12 November 20
To the People Who are Donating Now: Thank You!
Just want to take a moment to give a special shout out to the people who are responding to the donation appeals for this drive.
When it’s tough sledding the people who step up are the backbone of the organization.
This is one tough fundraising drive, make no mistake about it. But 464 people so far have said Reader Supported News is worth my time and my contribution.
That is inspiring.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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11 November 20
It's Live on the HomePage Now:
Reader Supported News
Nina Turner | Working People Delivered Biden His Victory. Now He Needs to Deliver for Them.
Nina Turner, The Washington Post
Turner writes: "As the dust settles, pundits, political operatives and party insiders are already swarming to tell the story of what really happened in 2020. They'll zero in on the smallest margins, the most unlikely Trump-to-Biden swing voters, the affluent white suburbanites. But that's not the story of this election."
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Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (photo: AP)
Tom Engelhardt | State of Chaos: Donald Trump Knew Us Better Than We Knew Ourselves
Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
Engelhardt writes: "Now that Trump's defeated, count on one thing: he'll take as much of this country with him as he can."
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A US Postal Service vehicle passes the White House, three days after election day. (photo: Bryan Dozier/Shutterstock)
US Postal Worker Recants Voter-Fraud Claims After Republicans Call for Inquiry
Maanvi Singh, Guardian UK
Singh writes: "A postal worker whose allegations of ballot tampering are the basis of Republican calls for investigations has reportedly recanted his story."
Investigators told the committee that Hopkins “did not explain why he signed a false affidavit”, the committee wrote in a statement.
Hopkins admitted to fabricating his claims, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing three officials. After he submitted the affidavit, the South Carolina Republican senator Lindsay Graham, who heads the Senate judiciary committee, called for a federal investigation.
Yesterday, the US attorney general sent a memo to prosecutors approving federal investigations into voter fraud, despite a lack of evidence that such fraud was taking place.
In response, the top justice department official in charge of voter fraud investigations, Richard Pilger, resigned, pointing to a 40-year department policy to refrain from intervening in elections and carry out investigations only after elections are certified.
News that Hopkins had fabricated his claims came as the Trump campaign continued to pursue longshot lawsuits in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia that are not backed by credible evidence.
Among these lawsuits is an effort in Pennsylvania to push the US supreme court to reject mail-in ballots that are postmarked by election day and arrived at election offices up to three days later. The state’s supreme court had approved a deadline extension for ballots that arrived late; several other states accept late-arriving ballots.
The Trump campaign attempted to argue in federal court that Republican observers were blocked from monitoring the vote count, until a lawyer for the campaign had to admit that actually a “non-zero” number of observers had been allowed.
These dubious lawsuits and investigations have continued after media outlets projected that Joe Biden was the clear winner of the election. Trump has yet to concede and has illegitimately declared himself the victor.
Top Republicans, including the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, have defended Trump’s right to challenge the election results. On Monday, McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor that Trump was “100% within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options”.
Republicans have been scrambling to drum up any evidence to back their baseless claims of fraud, opening up a hotline that was inundated with prank calls. On Tuesday, Dan Patrick, the Republican lieutenant governor of Texas, said he was offering $1m to incentivize people to come forth with evidence of irregularities.
The party’s efforts are unlikely to have any effect on the outcome of the presidential election. Biden has secured a big enough lead in swing states that even if some ballots that Republicans want thrown out were discarded, he would still win.
But critics have said that the president’s refusal to admit defeat and Republicans’ efforts to challenge the results are sowing doubt in the US elections system.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll this week of 1,363 adults found that 79% of Americans believe Joe Biden won the election, including about 60% of Republicans. About 72% said that the loser of the election should concede. A separate poll from Politico and Morning Consult, however, found that 70% of Republicans do not believe the presidential election was “free and fair”.
The president and his party’s efforts to undermine the effectiveness of the US elections system began before election day.
In August, Trump admitted he was undermining the postal service so the USPS would have a harder time delivering mail-in ballots. Louis DeJoy, the postmaster general and a major Republican donor, was found to have made cuts to the service amid major service delays reported around the country.
Turnout increased across predominantly Arab neighbourhoods in Dearborn, Michigan. (photo: Ali Harb/MEE)
How Michigan's Muslims Helped Biden Win the White House
Ali Harb, Middle East Eye
Harb writes: "In Dearborn, a city with a population of 94,000 and a large concentration of Arabs and Muslims, President-elect Joe Biden beat Trump by more than 17,000 votes - 30,718 to 13,239."
