed down to seven members of the Oath Keepers — including founder Stewart Rhodes — for their roles in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, a signal that prosecutors are not satisfied with the severity of the jail terms delivered by the federal judge overseeing the case.
U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Rhodes to 18 years in prison — the harshest sentence for any Jan. 6 defendant — reflecting his leadership of what Mehta characterized as a dangerous criminal conspiracy aimed at violently derailing the transfer of presidential power.
Nevertheless, the sentence for the Yale Law School graduate and disbarred attorney was seven years shorter than the 25-year prison term prosecutors recommended and four years below an agreed-upon “guidelines range” based upon Rhodes’ conduct.
In a series of filings, prosecutors also signaled they were appealing the sentences — all delivered by Mehta, an appointee of President Barack Obama — of several other defendants convicted for their own role in Rhodes’ alleged conspiracy.
Many of Rhodes’ coconspirators faced sentences that similarly fell below the guidelines ranges for their conduct — in some cases by several orders of magnitude. Among those who, like Rhodes, were convicted of seditious conspiracy:
- Florida Oath Keeper leader Kelly Meggs received a 12-year term; DOJ sought 21 years.
- Roberto Minuta of New York was sentenced to 4.5 years; DOJ sought 17 years.
- Joseph Hackett of Florida received a 3.5-year sentence; DOJ sought 12 years.
- Ed Vallejo of Arizona received a 3-year sentence; DOJ sought 17 years.
- David Moerschel of Florida was sentenced to three years: DOJ sought 10 years.
DOJ also appealed the conviction of two Oath Keepers acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of conspiring to obstruct Congress:
- Jessica Watkins of Ohio, who was sentenced to 8.5 years in jail; DOJ sought 18 years.
- Kenneth Harrelson of Florida, who was sentenced to 4 years; DOJ sought 15.
The sentences reflected the fact that Mehta viewed Rhodes as the key driver of the conspiracies. During sentencing hearings, several of the defendants similarly pointed to Rhodes, claiming they were manipulated and ginned up by him to participate in the attack on the Capitol.
Apparently, it’s unusual for DOJ to appeal the length of sentences. I wonder if they are anticipating asking for long sentences for Trump and his January 6 Conspirators? Read the whole thing at Politico.
Yesterday, the crazies on Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee got their opportunity to attack Trump-appointed FBI Director Chris Wray. Here’s what happened:
Aaron Blake at The Washington Post: ‘Insane,’ ‘ludicrous,’ ‘absurd’: FBI’s Wray shows teeth to GOP critics.
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