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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TODAY [2020-02-14]
Above the Fold
→ MCCLATCHY FILES FOR BANKRUPTCY.
File this under shocking but not surprising: McClatchy Co., the parent company of The News & Observer, the Durham Herald-Sun, The Charlotte Observer, and a bunch of other newspapers, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Thursday. For years, McClatchy has struggled with declining ad revenues and mounting debt, both from its 2006 purchase of Knight-Ridder and its deeply underfunded pension program. If a judge accepts McClatchy’s reorganization proposal, the company will be taken over by Chatham Asset Management, the hedge fund that owns The National Enquirer.
RELATED: In response to the news, Durham County commissioner candidate Nate Baker proposed that the county issue Journalism Vouchers — $20 a year to each resident to spend on the nonprofit journalism entity of their choice.
HERE IS SOMETHING I JUST LEARNED LAST NIGHT: “Here is all you need to know about McClatchy filing Chapter 11 and trying to duck pensions to “finish its digital transformation.” The N&O ran one of the first online news services IN THE WORLD, IN 1993(!!), before McClatchy bought them & dismantled it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nando” 8:09 AM · Feb 13, 2020 from Durham, NC·Tweetbot for iΟS
State & Local
→ BERNIE COMES, BLOOMBERG GOES.
Yesterday, Mike Bloomberg came to Raleigh Union Station, where he told a few hundred mostly seasoned citizens about his accomplishments as New York City mayor and mocked Donald Trump. (He failed to address the stop-and-frisk and redlining controversies, or the time he praised Singapore for executing drug dealers, or those weird memes his campaign purchased, or the fact that his deep pockets are robbing state and local Dem campaigns of talent.) Today, Bernie Sanders will take over the Durham Convention Center, where a few thousand Bernie bros and #HotGirlsforBernie will spend Valentine’s Day enraptured by universal health care and a livable planet. (He probably won’t discuss why he won’t release his health records like he promised to do.)
→ BERGER SELLS RALEIGH HOUSE, FACES ANOTHER ETHICS COMPLAINT.
In November, unrelenting ethics watchdog Bob Hall filed a complaint against Senate leader Phil Berger, alleging that Berger was using campaign funds to pay the mortgage on the townhouse he owned in Raleigh. Berger’s campaign listed its $73,500 in payments to Berger’s property company as rent. Senate ethics officials knew about Berger’s arrangement beforehand and had signed off, but Berger soon unloaded the townhouse anyway. He’d bought it in 2016 for $250,000 and sold it to a connected lobbyist in December for $330,000 — slightly less than the property’s appraised value but within the neighborhood’s norms. Though the State Ethics Commission’s executive director had pre-approved the sale, Hall filed another complaint anyway.
→ RALEIGH’S HILLSBOROUGH STREET GROWS UP.
A new report from LiveItUp! Hillsborough Street paints a rosy picture for the corridor around N.C. State: In 2019, it did $51.7 million in food and beverage sales, up almost 9 percent from 2018. Its retail vacancy rate is below 2 percent. And major construction projects totaling 1.2 million square feet are either planned or being built.
→ CARY WANTS TO BUILD AN INDOOR SPORTS COMPLEX.
The proposed 150,000-square-foot complex would seek to revitalize the Cary Town Centre and host youth and amateur events and tournaments. The money would come from Wake County tourism taxes. Interestingly, the county and Raleigh asked developers and local governments for bids on an indoor stadium; Cary was the only one interested. It wants $2.36 million a year for the next 30 years to build the $159 million project.
→ CHCCS SCHOOL BOARD CANCELS A CONTRACT IT DIDN’T APPROVE.
This does not seem like good governance: The school district has already spent $342,000 on a two-year professional development contract, though the school board never approved it. In fact, the school board wasn’t aware of it. In December, a month after school board members say they became aware of the contract, they suspended it — and for good reason. Contracts above $90,000 are required to get school board consent, and all contracts need to go through a pre-audit process, which wasn’t done here. Apparently, school administrators thought that, because each monthly payment was less than $90,000, they could enter this agreement without getting permission, which is not how these things work. The contract was closed on Tuesday.
