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What's worse than a widely used Internet-connected enterprise app with a hardcoded password? Try said enterprise app after the hardcoded password has been leaked to the world.

Atlassian on Wednesday revealed three critical product vulnerabilities, including CVE-2022-26138 stemming from a hardcoded password in Questions for Confluence, an app that allows users to quickly receive support for common questions involving Atlassian products. The company warned the passcode was "trivial to obtain."

The company said that Questions for Confluence had 8,055 installations at the time of publication. When installed, the app creates a Confluence user account named disabledsystemuser, which is intended to help admins move data between the app and the Confluence Cloud service. The hardcoded password protecting this account allows for viewing and editing of all non-restricted pages within Confluence.

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While YouTube has started deleting videos promoting false information on abortion, the South Carolina Senate introduced a new bill that strives to block Internet users from talking about abortion truthfully online.

Known as the "Equal Protection at Conception—No Exceptions—Act," the bill would ban any website from hosting or publishing any information about accessing or self-inducing abortion "knowing that the information will be used, or is reasonably likely to be used, for an abortion."

Specifically, the bill restricts "providing information to a pregnant woman, or someone seeking information on behalf of a pregnant woman, by telephone, Internet, or any other mode of communication." That includes restrictions against providing abortion referral services, including to doulas performing abortions, as well as hosting or maintaining a website that's "purposefully directed to a pregnant woman" living in South Carolina. Less specifically, the bill notes that further restrictions will apply once the law becomes enforced.

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Enlarge / Screenshot from One America News Network's press kit. (credit: One America News Network)

One America News Network is about to lose its last major TV distributor. After being removed from DirecTV in early April, the right-wing network was still aired on Verizon Fios. But with a channel-carriage contract expiring at the end of July, Verizon confirmed that the sides won't reach a deal.

"Our negotiation with OAN has been a typical, business-as-usual carriage negotiation like those that routinely happen between content distributors and content providers. These negotiations were focused on economics, as they always are, but OAN failed to agree to fair terms," Verizon said in a statement provided to Ars last night. "Since we were unable to reach an agreement, effective July 31, 2022, we will no longer have the rights to provide our customers with this programming, and it will be removed from the Fios TV lineup."

Verizon also confirmed the July 31 removal in an update posted to its website, which notes that "sometimes broadcasters and cable networks demand unacceptable price increases" that can increase customers' monthly TV bills. We contacted OAN about its removal from Verizon last night and will update this article if we get a response.

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Last month, drug company Genentech reported on the first clinical trials of the drug crenezumab, a drug targeting amyloid proteins that form sticky plaques in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients. The drug had been particularly effective in animal models, and the trial results were eagerly awaited as one of the most promising treatments in years. It did not work. “Crenezumab did not slow or prevent cognitive decline” in people with a predisposition toward Alzheimer’s.

Last year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) narrowly approved the use of Aduhelm, a new drug from Biogen that the company has priced so highly that it’s expected to drive up the price of Medicare for everyone in America, even those who never need this drug. Aduhelm was the first drug to be approved that fights the accumulation of those "amyloid plaques" in the brain. What makes the approval of the $56,000-a-dose drug so controversial is that while it does decrease plaques, it doesn’t actually slow Alzheimer’s. In fact, clinical trials were suspended in 2019 after the treatment showed “no clinical benefits.” (Which did not keep Biogen from seeking the drug’s approval or pricing it astronomically.)

Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average in other areas look like Hall of Fame material.

And now we have a good idea of why. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer’s research over the last 16 years might not just be wrong, but a deliberate fraud.

The suspicion that something was more than a little wrong with the model that is getting almost all Alzheimer’s research funding ($1.6 billion in the last year alone) began with a fight over the drug Simufilam. The drug was being pushed into trials by its manufacturer, Cassava Sciences, but a group of scientists who reviewed the drug maker’s claims about Simufilam believed that it was exaggerating the potential. So they did what any reasonable person would do: They purchased short sell positions in Cassava Sciences stock, filed a letter with the FDA calling for a review before allowing the drug to go to trial, and hired an investigator to provide some support for this position.

As Science reports, it was that investigator, Vanderbilt University neuroscientist and junior professor Matthew Schrag, who tipped over the whole applecart to discover that it wasn’t just that Cassava’s drug was ineffective. There’s good evidence that for the last 16 years, almost everyone has had the wrong idea about the cause of Alzheimer’s. Because of a fraud.

In 2006, Nature published a paper titled “A specific amyloid-β protein assembly in the brain impairs memory.” Using a series of studies in mice, the paper concluded that “memory deficits in middle-aged mice” were directed caused by accumulations of a soluble substance called “Aβ*56.” This was a specific form of a group known as “toxic oligomers” that had long been suspected as the possible precursors of amyloid plaques. The paper then went on to directly connect that condition to “cognitive deficits associated with Alzheimer's disease” independently of other conditions affecting the aging brain. 

The study didn’t come out of nowhere; it only seemed to confirm one of several hypothesis about Alzheimer’s that had been circulating for many years by that point. After all, the brains of Alzheimer’s patients do contain plaques that can sometimes seriously alter the structure of the brain. Those plaques do contain amyloids. It’s not much of a stretch to suggest those amyloids are a primary cause of the associated memory loss and dementia. Amyloids cause plaques, plaques cause damage, the damage causes Alzheimer's. QED. 

That 2006 paper was primarily authored by neuroscience professor Sylvain Lesné and given more weight by the name of well-respected neuroscientist Karen Ashe, both from the robust neuroscience research team at the University of Minnesota. It was Ashe who produced the transgenic mice used in the study, which genuinely do appear to have Alzheimer’s-like symptoms and that have since been used as the favored animal models for a generation of treatments. On her website, Ashe called Aβ*56 “the first substance ever identified in brain tissue in Alzheimer’s research that has been shown to cause memory impairment.”

The results of the study seemed to demonstrate the amyloids-to-Alzheimer’s pipeline with a clarity that even the most casual reader could understand, and it became one of—if not the most—influential papers in all of Alzheimer’s research. Not only has it been cited hundreds of times in other work, roughly 100 out of the 130 Alzheimer’s drugs now working their way through trials are directly designed to attack the kind of amyloids featured in this paper. Both Ashe and Lesné became neuroscience rock stars, the leaders of a wave based on their 2006 paper.

What intrigued Schrag when he came back to this seminal work were the images. Images in the paper that were supposed to show the relationship between memory issues and the presence of Aβ*56 appeared to have been altered. Some of them appeared to have been pieced together from multiple images. Schrag shied away from actually accusing this foundational paper of being a “fraud,” but he definitely raised “red flags.” He raised those concerns, discreetly at first, in a letter sent directly to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Only when that letter failed to generate a response did Schrag bring his suspicions to others.

Now Science has concluded its own six-month review, during which it consulted with image experts. What they found seems to confirm Schrag’s suspicions.

They concurred with his overall conclusions, which cast doubt on hundreds of images, including more than 70 in Lesné’s papers. Some look like “shockingly blatant” examples of image tampering, says Donna Wilcock, an Alzheimer’s expert at the University of Kentucky.

After reviewing the images, molecular biologist Elisabeth Bik said of the paper, “The obtained experimental results might not have been the desired results, and that data might have been changed to … better fit a hypothesis.”

Should this fraud turn out to be as extensive as it appears at first glance, the implications go well beyond just misdirecting tens of billions in funding and millions of hours of research over the last two decades. Since that 2006 publication, the presence or absence of this specific amyloid has often been treated as diagnostic of Alzheimer’s. Meaning that patients who did die from Alzheimer's may have been misdiagnosed as having something else. Those whose dementia came from other causes may have falsely been dragged under the Alzheimer’s umbrella. And every possible kind of study, whether it's as exotic as light therapy or long-running as nuns doing crossword puzzles, may have ultimately had results that were measured against a false yardstick.

In the face of the potential fraud unearthed by Schrag, it’s not as if the world has changed overnight.

Four months after Schrag submitted his concerns to the NIH, the NIH turned around and awarded Lesné a five-year grant to study … Alzheimer’s. That grant was awarded by Austin Yang, program director at the NIH’s National Institute on Aging. Yang also happens to be another of the co-authors on the 2006 paper.

