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Humans have been causing record-breaking heat since 1937

by LarryEastham239 Posted on March 10, 2016

Humans have been causing record-breaking heat since 1937

By on 9 Mar 2016commentsShare

Ah, the 1930s. What a decade. There were fireside chats, dance marathons, Twinkies, and Superman comics. Billie Holiday recorded “Summertime,” Nancy Drew started to give Sherlock a run for his money, and — apparently — goldfish gulping became a thing. But it wasn’t all jazz and Wonder Bread. There was also devastating economic collapse, crippling drought, and, according to a new study, the earliest case of a human-induced heatwave.

Reporting in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a group of scientists found that starting in 1937, humans have been at least partly to blame for 16 record-breaking heat events. They used computer models to simulate the past with and without anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and found that these events were “very unlikely to have occurred” without our influence.

Of course, there’s been a lot of talk lately about our role in recent heatwaves and extreme weather events. We just experienced the warmest winter on record, and sea-level rise is already worsening dramatic flooding in the U.S. This, however, is the first time that researchers have tried to tease out when we could first start to place blame. And as one of the study’s authors put it in a press release, Australia proved to be “the canary in the coal mine for the rest of the world.”

That’s because much of the Northern Hemisphere — especially Central Europe and East Asia — experienced a delay in heating for much of the 20th century due to aerosol pollution reflecting sunlight. Australia, meanwhile, was isolated from the bulk of that pollution and thus got to experience the full brunt of greenhouse gas emissions right from the get-go.

The rest of the world has since caught up, so we northerners can no longer use one form of pollution to delay the effects of another. Bummer.

On the plus side, we can start planning for next year’s 80th anniversary of the earliest known anthropogenic-related heat event. Because if there’s one thing that humans are good at, it’s trivializing major world events with superficial holidays. Here are a few things to consider when planning your party: 1937 was the year that we got Kix cereal, Spam, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, Rolos, and Smarties. It’s also when Amelia Earhart disappeared, the Hindenburg exploded, and the unemployment rate in the U.S. hit 14 percent.

Personally, I’m thinking a mid-summer processed food potluck with live jazz and a desert motif. I’ll also be serving these climate change cocktails.

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Humans have been causing record-breaking heat since 1937

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This Supreme Court Case Show the Perils of Appointing Prosecutors as Judges

by NorineAlison Posted on March 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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The US Supreme Court heard arguments last week as to whether Ronald D. Castille, former chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, should have stepped aside from considering the appeal of a death penalty case he personally greenlighted when he was Philadelphia’s district attorney.

It seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it? “He made the most important decision that could be made in this case,” Justice Elena Kagan commented during oral arguments.

Castille didn’t think so. Back in 2012, public defenders for Terrence Williams—who was convicted and sentenced to death at age 18 for murdering a 56-year-old named Amos Norwood—asked Castille to step aside because he oversaw the prosecutors who handled the case. The judge explained to the New York Times that he was merely functioning as an administrator. “I didn’t try the case,” he said, according to the paper. “I wasn’t really involved in the case except as the leader of the office.”

But Castille had additional baggage that raise questions about his involvement.

An appeals judge found that Andrea Foulkes, the prosecutor who tried Williams on Castille’s watch, had deliberately withheld key evidence from the defense—and thereby the jury. Norwood, the victim, had started a relationship with Williams when the boy was 13, and abused him, sexually and otherwise, for years. Although the details weren’t known at the time, the prosecution suppressed trial evidence suggesting that Norwood had an unnatural interest in underage boys.

Williams had previously killed another older man he’d been having sex with—51-year-old Herbert Hamilton. (Williams was 17 at the time of the crime.) The jury in that case, presented with evidence of their relationship, voted against the death penalty and convicted Williams of third-degree murder, a lesser charge. But Foulkes, who prosecuted both cases, told the Norwood jury that Williams had killed Norwood “for no other reason but that a kind man offered him a ride home.”

So there’s that. And then, as death penalty appeals lawyer Marc Bookman points out in an in-depth examination of the Williams prosecutions for Mother Jones, Castille was a big fan of the death penalty:

In the five years before the Williams case came onto its docket, the court, led by Chief Justice Ronald Castille, had ruled in favor of the death penalty 90 percent of the time. This wasn’t too surprising, given that Castille had been elected to his judgeship in 1993 as the law-and-order alternative to a candidate he labeled soft on crime…

“Castille and his prosecutors sent 45 people to death row during their tenure, accounting for more than a quarter of the state’s death row population,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted in 1993. “Castille wears the statistic as a badge. And he is running for the high court as if it were exclusively the state’s chief criminal court rather than a forum for a broad range of legal issues.” Castille was pretty clear about where he stood: “You ask people to vote for you, they want to know where you stand on the death penalty,” he told the Legal Intelligencer, a law journal. “I can certainly say I sent 45 people to death row as District Attorney of Philadelphia. They sort of get the hint.”

