Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00 AM Eastern Time
BREAKING — CNBC — Hollywood studios, writers near agreement to end strike, hope to finalize deal Thursday, sources say
On Wednesday evening, the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers released a joint statement that the two groups met for bargaining and would meet again on Thursday.
- Writers and producers are near an agreement to end the Writers Guild of America strike after meeting face to face on Wednesday, people close to the negotiations told CNBC.
- The two sides met and hope to finalize a deal Thursday, the sources said. While optimistic, the people noted, however, that if a deal is not reached the strike could last through the end of the year.
- On Wednesday evening, the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers released a joint statement that the two groups met for bargaining and would meet again on Thursday.
USA Today — A note to UAW workers and WGA writers on strike, from a rich guy: Enough already
Look, all I know is your recalcitrance is putting me at risk. If these strikes go on much longer I could slip from the top 0.0001% to the top 0.001%, and that would be mortifying.
The United Auto Workers are now on strike, and writers and actors have been striking against Hollywood studios for months. These work stoppages are clearly frustrating for the extremely wealthy, but I’m happy to say one anonymous executive had the courage to share his thoughts with the strikers.
Dear striking poors:
I am a wealthy executive involved in both the auto and film industries, and I’m writing today to politely ask you to halt your labor strikes before you do any more harm to me or my family, including my three purebred Tibetan mastiffs: Hampton, Belvedere and Harrumph.
Your unwillingness to accept the generous, more-than-zero wages you’re being offered is rude, and I don’t think you’ve given much thought to how your work stoppage might inconvenience people like me who are more important than you. Thanks to your “desire for an equitable wage,” several of my children have been forced to consider what it would be like to work for a living, and we’ve had to wean the mastiffs off wagyu to a wagyu-Angus cross, which has a lower marbling score that has made them impish.
Yep, he did it!
Washington Post — Biden’s new Climate Corps will train thousands of young people
President Biden on Wednesday announced an initiative to train more than 20,000 young people in skills crucial to combating climate change, such as installing solar panels, restoring coastal wetlands and retrofitting homes to be more energy-efficient.
The American Climate Corps comes as Biden seeks to win over young voters, a critical constituency, before next year’s presidential election. Polls show that climate change is a top concern for young people, who are more likely than older generations to face raging wildfires, stronger storms and rising seas in their lifetimes.
The initiative resembles a proposal that was included in an early version of Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act. The Civilian Climate Corps was ultimately dropped from the final version of the legislation during private negotiations last summer between Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).
Greenpeace — Greenpeace joined 600,000 people in global actions to #EndFossilFuels. Here’s what happened
...With over 700 marches and other actions in more than 60 countries and 600,000 participants worldwide 15-17 September, the global climate movement is more diverse and united than ever before. The main event was a climate march in New York City, where world leaders are gathering for the UN General Assembly and the UN Secretary General is convening a “no-nonsense” Climate Ambition Summit.
Following the Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi at the start of September, Greenpeace Africa marched in eight cities in Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and South Africa. In Durban, Greenpeace activists who collected plastic waste reminded us: “99% of plastics are made from oil & gas. End plastic pollution. End fossil fuels.”
… This year has been historically hot, polluted and deadly. Yet this global mobilisation can blow a fresh breeze of hope. The climate movement took to the streets and won’t budge until we end fossil fuels for good.
RGB — All eyes are on world leaders to do better at the Climate Ambition Summit
On September 20, the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres is hosting a Climate Ambition Summit seeking to galvanize greater climate action from world leaders. Coming on the heels of the powerful March to End Fossil Fuels last weekend, this summit continues the pressure on governments to meet the urgency of the moment.
...Back in March of this year, when the sobering IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report was released, the U.N. Secretary-General made a powerful speech calling the scientific report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb.” He also called for a quantum leap in climate action and announced an Acceleration Agenda for governments, the financial sector, and businesses. The upcoming Climate Ambition Summit will serve as an opportunity for those who have taken up the challenge to announce specific actions and commitments to deliver on this agenda.