Science has carefully detailed the work done in the analysis of the images. Other researchers, including a 2008 paper from Harvard, have noted that Aβ*56 is unstable and there seems to be no sign of this substance in human tissues, making its targeting literally worse than useless. However, Lesné claims to have a method for measuring Aβ*56 and other oligomers in brain cells that has served as the basis of a series of additional papers, all of which are now in doubt.

There seems to be no doubt that oligomers may play a role in cognitive impairment. However, that role may not be nearly as direct, or as significant, as the 2006 paper and subsequent papers by Lesné have suggested. It’s quite possible that the specific oligomer Aβ*56 may not even exist outside of Ashe’s transgenic mice. 

And it seems highly likely that for the last 16 years, most research on Alzheimer’s and most new drugs entering trials have been based on a paper that, at best, modified the results of its findings to make them appear more conclusive, and at worst is an outright fraud.

The Supreme Court’s decision last month ruling that the Biden administration lawfully ended the inhumane Remain in Mexico program was a surprising win on immigration. But on Thursday, the right-wing court reminded the president of who they believe gets to set policy within his administration: Republican judges.

In a 5-4 decision, justices refused to reinstate deportation priorities that had been blocked by Judge Drew Tipton, who was appointed by the previous administration in 2020. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretaries and similar officials have set similar priorities six times since 2000, Vox reported. But in yet another shadow docket decision this week, Tipton “gets to throw DHS into chaos by issuing a nationwide order that nullifies the executive branch's authority to set immigration priorities, something presidents have done forever,” tweeted legal expert Mark Joseph Stern.

The decision was the first with associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Amy Coney Barrett joined Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan in dissenting. After declining to allow a Democratic administration to set its own priorities, as administrations prior to it have done, the court agreed to hear the merits of the case in December.

RELATED STORY: Texas' corrupt attorney general is using the courts to sabotage Biden's immigration agenda

“Tipton, appointed to the bench by President Donald Trump, sided with the states and vacated the ICE priorities, leaving the agency without any operational guidelines,” The Texas Tribune reported. “A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected the administration’s plea to put Tipton’s order on hold while it considered the case’s merits.”

“Unbelievably, today, with a 5-4 vote the Supreme Court is allowing an unlawful intrusion by the state of Texas on the federal administration of immigration laws by keeping in place a nationwide injunction until after arguments at the end of the year,” American Immigration Lawyers Association President Jeremy McKinney said. “Every single law enforcement agency uses prosecutorial discretion on a daily basis. When resources, whether human or financial, are finite then decisions must be made about where and how those resources are best allocated. That’s just common sense.”

But common sense and conservatism, whether from right-wing officials or the judges they appoint, do not go together. As noted over and over again following one of these decisions (and there have been many), Republicans have been using right-wing judges to sabotage the president’s immigration agenda because they can. This anti-immigrant judicial pipeline has been primarily led by corrupt Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who himself has evaded court for years after being indicted in 2015 on felony securities fraud charges.

“It is striking that, just a few weeks ago, SCOTUS halted the Texas state government’s attempt to control a different enforcement policy in Biden v. Texas,” McKinney continued. “For those same justices who railed against nationwide injunctions before, to completely reverse their position today and be okay with this Texas judge enjoining a federal immigration agency from implementing immigration law is blatantly hypocritical and patently political.” But none of the decisions resulting from Paxton’s lawsuits actually have to make any sense. Republicans have the votes, and that’s all they need.

“Make no mistake, if a liberal judge had even dreamed of issuing a similar order against the Trump administration the Supreme Court would have come down on them like a ton of bricks,” tweeted American Immigration Council Policy Director Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. “This exposes even further how the shadow docket is nakedly political and unrelated to the law.” He said the previous administration “got slapped down a lot because it would issue policies that were obviously illegal, or be so sloppy that even conservative judges would demand a do-over or strike them down. That is just not the case here. The priorities were written to be ironclad.”

RELATED STORIES:

Texas judge tosses ICE guidelines, following lawsuit from Texas' corrupt attorney general

Cory Booker reintroduces bill to stop immigration agents from falsely identifying themselves as cops

Texas attorney general's latest lawsuit shows how Republicans don't want any immigrants here, period

In all of our reporting on Gov. Ron DeSantis, one thing has remained the status quo, and that’s his penchant for fascist rule. From his book banning to his “Don’t Say Gay” bill to the ban on teaching Black American history—under the guise of protecting kids from learning “CRT”—DeSantis is an old-school brownshirt tyrant. His latest dictate focuses on attacking the press in Florida.

Thomas Kennedy, an activist-journalist and Miami-based Democratic National Committee (DNC) member, is just one of three activist-journalists Daily Kos spoke with about being ejected from press conferences, kept off of press lists, and charged or arrested for trying to do their jobs and cover the governor.

Kennedy says that as much as he detests the previous governor, Rick Scott, at least he was accessible. On the contrary, DeSantis “moves with a presidential level of security of detail,” he says. “It’s ridiculous.”

RELATED STORY: DeSantis is throwing his support behind conservative school board candidates. It’s unheard of

Kennedy says DeSantis is “always being taken through back doors, and there's a perimeter established as soon as he enters a place. … He doesn't really meet people. You can tell the guy really likes to be in control of the situation.”

But the worst of it for Kennedy began when he confronted the Republican governor in July 2020 about his abysmal handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Not long after, Kennedy was stopped by police while parking in a public parking lot to enter a DeSantis press conference. He was made to get out of his car, detained for about 30 minutes, issued a trespassing warning, and was told “they don’t want you here.” He was then escorted out.

He said he began then to suspect that police had his vehicle information. So Kennedy asked Grant Stern, the executive editor of Occupy Democrats, who has also been famously ejected from a joint press conference in Florida, to do some investigating for him and pull any records he could find.

Stern uncovered an 83-page surveillance dossier on Kennedy compiled by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE). As Kennedy writes in an op-ed for Latino Rebels, the file “opened a criminal intelligence case against me without a criminal predicate. That’s when they started surveilling my social media while sharing my name, photo, and vehicle information with other police agencies in the state, in addition to other personal information.”

The document, highlighted in Kennedy’s lawsuit against DeSantis, makes note that Kennedy has “no history of violence.”

There’s no evidence that points directly to DeSantis’ team for directing the FDLE to create the file on Kennedy, but the governor’s office has blocked Kennedy from the press mailing list, and recently both he and Stern were ejected from a DeSantis press conference at Miami Dade College before it began.

In August 2021, Stern was violently pushed out of a DeSantis press conference in Miami after asking attempting to ask Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy a question about his support for the Jan. 6 House select committee.

Stern says he’s suffered a painful knee injury, requiring 26 doctor appointments over a six-month period, after security guards pushed him out of the room.

“I feel like there's a fear factor there that these people know that I'm going to dig up something really damaging about them or just with my questions cause their frail narratives to fall apart. Which is true, by the way,” Stern says.

Both Stern and Kennedy implied they were disappointed that no mainstream media journalists have stood up for them.

“They're afraid that they're going to lose their jobs if they stand up for somebody like me. It's 100% not even in question. I talk to them. They don't say that, but I know these people. I've known these people for years. Some of these people are in the room alongside us. … I mean, it should be front-page news when a journalist gets kicked out. Look at [Univision anchor] Jorge Ramos. Is this anything different than when Jorge Ramos wanted to ask Donald Trump questions?” Stern says.

Veteran journalist, community organizer, and member of the National Association of Black Journalists Ben Frazier was also ejected from a DeSantis press event held in Jacksonville, Florida.

Frazier, 71, tells Daily Kos that, the day he was asked to leave the event and later arrested, he knew DeSantis would be attending and wanted to ask him questions about his COVID-19 policies as they related to Black Floridians.

“I wanted to confront him and I knew it would be acrimonious, but so be it. That's what happens with regards to elected officials of the people and the Fourth Estate, the press. That's the way it's supposed to happen. I didn't think that they would stop me from asking questions, but apparently, as soon as I came through the door, they started trying to stop me,” Frazier says.

Frazier, who uses a wheelchair, explains that DeSantis’ officials asked for his press credentials, and when he didn’t provide them, the police arrested and then detained him for about 40 minutes. He was never charged.

“I've covered countless news conferences all of my life. When I say all of my life, I mean I've been doing this since 1970. And nowhere in the United States of America have I received this kind of treatment. … I mean, come on. I worked in Washington, D.C. during Watergate, and Richard Nixon didn't kick people out,” Frazier says.

