(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest ("Slouching toward Bethlehem" edition) [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-06-07 This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments. The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, eeff, rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. 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. What rough beast indeed! The con artist formerly known as the Orange Prince is staring down the barrel of multiple indictments from multiple grand juries. But that’s gotten tons of coverage in the diaries. Vlad the Beyond-the-Paler may be staring down the barrels of multiple Leopards, as well as the barrels of ex-z tanks that his fickle troopers lost to the heroes of the armed forces of Ukraine. They’re coming to take back the land you stole, Vlad. Rough beasts are not sleeping well tonight… and this has been well-covered, too. But me… all I can think of is the neat hole sliced out of the green grass of the Albany Rural Cemetery, in which we yesterday deposited the ashes of my father and my mother, and then, in the Jewish tradition, we passed around the shovel for each of us children and grandchildren to deposit our share of the earth that would bury them away. They were good people, lions of liberty, social justice warriors before that was a thing. My dad, Rabbi Bernard Bloom, brought Martin Luther King to his Temple in Chicago in 1964, long before it was chic (and he got flack for it), he marched for civil rights and against the war, and was a pioneer of Catholic Jewish dialogue at a time when the Church had not yet apologized for sicking homicidal mobs on the Jews every Easter as “Christ-killers”. He and liberal Bishop Howard Hubbard of Albany, New York, worked together and GOT that apology. And my mom… in addition to raising three kids in an age when that was supposed to be enough, and being a Rabbi’s wife in a time when THAT was supposed to be a quiet supporting role, instead both served on the board of Planned Parenthood, and lobbied the halls of New York’s state capitol on behalf of reproductive rights, and women’s rights, and social justice. Married 65 years, they could not bear to be apart, and passed within six days of each other. This will be an abbreviated digest. Hazy and dangerous fumes from ongoing wildfires in Canada have engulfed the skies over much of the Northeast, prompting serious air quality alerts in at least 16 states. x Due to hundreds of uncontrolled wildfires across Canada, New York City looks like a post-apocalyptic hellscape. If you want a prelude of what the world is going to look like if we do not address man-made climate change — this is it. #ActOnClimate pic.twitter.com/cimHQkDwkZ — Mike Hudema (@MikeHudema) June 7, 2023 Canadian officials said firefighters are scrambling to put out the blazes. So far this wildfire season, Canada has seen more than 8.7 million acres burned -- an area larger than the state of Vermont. x NYC between 11am and 2pm today pic.twitter.com/j9KWazyz5X — Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) June 7, 2023 "To date, the United States has deployed more than 600 U.S. firefighters and support personnel, and other firefighting assets to respond to the fires," the White House said in a statement. Over the course of the day, things kept getting weirder. People kept coughing. Stores closed early. Jodi Comer started wheezing uncontrollably ten minutes into her Prima Facie matinee. The sky got dark, then brownish gray. It felt strange to talk about work when the building across the street kept disappearing periodically as the visibility shifted. The prospect of a weekend spent indoors with kids threatened to send me into a COVID 1.0 panic. I kept reading articles and trying to trick myself into thinking things weren’t as bad as they really were. On my way back from getting my lunch, I was lucky enough to catch the moment when ​​the air-quality index was the worst it’s ever been since it started being measured (324 … seems bad, but IT has since gotten worse). The sky was the color of gourmet mustard, and it smelled like mesquite-smoked barbecue. There’s a wild, chaotic feeling that comes over us as a city when it seems like no one is in charge and all bets are off, especially when it’s coupled with the exciting feeling of living through history, even if it’s bad history. When the total chaos of today’s public messaging became obvious, I thought about the other days like this I’d lived through in NYC — more than a handful now. The obvious one, of course, which the tourists come downtown to commemorate. The 2003 blackout, which, if you were a 22-year-old, and not someone in dire need of electricity, felt like a 24-hour party, lawless in a good way. The early days of the COVID pandemic, when some people jogged down Eastern Parkway as the old ladies on park benches near them tut-tutted at one another for wearing the masks when we were supposed to be saving them for