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The Trump administration wants to freeze Obama-era requirements that force automakers to manufacture more fuel-efficient vehicles.

Under the Obama administration’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, new cars sold in the U.S. must average about 54 miles per gallon by 2025. But a joint proposal released today by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) would freeze those standards for post-2020 models, meaning cars would only have to average about 37 mpg by 2026.

The Trump administration is also trying to stop California and other states from being able to impose their own, stricter fuel-efficiency standards. NBC reports that

by lifting the California waiver put in place in 1975 as part of the original Clean Air Act, President Donald Trump’s administration is effectively neutering a potentially significant challenge to any rollback of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards. By setting levels of automotive CO2 emissions, California regulators could effectively retain higher mileage targets. The 10 other states and the District of Columbia that have adopted the tougher California guidelines would also be impacted by the White House move.

Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler says the proposal would make cars more affordable and save lives. “We are delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American public that his administration would address and fix the current fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions standards,” a statement from Wheeler reads. “Our proposal aims to strike the right regulatory balance based on the most recent information and create a 50-state solution that will enable more Americans to afford newer, safer vehicles that pollute less. More realistic standards can save lives while continuing to improve the environment.”

Environmental groups are already expressing their outrage over the plan. “How can we justify rolling back the most effective tool we have to fix global warming?” Rob Sargent, energy program director for Environment America, tells USA Today. “This latest move by the Trump administration means that our cars will continue to pump billions of metric tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere, further destabilizing the climate and sparking increasingly severe impacts of global warming,” he adds.

But automakers and free market groups have hailed the proposal. “The administration’s announcement that it will relax future fuel economy (CAFE) standards is good news for consumers,” Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center for Energy and Environment, said in a statement. “It means that the federal government will have slightly less control over the kinds of cars and trucks people can buy. It might even cause car prices to stop increasing so rapidly.”

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers and Global Automakers, two trade groups that represent some of the biggest carmakers in the world, issued a joint statement expressing similar sentiments. “We applaud the president and the administration for releasing this much anticipated proposal that includes a variety of standards for public consideration,” they said. “Automakers support continued improvements in fuel economy and flexibilities that incentivize advanced technologies while balancing priorities like affordability, safety, jobs and the environment.”

The EPA and NHTSA are giving the public 60 days to provide feedback to the new proposal. A final rule is expected this winter.

For several years, lobbyists for the hotel industry have been engaged in efforts to get local and state governments to make life more difficult for short-term rental and home-sharing platforms like Airbnb and VRBO.

But what happens when the lobbyists literally are the government?

We soon might get to find out, thanks to Kenny Glavan. He’s the city council president in Biloxi, Mississippi, and he recently pushed the city to step up enforcement of tax and licensing requirements for short-term rentals. But Glavan also happens to be the president of the Mississippi Hotel and Lodging Association, the state arm of a national organization that’s been on the forefront of legal and regulatory battles with Airbnb in New York City, Nashville, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.

The Biloxi Sun Herald reports that Glavan called a special meeting of the city council this week—and then showed up 45 minutes late for it—for the purpose of outlining a strategy to ensure “compliance” from short-term rentals. Renting a home for less than 30 days in Biloxi requires special permission from the city government and landlords have to pay the state’s hotel tax, of which the city takes a slice. In residential areas zoned for single-family homes, short-term rentals are not permitted at all. Glavan told the Sun Herald that he knows most of the short-term rentals in the city are not complying with those rules.

Glavan told the paper that he does not believe there is any conflict of interest that would prohibit him or the city council from voting on updates to the existing short-term rental rules—but this week’s hearing did not produce any concrete policy proposals and city officials will revisit the issue later, according to WDAM-TV.

It is also worth noting that another official from the Mississippi Hotel and Lodging Association was invited to testify at this week’s hearing. Linda Hornsby, the group’s executive director, called unlicensed vacation rentals a tax and safety issue, according to the Sun Herald.