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Enlarge / Kids line up to get their polio vaccines at the Woodbury Avenue School in Huntington, New York, on April 27, 1954. (credit: Getty | Newsday LLC)

Health officials in New York have detected a case of polio, marking the first case of the dangerous viral disease in the United States in years.

The case was detected in Rockland County, which in 2019 struggled with an explosive measles outbreak fueled by pockets of the community with low vaccination rates. Health officials in Rockland, neighboring New York City, and the state are now urging unvaccinated residents, particularly children, to get vaccinated, and those vaccinated, but at high risk, to get boosted.

"Many of you may be too young to remember polio, but when I was growing up, this disease struck fear in families, including my own," Rockland County Executive Ed Day said in a statement. "The fact that it is still around decades after the vaccine was created shows you just how relentless it is. Do the right thing for your child and the greater good of your community and have your child vaccinated now."

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US Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) want to ban Internet data caps. The senators today introduced the "Uncap America Act," which would "prohibit predatory data caps that force families to pay high costs and unnecessary fees to access high-speed broadband," they said in a press release.

"A broadband Internet access service provider shall not impose a data cap except when tailored primarily for the purposes of reasonable network management or managing network congestion," the bill says. The proposed law would order the Federal Communications Commission to issue "regulations to define the conditions under which a data cap is to be considered tailored to the purpose of reasonable network management or managing network congestion."

Data caps that don't comply with the exceptions would violate the Communications Act. "While certain broadband Internet access service networks may require practices to effectively manage congestion, those practices should be tailored to improve equitable access among consumers," the bill says. "Unnecessary data caps limit participation in the digital economy and are contrary to the public interest."

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Apparently President Biden isn’t in charge of the executive branch anymore.

On Thursday evening, the Supreme Court handed down a brief, 5-4 decision that effectively places Drew Tipton, a Trump-appointed federal trial judge in Texas, in charge of many of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) decisions about which immigrants to target.

The decision was largely along party lines, except that Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court’s three Democratic appointees.

The decision in United States v. Texas is temporary, but the upshot of this decision is that Tipton will effectively wield much of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s authority over how ICE officers prioritize their time for as much as an entire year — and that’s assuming that the Biden administration ultimately prevails when the Court reconsiders this case next winter.

At issue in this case is a perfectly standard decision Mayorkas made last September. Federal law provides that the secretary of homeland security “shall be responsible” for “establishing national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” Pursuant to this authority, Mayorkas issued a memo to ICE’s acting director, informing him that the agency should prioritize enforcement efforts against undocumented or otherwise removable immigrants who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being.”

Then-secretaries of homeland security issued similar memos setting enforcement priorities in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2017.

Not long after Mayorkas handed down his memo, however, the Republican attorneys general of Texas and Louisiana went to Tipton, a Trump judge with a history of handing down legally dubious decisions halting Biden administration immigration policies, asking Tipton to invalidate Mayorkas’s memo. Tipton obliged, and an especially conservative panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed Tipton’s order to remain in effect.

DOJ asked the Supreme Court to stay Tipton’s decision, temporarily restoring an elected administration’s control over federal law enforcement while this case proceeds. But the Court just refused. And it did so without explanation.

Additionally, the Court’s order announces that the justices will hear this case in December, after which it will decide whether Tipton’s decision should be permanently vacated.

This is not a close case, at least under existing law. Not only is there a federal statute that explicitly gives Mayorkas, and not Tipton, the power to establish “national immigration enforcement policies and priorities,” but Tipton’s order is also inconsistent with a legal doctrine known as “prosecutorial discretion.” That doctrine gives the executive branch discretionary authority to determine when to bring enforcement actions against individuals who allegedly violated the law.

The Supreme Court has instructed judges like Tipton to be very reluctant to second-guess these kinds of discretionary judgments by law enforcement agencies. As the Court held in Heckler v. Chaney (1985), “an agency’s decision not to take enforcement action should be presumed immune from judicial review.”

This presumption is especially strong in the immigration context. The Court has said that “a principal feature of the removal system is the broad discretion exercised by immigration officials.” Even after an enforcement agency decides to bring a removal proceeding against a particular immigrant, the Court explained in Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (1999), it “has discretion to abandon the endeavor.” And it may do so for any number of reasons, including “humanitarian reasons or simply for its own convenience.”

It is still possible that, after the Court hears this case in December, a majority of the Court will vote to vacate Tipton’s order and restore Mayorkas’s lawful authority. But even if that happens, that still means that Tipton will be allowed to exercise unlawful control of a federal law enforcement agency for months.

It won’t be the first time this happened, either. Last year, a Trump judge named Matthew Kacsmaryk handed down a similar order requiring the Biden administration to reinstate a Trump-era immigration policy known as “Remain in Mexico.” Though the Court eventually ruled against Kacsmaryk, it allowed his order to remain in effect for 10 months, leaving Remain in Mexico in place for that entire time.

And even after the Court ruled against Kacsmaryk, it sent the case back down to him with several legal issues unresolved — permitting Kacsmaryk to seize control of much of the nation’s border policy again, if he chooses.

Now, the best-case scenario for Mayorkas — and for the rule of law in the United States — is that the Supreme Court will treat Tipton’s order much like it treated Kacsmaryk’s, permitting an unlawful seizure of the Biden administration’s authority to remain in effect for only months, instead of permanently.

A new poll from the progressive consortium Navigator Research finds that a plurality of Americans agree that “people who support the Republican Party are inclined to resort to violence when they’re pushing their agenda or worldview.”

The survey found that 44% of respondents agreed with the statement, while 34% disagreed. The numbers are nearly mirror opposite for Democrats, with just 35% saying Democrats' supporters are likely to resort to violence, while 45% disagree.

Independents were 19 points more likely to view Republican supporters as likely to use violent means (40% agree) than Democratic supporters (21% agree).

The findings of the survey come as House Democrats have shifted toward a strategy of emphasizing the extremism of both Republican candidates and the MAGA movement. The Jan. 6 hearings appear to be helping their case as the nation awaits another primetime hearing Thursday (starting at 8:00 PM ET/5:00 PM PT).

When the survey asked those who viewed GOP supporters as more violence-prone an open-ended question about why, the dominant themes centered around “January 6th,” “Trump,” “white groups,” and “Proud Boys.”

By a 20-point margin, the Navigator survey found Americans support the Justice Department filing criminal charges against Donald Trump for his involvement in Jan. 6 (56% support, 36% oppose). Independents support filing charges by a 24-point margin (50% support, 26% oppose). The bar graph below notes too that support for filing charges increases—9 points among independents, 13 points among Republicans—after respondents read recent revelations from the select committee’s inquiry into Jan. 6 hearings. So the more people know, the better.

An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll similarly found a 57% majority of Americans say Trump bears either a great deal or good deal of responsibility for the Jan. 6 insurrection.

But the NPR poll found that just half of the respondents think Trump should be charged with a crime, while 45% say he shouldn't—a much smaller divide than Navigator found. However, the number of Americans who think Trump actually will be charged sits at just 28% in the NPR survey.

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One week ago, the DHS inspector general Joseph Cuffari informed members of the House select committee on Jan. 6 that the Secret Service had improperly deleted text messages for the dates surrounding the attempted coup. A spokesperson for the Secret Service promptly responded by calling the inspector general a liar, saying that while “data resident on some phones” was lost as part of a “pre-planned system migration,” it wasn’t as if anything had been deleted.

In fact, said the spokesperson, “none of the texts [the inspector general’s office] was seeking had been lost in the migration.” That statement came exactly two days before the Secret Service informed the select committee that, whoops, it had no texts to provide. Except, somehow, for exactly one from former Capitol Police chief Steven Sund.

All of which makes it seems like the Secret Service deliberately purged its text messages from the period, then lied about purging them. Spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi also appears to have lied when he claimed that the Secret Service deleted those text messages before it had any idea there was a reason to keep them, as Congress ordered the preservation of those records ten days after the assault on the Capitol.

With all that, it’s not a huge surprise that NBC News is reporting DHS has opened a criminal investigation into the Secret Service.

On Wednesday, Cuffari reportedly informed the Secret Service that the investigation into those text messages is now a criminal investigation. 