Castille also had it out for Williams’ defenders, with whom his old office was at odds. Bookman again:

Castille had a fraught relationship with the Federal Community Defender Office, a group of lawyers who represent numerous death row inmates, including Williams. Castille claimed that federal lawyers had no business appearing in state courts. He complained bitterly over the years about their “prolix and abusive pleadings” and about all the resources they dedicated to defending death row inmates—”something one would expect in major litigation involving large law firms.”

The defenders, for their part, routinely filed motions arguing that Castille had no business ruling on the appeals of prisoners whose prosecutions he had approved—particularly not in a case in which his office was found to have suppressed evidence helpful to the defense. But as chief justice, Castille had the last word. He denied all such motions, and accused the federal defenders of writing “scurrilously,” making “scandalous misrepresentations,” and having a “perverse worldview.”

It’s not too hard to predict which way the Supreme Court will rule—although whether their decision helps Williams get a resentencing is another matter. America’s justice system makes it unbelievably hard to get a second chance once you are convicted of a serious crime.

But all of this brings up a broader, question: Prosecutors like Castille are appointed to the bench in far greater numbers than former defenders—even President Obama has perpetuated this trend. Which is why it was so worthy of note that California Gov. Jerry Brown, under federal pressure to reduce incarceration in the Golden State, has broken with his predecessors and moved in the other direction. Northern California public station KQED recently pointed out that more than a quarter of Brown’s 309 judicial appointments have been former public defenders, whereas only 14 percent were once DAs (31 percent had some prosecutorial experience). From that report:

“We never had a tradition that said to be a judge you had to be a district attorney. That developed probably in the ’90s,” Brown said. “The judges are supposed to be independent. You want judges that have a commercial background, you want judges that have a prosecutorial background, city attorneys, or county counsel, or small practice, plaintiffs’ practice—you want a diversity, instead of kind of a one note fits all.”

When it comes down to it, politicians are still eager to appear tough on crime. But is it really good policy—financially or ethically—to stack the bench with judges who are accustomed to being rated according to the number of people they lock away?

“Most district attorney judges that I’ve experienced are unable to divorce themselves from their background once they become a judge,” Michael Ogul, president of the California Public Defenders Association, told KQED. “They are still trying to help the prosecution, they are still trying to move the case towards conviction or towards a harsher punishment.”

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This Supreme Court Case Show the Perils of Appointing Prosecutors as Judges

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There’s an important ballot fight in Florida between big power companies and the solar industry

by VitoBadgett Posted on March 7, 2016

There’s an important ballot fight in Florida between big power companies and the solar industry

By on 7 Mar 2016commentsShare

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Florida Supreme Court is set to weigh in on a controversial ballot measure that environmentalists warn could erect a new obstacle for the state’s struggling renewable-energy industry.

On Monday, the court is expected to begin hearing oral arguments over Amendment 1, a proposed ballot initiative that purports to strengthen the legal rights of homeowners who have rooftop solar panels. But critics in the solar industry and environmental groups claim that if the measure passes in November, it would actually deal a major blow to rooftop solar by undermining one of the key state policies supporting it.

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Amendment 1 was created by an organization with a grassroots-sounding name: Consumers for Smart Solar. In reality, though, the organization is financed by the state’s major electric utility companies as well as by conservative groups with ties to the Koch brothers. The measure qualified for the ballot in late January, after nabbing nearly 700,000 signatures from Floridians. A competing measure — pushed by Floridians for Solar Choice, a group backed by the solar industry — did not get enough signatures to make the ballot.

In Florida, the Supreme Court is commonly asked by the attorney general to review ballot initiatives to ensure that what voters will read on the ballot accurately characterizes the legal effects of the measure. And in this case, it does not, according to a legal brief filed by the environmental group Earthjustice:

If passed by the voters, the utility-sponsored amendment would be a constitutional endorsement of the idea that rooftop solar users should pay higher utility bills than other customers. Solar users could end up paying twice as much as other customers pay to buy power from the utilities. This utility-sponsored amendment pretends to be pro-solar but is actually a disguised attempt to derail rooftop solar in Florida.

“This is really shrewd, cynical deception,” said David Guest, the Earthjustice attorney who will argue the group’s position to the court on Monday.

A spokesperson for the utility-backed Consumers for Smart Solar countered in an email that “our amendment is not misleading” and that its opponents “are manufacturing false arguments and using scare tactics.”