If there are public safety issues with a short-term rental, cities probably have other tools they could use to address them. And if a home is considered safe for people to reside in year-round, there’s no reason it wouldn’t be safe for visitors to use. Often, claims about unsafe short-term rentals are red herrings used to garner support for restrictive policies.

Short-term rentals have brought both tourists and income to Biloxi. Data from Airbnb shows that homeowners in the city earned $762,000 during 2017 from more than 5,000 guests who booked stays via the platform. Across the whole of the state, Mississippi homeowners earned more than $6.4 million from more than 50,000 visitors, with more than 1,300 homes in the state rented for at least one night.

If Glavan and the hotel association plan to crack down on short-term rentals in pursuit of more tax revenue, they might end up cutting off valuable income from Biloxi residents and businesses—after all, those 5,000 tourists were eating meals and spending money on other things, too.

Mostly, the situation in Biloxi is just a good illustration of the stark power asymmetry that exists when governments regulate Airbnb, even when a lobbyist isn’t pulling double duty as a city council president. Hotels and their trade associations have attorneys, lobbyists, and longstanding relationships with state lawmakers and city officials. In short, they know how to get what they want—and they have the time and incentive to keep up to date with the ins and outs of policymaking.

Most homeowners renting spare rooms via platforms like Airbnb have no such government relations experience—and in Biloxi, they are probably right to wonder whether they will get a fair hearing from their hotel lobbyist/city council president.

The death penalty is “inadmissible” because it attacks human “dignity,” the Roman Catholic Church says.

In the past, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has supported the death penalty “if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.” But in May, Pope Francis approved a major change to the doctrine that says capital punishment is wrong in all cases. The update was published today, the Associated Press reports.

“The church teaches, in the light of the Gospel, that the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person and she works with determination for its abolition worldwide,” the catechism’s new text reads.

The catechism acknowledges that capital punishment has long been seen as a “means of safeguarding the common good.” But there is now “an increasing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes,” the doctrine says. “In addition, a new understanding has emerged of the significance of penal sanctions imposed by the state. Lastly, more effective systems of detention have been developed, which ensure the due protection of citizens but, at the same time, do not definitively deprive the guilty of the possibility of redemption.”

According to Cardinal Luis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church’s teachings on capital punishment have simply evolved. “If, in fact the political and social situation of the past made the death penalty an acceptable means for the protection of the common good, today the increasing understanding that the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes,” Ladaria says in a letter explaining the change.

Though the church’s teachings have evolved, Francis’ views on the subject have not. During a 2015 trip to the United States, where the death penalty is legal, he told Congress that “from the beginning of my ministry,” he has advocated for it to be abolished.

Previous popes have had differing opinions. Francis’ immediate predecessor, Pope Benedict XVI, did not oppose the death penalty in all cases, according to the BBC. But Pope John Paul II, who came before Benedict, generally advocated for imprisonment instead.

A former Veterans Affairs employee has been convicted on federal fraud charges after using his position to write himself into a disabled veteran’s will.

A press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Tennessee details Kenneth Richard Devore’s long list of crimes, beginning with the attempted defrauding of a disabled veteran. The veteran, identified by the government as D.N., was discharged from the military in 1986. After D.N. was officially declared incompetent, Devore, a VA field examiner, was tasked in 2013 with making sure D.N. received his VA benefits and that his assets were managed responsibly.

But that’s not what Devore did. Instead, he concocted a plan that would make himself rich. Devore convinced the unsuspecting veteran that he needed a will and then helped him write the document, listing himself as the sole beneficiary of D.N.’s assets. Devore then drove D.N. to the post office to have the documents notarized. He also forged D.N.’s initials in a notice sent to Regions Bank, which the DOJ says was D.N.’s legal guardian. Devore was poised to defraud the veteran of more than $680,000.