In a letter from Inspector General Gladys Ayala to Secret Service Director James Murray, the inspector general’s office called a halt on any other action concerning the texts from the Secret Service side. That includes a freeze on all digital media, and insists that the Secret Service ”immediately refrain from interviewing potential witnesses, collecting devices, or taking any other action that would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation.”

The immediate result is some confusion: The select committee has subpoenaed the Secret Service for those messages, while the inspector general has ordered them to stop looking. Past messages from the Secret Service and statements from Guglielmi had demonstrated a high level of disdain for inspector general Cuffari. So it would not be surprising to find that the agency erred on the side of ignoring his instructions.

On the other hand, there is the phrase “criminal investigation.”

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In a 228-195 vote, the House voted Thursday morning to enshrine federal protection of access to contraceptives without government restrictions into law, with just eight Republicans voting “yes” and two cowardly Republicans voting “present.” Yes, 195 lawmakers believe that the federal government should not guarantee that Americans have the basic right to plan their families. Put another way, 195 Republicans believe that a state government should be able to deny you that right.

One. Hundred. And. Ninety. Five.

That needs to be shouted out repeatedly. And the vote needs to be held in the Senate, were we can see again that Republicans think they need to be smack dab in the middle of controlling your private life.

RELATED STORY: As House Democrats work to codify marriage equality, contraception rights, Senate Republicans cringe

The Right to Contraception Act  (a very good read, by the way) would statutorily protect access to and use of contraceptives, as well as health care providers’ right to provide contraception and information about how to use it. It would allow the Justice Department as well as individuals and entities harmed by state restriction to birth control access and provision to seek enforcement of those rights in court.

“The right to contraception is a fundamental right, central to a person’s privacy, health, wellbeing, dignity, liberty, equality, and ability to participate in the social and economic life of the nation,” the lawmakers state in the findings section of the bill, pointing out that the “Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized the constitutional right to contraception.” They also point out that Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning abortion rights, wrote that the court “should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell” and that the court has “a duty to correct the error established in those precedents” by overruling them.

“The right to make personal decisions about contraceptive use is important for all Americans, and is especially critical for historically marginalized groups, including Black, indigenous, and other people of color; immigrants; LGBTQ people; people with disabilities; people with low incomes; and people living in rural and underserved areas,” the legislation states. “Many people who are part of these marginalized groups already face barriers—exacerbated by social, political, economic, and environmental inequities—to comprehensive health care, including reproductive health care, that reduce their ability to make decisions about their health, families, and lives.”

Which are all of the reasons why Republicans voted against affirming this right: These are all the people they want to punish, down to what happens in their bedrooms. If they can force them to be pregnant and to secure the “domestic supply of infants,” as Justice Samuel Alito so terrifyingly described their intent, so much the better.

Senate Democrats have to make their Republicans counterparts vote on this. Those Republicans are already tying themselves up in knots trying to justify why they think the state should be getting in bed with all of us.

“I don’t know that we need to codify things like that. Shouldn’t that be states and local jurisdictions, maybe?” Republican Joni Ernst recently told NBC News, adding, “I would just have to see how it’s worded. But, no, I think women should have access to contraception. But it depends on the definition of contraception.”

They need to be forced to explain why they don’t think we should be able to use whatever birth control is safe and effective for us. They also need to be forced to explain why they think it’s just about women, when there are an awfully lot of sexually active men out there with partners who could become pregnant, and they probably like being able to do something to prevent that, too. Make them have those conversations, too.

If that means the Senate doesn’t get to have the whole of August recess off in order to get this done, fine. It’s far more important that Democrats show the country that they will not let the country slide even further into a dystopia that we all hoped would remain the stuff of fiction.

Senate leaders are introducing sweeping legislation Thursday meant to lift federal prohibitions on marijuana more than 50 years after Congress made the drug illegal.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s Cannabis Administration and Opportunity Act would decriminalize weed on the federal level and allow states to set their own marijuana laws without fear of punishment from Washington.

The bill has been a long time coming — Schumer, along with Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) proposed a discussion draft more than a year ago — and its odds of passing in this Senate are slim. But the legislation will shape the conversation around cannabis legalization going forward and portions of it are likely to find their way into other bills that could pass before the end of the year.

The legislation includes both Democratic and Republican priorities: It expunges federal cannabis-related records and creates funding for law enforcement departments to fight illegal cannabis cultivation. It also establishes grant programs for small business owners entering the industry who are from communities disproportionately hurt by past drug laws, requires the Department of Transportation to research and develop a nationwide standard for marijuana-impaired driving, and restricts the marketing of cannabis to minors.

Schumer has been the highest-ranking champion of marijuana legalization in Washington, labeling it a top priority over the last two years. It was one of the issues he said Democrats would tackle if they took back the Senate in 2020.

"When a state like South Dakota votes by referendum to legalize, you know something is out there," Schumer told POLITICO last year. "The American people started speaking sort of with a clear message. More than two-to-one, that they want the law changed."

While marijuana legalization has spread rapidly across the U.S. over the past decade, Capitol Hill has not transitioned as quickly. Nineteen states now allow anyone at least 21 years old to possess and use the drug, and 37 states have established medical marijuana programs. National polls have consistently shown that roughly two-thirds of Americans back marijuana legalization, and support is even higher among younger voters.

But the votes aren’t yet there to pass Schumer’s bill on Capitol Hill.

That's in part because many lawmakers from states with legal markets don't yet support substantial changes to federal law. Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, for example, represents a state where weed is legal — Montana — and says he does not support federal decriminalization. A handful of other Democrats told POLITICO that they are against legalization or are undecided, including Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.). Schumer would need all Democrats, plus ten Republicans, to get the bill over the finish line.

Cannabis legalization advocates have had success in the past framing it with Republicans as a states’ rights issue, but some pro-decriminalization Republicans will likely be unhappy with the bill’s expungement of cannabis-related criminal convictions and its equity grant provisions.

Further complicating matters is that the House has twice passed its own sweeping marijuana legalization package, known as the Mariuana Opportunity, Reinvestment and Expungement Act. That legislation does not include much of the regulatory structure that's part of the Senate bill, and also has a different tax rate.

And even if a bill were somehow to pass, it is unclear if President Joe Biden would sign it. He has repeatedly said he does not support federal weed legalization.

Bipartisan weed talks

Instead, some Democrats and Republicans are considering a smaller cannabis bill later this year that could see one or more provisions from the CAOA added to the SAFE Banking Act, a more widely-supported bill that would make it easier for banks to offer financial services to cannabis companies. That plan is still in the discussion stage and nothing formal has been decided.

Many of the changes added to the final Senate bill echo requests regularly made by Republicans. Law enforcement grants, a nationwide youth prevention campaign and traffic safety research all correspond to concerns that legalization skeptics have frequently raised. Schumer has met with Republicans — including Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), a co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus — in recent months to discuss where the two parties could potentially come together on weed legislation. Whether the changes will be enough to get enough Republicans on board, however, seems doubtful at this point.

Congress has a lot to tackle still in this year, but Democrats are facing the possibility that they will lose the House in this year’s midterm election. That has lit a fire under some lawmakers and cannabis advocates to find a weed bill that can pass this year, and it’s expected that after this bill receives its fanfare, the weed discussion will shift to what is possible to get done in this Congress — versus what Democrats dream they could accomplish.

"McConnell would never bring these things to the floor," Schumer said last year. "We'll move forward and try to get this done as soon as we possibly can."

A bill Republicans introduced in the North Carolina House last year is attracting renewed attention amid GOP promises to revisit further abortion restrictions for the state in 2023. The bill in question would define the start to human life as the “moment of fertilization” and deem abortion first-degree murder. Sponsored by Republican state Reps. Larry Pittman and Mark Brody, the legislation even goes so far as to deem murdering the pregnant person to prevent abortion an act of self-defense. “Any person has the right to defend his or her own life or the life of another person, even by the use of deadly force if necessary, from willful destruction by another person,” legislators wrote in the bill. “The State has an interest and a duty to defend innocent persons from willful destruction of their lives and to punish those who take the lives of persons, born or unborn, who have not committed any crime punishable by death.”

Now, it’s worth noting that no action was taken on the bill, but activists and attorneys alike are still encouraging North Carolinians to vote this election season because the bill’s mere existence is simply terrifying and, in many ways, a sign of what may be to come. 

