Marcy Wheeler: Mueller Probe Could Lead to Indictment of the Trump Organization

Published on Dec 10, 2018
Democracy Now!

https://democracynow.org – Federal prosecutors have accused President Trump of committing a federal crime by directing illegal hush money to two women during the presidential election. The accusation was revealed Friday in filings made public by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York, including a damning sentencing memo for Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen, who has admitted to paying adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal during the campaign in order to prevent them from speaking to the media about their alleged affairs with Trump. The sentencing memo was made public along with two new sentencing memos from special counsel Robert Mueller: one for Cohen and another for Trump’s former campaign chair Paul Manafort. “We keep talking about whether you can indict a sitting president,” says independent journalist Marcy Wheeler, editor of EmptyWheel.net. “There’s still a debate about that, but, really critically, you can indict a corporation. You can indict Trump Organization.”

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COP24: U.S., Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait Block Adoption of U.N. Climate Report

Dec 10, 2018

and

Here at the U.N. climate talks in Katowice, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait have blocked language “welcoming” October’s landmark IPCC climate report, which warned of the catastrophic effects of a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius—or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit—beyond which global crises could unfold at a rapid pace. The four countries rejected using the word “welcome,” insisting that members instead “note” the findings of the widely cited U.N. report.

Protesters Take to the Streets as COP24 Heads into Second Week

Dec 10, 2018

The report was blocked hours after thousands of climate protesters marched in Katowice on Saturday to call out Poland’s promotion of coal mining and to demand urgent action on climate change. Major climate protests took place in a number of other cities, including Montreal, where protesters spoke out against the Trans Mountain expansion pipeline, and in Paris, where an estimated 25,000 people marched, at times overlapping with the “yellow vest” demonstrations.

Tristan: “Climate nowadays is really fundamental, and in particular in a context of social debate. Both causes converge, because decision makers and leaders are elected to take decisions in both areas. And today the context urges us to fight, because there is a climate emergency and also an increasing social emergency.”

We’ll bring you voices from the protest here in Katowice later in the broadcast.

For ongoing stories see:

• Katowice Climate Summit 2018 | Democracy Now!
• Climate change | Environment | The Guardian
• UN climate change conference 2018 – BBC News

Climate change | Environment | The Guardian

See related:

• Katowice Climate Summit 2018 | Democracy Now!
• UN climate change conference 2018 – BBC News

Katowice Climate Summit 2018 | Democracy Now!

See related:

• UN climate change conference 2018 – BBC News
• Climate change | Environment | The Guardian
  

UN climate change conference 2018 – BBC News

See related:

• Katowice Climate Summit 2018 | Democracy Now!
• Climate change | Environment | The Guardian

 

Climate change: COP24 fails to adopt key scientific report – BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46496967

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent, Katowice
See: https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/cgdwpywgeegt/un-climate-change-conference-2018

Attempts to incorporate a key scientific study into global climate talks in Poland have failed.

The IPCC report on the impacts of a temperature rise of 1.5C, had a significant impact when it was launched last October.

Scientists and many delegates in Poland were shocked as the US, Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kuwait objected to this meeting “welcoming” the report.

It was the 2015 climate conference that had commissioned the landmark study.

• Final call to halt ‘climate catastrophe’
• Five things we have learned from the IPCC report
• What does 1.5C mean in a warming world?

The report said that the world is now completely off track, heading more towards 3C this century rather than 1.5C.

Keeping to the preferred target would need “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. If warming was to be kept to 1.5C this century, then emissions of carbon dioxide would have to be reduced by 45% by 2030.

The report, launched in Incheon in South Korea, had an immediate impact winning praise from politicians all over the world.

… (read more)

See related:

• Katowice Climate Summit 2018 | Democracy Now!
• Climate change | Environment | The Guardian
• UN climate change conference 2018 – BBC News

Amount of deep life on Earth quantified – BBC News

By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent

Scientists have estimated the total amount of life on Earth that exists below ground – and it is vast.

You would need a microscope to see this subterranean biosphere, however.

It is made up mostly of microbes, such as bacteria and their evolutionary cousins, the archaea.

Nonetheless, it represents a lot of carbon – about 15 to 23 billion tonnes of it. That is hundreds of times more carbon than is woven into all the humans on the planet.

“Something like 70% of the total number of microbes on Earth are below our feet,” said Karen Lloyd from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, US.

“So, this changes our perception of where we find life on Earth, from mostly on the surface in things like trees and whales and dolphins, to most of it actually being underground,” she told BBC News.

Prof Lloyd is part of the Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) project, a near-decade long effort to identify how the ubiquitous element is cycled through the Earth system. The consortium is reporting its latest discoveries here at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) annual Fall Meeting in Washington DC.

• Humans help cook up mineral bounty
• Earth’s rarest minerals catalogued
• ‘Vast store’ of world’s oldest water

…(read more).