The three tracks for the Acceleration Agenda are Ambition, Credibility, and Implementation, outlined in more detail here.
Governments are being asked to commit to more ambitious emission reduction commitments for 2030 and beyond by 2025, as part of the regular cycle of updates in line with the latest science called for in the Paris agreement, as well as to boost climate finance commitments from rich nations.
Washington Post — Federal government to start providing free coronavirus tests once again
Just as a summer covid wave shows signs of receding, the Biden administration announced Wednesday that it is reviving a program to mail free rapid coronavirus tests to Americans.
Starting Sept. 25, people can request four free tests per household through covidtests.gov. Officials say the tests are able to detect the latest variants and are intended to be used through the end of the year.
The return of the free testing program comes after Americans navigated the latest uptick in covid cases with free testing no longer widely available. The largest insurance companies stopped reimbursing the costs of retail at-home testing once the requirement to do so ended with the public health emergency in May. The Biden administration stopped mailing free tests in June.
Wired — The Gruesome Story of How Neuralink’s Monkeys Actually Died
Elon Musk says no primates died as a result of Neuralink’s implants. A WIRED investigation now reveals the grisly specifics of their deaths as US authorities have been asked to investigate Musk’s claims.
FRESH ALLEGATIONS OF potential securities fraud have been leveled at Elon Musk over statements he recently made regarding the deaths of primates used for research at Neuralink, his biotech startup. Letters sent this afternoon to top officials at the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by a medical ethics group call on the agency to investigate Musk’s claims that monkeys who died during trials at the company were terminally ill and did not die as a result of Neuralink implants. They claim, based on veterinary records, that complications with the implant procedures led to their deaths.
Musk first acknowledged the deaths of the macaques on September 10 in a reply to a user on his social networking app X (formerly Twitter). He denied that any of the deaths were “a result of a Neuralink implant” and said the researchers had taken care to select subjects who were already “close to death.” Relatedly, in a presentation last fall Musk claimed that Neuralink’s animal testing was never “exploratory,” but was instead conducted to confirm fully formed scientific hypotheses. “We are extremely careful,” he said.
MSNBC
In case you missed it, it’s a good one:
Yale Environment 360 — Road Hazard: Evidence Mounts on Toxic Pollution from Tires
Researchers are only beginning to uncover the toxic cocktail of chemicals, microplastics, and heavy metals hidden in car and truck tires. But experts say these tire emissions are a significant source of air and water pollution and may be affecting humans as well as wildlife.
For two decades, researchers worked to solve a mystery in West Coast streams. Why, when it rained, were large numbers of spawning coho salmon dying? As part of an effort to find out, scientists placed fish in water that contained particles of new and old tires. The salmon died, and the researchers then began testing the hundreds of chemicals that had leached into the water.
A 2020 paper revealed the cause of mortality: a chemical called 6PPD that is added to tires to prevent their cracking and degradation. When 6PPD, which occurs in tire dust, is exposed to ground-level ozone, it’s transformed into multiple other chemicals, including 6PPD-quinone, or 6PPD-q. The compound is acutely toxic to four of 11 tested fish species, including coho salmon.
Mystery solved, but not the problem, for the chemical continues to be used by all major tire manufacturers and is found on roads and in waterways around the world. Though no one has studied the impact of 6PPD-q on human health, it’s also been detected in the urine of children, adults, and pregnant women in South China. The pathways and significance of that contamination are, so far, unknown.