RELATED STORY: More than half of states 'back down' from abortion rights fight. These have not

Aylett Colston, a North Carolina attorney and fair elections advocate, shared a thread on Twitter Tuesday to clear up a few misconceptions about the bill and the state in general. “While the bill that would punish abortion by death penalty is kaput [it's not going anywhere], that doesn't mean that right to bodily autonomy is safe in North Carolina,” Colston tweeted. “There's an NC law banning abortions after 20 weeks that was previously struck by courts & some lawmakers are trying to get it reinstated [I don't know the likely outcome].”

She explained that the state legislature, the North Carolina General Assembly (NCGA), writes and passes legislation. The governor can veto laws, but the General Assembly can overturn the veto with a vote of three-fifths present and voting in each chamber. “Republicans currently have a majority of the seats in the NCGA [state legislature], but don't have three-fifths of each chamber, so they don't have the votes to override a veto now,” Colston tweeted. “But NC state legislative elections are this year.”   

House Speaker Tim Moore has said legislation restricting abortions will be "a top priority" if the GOP wins a veto-proof majority of seats in November.

”North Carolinians can rest assured that we are taking the necessary steps to ensure that current restrictions on the books will be enforced,” Moore told WRAL in June. “North Carolinians can also expect pro-life protections to be a top priority of the legislature when we return to our normal legislative session in January."

Democratic North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper signed an executive order on July 6 to protect those seeking abortion services in the state from being extradited and prevent state agencies from helping other states prosecute those seeking abortions except when required by court order.

But that should bring little comfort. “Since the NCGOP took over the NCGA in 2010, we've seen they can be fast and sneaky when they want to be,” Colston tweeted. “Like when they put anti-abortion provisions into a motorcycle-safety bill in the middle of the night in 2013.”

That’s when Republican Gov. Pat McCrory threatened to veto the state Senate's anti-abortion legislation "unless significant changes and clarifications are made," so the House and Senate did so and rushed the changes through in motorcycle safety legislation, Daily Kos earlier reported.

RELATED STORY: North Carolina House sneaks revised anti-abortion language onto motorcycle safety bill

"So while there is NOT a law on the books in NC that punishes people who have abortions with the death penalty, North Carolinians' bodily autonomy is still at risk over the next few months," Colston tweeted. "If Republicans win three-fifths of each chamber of the NC General Assembly in November [which is possible], then NC could see abortion outlawed or severely restricted by the end of the year."

Contribute to build North Carolina’s progressive infrastructure in 2022 and beyond

Mitt Romney doesn't think it's necessary. Richard Burr hasn’t read it. And Todd Young is “fixated” on microchips.

Those are some of the answers Republicans gave Wednesday on whether they'd back legislation writing same-sex marriage into law. And though Democrats want assurances the bill could pass the Senate before taking it up, Chuck Schumer may have to take a gamble to find out if the landmark legislation has the GOP support necessary to clear a 60-vote threshold.

“I’m keeping a very open mind,” said Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, one of many Republicans who said Wednesday they are either undecided or haven’t looked at the bill that would enshrine the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision as law.

She added: “I have a good number of very close friends that are same-sex married.”

After the House passed a bill Tuesday codifying marriage regardless of sexual orientation, ethnicity or country of origin — a response to the high court's overturning of Roe v. Wade that won 47 GOP votes — Schumer now needs 10 Republican senators to send it to President Joe Biden’s desk.

He said on Wednesday he wants to put the legislation on the floor and has tasked Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), the first openly gay senator, with finding Republican support.

But if Republicans' unenthusiastic responses on Wednesday are any indication, Schumer will probably have to put the bill on the floor in order to find out if it can pass. Senators like Burr, Romney, Ernst and Young aren't giving hard "nos" by any means, but they aren't racing to provide the 10 ironclad commitments Democrats would need to make same-sex marriage a law, either.

Even retiring senators were keeping their views to themselves about the four-page bill. Burr (R-N.C.) merely said: “I haven’t looked at the legislation. Is that too much to ask for?”

“I’m aware of this bill. I haven’t looked at it,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who many Democrats think is open to voting for the same-sex marriage bill and backed a nondiscrimination bill in 2013.

Since the Supreme Court struck down restrictions on same-sex marriage in 2015, the Republican Party has largely sidestepped litigating its own internal divisions over the matter. Many social conservatives and mainstream GOP politicians still oppose same-sex marriage, guaranteeing that the House’s bill would divide the GOP.

The 47 House Republicans who supported the legislation represent what would've been an unthinkable number just a decade ago, but still a solid minority of the GOP conference. Explaining his vote for the bill, ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus chair Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) focused on its non-LGBTQ elements: “I don't think that interracial marriages should be outlawed."

And sure enough, across the Capitol, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said his party would surely try to filibuster the effort. Asked if the same-sex marriage bill would get the 10 Republicans needed to clear that obstacle, he said: “I hope not.”

The same-sex marriage bill came to the House floor as part of a broader strategy by Speaker Nancy Pelosi's caucus to respond to the high court's elimination of a nationwide right to an abortion. In light of a concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas that encouraged the Supreme Court to also revisit the Obergefell decision and another governing contraceptive access, House Democrats raced to show their support for protecting both same-sex marriage and birth control.

But over in the Senate, Democrats say they aren't interested in burning valuable floor time on a political vote — they want to vote on a bill that would go to Biden's desk. Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) said it’s a “good idea” to prioritize the legislation but is “of the mind right now that we should be taking the floor time on things that we could actually pass.”

“It's important enough to take some time out of a recess,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “60 votes is within the realm of the possible.”

Democrats themselves spent much of the pre-Obergefell era divided on same-sex marriage, with even former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama opposing it initially. (Obama got a nudge on the issue from his then-vice president, Joe Biden.) But these days, the party is pretty much united in support.

The Senate is set to go on a lengthy break in two weeks, however, and Democrats are trying to pass legislation that would pour money into the domestic microchip manufacturing industry, cut the prices on prescription drugs and admit Sweden and Finland into NATO. That leaves Schumer with a tough decision on whether to wedge same-sex marriage into the schedule before the summer break.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, the lead GOP sponsor of the same-sex marriage legislation, said that the bill should get a vote, but there isn’t a rush.

“I would like to see it on the floor. I don’t think it needs to be done this work period. There is no pending immediate case that’s going to be decided before the end of the year. So we have some time,” Collins said. “I do think codifying is a good idea.”

Collins and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) are co-sponsoring Baldwin’s legislation, which aides say is identical to the House’s version. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said he’s likely to support it, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said she’s “absolutely looking at how we can support marriage equality.”

But other than a handful of hard nos from the likes of Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), most Republicans refused to tip their hands. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said he’s waiting for his staff to review the legislation, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said he needed to review it and Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said he's not commenting on it yet.

“I haven’t given consideration to that legislation in part because the law isn’t changing and there’s no indication it will. And clearly the legislation from the House is unnecessary,” said Romney (R-Utah).

He said that Thomas’ push to reexamine previously decided cases “has opened a lot of doors that no other justice has walked through.”

That leaves Democrats well short of the 10 hard yeses they are hoping to find. Still, Republicans think that at some point, Schumer will probably force them to make up their minds on the Senate floor.

“I’m going to reserve comment on that,” said Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.). “I’m assuming it’s coming.”

Olivia Beavers contributed to this report.

After a two-year legal battle by former President Donald Trump and his administration to keep emails and memos hidden about the attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census, the House Oversight and Reform Committee released the documents Wednesday.

NPR reports that the newly discovered information shows a secret plan by Trump and his team to try to keep undocumented immigrants from being counted in the 2020 census.

Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney of New York, who chairs the House oversight committee, said in a statement: "Today's Committee memo pulls back the curtain on this shameful conduct and shows clearly how the Trump administration secretly tried to manipulate the census for political gain while lying to the public and Congress about their goals. … It is clear that legislative reforms are needed to prevent any future illegal or unconstitutional efforts to interfere with the census and chip away at our democracy."

RELATED STORY: District Attorney Fani Willis is rounding up imposter electors (and Giuliani) like cows on a ranch

Thanks to a 2019 Supreme Court ruling, Trump’s hopes of adding the question “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” to the census came crashing down.