The court battle over the ballot measure is just the latest episode in a long and brutal fight in Florida pitting solar companies and their environmentalist allies against power companies that fear losing their customers to rooftop solar power. Despite being one of the country’s sunniest (and largest) states, Florida ranks just 15th for solar installations. As Tim Dickinson recently explained in a great feature for Rolling Stone:

Key policies that have spurred a rooftop solar revolution elsewhere in America are absent or actually illegal in Florida. Unlike the majority of states, even Texas, Florida has no mandate to generate any portion of its electricity from renewable power. Worse, the state’s restrictive monopoly utility law forbids anyone but the power companies from buying and selling electricity. Landlords cannot sell power from solar panels to tenants. Popular solar leasing programs like those offered by SolarCity and Sunrun are outlawed. Rooftop solar is limited to those who can afford the upfront expense; as a result, fewer than 9,000 Florida homes have panels installed.

The controversial ballot measure would amend the Florida constitution to guarantee that “electricity consumers have the right to own or lease solar equipment installed on their property to generate electricity for their own use.” Sounds great, right?

Actually, it’s a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, Floridians already have that right, even though it’s not explicitly mentioned in the state’s Constitution.

“There already is a right to own or lease solar,” explained Hannah Wiseman, a professor of energy law at Florida State University. In this area, she said, Amendment 1 “is entrenching existing laws.”

What the amendment won’t do, however, is legalize the type of solar lease offered by SolarCity, which is currently banned in Florida. “Third-party ownership” is a business model in which a contractor such as SolarCity installs solar panels on your roof free of charge, retains ownership of those panels, and then sells you the electricity they produce at less than the cost of buying electricity from the grid. That model has been extremely successful for SolarCity in California and other leading solar states, since it’s simple and allows homeowners to avoid the big up-front costs of installing and maintaining their own panels. In Florida, only electric utilities have the right to sell electricity to homeowners; you can buy or lease your own solar panels, but you can’t arrange to buy power from a third-party solar contractor. The failed ballot measure backed by Floridians for Solar Choice would have changed that, but Amendment 1 will not.

But according to Guest, there’s an even more insidious provision in Amendment 1’s fine print. The amendment says state and local governments have the authority “to ensure that consumers who do not choose to install solar are not required to subsidize the costs of backup power and electric grid access to those who do.”

The issue here is net metering, a policy that exists in almost every state (including Florida) that requires electric utilities to purchase excess electricity from solar homes. In effect, the extra power your panels produce in the afternoon offsets the cost of power you take from the grid at night. The policy is widely loathed by power companies because they not only lose a paying customer to solar but also have to pay that customer and take the customer’s extra power off their hands. Electric utilities across the country have waged a variety of wars against net metering over the last several years; one of their biggest wins was in Nevada this year.

Often the fight comes down to a complicated, sometimes esoteric debate about whether net metering forces utilities to raise their rates for nonsolar homes to cover the cost of solar homes. (In addition to having to buy the excess power, utilities say solar homes still make use of transmission lines and other grid infrastructure without paying their fair share for it.)

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That brings us back to the amendment: If passed, Wiseman said, it would allow utilities to argue that net metering is a “subsidy” for solar and that lawmakers have the authority to prohibit it.

“It could open the door for utilities charging solar users high fixed fees and potentially getting rid of net metering,” Wiseman said.

Guest was more blunt: “They’re trying to kill net metering, is really what it is.”

All of this seems to be pretty confusing for Floridians, who appear to hold conflicting views on the controversy. According to the solar-industry-backed Floridians for Solar Choice, 82 percent of the state’s voters said they would support changing the law to permit third-party ownership of solar. But a recent poll from the utility-backed Consumers for Smart Solar found that 73 percent of voters support their ballot measure.

One of the amendment’s opponents is Debbie Dooley, a Georgia-based Tea Party activist who has rallied conservative opposition to this measure and other potentially anti-solar policies around the country. Consumers for Smart Solar is engaged in “a campaign of lies and deception,” she said. The group “claims to support a free-market principle, but they are taking an anti-free-market position by siding with monopolies to stop competition from solar.”

Now it’s up to the court to determine if Amendment 1’s wording is, in fact, deceptive. If they decide it is, they could throw the measure out. The case is much more ambiguous than the ballot measure language the court normally reviews, Wiseman said. But she added it’s rare for the court to remove initiatives from the ballot.

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Introducing "Bite," Our New Podcast About Food Politics

by RamonKraegen901 Posted on March 6, 2016

Mother Jones

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Earlier this winter, an essay on the food and culture website First We Feast laid out some complaints about contemporary food journalism: “Food media has felt, for lack of a better word, soft,” editor Chris Schonberger wrote. To find investigative reporting on food issues, readers must look outside the “food media” bubble. As legendary culinary writer Ruth Reichl told Schonberger and company: “If you’re interested in the politics of food, you can go to Mother Jones or something.”

