The Trump administration's drilling dreams may have just burst.
Late on Tuesday, a judge in Washington, D.C.'s U.S. District Court ruled that the Interior Department broke the law when selling off federal land for oil and gas drilling. It's a defeat for the Wyoming plan involved in the case, but also could spell trouble for President Trump's drill-happy Bureau of Land Management, The Washington Post suggests.
Two environmental advocacy groups first sued the BLM for leasing and selling federal lands for drilling under former President Barack Obama's watch, saying the department ignored the threat of climate change when making the decision. Additional moves by the Trump administration to increase drilling offshore and in Alaska later boosted the case's implications, the two groups later said. That's because even though Obama's Interior Department started considering climate change more heavily as his administration waned, Trump officials completely reversed those considerations. And when the D.C. judge ruled that the Obama BLM broke the law because it "did not sufficiently consider climate change," Trump's looser standards were almost certainly lumped into that decision.
The Tuesday decision temporarily stops companies from drilling on the 300,000 acres of Wyoming land the BLM sold under Obama, the Post says. It also could force the BLM to rethink what it considers before authorizing future drilling projects, seeing as current standards "deprive the agency and the public of the context necessary to evaluate oil and gas drilling on federal land," the judge wrote in his decision. Read more at The Washington Post. Kathryn Krawczyk
James Holzhauer is kicking Daily Doubles and taking names.
On his fourth day on Jeopardy! two weeks ago, Holzhauer easily crushed Jeopardy!'s one-game winnings record of $77,000, pulling in $110,914. He's since passed $1 million in earnings and crushed a few more records on the way — and his fellow Jeopardy! elites have a few theories on how he's done it.
Just a few days after setting a new one-game record, Holzhauer did it again with a $131,127 haul. He now claims the top seven single-game winnings spots, per the official Jeopardy! recordbooks. Holzhauer also hit the $1 million mark in the shortest number of games — 14 — on Tuesday night, and has the second-highest regular-season winnings total of all time.
Ken Jennings, who still has the highest regular-season win total of all time, told The Associated Press that Holzhauer is doing so well because "Most Jeopardy! players never think about maximizing winnings." Jennings says he "wouldn't have the stomach to bet $60,000 on a Final Jeopardy clue," but Holzhauer, a professional sports better, told Wired that he doesn't have a "mental block" because "it's only money." 2017 Tournament of Champions winner Buzzy Cohen also credits Holzhauer's board-hopping strategy, saying the game show prodigy "took a playbook that has existed and executed it flawlessly."
But it's not all fun and Final Jeopardy! for everyone. Seeing as "every game show has a prize budget" largely "determined by way of averages of what has been won in the past," a former Game Show Network programming head tells The Atlantic that "James's performance, I'm sure, is causing grief for an accountant somewhere." Kathryn Krawczyk
Move over, geologists: there's a new field of scientific study in town.
NASA's InSight spacecraft detected a potential earthquake on Mars earlier this month, and scientists are rejoicing over the discovery of the "marsquake."
"We've been collecting background noise up until now, but this first event officially kicks off a new field: Martian seismology!" NASA geologist Bruce Banerdt said, per NBC News.
The tremor was too small to help NASA obtain any information on the Red Planet's interior, NBC News reports, but scientists are hoping the discovery will lead the seismometer to detect bigger earthquakes.
"We've been waiting months for our first marsquake," Philippe Lognonné, the principal investigator for the seismometer, said in a statement. "It's so exciting to finally have proof that Mars is still seismically active. We're looking forward to sharing detailed results once we've studied it more and modeled our data."
Lognonné expects larger quakes in the future to help determine crust thickness and core size, per NBC. Marianne Dodson
Another Republican has hopped on the impeachment train.
After the Mueller report detailed President Trump's failure to take what Michael Gerson calls "a criminal plot by a hostile foreign government" to the FBI, the chief speechwriter for former President George W. Bush writes that "House leaders should lay the groundwork for impeachment." This move strays from politics' usual goals of "partisanship" and "endless fundraising," Gerson continues in his Monday op-ed for The Washington Post, but adds that this choice will "echo across the decades."
As Gerson describes in the Post, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report "shows that Trump and members of his campaign team were willing — actually, eager — to cooperate with Russian attempts to subvert a presidential election." Trump also "ordered subordinates to lie about their ties to the Russians," Gerson continues, going on to decry Attorney General William Barr for "provid[ing] cover for those deceptions." Yet Congress, Gerson writes, is "punting" its "responsibility" to hold Trump accountable for these actions. It's time for impeachment, Gerson finishes, because "the honor of the presidency now depends on the actions of Congress."
Gerson has previously authored Post op-eds saying Trump is a "Russian stooge" and a "danger to democracy." But it ran just ahead of another Republican's call for impeachment, this one from former Trump transition staffer J.W. Verret, published Tuesday in The Atlantic. Verret was not a "Never Trumper," but opposed Trump on several policy points. And after reading the Mueller report twice, he reached a "tipping point" with Trump's leadership and said "Republicans in Congress" should have reached it too. Kathryn Krawczyk
Steven Spielberg and Netflix seem to have buried the hatchet — if there ever even was one to begin with.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Board of Governors in a meeting on Tuesday decided not to make any changes to its Oscars eligibility rules, per CNBC. Going forward, a movie will still only have to play in theaters for a minimum of one week in Los Angeles in order to qualify for the awards, Variety notes, and it's still allowed to be released on streaming immediately.
There had previously been reports that Spielberg was engaged in a full-on war with Netflix and would be proposing a rule change at this meeting that would affect the streamer, which debuts its movies online either the same day as they open theatrically or a few weeks later. For example, a rule could be implemented requiring films to play in theaters for a longer period of time to be eligible or requiring they be exclusive to theaters for some time.
This war, as it turns out, may have been overblown. Spielberg didn't even end up attending this meeting let alone propose anything, and The New York Times cites sources as saying Spielberg is actually less frustrated with streaming services than with major theater exhibitors who refuse to play films like Roma since they require a lengthy exclusivity window. In fact, Spielberg reportedly lobbied AMC and Regal to play Netflix's Roma to no avail.
Breaking his silence on the issue, Spielberg told the Times that people should be able to watch movies "in any form or fashion that suits them," whether that's on the big screen or the small screen, although did still exalt the importance of movie theaters. Ironically, reports suggest Netflix may be giving its upcoming The Irishman a robust theatrical release, meaning Spielberg may get his wish without any rules changes even being required. Brendan Morrow