The Trump administration had attempted to use the Voting Rights Act (VRA) as cover, with the unfounded claim that “legal arguments that the Founding Fathers intended for the apportionment count to be based on legal inhabitants.”

The new report by the House Committee should help the House protect the next census in 2030 with its efforts to pass HR 8326, the Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act.

"[HR 8326] basically moves to make sure that the census is fair and accurate, that it is removed from political influence and that the decisions made are made on science and not politics," Maloney explained to NPR.

One of the key players behind adding the citizenship question to the census was former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversaw the Census Bureau.

Ross seemed to be hellbent on adding it to the form. But like all things in the Trump world, adding this particular question was unprecedented. Since the nation’s first count in 1790, based on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, all Americans—citizens and noncitizens—have been counted on the form.

During his testimony in Congress, Ross alleged that the plan to add the question was based “solely” on a letter from the Department of Justice (DOJ) asking for more information on citizenship that would be used to protect racial and language minorities and enforce the VRA. However, as NPR reports, Ross was the person who initiated the DOJ’s need for more data.

“Sec. Ross has reviewed concerns and thinks DOJ would have a legitimate use of data for VRA purposes,” former Commerce Department attorney James Uthmeier wrote to John Gore, a Trump appointee at the DOJ.

In fact, an email written on Sept. 17 from Uthmeier to Earl Comstock, another Trump appointee, indicated a need to keep their nefarious plan secret.

“Ultimately, everyone is in agreement with our approach to move slowly, carefully, and deliberately so as to not expose us to litigation risk,” Uthmeier wrote.

The world wasn’t built for this heat.

Europe is baking under heat so extreme that it’s causing train tracks to bend and roads to buckle.

The heat wave, which brought record-breaking temperatures to the UK, France, and elsewhere in the past two weeks, is exposing a frightening reality: Much of Europe isn’t built for extreme heat, or for a climate that’s swiftly changing.

While severe heat waves, fueled by climate change, have become the new reality of summer, the extreme temperatures now rolling through Europe seem especially catastrophic. On Tuesday, temperatures in the UK broke the national record, reaching 40.3 degrees Celsius (104.5 degrees Fahrenheit), and the weather agency declared its first-ever “red warning” for exceptional heat — the highest level of weather warning possible. France, meanwhile, saw more than 100 record-breaking temperatures across the country in the last week.

“Even as a climate scientist who studies this stuff, this is scary,” said Hannah Cloke, a professor at the University of Reading who studies natural hazards. “We have had heat waves in the UK before,” she added, but the severity of the forecasted heat “is enough to kill people and animals, damage property, and hobble the economy.”

Part of the problem is that many buildings, highways, and other infrastructure in Europe are old and built with outdated temperature extremes in mind, said Mikhail Chester, a professor of engineering at Arizona State University. They simply can’t tolerate the new normal, he said. Hence things like railway fires in London.

Cities like Dubai and Phoenix, Arizona, in contrast, can withstand higher temperature extremes because their infrastructure was built more recently and with heat in mind. While these places may face issues related to water and energy usage, 100-degree weather isn’t as big of a problem for them, Chester said.

It’s important that urban planners and politicians who oversee city budgets recognize that so-called temperate places can get really hot as the climate warms. It’s not just Europe, either. Roughly 40 million Americans living around the Great Plains were under heat alerts Tuesday, and last week the Texas power grid took emergency measures to avoid heat-related blackouts.

“It’s becoming so tough to ignore the reality that stuff just isn’t working as well as it has in the past,” Chester said. “You can’t hide from this.”

Images that popped up on social media this week are a warning of what the future holds — and a stark reminder that climate adaptation is essential.

The record temperatures warped metal rails and set train tracks on fire

You know it’s hot when steel railroad tracks start to warp.

This week, soaring temperatures caused steel rails in London to expand and buckle, as temperatures on the tracks reached nearly 120°F, according to Network Rail, an organization that manages the railway infrastructure in England, Scotland, and Wales.

“For some of our track, such high temperatures are more than our track is designed to cope with,” the organization explains on its website. “The problem is that when steel rails get hot, they expand, which can cause a buckled rail.”

In a tweet Monday, Network Rail said it was painting the rails white to keep them as cool as possible during the heat wave.

Railways aren’t only bending, but also catching fire under the extreme heat. Early last week, the network shared a photo of its tracks on fire, warning that the heat would be “a serious challenge.”

It’s also caused roads and runways to buckle

Scorching temperatures can also start to soften or warp roads. Earlier this week, a major road in Cambridge called A14 closed after it developed a large kink from the heat (you can see an image of it here).

Intense heat can even soften asphalt, Chester, the engineering professor, said. So when you drive a heavy vehicle like a garbage truck or school bus on a road during a severe heat wave, it can cause the road to “rut,” he said, or warp.

Extreme heat can also be a problem for runways (which are basically big roads). On Monday, Luton, a major airport in London, suspended flights after the heat caused a section of runway to “lift,” the airport said on Twitter. (It resumed flights later that day.)

Heat-fueled wildfires threaten buildings and transit infrastructure

Extreme temperatures can suck moisture out of vegetation, turning it into a tinderbox. So it’s no surprise that wildfires have erupted in recent weeks across France, Spain, and the UK, where tens of thousands of acres have burned, causing transit delays and threatening homes and buildings.

Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images

Early this week, a passenger on a train traveling through Zamora, Spain, captured a terrifying scene: Outside the window — where the train had temporarily stopped — a bright red wildfire raged near the tracks. Train services in the area were suspended for a day and a half because of the fire.

Air conditioning isn’t standard in much of Europe. Commuters felt the heat.

Air conditioning is relatively rare in most of northern Europe, especially compared to the United States. The same is true of the London Tube — only 40 percent of the train network has air conditioning, and authorities warned commuters in the British capital to carry water with them if they traveled.

As Vox’s Umair Irfan has explained, extreme heat is an immense health risk:

Extreme heat is one of the deadliest weather phenomena in the world. There are direct health effects like heat stroke, which occurs when body temperature rises to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to organ failure, and heat exhaustion ... But high temperatures can also worsen conditions like high blood pressure and can limit the effectiveness of certain medications.

European commuters face tough choices. They must either bear the heat and suffer, or avoid (perhaps important) travel. And they need to make that choice because the system was simply not designed for the heat.

Aaron Chown/PA Images via Getty Images

Angel Garcia/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To protect vital infrastructure, cut back carbon emissions

Heat waves are a symptom of the larger problem of climate change, and the best way to safeguard our highways, railways, and buildings is to tackle the root cause by lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Climate-fueled disasters are likely to get worse before they get better.

But emissions reductions take time and money, and there are some things cities can do in the interim, Chester said. The most obvious one is to update infrastructure to reflect the reality of climate change. “We probably need to be designing well past what the minimum regulation tells us, which, by the way, is often based on historical temperatures,” he said.

In other words, architects and civil engineers should be building like it’s, say, 2060, rather than 1960.

Revamping infrastructure is expensive, so we should also be turning to other solutions to make cities more resilient, Chester said, such as green infrastructure. Planting trees, for example, could help reduce urban heat islands (though they also require water).

These solutions are clearly urgent, considering what this week has brought. The start of the summer has been a signal of what’s to come, and there are still two months left.

Europe is just the beginning. Heat waves are the new baseline, and countries around the world will have to decide quickly whether they wish to take real climate action or accept a future of extreme heat and the pain that comes with it. Neither path is easy. Only one will lead to less suffering.

By Alex Henderson During the Bill Clinton years, the term “originalism” was primarily used in connection with two far-right U.S. Supreme Court justices: Clarence Thomas and the late Antonin Scalia. Others on the High Court, from the late liberal Clinton appointee Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to Justice Anthony Kennedy — a right-wing libertarian and Ronald Reagan appointee who was fiscally conservative yet protective of gay rights and abortion rights — rejected originalism, which is often synonymous with far-right social conservatism. The Clinton years are long gon…

Read More

Autonomous boats are now crossing oceans.

The Mayflower Autonomous Ship finally arrived on the coast of Nova Scotia last month, marking the end of its long trek across the Atlantic. While the modern Mayflower is far from the first vessel to make that voyage, this small robotic boat is the largest to ever do so navigated by artificial intelligence with no humans aboard. A few technical hiccups notwithstanding, its trip is the latest evidence that the future of the high seas could be autonomous.