Indeed, Mother Jones has delved into food and agriculture’s thornier topics for decades. We’ve taken full advantage of our tagline of “smart, fearless journalism” to expose the nut industry’s voracious thirst, observe fast-food’s sway on nutrition policy, illuminate the environmental toll of snacks’ excessive packaging, and examine the industry cover-up of sugar’s health risks. And now, we’re excited to take this knack for no-bullshit reporting to a brand new medium: Bite podcast.

Bite is a podcast for people who think hard about their food. In each biweekly episode, my co-hosts Tom Philpott and Kiera Butler and I will interview a writer, scientist, farmer, or chef to uncover the surprising stories behind what ends up on your plate. We’ll help you digest the major food news of the week. We’re interested in how your food intersects with other important topics like identity, social justice, health, corporate influence, and climate change.

Don’t worry—we’ll have some fun, too. We’re happy to indulge in some full-on foodie-ism from time to time. (Check out our recipes for wine-braised short ribs and cranberry salsa.) We’ll reflect on the weirdest things our guests have eaten as of late. And we’ll try to solve your food mysteries—especially if you get in touch with us on Twitter or Facebook, or by sending an email to bite@motherjones.com.

Subscribe to Bite on iTunes to hear our teaser, and get ready for our first episode, which will drop very soon. We hope you’re hungry.

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Introducing "Bite," Our New Podcast About Food Politics

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Bad news: Low-carbon air travel isn’t very likely

by NicholXVPT Posted on March 4, 2016

Bad news: Low-carbon air travel isn’t very likely

By on 4 Mar 2016commentsShare

Propaganda, false narratives, mythical science, relentless money-grubbing — I’m not talking about American politics; I’m talking about the aviation industry.

Air travel is terrible for the environment. (It’s also pretty bad for your wallet, dignity, and general respect for other people, but that’s another story.) So it’s no wonder that news organizations, including this one, tend to clamber over ever new technological innovation that comes around, promising to deliver low- or no-emission airplanes. But according to a new study published in the journal Transportation Research Part D, the prospect of near-term sustainable aviation is a myth.

Here are the sobering facts, according to the study: There were about 3,700 commercial planes in use back in 1970, 9,200 by 1990, and 21,000 by 2010. By 2030, there could be up to 40,000, and by 2050, air travel could account for as much as 19 percent of total energy used for transportation, compared to 11 percent in 2006.

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Airplanes today are much more efficient — and safer — than the airplanes of Airplane!, sure, but not efficient enough to compensate for a more than quintupling of the fleet. And now, those emissions are only going to continue to rise, and, as the researchers note, “no international policy will in the foreseeable future address this situation.”

Fortunately, there’s a groundbreaking techno-fix just around the corner, waiting to usher in the clean airplane of the future, right? Wrong. According to these researchers, that airplane is a false hope that we’ve been clinging to for more than 20 years, and here’s how they found out:

First, the team compiled a list of 20 efficiency-boosting technologies hyped by the aviation industry between 1994 and 2013. These potential game-changers broke down into three broad categories: alternative fuels like hydrogen, algae, and this stuff that you’ve probably never heard of; new engines that could, for example, run on sunlight or electricity; and “airframe” improvements that would make planes lighter and more aerodynamic.

To assess how these techno-fixes played in the media, the researchers then searched the archives of major news publications like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, and The Guardian and found 1,532 articles mentioning said miracles of innovation. From there, they narrowed the results to 1,294 articles about the nine most popular technologies and then used a random sampling of 180 articles for close analysis.

And here’s what they found:

Most of the ‘solutions’ that have been presented over the past 20 years constitute technology myths. Specifically, it is possible to distinguish three types of myths, i.e. (i) myths that refer to abandoned technologies once seen as promising; (ii) myths that refer to emerging technology discourses, though generally overstating the realistic potential offered by these technologies (and some of these potentially representing dead ends as well); and (iii) myths that refer to solutions that are impossible for physical reasons; this latter type of myth exemplified by the notion of solar flight.

The danger here is that believing these myths gives us an excuse to not address the huge problem that is air travel in a time of climate change. As evidence of this, the researchers point to something that U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Davey said in The Guardian in 2014: “If you look at the future of flight it is possible to imagine, with technological innovation, that we will have zero-carbon flight in the future.”

It’s also possible to imagine that we’ll one day be able to go through airport security without having TSA agents give us attitude for forgetting that laptops go in their own bins, belts come off, watches stay on, shoes come off — but don’t need a bin — boarding passes can be put away, baggy sweatshirts come off if you’ve got something on underneath, liquids are OK in small amounts but still go in a bin, and for the love of god EMPTY YOUR POCKETS.

But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen anytime soon.

