January 6: Just the facts

Wikipedia- More than 1,200 people have been charged with federal crimes relating to the attack. As of December 2023, 728 defendants had pleaded guilty, while another 166 defendants were convicted at trial; a total of 745 defendants have been sentenced. Many participants in the attack were linked to far-right extremist groups or conspiratorial movements, including the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters. Numerous plotters were convicted of seditious conspiracy, including Oath Keepers and Proud Boys members;^[82] the longest sentence to date was given to then-Proud Boy chairman Enrique Tarrio, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison….

Encouraged by Trump, on January 5 and 6 thousands of his supporters gathered in Washington, D.C., to support his false claims that the 2020 election had been "stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats" … Starting at noon on January 6,  at a "Save America" rally on the Ellipse, Trump gave a speech in which he repeated false claims of election irregularities and said, "If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore." …

More than 2,000 rioters entered the building, with many vandalizing and looting,  including the offices of then-House speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Congress members. Rioters also assaulted Capitol Police officers and reporters, and attempted to capture and harm lawmakers. A gallows was erected west of the Capitol, with rioters chanting to "Hang Mike Pence" after he rejected requests, from Trump and others, to use his authority to overturn the election results.

With building security breached, Capitol Police evacuated and locked down both chambers of Congress and several buildings in the Complex. Rioters occupied the empty Senate chamber while federal law enforcement officers defended the evacuated House floor  Pipe bombs were found at both the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee headquarters, and Molotov cocktails were discovered in a vehicle near the Capitol.

Internet

 AP News - New York can move ahead with a law requiring internet service providers to offer heavily discounted rates to low-income residents, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. The decision from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan reverses a lower court ruling from 2021 that blocked the policy just days before it went into effect.The law would force internet companies to give some low-income New Yorkers broadband service for as low as $15 a month, or face fines from the state. Telecoms trade groups sued over the law, arguing it would cost them too much money and that it wrongly superseded a federal law that governs internet service.

Restaurants

 One of the reasons I like going to restaurants is because they are a rare place that asks you what you want and when you reply, they say your choice is "awsome." - Sam Smith

Trump

Guardian - We’ve now finished our first week of testimony in former president Donald Trump’s criminal trial – and have one major witness in the books. David Pecker, the former CEO of American Media Inc, and CEO and publisher of the National Enquirer, wrapped up his testimony on Friday afternoon after cross-examination by Trump’s legal team and a quick second round of questioning from the prosecution and defense.

Prosecutors had a few main goals with Pecker:

• Show that Pecker and Trump engaged in an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election
• Establish AMI’s “catch-and-kill” pattern of purchasing negative stories about Trump to keep them under wraps
• Show how close the former Trump attorney Michael Cohen was with Trump
• Tee things up for future testimony about the falsified payments scheme that Trump allegedly used to pay back Cohen after he paid to keep adult film star Stormy Daniels from telling the public about her alleged affair with Trump before the 2016 election

They seemed to achieve all of them, to varying degrees. Pecker said he had agreed to help Trump keep bad stories out of the news, saying on multiple occasions that he had promised to be the Trump campaign’s “eyes and ears” for problematic stories – a contention he repeated while being grilled by Trump’s attorney on Friday. He said explicitly, and repeatedly, that he had been doing so to help Trump’s election chances. When asked why he’d paid $150,000 to buy the former Playboy model Karen McDougal’s story to keep it quiet, he said he and Cohen “didn’t want this story to embarrass Mr Trump or embarrass or hurt the campaign”. He talked about specific meetings he had had with both Cohen and Trump, and made clear that Cohen had regularly checked in with him on behalf of “the boss”. And Pecker’s testimony established a pattern of Trump looking to get others to buy women’s silence to help his campaign, setting up Trump’s post-election payments to Cohen.

BBC - One of Donald Trump's potential running mates is facing criticism for sharing a story in her memoir about how she killed her dog. Kristi Noem, 52, the governor of South Dakota, wrote in her soon-to-be released memoir that the dog, Cricket, was "untrainable" and "dangerous."After deciding she needed to be put down, Ms Noem led the dog to a gravel pit and shot her."It was not a pleasant job," she wrote. "But it had to be done."