Slowly, self-steering ships are becoming a reality. In Norway, an autonomous battery-powered container vessel is shuttling fertilizer between a factory and a local port, and pending a successful trial, it could be fully certified within the next two years. A commercial tanker called the Prism Courage recently traveled from Texas, through the Panama Canal, to South Korea, guided by software from Avikus, a subsidiary of HD Hyundai, a shipbuilding operation that was spun off of the car group. There are even some boats meant to transport humans that can now operate on their own: A self-driving water taxi created by the artificial intelligence startup Buffalo Automation was ready to ferry people across the Tennessee River in downtown Knoxville, at least as of April.

Not all robo-boats are created equal. Some current AI sailing software is assistive, and requires at least some form of monitoring from a person onboard, while more advanced technology can operate a ship entirely independently, without any need for humans. Regardless, this new generation of autonomous vessels stands to make people a more marginal part of life at sea. Because many self-steering boats are still relatively new, there’s not yet enough evidence to prove that the technology that powers these ships is as capable as human navigators. Still, these vehicles could not only make it easier to traverse the world’s waterways, but also do so with a smaller carbon footprint than crewed boats.

“A computer can be optimizing for fuel savings and integrating a lot of different inputs around how fast they need to be moving through the water to reach their destination on time, what the weather conditions are like, how the vessel is operating, [and] how the engines are operating,” Trevor Vieweg, the chief technology officer at Sea Machines Robotics, a startup that designs self-driving boats, told Recode. “By using those same technologies, we can reduce carbon emissions — and fuel burn overall.”

To navigate independently, an autonomous boat typically needs a wide variety of sensors, including cameras and radar, as well as data from other sources, like GPS. These sensors are positioned around the vessel, and help a ship plan its route and sense nearby obstacles, like, for example, a floating log or a chunk of an iceberg. As with self-driving cars, autonomous ships can be classified into several levels based on how well their tech can perform without human help. The International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency that regulates shipping, has proposed a spectrum of autonomy starting with Level 1 ships, which would be operated by humans but might allow AI to make some unsupervised decisions, and ramping up in sophistication to Level 4 ships that could sail completely independently, with no human involvement or decision-making required.

Advocates say these ships are less susceptible to human error — ship and boat accidents are somewhat common — and could allow boat operators to assign workers to other tasks where they can be more productive. Artificial intelligence could also navigate ships more efficiently, and make better calculations about routes and speeds. The hope is that by saving time and, perhaps most importantly, fuel, ocean vessels can cut down on their energy consumption, which remains a significant contributor to climate change. In the absence of full autonomy, some experts have even suggested that software could enable humans to steer boats remotely, which would come with several benefits. For instance, remotely piloted ships would reduce the risk of spreading illness through international cargo transport, which has been a concern throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

Right now, ships with autonomous capabilities represent a tiny fraction of the many vessels in operation today. But in the future, self-steering ships could make all sorts of water-based activities more convenient. For example, the Mayflower Autonomous Ship, which was supported in part by IBM, was designed to study the ocean’s health, record audio of marine life, and take samples of microplastic. The boat doesn’t include a deck, bathrooms, or bunks, and much of the space inside is occupied by its technology, like its onboard computers, batteries, and motors.

“Not having humans on board frees up/eliminates the space occupied by them and supplies necessary to sustain human presence, as well as the power that the ship requires to carry the weight entailed,” said Ayse Atauz Phaneuf, the president of ProMare, the marine research organization that worked on the project. “Unmanned vehicles such as the Mayflower Autonomous Project will be able to spend considerably longer time at sea, accessing significant yet distant parts of the ocean.”

Phaneuf told Recode that the vehicle, and others like it, could eventually make ocean research expeditions much less expensive to launch. In addition to making it easier to study the ocean, autonomous ships could also make it more convenient to transport freight. In Japan, a partnership between a non-profit and freight transportation companies successfully showed earlier this year that autonomous container ships could travel between ports throughout the country. The demonstration was meant to prove that these vehicles could eventually help cut down on the shipping industry’s need for workers, especially as Japan confronts an aging population. There are also organizations like One Sea, which has brought together shipping and AI companies to promote autonomous ocean transportation, and to advance the technology involved.

There are those environmental benefits, too. HD Hyundai’s navigation tech works by using artificial intelligence to determine a ship’s routes and speeds, and the software also factors in the height of nearby waves and the behavior of neighboring vessels. The company says by using this AI, the Prism Courage — the commercial tanker that traveled through the Panama Canal — boosted its fuel efficiency by about 7 percent, and cut down on its greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent. While that might not sound like a lot, those savings could add up quickly.

Autonomous ships do face headwinds. One industry expert we spoke to said that smaller boats, like survey vessels and ferries, are more likely to incorporate autonomous technology than the large, container ships that make up the bulk of the world’s freight transportation. Some critics, including Maersk’s CEO, have argued that the savings that might come from autonomous software may not be enough to incentivize large shipping companies to invest in the tech, especially since many ocean carriers don’t use particularly large crews in the first place (a typical cargo ship might have just 20 workers aboard). Another concern is that autonomous software could make these ships more vulnerable to cyberattacks, though non-autonomous shipping operations have already been hacked.

And finally, there’s also the extremely complicated matter of international maritime law, which may not be prepared for the arrival of artificial intelligence.

“How should we deal with the liability issue where an autonomous system, although properly designed and maintained, acts unpredictably?” Melis Ozdel, the director of the University College London Centre for Commercial Law, told Recode. Of course, there are many ways autonomous vessels could upend life at sea, whether it’s the possibility of a robo-boat crashing into a cruise full of tourists, or the uncertain fate of pirates who might capture a ship, only to discover that it’s actually remote-controlled.

AI ships have already shown they can work, at least sometimes, though the technology that powers these vessels is still being developed and may require years to fully take off. Still, all signs indicate that these next-generation boats do have advantages. Eventually, sailing might look a little less like weeks out at sea and a little more like monitoring a ship from the comfort of an office, conveniently located on land.

This story was first published in the Recode newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Three counties in Pennsylvania are providing a preview of constitutional crises to come if election subversion by the Republican Party is not stopped now, while the Democratic-controlled Congress and White House still have the chance. Three county boards of elections (Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster) in Pennsylvania are refusing to certify some mail-in ballots for the 2022 primary election, which was conducted on May 17.

The primary is over. The results are uncontested. This precise issue—whether undated but otherwise valid mail-in ballots should be counted—has in fact already been contested in Pennsylvania and all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Yes, the court decided in refusing to take up a separate challenge of ballots from the state, the lack of a date is not enough to invalidate a vote.

There are about 1 million voters in these three counties, which are now under a state court order to certify all of the ballots legally cast in the Republican primary, and they are refusing to do so. These officials, despite the fact that this is a settled issue, have decided that they are the sole arbiters of which votes should count. That’s a problem. A big problem—and a bad harbinger of what could come.

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Marc Elias of Democracy Docket details the core of the threat:

Most importantly, these counties did not refuse to submit any election results at all. Worse, they submitted results that intentionally exclude lawful votes. Our decentralized method of running elections relies on precinct workers and county officials acting in good faith to ensure every lawful ballot is counted and included in accurately tabulated vote totals. When a county fails to submit results, it is easily detected. But, when a county presents incomplete results as complete, the risk of undetected election subversion increases.

Our own Adam Bonin points to a closely related story out of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where the Board of Elections received an “expletive-laden letter, filled with a suspicious substance” on Monday. “Since the 2020 election, people in Bucks County have been misled by baseless and unfounded allegations and our Board of Election employees have been subjected to unprecedented hostility as a result,” Board of Elections Chair Bob Harvie said. “Today’s incident was an example of the kind of idiotic and pathetic behavior which has been targeted at election workers around the nation.”

The elections officials in Berks, Fayette, and Lancaster counties are part of that problem in the state. Not necessarily because they believe in the Big Lie writ larger—every election without their preferred outcome is fraudulent—but because they’ve taken the further step of deciding that they get to pick and choose which votes count.

Which is exactly what is threatened on a larger scale by the U.S. Supreme Court when it takes up the “independent state legislature” theory this fall. In that case, the Court will decide if state legislatures have primacy in deciding federal elections—above state and federal courts, above everyone. Sort of like what those county officials are unconstitutionally declaring in Pennsylvania: that they have the final say.