medical personnel. It’s the thrill of bad history that I just saw a guy experience as he lit up his first cigarette in years, explaining that he’d heard that the smoke we’re all inhaling is like smoking six a day anyway. To my friend, I say, smoke ’em if you got ’em. x Pretty stunning: *No* major estimate of climate change’s financial costs includes the cost of these wildfire smoke days, @MarshallBBurke tells me In other words, any estimate you’ve ever read of climate change’s costs did not include the cost of thishttps://t.co/FoCCzA7OMG pic.twitter.com/vFs5dnOzyt — Robinson Meyer (@robinsonmeyer) June 7, 2023 x Today is D-Day and at the American cemetery in Normandy, French caretakers will have collected sand from Omaha Beach and rubbed it into the gravestones to highlight the names of the departed. They do this for all 9,388 soldiers who lay there.#DDay79 pic.twitter.com/dRrjG9MWQK — Michael Warburton (@MichaelWarbur17) June 6, 2023 Federal prosecutors formally informed Donald Trump’s lawyers last week that the former president is a target of the criminal investigation examining his retention of national security materials at his Mar-a-Lago resort and obstruction of justice, according to two people briefed on the matter. The move – the clearest sign yet that Trump is on course to be indicted – dramatically raises the stakes for Trump, as the investigation nears its conclusion after taking evidence before a grand jury in Washington and a previously unknown grand jury in Florida. x Good thing Trump spent all of 2016 insisting that Presidential candidates who mishandled classified information should be prosecuted DURING the campaign and sent to jail. https://t.co/mK5Np2VW2a — emptywheel (@emptywheel) June 7, 2023 Trump’s lawyers were sent a “target letter” days before they met on Monday with the special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Mar-a-Lago documents case, and the senior career official in the deputy attorney general’s office, where they asked prosecutors not to charge the former president. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked for an extension to file his annual financial disclosure, a move that comes in the wake of a ProPublica investigation into trips he accepted from a GOP megadonor. The high court’s 2022 disclosures were made public Wednesday afternoon, but a justice is allowed to request up to a 90-day extension. x Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked for an extension to file his annual financial disclosure, a move that comes in the wake of a ProPublica investigation. https://t.co/r35uHeXMhb — The Hill (@thehill) June 8, 2023 Thomas and fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito both requested extensions, a spokesman for the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts confirmed. Former Vice President Mike Pence opened his bid for the Republican nomination for president Wednesday with a firm denunciation of former President Donald Trump, accusing his two-time running mate of abandoning conservative principles and being guilty of dereliction of duty on Jan. 6, 2021. On that perilous day, Pence said, as Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol after the president falsely insisted his vice president could overturn the election results, Trump “demanded I choose between him and our Constitution. Now voters will be faced with the same choice.” Pence is the first vice president in modern history to challenge the president under whom he served. While he spent much of his speech, delivered at a community college in a suburb of Des Moines, criticizing Democratic President Joe Biden and the direction he has taken the country, he also addressed Jan. 6 head-on, saying Trump had disqualified himself when he declared falsely that Pence had the power to keep him in office In the early morning of Wednesday, May 31, a heavily armed joint task force of officers from the Atlanta Police Department and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided the Teardown House, a long-standing community center in Edgewood—a historically Black, rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Atlanta—that doubles as a home for community organizers. x for @thenation, I wrote about last week's politically motivated arrests/kidnappings of bail fund organizers, the broader state repression of protest against Cop City, and what this means for Atlanta (and the rest of the country) https://t.co/bOKsAg3w9k — Hannah Riley #StopCopCity (@hannahcrileyy) June 7, 2023 The police arrested Marlon Kautz, Adele Maclean, and Savannah Patterson, three activists who help run the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a mutual aid and bail fund founded in 2016. Their arrests were predicated on allegations of “charity fraud” and money laundering—all connected, quite tenuously, to the effort to stop the building of the infamous police training center known as Cop City. On Monday, Cop City took another step forward, as the Atlanta City