Slate — Brett Kavanaugh’s Whoopsie Forces Groundhog Day at the Supreme Court
Two years ago, the Supreme Court set the stage for its 2021–22 term through a wild abuse of the shadow docket after lawmakers in Texas passed a deliberately unconstitutional abortion ban in the form of a vigilante law called S.B. 8. Texas jammed the court into deciding the future of Roe v. Wade in an unsigned order in the dark of night, an incomprehensible decision that presaged the formal end of Roe nine months later. Last year, the term opened under the cloud of the unprecedented leak of the Dobbs opinion and the halfhearted in-house investigation that followed, as well as unusually public sparring between the justices. By last November, the court was hit with a revelation that conservative donors used pay-to-play schemes to influence the justices—a story that snowballed into a full-on corruption crisis after the revelation that justices were accepting exorbitant gifts from the same group of millionaires and billionaires with a vested interest in court decisions about money in politics, hobbling labor, and strangling the administrative state. Both of the past two terms, in short, opened with a self-inflicted face punch to the court’s legitimacy.
The third full term in thrall to the 6–3 supermajority is now upon us, and it brings yet another crisis of the court’s own making: The Alabama Legislature has defied meticulous instructions to create a second congressional district in the state where Black residents could effectuate their voting power. In last June’s Allen v. Milligan, the court explicitly upheld a lower court ruling ordering that a second such district be created. Alabama—led by Republicans in the statehouse—spent the last few months declining the court’s explicit instructions. The new maps were drawn with a single majority-Black district. The district court issued a furious rebuke. Now Alabama has come back to the Supreme Court in an emergency posture requesting a green light to use their still-illegal maps, claiming that the decision in Milligan didn’t in fact mean what it said it meant.
Why? Because in his concurrence in Milligan, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the determinative fifth vote in the case, signaled to the lawmakers that he’d be open to deciding the matter in their favor on a different theory that was neither briefed nor argued: Things might come out differently, he wrote, winkingly, if they came back armed with the argument that “even if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting” under the Voting Rights Act “for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.” (He called the Voting Rights Act a form of “race-conscious redistricting” because it forbids states from diluting the votes of racial minorities, and measuring dilution requires consideration of race.) Alabama legislators reasonably think Kavanaugh’s in the bag based on “intelligence” that’s either an inside source or a straightforward reading of his Milligan concurrence. So they refused to follow the directives of the court in the hopes that in this go-round, they win.
CityFix — How Oslo Achieved Zero Pedestrian and Bicycle Fatalities, and How Others Can Apply What Worked
In 2015, the City of Oslo, Norway, made a commitment after years of rising transportation injuries to reduce car traffic and prioritize the safety of pedestrians, cyclists and the environment. Unlike in the United States and other countries where transportation fatalities are often viewed as unavoidable, the government of Norway made a strong commitment to eliminate serious injuries and fatalities on their roadways nationally and has worked towards this vision for nearly two decades.
From 2010-2019, Oslo had an average of five to seven traffic fatalities a year. Some U.S. cities of similar size to Oslo (population 693,491 in 2018) have more than double the traffic fatalities in a given year. There are no records of children between 6 and 15 years old dying in traffic since digital records began in 1999. The risk of fatal or serious road traffic injuries, on a trip-by-trip basis, has fallen 47% for cyclists, 41% for pedestrians and 32% for drivers between 2014 and 2018. The average number per 1 million trips for cyclists was reduced from 3.2 to 1.7, pedestrians from 0.7 to 0.4, and car occupants from 1.7 to 1.1. Finally, in 2019, Oslo achieved a critical milestone: no vulnerable road users died all year, and only one car driver died.
In 2015, the political climate and public will in the City of Oslo changed the tone on accepting continued surface transportation fatalities. The mayor, city council and transport division staff all supported a shift in roadway decision-making from car-centric to people-centric. Reductions in serious injuries and fatal crashes around 2015 coincided with several important changes made that year:
- The city government set a goal to reduce car traffic by one third by 2030.
- The authority to designate bus lanes, bike lanes, one-way traffic and closed streets to traffic was transferred from the police to the city government, allowing swift transformation of parking lanes to bike lanes and closure of through streets.
- The city implemented a bicycle strategy, with an aim to increase bicycle mode share to 25% by 2025.
- Oslo announced that it would make the city center car-free by 2019. The project has led to removal of all regular street parking in the city center and closure to all through traffic.
How’s YOUR narrative going this week? Tell us about your 12-hour days in comments!