The Senate is nearing an agreement that could help fight one aspect of this: the presidential electoral count. Reforming the Electoral Count Act of 1887 is one necessary means of protecting elections and it needs to pass. But it’s not nearly enough. not when threats and intimidation and a willingness to cheat to win pervades the Republican Party. It’s not just presidential elections that count—it’s all of them.

This election, the 2022 midterm, might be our last chance to stop them. We need a Democratic majority in the Senate big enough to end the filibuster and pass the democracy-saving legislation Republicans have shut down. We need a big enough majority—one that recognizes the scope of the threat we’re facing—to reform and expand the federal courts, but particularly the U.S. Supreme Court. 

RELATED: Supreme Court agrees to hear case that could shatter democracy in any state with a GOP legislature

Republicans are launching all-out attacks on LGBTQ+ youth and adults. As Daily Kos has continued to cover, we’re seeing discriminatory anti-trans bills catch major speed across the nation, especially when it comes to denying people access to sports, bathrooms, and even life-saving gender-affirming health care. Conservatives are even attacking books by and about LGBTQ+ folks (as well as people of color and especially writers who live in both identities) in an effort to stomp out access to queer identities and histories via reading. Put simply: This is very bad.

There’s always a lot to celebrate when openly queer people do win elections, whether it’s big or small. But getting elected isn’t the end of the road. And on the one hand, it shouldn’t be; we elect people to represent our needs and our interests, and no one should slow down their work just because they’ve won the race. But when it comes to openly queer folks holding office, it’s not just about working hard and serving constituents. It’s also, sadly, about facing discrimination and even threats against their safety.

One recent example comes to us from Oklahoma, where the openly gay mayor of The Village, Adam Graham, shared he has resigned from his positions as council member and mayor due to harassment and safety concerns. Graham has served on the city council since 2019 and was only recently elected mayor on May 2, as reported by The Oklahoman. 

RELATED: Republican who introduced anti-trans health care bill admits he didn't talk to trans folks first

Graham shared his resignation statement via Twitter on Monday, writing in part that it’s been his “privilege” to “break boundaries” but that he no longer feels “safe” serving in this capacity. He went on to say in the last month alone, he’s been “followed home from meetings” and “threatened” while walking his dog. He said he’s been “harassed” at Starbucks. He even alleged his tires have been slashed.

"Unfortunately, these malicious, bad-faith attacks are escalating,” Graham wrote. “And I no longer feel safe to serve in my capacity as mayor. It’s with a heavy heart that I tender my resignation effective immediately."

You can check out his statement below.

In his statement, Graham alleges some of the harassment stems from interactions with Nichols Hills Police in late May 2022. Graham says he “stood up” to police who were targeting folks who live in The Village and that he will never “apologize” for standing up for his constituents.

“I will never understand why some officials are more concerned with representing the interests of Nichols Hills than the interests of their constituents,” he added. 

According to LGBTQ Nation, Nichols Hills officer Brandon Edwards has claimed Graham arrived on the scene soon after officers stopped a speeding car inside the city limits of The Village; Edwards says Graham “yelled” at them about how they weren’t allowed to stop people in The Village city limits. In a report, Edwards argued Graham’s presence riled the already uncooperative driver up more. 

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Enlarge / This week, the classic RPG-FPS series Heretic and Hexen are back in a curious way.

While we at Ars Technica don't necessarily cheer the moments when giant gaming conglomerates swallow up other giant gaming conglomerates, we also have a faction that champions efforts to preserve and re-release classic video games. These two philosophies collided this week, leaving us feeling a bit dizzy.

The bottom-line good news: Four underappreciated classics from the id Software universe are closer to a broader re-release and are currently free to download. This appears to be related to Microsoft's planned $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard's vast catalog of game publishing and development properties.

A Thursday announcement from Microsoft's Xbox division confirmed that five "Bethesda" video games were now available on modern Windows PCs via the Microsoft Store, albeit through an unusual path. These games, including the two earliest Elder Scrolls adventures and three fantasy-tinged shooters from the combined Heretic and Hexen series, would need to be accessed through the Xbox Insider Hub on Windows 10 and Windows 11 PCs, as they were "previews" meant to solicit "feedback." Joining the Xbox Insider Hub on Windows PCs is free and does not require a Game Pass subscription, which means these games are now free to download for participating members (at least until MS revokes their availability on the Insider Hub).

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The doctor at the forefront of a national battle over abortion rights took a step toward suing Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita for defamation on Tuesday— saying his public threat to criminally prosecute her after she provided an abortion for a 10-year-old girl from Ohio caused her "reputational harm and emotional distress” and featured several “false and misleading" statements.

Caitlin Bernard — the Indiana OB-GYN who performed the abortion on the young rape survivor — claims Rokita made statements in media appearances and press releases over the past week that he “recklessly and/or negligently failed to ascertain” were true, including suggesting without evidence that Bernard violated the patient’s HIPAA privacy rights and failed to file the proper paperwork required after treating a minor.

Rokita's threat of prosecution came three weeks after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and highlighted how local authorities felt newly empowered to target physicians even in states where the procedure remains legal.

The child had to travel from Ohio to Indiana because she was just a few days past her home state's six-week limit for abortions which includes no exemptions for rape or incest.

President Joe Biden cited the case as an example of the harm and chaos the country is experiencing in the wake of the high court's ruling, prompting several elected officials and media pundits to spend days questioning the veracity of the story until law enforcement arrested the alleged perpetrator and confirmed the rape and pregnancy.

The new notice of a tort claim from Bernard now triggers a 90-day period where the state is in charge of investigating the situation. After that, depending on what they find, a lawsuit can be filed.

A spokesperson for Rokita said his work is distinguishing Indiana as a protector of unborn life and of women and that the claims were baseless.

"This is part of a divisive narrative and an attempt to distract from the important work of the office, including the duty to determine whether practitioners have violated the standards of practice in his or her profession, as well as federal and state laws," the spokesperson said.

Last week, the Republican attorney general issued a statement saying his office is investigating Bernard, specifically whether she reported the abortion to the departments of health and child services within the required three-day time window.

In a statement that remains on his website — even after media outlets including POLITICO obtained records that showed she did report the abortion — Rokita warned: “The failure to do so constitutes a crime in Indiana, and her behavior could also affect her licensure.”

Bernard’s legal filing doesn’t specify an amount she'll be demanding from the state, but it says she “intends to seek damages for security costs, legal fees, reputational harm, and emotional distress.”

Bernard's spokesperson Kendra Barkoff told POLITICO that her client has experienced "personal and dangerous threats" against her and her family since Rokita publicly accused her of wrongdoing.

Rokita is also facing blowback from other corners. On Friday, the former dean of the Indiana University School of Law launched a formal ethics complaint against him — asking the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission to look into whether he committed professional misconduct in making “inflammatory statements on national television” about Bernard “without due diligence concerning their truthfulness.” If the commission finds that Rokita did act improperly, he could face disbarment.

Indiana, meanwhile, is just a few weeks away from convening a special session of its GOP-controlled legislature during which consideration of a near-total abortion ban is expected.

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A security firm and the US government are advising the public to immediately stop using a popular GPS tracking device or to at least minimize exposure to it, citing a host of vulnerabilities that make it possible for hackers to remotely disable cars while they’re moving, track location histories, disarm alarms, and cut off fuel.

An assessment from security firm BitSight found six vulnerabilities in the Micodus MV720, a GPS tracker that sells for about $20 and is widely available. The researchers who performed the assessment believe the same critical vulnerabilities are present in other Micodus tracker models. The China-based manufacturer says 1.5 million of its tracking devices are deployed across 420,000 customers. BitSight found the device in use in 169 countries, with customers including governments, militaries, law enforcement agencies, and aerospace, shipping, and manufacturing companies.

BitSight discovered what it said were six “severe” vulnerabilities in the device that allow for a host of possible attacks. One flaw is the use of unencrypted HTTP communications that makes it possible for remote hackers to conduct adversary-in-the-middle attacks that intercept or change requests sent between the mobile application and supporting servers. Other vulnerabilities include a flawed authentication mechanism in the mobile app that can allow attackers to access the hardcoded key for locking down the trackers and the ability to use a custom IP address that makes it possible for hackers to monitor and control all communications to and from the device.

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