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Donald Trump Pulls Out of Conservative Conference

by CarenDiaz8529 Posted on March 4, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, canceled his scheduled appearance at one of the largest annual gatherings of conservatives on Friday. Trump was scheduled to speak early Saturday morning at the Conservative Political Action Conference, hosted this year at a hotel conference center outside Washington, DC, but CPAC announced on Twitter that he’d bailed:

CPAC wasn’t exactly prime Trump territory—but nor was it entirely hostile. There was a lonely protester lamenting that Trump would rip apart the party on Thursday. But most CPAC attendees said that they weren’t all that concerned by his reluctance to distance himself from a white supremacist, and that they’d still support him in the general election even if their preferred nominee at the moment might be Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. Over the course of the first day of the conference, the schism in the Republican Party was largely left unmentioned, with speakers shying away from mentioning Trump by name.

But at a watch party for Thursday night’s GOP debate, the crowd titled heavily toward Cruz and Rubio, jeering each time Rubio attacked Trump. Perhaps Trump’s fans relayed the message and warned him against speaking to a potentially hostile crowd on Saturday.

Update: Trump issued a press release on Friday announcing a rally in Wichita on Kansas and citing it as his reason for withdrawing from CPAC:

The Donald J. Trump for President Campaign has just announced it will be in Wichita, Kansas for a major rally on Saturday, prior to the Caucus. Mr. Trump will also be speaking at the Kansas Caucus and then departing for Orlando, Florida to speak to a crowd of approximately 20,000 people or more. Because of this, he will not be able to speak at CPAC, as he has done for many consecutive years. Mr. Trump would like to thank Matt Schlapp and all of the executives at CPAC and looks forward to returning to next year, hopefully as President of the United States.

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Donald Trump Pulls Out of Conservative Conference

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Here’s how major cities measure up on climate change spending

by SofiaStout Posted on March 1, 2016

Here’s how major cities measure up on climate change spending

By on 1 Mar 2016 5:07 pmcommentsShare

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The headline negotiations during the Paris climate summit in December were between national governments: What would China, the United States, and other big emitters be willing to do? But just outside the spotlight, some of the most optimistic commitments to curb greenhouse gas emissions, ramp up clean energy, and invest in adaptive measures were being made by cities.

A new analysis from social scientists at University College London sheds some new light on the money behind those municipal efforts — and the results paint a highly uneven picture. The researchers compared spending on climate adaptation in 10 major global cities — that is, investments in infrastructure, public health, water systems, etc., aimed at making them more resistant to climate change. All 10 cities are members of the Compact of Mayors, an initiative that came out of Paris to hold cities to a high standard of climate action.

On average among those 10 cities, spending on climate adaptation accounted for one-fifth of one percent of GDP in 2015, or about $855 million. Not surprisingly, cities in wealthier countries such the U.S. and the U.K. spent far more than cities in African countries and Southeast Asia:

Nature

Cities in developing countries also lag behind on spending on a per-capita basis. (The Paris figure is so high in part because the study counted population just within a city’s official boundaries, not the surrounding metropolitan area, and Paris’ boundaries are relatively small) …

Nature

… and as a share of GDP:

Nature

The findings illustrate that spending on climate adaptation is more a function of wealth, and the value of local real estate, than the size of a city’s population or its relative vulnerability to climate impacts. The researchers conclude that “current adaptation activities are insufficient in major population centres in developing and emerging economies.”

That may not be very surprising — of course New York and London will be better able to rally funds for climate readiness than Addis Ababa. But it’s an important snapshot of the uphill battle developing countries face in confronting climate change.

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This Case Just Gave Apple Some Major Ammo in Its Fight With the FBI

by AngeloLcgdvmdq Posted on March 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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A federal judge in New York denied the government’s request to make Apple help unlock the iPhone of a suspect in a drug case, potentially dealing a major blow to the FBI’s effort to compel the company to assist the bureau in accessing an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters.

In both cases, the government requested that Apple help bypass the lock screen security on an iPhone to assist a federal investigation. The New York case was one of at least 12 in which Apple has refused to give the government the technical assistance it was seeking. The government’s argument in each case rested on the All Writs Act, a law first passed in 1789 that allows the government to issue orders, or writs, that are “necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.” But that power is also subject to limitation, including such orders being a last resort and not imposing an “undue burden” on the person or organization to which it applies.

Apple argued the government’s requests overstepped its ability to demand cooperation. “We’re being forced to become an agent of law enforcement,” complained Apple’s lawyer, Marc Zwillinger, in arguments in the New York case last year, and Judge James Orenstein agreed. “After reviewing the facts in the record and the parties’ arguments, I conclude that none of those factors justifies imposing on Apple the obligation to assist the government’s investigation,” he wrote in his decision issued on Monday evening.

Orenstein echoed points made by Apple in its challenge last week to the court order in the San Bernardino case. The company wrote that the government’s demand that Apple write new software for the FBI created a “boundless interpretation” of the All Writs Act, allowing the government to order virtually any assistance it wanted. The court filing raised the specter of “compelling a pharmaceutical company against its will to produce drugs needed to carry out a lethal injection in furtherance of a lawfully issued death warrant, or requiring a journalist to plant a false story in order to help lure out a fugitive.” Orenstein similarly wrote that he rejected “the government’s interpretation that the All Writs Act empowers a court to grant any relief not outright prohibited by law.”

