3 Stories You Should Read 2/21/2019: Bramble Cay Melomy, Christopher Paul Hasson, Nancy Pelosi
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In the category of: Things that can’t be fixed.
Australian Rat Declared Extinct Due To Man-Made Climate Change
One expert said the island mammal “is just the first of what will be countless species lost to climate change if we don’t get our pollution under control.”
The Australian government has confirmed the extinction of a small rodent native to a tiny spit of sand in the northernmost part of the Great Barrier Reef ― the first known mammal lost to human-caused climate change.
Bramble Cay melomys lived on the coral island of Bramble Cay, located in the Torres Strait between Queensland state and Papua New Guinea. The Government of Queensland initially declared the species extinct in a 2016 report, and Australian Environment Minister Melissa Price confirmed the die-off in a press release this week. The whiskered rat has been officially reclassified from “endangered” to “extinct.”
Geoff Richardson, an official with Australia’s Department of the Environment and Energy, told lawmakers on Monday that the declaration “was not a decision to take lightly,” according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
In the category of: It’s a white problem.
Christopher Paul Hasson wrote he was “dreaming of a way to kill almost every last person on the earth.”
A Coast Guard lieutenant and self-proclaimed white nationalist was arrested on charges of illegal drug and weapons possession on Friday. But authorities say the charges are just the “proverbial tip of the iceberg” and that the man is a “domestic terrorist, bent on committing acts dangerous to human life.”
Christopher Paul Hasson, a 49-year-old resident of Silver Spring, Maryland, had stockpiled weapons and ammunition and was allegedly planning to kill a number of prominent Democratic politicians and journalists as well as professors, judges, and “leftists in general,” federal prosecutors said in a court filing on Tuesday.
The filing details disturbing allegations, including Hasson’s writings about a potential race war, where he asserts that “much blood will have to be spilled to get whitey off the couch,” and his study of Anders Breivik, a Norwegian far-right domestic terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011. Law enforcement agents discovered 15 firearms and more than 1,000 rounds of mixed ammunition when they searched Hasson’s home on Friday. Seamus Hughes of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism was first to uncover the filing.
In the category of: A woman with a plan.
NANCY PELOSI REVEALS HER PLAN TO DISMANTLE TRUMP’S NATIONAL EMERGENCY
The House speaker wants Congress to bring the president to heel.
Donald Trump’s emergency declaration is already facing a lawsuit filed by several states—and now, as expected, Democrats are mounting their own challenge to the president’s possibly unconstitutional measure to build his long-sought border wall. In a letter Wednesday obtained by Politico, Nancy Pelosi called on lawmakers to support a resolution by Texas Representative Joaquin Castro seeking to “terminate this emergency declaration.”
“The President’s decision to go outside the bounds of the law to try to get what he failed to achieve in the constitutional legislative process violates the Constitution and must be terminated,” Pelosi wrote to both Democrats and Republicans of the resolution, which, according to the Associated Press, is expected Friday. “We have a solemn responsibility to uphold the Constitution, and defend our system of checks and balances against the President’s assault.”
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