Devore was forced to resign for misconduct in 2015 after the forged documents were uncovered. He then applied for a position with the National Background Investigations Bureau, which conducts investigations into candidates for government positions that require security clearance. (Its website promises “efficient and effective background investigations to safeguard the integrity and trustworthiness of the Federal workforce.”) He failed to disclose his misconduct at his old job, and he also claimed to have attended Canterbury University, a school that was fabricated by Devore himself. Despite all this, he was hired.

But the misdeeds don’t end there. While working for both the VA and the National Background Investigations Bureau, Devore was drawing a separate income from the VA after claiming in 2009 that he was 100 percent disabled, which suggests that the federal government is perhaps an even easier mark than a mentally incompetent veteran.

As Public Information Officer Sharry Dedman-Beard explained to Reason, Devore was indicted in February 2017 after the Veterans Administration Office of Inspector General began an investigation into his behavior. Dedman-Beard also confirmed that Devore was “unsuccessful in his efforts to obtain the victim’s money.”

On July 25, a federal jury convicted Devore of “six counts of wire fraud, one count of theft of public money over $1,000, one count of willful mail fraud, one count of conflict of interest of a federal employee, two counts of making or using a false writing and one count of making a false statement.” His sentencing is scheduled for November 5.

“Bias Response Team” doesn’t violate student rights, federal court rules. The University of Michigan’s “Bias Response Team” (BRT) isn’t an implicit threat to student free speech rights, said U.S. District Court Judge Linda V. Parker. The program relies on student reports of “biased” speech on campus and contacts the alleged speaker to offer guidance on speaking in a school-approved way. Students who are contacted are not required to respond.

The issue may seem relatively minor, but it was big enough for the U.S. Department of Justice to get involved in May, issuing a statement of interest that accused the University of Michigan of imposing “a system of arbitrary censorship of, and punishment for, constitutionally protected speech.”

Under the school’s bias response program, “a student who voices a controversial or unpopular opinion—or who seeks to use humor, parody, or satire when discussing sensitive topics—could face severe punishment,” argued Speech First, a D.C.-based advocacy group that filed the lawsuit in May.

But the school countered that the team isn’t a disciplinary body and student participation is dependent on their consent. So long as administrators at the state school are only offering helpful hints on how students can make their speech and opinions more “inclusive,” no one’s First Amendment Rights have been threatened the school argued—and Judge Parker agreed.

Last year, Liz Wolfe wrote here about college bias response teams and a self-congratulatory study from academics finding that they “created a safer, more welcoming campus community.” Robby Soave has covered the topic many times, noting how these bodies fail to distinguish between speech that could actually be considered harassing—at the University of Michigan, for instance—and speech that is merely “bothersome to an individual.”

In June, the University of Michigan changed its definitions of biased speech, narrowing the definitions of bullying and harassing..

This was already in the works and not in response to DOJ’s intervention, the school told Michigan Radio. “When the Speech First lawsuit called out some of the things we were already working on, we were well-prepared to update and simplify these definitions,” said University President Mark Schlissel. But he also contended that the group’s lawsuit had mischaracterized the school’s Bias Response Team, offering as support the fact that similar situations were in place at “many schools.”

FREE MINDS

Powerful Pegasus spy software targets Amnesty International. The human rights group Amnesty International said that spying software linked to the Israeli company NSO Group was sent to an Amnesty staffer and to a Saudi Arabian rights activist via WhatsApp in June.

“NSO Group is known to only sell its spyware to governments,” said Joshua Franco, Amnesty International’s head of technology and human rights, in a Wednesday statement.

The potent state hacking tools manufactured by NSO Group allow for an extraordinarily invasive form of surveillance. A smartphone infected with Pegasus is essentially controlled by the attacker – it can relay phone calls, photos, messages and more directly to the operator. This chilling attack on Amnesty International highlights the grave risk posed to activists around the world by this kind of surveillance technology. … Amnesty International is concerned that these could be used to bait and spy on activists in countries including Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo and Hungary, in addition to the Gulf.