The judge’s ruling in the New York case rested on another Apple-friendly premise: the notion that what the government wants “is unavailable because Congress has considered legislation that would achieve the same result but has not adopted it.” Apple’s court filing argued that “Congress and the American people have withheld” the power to make companies break the security features of their own phones—for example, by expanding federal wiretapping laws to include cellphones—and thus the government should not be allowed to simply take that power through court orders. Orenstein backed that argument, saying that forcing Apple to comply would “transform the All Writs Act from a limited gap-filling statute…into a mechanism for upending the separation of powers.”

Even if the All Writs Act applied, Orenstein wrote, he found that the government’s request would still place an undue burden on the company. That’s further good news for Apple’s argument in the San Bernardino case. The company says complying with that order would take a team of 6 to 10 engineers at least two weeks to write the necessary software, and the technical assistance that Orenstein rejected in the New York case is less complicated.

Sheri Pym, the federal judge in the San Bernardino case, actually granted the FBI a court order similar to the one Orenstein rejected on Monday. But she kept her order from taking effect until Apple filed its challenge. And while the New York and San Bernardino cases aren’t identical, Orenstein’s ruling, as FBI Director James Comey put it in a congressional hearing last week, will likely be “instructive” as Pym considers Apple’s argument—and could severely dent the FBI’s hopes of getting the powers it wants.

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This Case Just Gave Apple Some Major Ammo in Its Fight With the FBI

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Why Did Sheldon Adelson Buy Nevada’s Biggest Paper?

by ChandaFrederick Posted on February 16, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December, journalists at the Las Vegas Review-Journal were told that their paper had been sold—and that they wouldn’t be told who the new owners were.

The move touched off a nationwide guessing game, with speculation soon turning to local billionaire Sheldon Adelson. At first, the casino magnate rebuffed questions, before finally confirming his involvement.

That put an end to that mystery, but plenty of others surrounding the sale remain: How did a group of Review-Journal reporters end up tasked with an unorthodox investigation into a local judge trying a case vital to Adelson? And how did an article critical of that judge end up running in a Connecticut newspaper under a fake name?

But the most important question of all is why, exactly, did the political megadonor made the purchase? His family maintains it was an investment, but hardly anyone would argue the American newspaper industry is a safe financial bet in 2016. Was it to push his agenda in the 2016 presidential race? Or was it to take control of a local watchdog that has often been an irritant?

Adelson and his company, Las Vegas Sands, are major players in the city’s economy and politics, and since the mogul purchased the Review-Journal, the paper has wrestled with how to fairly cover its owner and disclose his many interests. Read all about it below, and make sure read our accompanying cover story on Adelson, too:

Spring 2015

An emissary quietly approaches GateHouse Media, the owners of the 106-year-old daily Las Vegas Review-Journal, on behalf of Sheldon Adelson.

David Becker/Zuma Press

September 21

News + Media Capital Group forms as a Delaware corporation. The paperwork lists Michael Schroeder, the publisher of a small chain of Connecticut newspapers, as the company’s manager. It will be three months until Adelson admits his family controls the company.

September

Schroeder offers a freelance reporter $5,000 to write an article on Nevada judges for one of his Connecticut papers. During the meeting, Schroeder mentions Adelson’s name and provides a 40-page “dossier” of court documents and newspaper clips. The reporter turns down the assignment, later telling the Huffington Post that it sounded too unorthodox.

Early November

A GateHouse executive calls a top editor at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, another GateHouse paper, with a story tip involving Las Vegas judges. The editor refuses to have his reporters investigate. “We just didn’t have the resources,” he later said. “There were too many questions that still needed to get resolved.”

November 4

The Nevada Supreme Court denies Adelson’s push to have Judge Elizabeth Gonzalez removed from former Sands executive Steve Jacobs’ wrongful-termination lawsuit against Adelson. Gonzalez had clashed with Adelson when he refused to answer questions on the stand: “Sir, you don’t get to argue with me,” she said. “Do you understand that?”

Jeff Scheid/AP

November 6

Over editors’ protests, GateHouse orders a group of Review-Journal reporters to drop everything and investigate several Las Vegas judges. The reporters eventually file 15,000 words of notes on three judges, including Gonzalez.

December 1

While none of the team’s reporting ever appears in the Review-Journal, two small Connecticut papers owned by Schroeder publish an article under the byline of Edward Clarkin that excoriates Gonzalez’s handling of the Adelson case.