Workers

Axios - It was a huge week for U.S. workers, who notched some big wins that could lead to higher wages for millions.... The Labor Department this week expanded its rule on when employees are owed overtime.

• Also this week, the Federal Trade Commission took the radical step of releasing a rule that bans nearly all noncompete agreements.
• The FTC estimates that 30 million Americans are subject to these agreements and that its ban will lead to $524 in increased wages per year, per worker, on average.

Outside of Washington, auto workers in the South scored a breakthrough victory last week when employees at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga voted overwhelmingly in favor of unionizing. The vote gives unions a major inroad into organizing the South, historically hostile to organizing.

Another worker win: Late last night, Daimler truck workers in North Carolina reached a deal that gives them 25% raises and avoids a strike that would have started today, The New York Times reports.

Environment

EcoWatch - Climate change damage worldwide will cost approximately $38 trillion annually by 2050, according to a new study by Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. The impacts will be felt all over the world, but will most affect countries that have contributed the least to the climate crisis “Our study highlights the considerable inequity of climate impacts: We find damages almost everywhere, but countries in the tropics will suffer the most because they are already warmer. Further temperature increases will therefore be most harmful there. The countries least responsible for climate change are predicted to suffer income loss that is 60% greater than the higher-income countries and 40% greater than higher-emission countries. They are also the ones with the least resources to adapt to its impacts,” said co-author of the study Anders Levermann, PIK’s head of research department complexity science, in a press release from PIK... “Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly-developed ones such as Germany and the U.S., with a projected median income reduction of 11% each and France with 13%,” said study co-author Leonie Wenz, a PIK climate scientist and economist, as The Associated Press reported.

Inside Climate News -  In 1971, President Richard Nixon’s science advisers proposed a multimillion dollar climate change research project with benefits they said were too “immense” to be quantified, since they involved “ensuring man’s survival,” according to a White House document newly obtained by the nonprofit National Security Archive and shared exclusively with Inside Climate News. The plan would have established six global and 10 regional monitoring stations in remote locations to collect data on carbon dioxide, solar radiation, aerosols and other factors that exert influence on the atmosphere. It would have engaged five government agencies in a six-year initiative, with spending of $23 million in the project’s peak year of 1974—the equivalent of $172 million in today’s dollars. It would have used then-cutting-edge technology, some of which is only now being widely implemented in carbon monitoring more than 50 years later.  But it stands as yet another lost opportunity early on the road to the climate crisis. Researchers at the National Security Archive, based at the George Washington University, could find no documentation of what happened to the proposal, and it was never implemented.

Politics

Roll Call - After 20,000 or more New Hampshire voters received a call with the artificial-intelligence-doctored voice of President Joe Biden asking them to skip the state’s primary in January, state officials were in a quandary. Attorney General John M. Formella launched an investigation alongside others into the robocall that urged recipients to “save your vote for the November election,” ultimately identifying a Texas-based organization as the culprit. But New Hampshire lawmakers who say simply identifying the origins of these deepfakes isn’t enough are backing legislation that would prohibit them within 90 days of an election unless they’re accompanied by a disclosure stating that AI was used.  New Hampshire is now one of at least 39 states considering measures that would add transparency to AI-generated deepfake ads or calls as political campaigns intensify ahead of the November presidential election. The state’s measure passed in the House but not the Senate.  Like New Hampshire’s bill, other states’ efforts are largely focused on identifying content produced using AI as opposed to controlling that content or prohibiting its distribution, according to Megan Bellamy, vice president of law and policy at the Voting Rights Lab, a nonpartisan group that tracks election related laws in states.

In Wisconsin, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed into law a measure that requires political ads and messages produced using synthetic audio and video or made using AI tools to carry a disclaimer. Failure to comply results in a $1,000 fine for each violation. Fair-election groups like Voting Rights Lab say that doesn’t go far enough. The Wisconsin disclaimer requirement applies only to campaign-affiliated entities while leaving out other individuals and groups, Bellamy said.

Meanwhile. . .

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