→ WEATHER: The sun! Partly sunny and cooler, high of 48. 🌤
Nation & World
→ SENATE PASSES WAR-POWERS RESOLUTION TO RESTRAIN TRUMP.
Over President Trump’s objections, the Senate passed a bipartisan resolution to limit Trump’s ability to wage war against Iran. From the NYT: “The bipartisan vote, 55 to 45, amounted to a rare attempt by the Senate to restrain Mr. Trump’s authority just over a week after it voted to acquit him of impeachment charges, and nearly six weeks after the president moved without authorization from Congress to kill a top Iranian security commander.”
REALITY CHECK: “But it was a mostly symbolic rebuke of the president, as support for the measure fell short of the two-thirds supermajority needed to override a promised veto by Mr. Trump.”
→ DOJ BRASS INTERVENED IN MICHAEL FLYNN’S SENTENCING, TOO.
Roger Stone isn’t the only Trump ally/Russiagate defendant to get special treatment from William Barr’s Justice Department. According to NBC News, top Justice officials also leaned on career prosecutors to lower the sentencing recommendation against former national security adviser Michael Flynn. And that’s not the only instance of Barr meddling: He also removed Jessie Liu, the U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who’d been overseeing the case against Stone and an inconclusive investigation into Trump bête noire Andrew McCabe. Trump — who has publicly demanded that McCabe go to prison — rescinded Liu’s appointment to a Treasury Department position.
“IMPOSSIBLE TO DO MY JOB”: In an interview with ABC News, Barr said that Trump has never asked me to do anything in a criminal case,” but he added that Trump’s tweets about DOJ matters make it “impossible for me to do my job.”
JOHN KELLY SPEAKS OUT: The same day Barr told Trump to stop tweeting, the president’s former chief of staff broke his silence, saying Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman did the right thing in testifying about Trump’s Ukraine call, criticized Trump’s anti-immigration policy, and more or less called Trump’s dealings with North Korea naive. Predictably, Trump lashed out.
→ HOUSE VOTES TO EXTEND THE ERA DEADLINE.
The U.S. House voted 232–183 on Thursday to eliminate the 1982 deadline for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, with five Republicans joining Democrats in support. There’s a similar bill in the Senate. While it has bipartisan sponsors, the bill is unlikely to pass. Even if it does — as we mentioned yesterday — the ERA’s constitutionality is in doubt, despite Virginia becoming the 38th state to ratify the amendment last month.
→ TRUMP, REVERSING HIMSELF, ADMITS HE SENT RUDY TO UKRAINE.
Don’t act so surprised. In an interview with Geraldo a week after his acquittal, Trump — who had previously denied dispatching his personal lawyer to dig up dirt on the Bidens — stopped pretending. Asked if he regretted sending Rudy Giuliani to Ukraine, Trump said, "No, not at all. … Here's my choice: I deal with the Comeys of the world, or I deal with Rudy, … So when you tell me, why did I use Rudy, and one of the things about Rudy, number one, he was the best prosecutor, you know, one of the best prosecutors, and the best mayor, But also, other presidents had them."
→ PENTAGON WILL DIVERT $3.8B MORE TO THE WALL.
As part of the president’s plan to prove that he is too building a wall, the Pentagon told Congress that it will divert $3.8 billion to build 177 more miles of barrier, taking money from aircraft, drones, and navy vessels without congressional authorization. This is part of a plan to take $7.2 billion from the Pentagon’s budget for the wall this year — a year in which the president just so happens to be up for re-election.
→ COURT ORDERS MICROSOFT TO HALT WORK ON $10B DEFENSE CONTRACT.