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Former Louisville Metro Police detective Brett Hankison is called a 'sexual predator' in a new lawsuit. (photo: Facebook)
Breonna Taylor Cop Sued by Lawyer for Sexually Assaulting Her
Tessa Duvall, The Louisville Courier Journal
Duvall writes: "A new lawsuit filed against former Louisville Metro Police detective Brett Hankison calls him a 'sexual predator' who left an alleged victim 'physically injured and mentally battered.'"
Margo Borders of Louisville is accusing Hankison of "willfully, intentionally, painfully and violently" sexually assaulting her after offering her a ride home from a bar in 2018.
Borders, a local attorney and University of Louisville law school graduate, publicly accused Hankison of the attack in a June 4 Facebook post shared more than 16,000 times. She called him "a predator of the worst kind" in a previous statement to The Courier Journal.
Hankison, 44, was one of three officers who fired a weapon at Breonna Taylor's apartment the night she died March 13, though officials said none of his 10 rounds struck the 26-year-old unarmed Black woman.
LMPD has since fired Hankison for his role in the shooting, saying he fired "blindly" into Taylor's apartment. He also faces three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment for bullets that went into a neighboring occupied apartment.
Borders says on April 20, 2018, she saw Hankison working outside the Tin Roof bar while he was in uniform and she was a law student. They'd previously met in 2017 and had contact over social media.
After her friends left the bar, Hankison insisted on giving her a ride home and invited himself inside her apartment, the suit alleges.
Borders left Hankison on the couch while she fell asleep in her room, and Hankison sexually assaulted her, the suit said.
Once she regained consciousness, Borders yelled for Hankison to get off of her, the suit says. Later that day, Hankison messaged Borders and tried to "suggest that the two had engaged in consensual relations," it says.
The assault left Borders bloodied and in "tremendous physical pain," the suit alleges.
Hankison's attorney for the case couldn't immediately be reached for comment. Allegations in a civil suit represent one side of a story and are not evidence in a court of law.
The suit was filed Tuesday in Jefferson County Circuit Court by Sam Aguiar and Lonita Baker, attorneys for Taylor's family, along with Steve Romines, an attorney for Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who has filed a civil suit against LMPD.
Walker fired a shot when police broke in Taylor's door during an attempted drug search. Police say the shot struck Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly in the thigh. Mattingly, Hankison and Detective Myles Cosgrove fired 32 shots in return, killing Taylor.
Walker was charged with attempted murder of an officer, but the charge was dropped after he said he didn't hear police announce themselves at Taylor's door. Walker is suing for wrongful arrest.
Borders' attorneys are joined by Harry Borders, the victim's father and an attorney at Borders & Borders, a law firm where Margo Borders works as a lawyer.
The suit also includes comments from nine other women who claim either inappropriate conduct or sexual assault by Hankison.
Another woman also publicly accused Hankison of sexual misconduct in an Instagram post liked nearly 450,000 times, the suit says. In it, she says Hankison offered her a ride home from a bar and proceeded to rub her, kiss her and call her "baby."
"Mortified, I did not move," she wrote. "I continued to talk about my grad school experiences and ignored him. As soon as he pulled up to my apartment building, I got out of the car and ran to the back."
The woman wrote that her friend reported the incident the next day, "and of course nothing came from it."
In addition to Hankison, the suit names former LMPD chief Steve Conrad, other police officers, the Tin Roof and its manager for failing to intervene or prevent Hankison's alleged conduct.
The failure of other officers who did not report or stop Hankison's actions was "unreasonable, unconscionable, conducted in bad faith and a proximate cause of the harms suffered by Margo," the suit says.
It also alleges that the Tin Roof knew Hankison "routinely identified intoxicated young women, put them in his vehicle while in uniform and left the premises with them while already beginning to engage in visible misconduct."
LMPD declined to comment, citing pending litigation.
The Tin Roof put out a statement Wednesday morning, saying Hankison was terminated in the spring and the bar now only uses internal security staff.
"We feel there is an obligation to provide a safe environment for guests as they enter and exit the venue and would never deliberately put the safety of our patrons at risk especially by those contracted to serve and protect," the statement said. "We find the allegations to be reprehensible, and our company does not tolerate abuse of power or discrimination in any form."
The suit seeks damages and attorneys fees for Borders.
Indigenous people from Cauca as they march to Bolivar Square in Bogota, Oct. 19, 2020. (photo: Carlos Ortega/EPA
Colombia: Murders of Social Leaders Reach 251 So Far This Year
teleSUR
Excerpt: "Colombia's Institute of Studies for Development and Peace Observatory of Conflicts, Peace, and Human Rights reported that the number of social leaders' assassinations of had climbed to 251 deaths so far this year in the country."