December 10

GateHouse sells the Review-Journal to News + Media Capital Group for $140 million. The price is two to three times the paper’s estimated value, driving speculation that Adelson is the purchaser. Schroeder tells the newsroom that the new owners “want you to focus on your jobs…Don’t worry about who they are.” That night, according to the Huffington Post, publisher Jason Taylor stops the presses as an article on the sale is revised to deemphasize questions about the mystery buyer.

December 15

Adelson sits in the front section as his Venetian resort hosts a Republican presidential debate. He denies to CNN’s Brian Stelter that he’s bought the paper, saying he has “no personal interest.”

December 16

Adelson and his family are finally revealed as the Review-Journal‘s new owners but insist in an open letter that they always intended to come forward and had bought the paper as an investment with no plans to meddle in its management. Despite these assurances, Taylor requires reporters and editors to get approval before covering Adelson or the sale.

December 18

The Review-Journal publishes an article detailing how its reporters were tasked with the judicial investigation. The article also explores ties between Schroeder, the newspaper group’s manager, and the Edward Clarkin article slamming Gonzalez. It notes that Clarkin’s byline previously only appeared as a restaurant reviewer.

December 22

After five years on the job, the Review-Journal‘s top editor accepts a buyout offer, citing concerns about the new ownership.

December 23

The Hartford Courant reports it can’t find anyone named “Edward Clarkin” in Connecticut, and that sources quoted in his article say they’ve never heard of him. The Courant also reports that major passages in the Clarkin article are “nearly identical to work that previously appeared in other publications.” Another Connecticut journalist tweets that Schroeder’s middle name is Edward and his mother’s maiden name is Clarkin.

Gregor Cresnar/The Noun Project

Around December 28

Schroeder is removed from his post overseeing the Review-Journal. “It just seemed like the right thing to do under the circumstances,” an Adelson spokesman later says. “I’ll leave it at that.”

January 4, 2016

The Review-Journal’s managers bring in an adviser to work out guidelines for covering Adelson’s many interests. An editor live-tweets the contentious meeting. “You’ve got to ease up here just a little,” the adviser says, “so everyone doesn’t blow their cork.”

January 5

Michael Schroeder publishes a note to readers, taking “full responsibility” for the Clarkin article, which he says failed to meet his papers’ standards, and conceding that the byline was a pseudonym.

Stephen Dunn/The Hartford Courant

January 6

Editorial writer Glenn Cook is appointed interim editor. He issues guidelines requiring a standing disclosure on the Adelsons’ interests and ownership of the Review-Journal in the print edition and on the paper’s website, and additional taglines mentioning Adelson’s ownership on “all relevant” stories. The guidelines preserve the publisher’s right to review “significant stories about the newspaper’s ownership.”

January 11

During a deposition, one of Steve Jacobs’ lawyers asks Adelson’s son-in-law, Patrick Dumont, if he discussed Jacobs’ lawsuit with Schroeder or participated in drafting any articles on the trial. Dumont declines to answer.

January 13

Las Vegas Sands lawyers file a new motion to remove Gonzalez from the Jacobs case, arguing that she showed bias against Sands by giving interviews to the press amid “recent intensified media coverage of the lawsuit.” Gonzalez denies any “bias toward or prejudice against” Las Vegas Sands.

January 27

Press critic Jay Rosen outlines a series of unanswered questions about the Review-Journal transaction. “By failing to address the very serious questions left hanging by the sale,” he writes, “the people who run GateHouse Media are, I believe, playing havoc with its reputation.”

January 28

The Review-Journal announces that Craig Moon, former publisher and president of USA Today and executive vice president of Gannett, will replace Taylor as publisher. Moon immediately removes the standing disclosure statement, calling it “overkill.”

January 28

Las Vegas Sands proposes building a $1.2 billion domed stadium, to be shared by the University of Nevada-Las Vegas football team and a potential NFL franchise. Sands had previously opposed plans to redevelop the site as an improvement project for the Las Vegas Convention Center—a direct competitor with Adelson’s Sands Expo and Convention Center.

January 30

The Review-Journal editorial board praises the plan for a new stadium: “This stadium is the missing piece of tourism infrastructure in Las Vegas, more important than any other proposal, including the expansion of the Las Vegas Convention Center.”

February 4

Gatehouse CEO Mike Reed tells Politico that there was no “specific mandate” for Review-Journal reporters to investigate Las Vegas judges, and he accuses the newsroom of spinning “untruths” about the judicial investigation. Since Moon was hired, Politico reports, stories involving Adelson have been “reviewed, changed or killed almost daily.”

February 5

J. Keith Moyer, a veteran of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the Fresno Bee, and several Gannett papers, is named editor of the Review-Journal. On the same day, sources close to Adelson tell Politico that the billionaire is nearing an endorsement of Marco Rubio, the Review-Journal endorses Rubio. “The Adelsons have detached themselves from our endorsement process, and our endorsement of Sen. Rubio does not represent the support of the family,” the editorial board writes.