The president has made his antipathy toward The Washington Post — and its owner, Amazon owner Jeff Bezos — no secret. That antipathy led a federal judge to order the Pentagon to halt work on a $10 billion cloud computing network that was supposed to go live tomorrow. The Pentagon awarded the contract to Microsoft in October after a last-minute intervention from the White House. Amazon — which had also bid on the contract — sued, alleging improper interference.
→ HOW TO CUT CARBON EMISSIONS.
Tax carbon, then give Americans refunds — at least, that’s the consensus of the Climate Leadership Council, a group of economists, business executives, economists, and politicians.
FROM THE WASHINGTON POST: “The council’s proposal is ambitious. It would impose what it calls a ‘carbon fee,’ which in 2021 would be set at $43 a ton and rise every year by 5 percentage points above inflation. That would double the price of a ton of coal, tax natural gas at $2.28 per thousand cubic feet and raise gasoline pump prices by about 38 cents a gallon. While the fees collected would go back to American families to help offset higher energy costs, they also would act as an incentive for individuals and companies to slash carbon emissions to a level lower than what President Barack Obama’s administration pledged under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the council says.”
RELATED: BP, the oil and gas company, says it will cut its greenhouse gas emissions to net-zero by 2050 and shift its investments to energy projects that do not contain carbon dioxide. In doing so, it joins Dominion Energy, which last week announced a goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2017, and 17 other U.S. utilities with similar targets.
→ U.S. CHARGES HUAWEI WITH CONSPIRACY TO STEAL TRADE SECRETS.
Federal prosecutors have charged the Chinese tech giant with a decades-long effort to steal intellectual property from six American companies. The alleged theft, The Washington Post reports, “helped Huawei illegally obtain technology relating to Internet routers and antennas, giving the company an unfair competitive advantage, prosecutors said.” The indictment also says the country has worked with Iran and North Korea, countries the U.S. has sanctioned.
Arts & Culture
→ A RITUAL FOR READING DUB.
There are few Durham writers I enjoy reading more than Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and certainly very few I enjoy editing more (and not only because I don’t have to do much). She’s a poet. She’s a scholar. She’s a thinker. She’s just damn smart and insightful and challenging, and her words are always magnificently sculpted. Yesterday, Duke University Press released Dub: Finding Community, the third book in Gumbs’s experimental trilogy. Check out Monèt Noelle Marshall’s instructions for reading from this week’s paper. More important, check out Dub — and Gumbs’s previous works, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity — at your earliest convenience.
→ CREATING A LITERARY PLATFORM FOR MARGINALIZED VOICES.
Poet Ina Cariño kicked off Indigena — an ongoing reading series by and for people of color, queer people, and disabled people — in December to create a platform to celebrate marginalized voices. That first reading drew about 20 people. The second one — featuring Taari Coleman, Nina Foster, Aimee (Harrison) Wright Clow, Jessica Q. Stark, and others — takes place at 3:30 p.m. on Sunday at VAE Raleigh. Cariño spoke with the INDY’s Emily Cantaneo about the series and why it’s important to the Triangle’s literary community.
Odds & Ends
→ THE HOUSTON ASTROS APOLOGIZE FOR ALL THE CHEATING.
Amid calls that the Astros be stripped of their 2017 World Series title, owner Jim Crane pinky swears his team will never steal signs again — and he says his players shouldn’t be punished. The Astros’ cheating was apparently an open secret inside baseball, but their “system for using electronics to steal signs came into full public view Nov. 12, when former pitcher Mike Fiers exposed the machinations in a story published by the Athletic.”
→ THE DAY OF THE LOCUST.
Last week, we reported on the massive disappearance of bees occurring as a result of climate change. This week, it’s locusts — billions and billions of them. They’re swarming southern Ethiopia and parts of Kenya in numbers not seen in decades, and climate change and regional conflict are to blame.
→ WHO NEEDS (HUMAN) ROMANCE? GET A FURRY BEST FRIEND.
Through February 17, the Wake County Animal Center is offering discounts on adoption fees: dogs for $25, cats for whatever you want to pay, and that miniature pony will be up for auction at 10:00 a.m. on Monday.
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