An Amnesty International investigation connected the link in the Pegasus-spreading message to hundreds of other “suspicious websites which had been previously connected to NSO Group,” it said. In addition:

Last year Toronto-based research group Citizen Lab uncovered NSO Group’s involvement in a similar spyware scheme in Mexico. Activists, journalists and opposition party leaders were targeted by false messages containing Pegasus software in an attempt to silence government opposition. Pegasus was also used to target the Emirati award-winning human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor, who has been in prison in the United Arab Emirates since March 2017.

FREE MARKETS

NYC says no thanks to $100 million from ride-sharing companies. Uber and Lyft offered to bail out struggling New York City taxi drivers in exchange for city regulators backing off plans to require a minimum wage for drivers and cap the number of new Uber and Lyft vehicles permitted in the city.

The $100 million “hardship fund” would “support individual taxi medallion owners,” reports The Verge. But it was “summarily rejected” by Mayor Bill de Blasio and city leaders. “It’s a little bit astonishing to us,” Lyft’s vice president of public policy Joe Okpaku told the publication.

Uber and Lyft claim a cap on vehicle licenses would send wait times soaring and driver earnings plummeting. They also say a cap would disproportionately affect outer borough residents, including low-income communities and people of color. “The cap bill would set things back to a time when service levels were horrible in the outer boroughs,” Okpaku said.

QUICK HITS

BREAKING: Pope changes church teaching on death penalty, says it is always inadmissible because it “attacks” human dignity.

— The Associated Press (@AP) August 2, 2018

• The end of Sen. Ted Cruz? The Texas Republican is “neck and neck” in a race for reelection with Democratic U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, The Hill reports.
• U.S. activists say they’re being targeted by Facebook’s crackdown on alleged Russian bots.

Pressure on social media companies to allow only certain kinds of “political content” means the government always wins.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/594555/facebook-quietly-deleted-homeland-security-ads-from-political-content-archive

Ron Wyden: “I just want to be clear, as the author of section 230, the days when these [platforms] are considered neutral are over.” cc: all of Silicon Valley

— David McCabe (@dmccabe) August 1, 2018

• The Trump administration is considering “doubling proposed tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods to 25 percent from 10 percent.“

Charles Koch of Koch Brothers, who claims to be giving away millions of dollars to politicians even though I know very few who have seen this (?), now makes the ridiculous statement that what President Trump is doing is unfair to “foreign workers.” He is correct, AMERICA FIRST!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2018

• A broad new study on “the possible protective effect of light-to-moderate alcohol use on risk of dementia” finds that people who drink a “light-to-moderate” amount of alcohol—defined as one-to-14 drinks per week, with wine being better than beer or liquor—are less likely to suffer cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease than non-drinkers.
• Testing the low limits of predatory academic publishers, The Independent’s Gary Lewis published a paper examining the theory that “politicians from the right would surely wipe with their left hand, and those from the political left with their right hand.” The resulting article, “Testing inter-hemispheric social priming theory in a sample of professional politicians – a brief report” from a fiction professor at the “Institute of Interdisciplinary Political and Fecal Science,” was published by the U.K.’s Crimson Publishers, he says.

They are literally arguing that dairy farmers are going to disappear if the Almond Milk scourge is allowed to spread. https://t.co/nFt4gcztlQ

— Conn Carroll (@conncarroll) August 1, 2018

• In the wake of a federal court ruling that President Trump can’t block critics on Twitter, two anti-vaccination activists are suing their state senator, California Democrat Richard Pan, because he blocked them from viewing his Twitter account.
• Most Americans say they don’t pay attention to nutrition labels, according to a new Gallup poll.
• This has to be a trick, right? “TSA considering eliminating screening at smaller airports.“
• Someone’s got a new crush…

Thank you to Chairman Kim Jong Un for keeping your word & starting the process of sending home the remains of our great and beloved missing fallen! I am not at all surprised that you took this kind action. Also, thank you for your nice letter – l look forward to seeing you soon!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 2, 2018