February 8

Moyer tells USA Today that Adelson “told me directly he would be staying out of the newsroom,” and shares that the new owners have aspirations to make the Review-Journal “a Western regional powerhouse.”

“People will be watching, and they should be,” Moyer says.

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Why Did Sheldon Adelson Buy Nevada’s Biggest Paper?

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Here Are Six All-Important Cases Now Pretty Much Decided After Scalia’s Death

by ElizbethCardwel Posted on February 14, 2016

Mother Jones

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The last time a sitting Supreme Court justice expired on the job was in 2005, when Chief Justice William Rehnquist died of cancer. But Rehnquist’s death was somewhat expected, and he died in September, before the start of the October term, and before the court was in full swing with oral arguments and case decisions. Justice Antonin Scalia, unfortunately, has died smack in the middle of a blockbuster court term, with a host of hot-button cases argued, or about to be argued, and all to be decided by the end of June.

Because of the polarized nature of the court, Scalia’s death makes it all but certain that in most of those cases, the votes will result in a 4-4 tie, which means that the decision of the lower courts will likely stand unless one of the justices goes off the reservation and votes with the opposite side. That means we can probably predict the outcome of several key cases without having to wait until June.

The results are a mixed bag. The Obama administration is likely to lose an important fight over immigration. Unions win. Reproductive rights for women could suffer. And challenges to redistricting are likely to founder.

Here’s a rundown of how six of those cases are likely to unfold:

Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association: Perhaps the biggest beneficiaries of Scalia’s death are public sector unions. This case, which produced one of the more contentious oral arguments of the term, was headed towards a 5-4 decision in favor of Rebecca Friedrichs and the other plaintiffs who were challenging the California’s teachers’ union’s right to charge public school employees fees to cover the costs of the collective bargaining it did on their behalf, even though they aren’t members of the union. The case was teed up by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, and labor supporters feared a ruling against the union could devastate what’s left of labor’s power. The lawyers for Friedrichs asked the lower court to rule against them to hasten the case’s arrival at the Supreme Court. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals complied, and now that decision is likely to stand if the liberal-conservative split on the court delivers a 4-4 vote. Labor wins.

US v Texas: Texas and nearly two dozen other states filed suit to block the implementation of President Barack Obama’s orders to the Department of Homeland Security to defer the deportation of about 5.5 million immigrants, especially children brought to the US illegally by their parents. In November, the ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding a lower court decision, ruled that Obama had exceeded his authority to make such sweeping changes to the immigration system without an act of Congress. Obama’s move was in trouble even with Scalia on the court, but now it seems likely that a tie vote will result in the Fifth Circuit’s ruling holding fast. Immigrants lose.

Evenwel v Abbott and Harris v Arizona Independent Redistricting: These cases both involve attacks on the drawing of legislative districts and involve the sorts of political issues that the court has historically avoided, preferring to leave politics and redistricting fights to the politicians. Rulings in favor of the plaintiffs–mostly tea party activists–would likely result in political districts more tilted to favor rural, white Republican voters. Both cases came to the court on appeal from unusual three-judge courts that are specifically delegated to hear certain sorts of election law and voting rights cases. Those trial courts are different in that appeals of their decisions go straight to the US Supreme Court, bypassing the traditional federal appellate courts. Conservatives in recent years have used these courts as a way of fast-tracking their cases to the now-very conservative Supreme Court. The landmark Citizens United case came to the court this way. Now, though, that fast track is going to grind to a halt, as the plaintiffs in both cases lost in the three-judge courts, whose decisions are likely to now stand. Tea partiers lose.

Women’s Whole Health v Hellerstedt and Zubik v Burwell: The court is poised to hear several major challenges involving women’s reproductive health rights. In Women’s Whole Health, the court will decide whether Texas’s restrictive abortion law, which has already resulted in the closure of many clinics and, if fully enforced, would close even more clinics and force women in Texas to travel long distances or leave the state in search of a legal abortion, is constitutional. The conservative Fifth Circuit upheld most of the law, but the Supreme Court blocked parts of it from taking effect until the case could be heard. If there’s a tie at the Supreme Court, the abortion clinics are all but doomed.

In Zubik, a host of religious organizations, including the Little Sisters of the Poor, have asked the court to block a requirement by the Obama administration that they sign a form asking for a religious exemption for providing mandatory contraception coverage in their insurance plans for employees that’s required by the Affordable Care Act. Virtually all of the lower courts have ruled against the nuns and the other organizations, declaring that signing a piece of paper isn’t much of a burden on religious liberty. So a tied Supreme Court vote is likely to result in a victory for the Obama administration. Nuns lose.

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Here Are Six All-Important Cases Now Pretty Much Decided After Scalia’s Death

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