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Activity in the San Ardo oil field near Salinas, California, has been linked to earthquakes. (photo: Eugene Zelneko/Wikimedia)
Fracking Likely Triggered Earthquakes in California a Few Miles From the San Andreas Fault
Thomas H. Goebel, The Conversation
Goebel writes: "The way companies drill for oil and gas and dispose of wastewater can trigger earthquakes, at times in unexpected places."
In West Texas, earthquake rates are now 30 times higher than they were in 2013. Studies have also linked earthquakes to oil field operations in Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and Ohio.
California was thought to be an exception, a place where oil field operations and tectonic faults apparently coexisted without much problem. Now, new research shows that the state's natural earthquake activity may be hiding industry-induced quakes.
As a seismologist, I have been investigating induced earthquakes in the U.S., Europe and Australia. Our latest study, released on Nov. 10, shows how California oil field operations are putting stress on tectonic faults in an area just a few miles from the San Andreas Fault.
Seismic Surge
Industry-induced earthquakes have been an increasing concern in the central and eastern United States for more than a decade.
Most of these earthquakes are too small to be felt, but not all of them. In 2016, a magnitude 5.8 earthquake damaged buildings in Pawnee, Oklahoma, and led state and federal regulators to shut down 32 wastewater disposal wells near a newly discovered fault. Large earthquakes are rare far from tectonic plate boundaries, and Oklahoma experiencing three magnitude 5 or greater earthquakes in one year, as happened in 2016, was unheard of.
Oklahoma's earthquake frequency fell with lower oil prices and regulators' decision to require companies to decrease their well injection volume, but there are still more earthquakes there today than in 2010.
A familiar pattern has been emerging in West Texas in the past few years: Drastically increasing earthquake rates well beyond the natural rate. A magnitude 5 earthquake shook West Texas in March.
How It Works
At the root of the induced earthquake problem are two different types of fluid injection operations: hydraulic fracturing and wastewater disposal.
Hydraulic fracturing involves injecting water, sand and chemicals at very high pressures to create flow pathways for hydrocarbons trapped in tight rock formations. Wastewater disposal involves injecting fluids into deep geological formations. Although wastewater is pumped at low pressures, this type of operation can disturb natural pressures and stresses over large areas, several miles from injection wells.
Tectonic faults underneath geothermal and oil reservoirs are often precariously balanced. Even a small perturbation to the natural tectonic system – due to deep fluid injection, for example – can cause faults to slip and trigger earthquakes. The consequences of fluid injections are easily seen in Oklahoma and Texas. But what are the implications for other places, such as California, where earthquake-prone faults and oil fields are located in close proximity?
California Oil Fields' Hidden Risk
California provides a particularly interesting opportunity to study fluid injection effects.
The state has a large number of oil fields, earthquakes and many instruments that detect even tiny events, and it was thought to be largely free of unnatural earthquakes.
My colleague Manoo Shirzaei from Virginia Tech and I wondered if induced earthquakes could be masked by nearby natural earthquakes and were thus missed in previous studies. We conducted a detailed seismologic study of the Salinas basin in central California. The study area stands out because of its proximity to the San Andreas Fault and because waste fluids are injected at high rates close to seismically active faults.
Using satellite radar images from 2016 to 2020, Shirzaei made a surprising observation: Some regions in the Salinas basin were lifting at about 1.5 centimeters per year, a little over half an inch. This uplift was a first indication that fluid pressures are out of balance in parts of the San Ardo oil field. Increasing fluid pressures in the rock pores stretch the surrounding rock matrix like a sponge that is pumped full of water. The resulting reservoir expansion elevates the forces that act on the surrounding tectonic faults.
Next, we examined the seismic data and found that fluid injection and earthquakes were highly correlated over more than 40 years. Surprisingly, this extended out 15 miles from the oil field. Such distances are similar to the large spatial footprint of injection wells in Oklahoma. We analyzed the spatial pattern of 1,735 seismic events within the study area and found clustering of events close to injection wells.
Other areas in California may have a similar history, and more detailed studies are needed to differentiate natural from induced events there.
How to Lower the Earthquake Risk
Most wastewater disposal and hydraulic fracturing wells do not lead to earthquakes that can be felt, but the wells that cause problems have three things in common:
- These are high-volume injection wells;
- They inject into highly permeable rock formations; and
- These formations are located directly above tectonic faults in the deeper geologic basement.
Although the first issue may be difficult to resolve because reducing the volume of waste fluids would require reducing the amount of oil produced, the locations of injection wells can be planned more carefully. The seismic safety of oil and gas operations may be increased by selecting geologic formations that are disconnected from deep faults.
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