Council voted 11-4 to spend an additional $30 million of public money on the project—bringing the city’s total funding to $67 million. The council did this after more than 14 consecutive hours of impassioned public comment against the project. Thousands of television and film writers who are part of the Writers Guild of America are in the middle of a historic strike. They’re forming picket lines in front of studios and productions in New York and Los Angeles and shutting down active sets. The last time they went on strike was 15 years ago — when streaming’s impact on the film and television industry was only just taking shape. This time around, they are striking for better residuals and rights against the looming threat of AI, among other concerns. x YouTube Video At the core of this dispute is streaming and how it has revolutionized the industry. Companies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV+, and more have given consumers an unprecedented array of films and TV shows and opened the door to new voices that don’t have to adhere to mainstream network formats. On the other hand, it has also changed how television gets produced, the role writers play, and how they get paid. We interviewed four television writers and showrunners about how streaming has changed how they work, how their incomes have taken a hit, and why it has become harder than ever to build a career. x Remembering the iconic @prince on his birthday today 💜 Watch his beautiful rendition of “A Case of You” and revisit the song here: https://t.co/Zu1dLpSR3Y. pic.twitter.com/Pxx1hoIxy9 — Joni Mitchell (@jonimitchell) June 7, 2023 x Alan Turing killed himself 69 years ago today. He broke the Nazi Enigma code in WWII, leading to victory over Hitler. Turing was chemically castrated by the British state for being gay. His suicide warns us today of where intolerance and hatred can lead to. #PrideMonth pic.twitter.com/nEDyuYMOyJ — Xavi Ruiz (@xruiztru) June 7, 2023 Scientists have discovered the remains of a “lost world” of mysterious lifeforms that thrived on Earth some 1.6 billion years ago and may be the oldest known ancestors of the lineage that eventually produced plants and animals, including humans, reports a new study. The breakthrough detection of microscopic creatures called “protosterol biota” in ancient Australian rocks fills a major gap in our understanding of the early evolution of eukaryotes, a family that includes all lifeforms with nucleated cells. These organisms thrived in watery habitats across our planet about a billion years before the emergence of animals and plants, but they have managed to remain hidden in the fossil record until now “Our findings illustrate that most life that ever existed is now extinct and therefore often overlooked, while these organisms may have played important roles in the evolution of complex life and may have shaped ecosystems for much of Earth history,” said Benjamin Nettersheim, a geobiologist at the University of Bremen’s Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM), who co-led the work, in an email to Motherboard. And one more, very small, extinction event — my dad and my mom. Here’s the tribute that appeared in the local paper, and links to the obits, courtesy of my brother’s twitter feed (repeated for those who are tweetless) Rabbi Bernard H. “Bert” Bloom, a pioneer in establishing ecumenical ties among the Capital Region’s faith communities and in Jewish education, died Sunday in hospice care. He was 93. ...Bloom played a key role in the installation of "Portal," a sculpture outside the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception that commemorates the harmony between the Capital District's Jewish and Catholic communities, Kane said. In 1991, Kane recalled, Bloom walked through "Portal" with Polish Cardinal Jozef Glemp, who created an international controversy in 1989 with anti-Semitic remarks. At that time, Bloom said he told Glemp, "May this symbolize a new beginning of understanding for our peoples." ...“What I inherited from Rabbi Bloom was very similar of the mold of rabbinic leadership that I practice — education, experimenting with connecting Jews to Judaism, interfaith dialogue, creating a strong social justice presence in the Capital Region,” Cutler said. levinememorialchapel.com/obituary/RabbiBernard-Bloom… https://levinememorialchapel.com/obituary/Bailey-Bloom… x It's been a hell of a couple weeks. Thanks for the kind words and reminiscences of my mother and father. If you missed the news, here are links to the obituaries and a Times Union article about dad. https://t.co/UNecizVvyo https://t.co/BuHtFqv7Hb https://t.co/Yo5mztIhAo pic.twitter.com/jdlwI83Up3 — 🌻Joel יואל🌻 (@Academia_Nut) June 7, 2023 Hug the ones you love, and tell us who YOU’RE thinking about in the comments [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/6/7/2173993/-Overnight-News-Digest-Slouching-toward-Bethlehem-edition Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/