In other news, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) officially launched his 2020 presidential campaign today. Booker joins a field of candidates that is already quite large.
Meanwhile, CBS News reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been giving immigrants fake court dates because they don't have system in place to ensure that real dates are issued.
The fake notices stem from a Supreme Court ruling last summer. Prior to the decision, ICE officials used to send immigrants NTAs with date listed as "TBD" - or "to be determined." The immigration court would issue the migrant an official hearing notice later, said Casson.
One effect of this: The NTAs could block an immigrant's eligibility for "cancellation of removal," a legal residency status granted to some undocumented immigrants after 10 uninterrupted years of living in the U.S. A NTA, even without a hearing date, would interrupt the 10-year "clock," said Jeremy McKinney, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based immigration attorney, in a telephone interview with CBS News.
A Supreme Court ruling last summer — Pereira v. Sessions — banned the practice, requiring all appearance notices to use actual dates.
However, systems weren't in place for ICE to see the court's schedule, so ICE issued fake dates instead.
Finally, researchers at University College London say early European settles killed so many Native Americans (56 million!) that it actually changed the earth's climate and caused the so-called "Little Ice Age" in the 1600s.
European settlers killed 56 million indigenous people over about 100 years in South, Central and North America, causing large swaths of farmland to be abandoned and reforested, researchers at University College London, or UCL, estimate. The increase in trees and vegetation across an area the size of France resulted in a massive decrease in carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere, according to the study.
Carbon levels changed enough to cool the Earth by 1610, researchers found. Columbus arrived in 1492. [...]
"For once, we've been able to balance all the boxes and realize that the only way the Little Ice Age was so intense is ... because of the genocide of millions of people," Maslin told CNN.
Have a good weekend. Enjoy the Super Bowl, if that's your thing.