🌊 House Feeling Impeachy

PLUS: Das Radikal

February 14, 2024

Happy Valentine's Day. And Single Awareness Day.

Yes, Single Awareness Day is actually a thing now. We don't know who celebrates it — besides, well, half of the Maxes — but it's no accident that its acronym spells "SAD."

Now that my keyboard's wet with tears, we would like to wish all of you a wonderful Valentine's Day. Make sure to kick it off with some detective work on day three of the Treasure Hunt. No correct guesses yet!

In today's edition:

🇺🇸 Even the Homeland Security Secretary is unsafe

⛪️ From breaking bread to breaking bad

✈️ Amelia Earhart: Lost and Found Part 1

And so much more!

–Max, Max, Jen, and Alex

KEY STORY
House Impeaches Mayorkas

House Republicans voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas

  • Record numbers of undocumented migrants entered the US in 2022 and 2023. Republicans blame the Biden Administration and Mayorkas, whose responsibilities include securing the border. Republicans say Mayorkas intentionally violated immigration laws

  • After a failed attempt last week, the House voted 214-213 on Tuesday to impeach Mayorkas. He is the first cabinet member to be impeached since 1876 and now faces trial in the Senate, where the Democratic majority makes his conviction (and removal) unlikely

Dig Deeper

  • Three House Republicans voted with every Democrat against impeachment

  • Mayorkas has said the Biden administration should not be held responsible for the border situation, claiming on Sunday, “We don’t bear responsibility for a broken system”

  • The last secretary to be impeached was Secretary of War William Belknap, who – during the notoriously corrupt Grant administration – gave out lucrative appointments in exchange for payments. Belknap resigned and was later acquitted in the Senate vote

KEY STORY
Estonia: Russia Expects NATO War

Russia may double the number of its troops stationed on Russia’s border with the Baltic states and Finland, Estonia’s spy agency said

  • The Baltic countries – Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia – were all formerly part of the Soviet Union but have since joined the EU and NATO. Finland joined NATO last year due to the war in Ukraine

  • In a report released on Tuesday, Estonia’s spy agency said Russia is “probably anticipating a possible conflict with NATO within the next decade” and may double its troops on its border with the Baltic states and Finland

  • “The success and timeline of Russia’s military reform will be largely determined by the course of the war in Ukraine,” the report added

Dig Deeper

  • Also Tuesday, news broke that Russia had placed Estonia's prime minister on its list of wanted individuals

  • The charges against her weren’t specified, although Russian officials said they are related to her efforts to remove World War II-era Soviet monuments in her country

  • The prime minister called the charges a “familiar scare tactic”

SPONSORED
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  • Beyond just water, our sweat contains vital electrolytes like salt. So, when you hydrate, replenishing these nutrients is essential – yet often forgotten, or done by super sugary sports drinks

  • Without the right electrolyte balance, you can get cramps, aches, and slow down muscle recovery

  • LMNT offers a clean and healthy solution. With no sugar or artificial ingredients, LMNT provides the perfect electrolyte boost after a workout or just another busy day of life

  • And with its delicious flavors, like the ever-popular Chocolate Caramel—it's a treat for anyone looking to feel their best

Dig Deeper

KEY STORY
Iran Out of Syria

Iran pulled its senior commanders from Syria out of a desire to prevent further escalation with the US and Israel, the Financial Times reported

  • Iranian troops have long operated out of Syria. Since October 7, Israel and the US have bombed facilities in Syria linked to Iran’s presence there

  • Per the FT, following the deadly attack against a US base in Jordan last month, Iran pulled several commanders out of Syria, fearing that if they were killed in the US’ response, Iran would be forced to retaliate strongly

  • The withdrawal is the clearest indication yet that Iran does not desire a broader war with the US

Dig Deeper

  • Sources who spoke with Reuters also noted the troop pullback but attributed it to deadly Israeli airstrikes which stoked Iran’s fears that an intelligence leak had revealed the location of Iranian forces

KEY STORY
Germany Cracks Down on the Right

Germany’s interior minister introduced measures to crack down on “German right-wing extremists”

  • For years, Germany’s intelligence services have warned of “rising right-wing extremism.” At the same time, the AfD, an upstart right-wing party, has gained widespread support and is now the country’s second-most popular party

  • On Tuesday, Germany’s left-leaning interior minister introduced measures that would make it easier for agencies to surveil groups deemed to be “right-wing extremists.” They will also ban those deemed “far-right extremists” from owning weapons

Dig Deeper

  • Germany's government will also set up an early-detection system to identity foreign-backed botnets — networks of malware-infected computers controlled by an attacker

  • “We want to dismantle right-wing extremist networks, deprive them of their income and take away their weapons,” the minister said

RUNDOWN
Some Quick Stories for the Office

💰 US prices rose 3.1% over the year to January, higher than the 2.9% increase many economists had predicted. All three major stock indexes fell after the news, with the Nasdaq ending the day down 1.8%

🏈 This year’s Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers was the second-most-watched US broadcast in history with 123M viewers, behind only the 1969 Moon landing

🐈 Public health officials in Oregon reported a case of bubonic plague that was passed to a resident from a pet cat. The CDC estimates there are seven plague cases in the US annually, 80% of which are bubonic

👤 Scammers stole a record $10B from US adults last year, up from $8.9B the year prior, federal data shows. The development of AI has fueled a rise in scams that are more sophisticated and believable than before

🏙️Chicago will not renew the city’s contract with ShotSpotter, a tech company that claims it can identify when and where a gunshot was fired. A report leaked last week found that only 1% of shootings end in an arrest due to ShotSpotter

🙊 Cohere for AI, a nonprofit AI lab, launched Aya, an AI model that can operate in 101 different languages — more than twice as many languages as any competitor

COMMUNITY
Weekly Debate

Most news companies repress ideas they don’t agree with. We are different. To prove it, we’re making this a place where people can have a free and open debate. Each week we lay out a debate on Monday — read this week’s Roca Votes here — and feature responses here, replies to those the following day, and so on.

This week’s topic:

Do you think there is anyone — past or present — who should inherently be “off limits” from a media interview? 

Here are some reader responses to B, Joe and Austin:

C from Philadelphia: “I fully agree with B from Boston’s take and I thought that was worth pointing out because it’s a position I had not considered before. Originally my answer would have been something more like Austin from Utah, that no knowledge should be off-limits and human perspectives have inherent value. But in the interest of protecting children they should perhaps be off-limits, not because their perspectives are not valuable, but because adults should not be exploiting their perspectives for monetary gain or ‘clout.’”

Marcus from Connecticut: “I like both Joe's and B's, but Austin's closing comment, ‘Why wouldn’t anyone want to gather as much knowledge as possible from anyone and everyone?’ is a bit naive.  Should not individuals, with their own knowledge, often hard won, be allowed proprietary protection of that knowledge, to do with as they see fit within the guidelines of our laws and regulations?  Freedom and independence have been foundational principles of our country -- and should continue to be held as such.”

VB added: “I applaud Tucker Carlson for his journalistic approach to seeking the TRUTH. I believe he wants what is best for the United States!”

While Joe from Canada said: “Media should have a moral backbone and not interview leaders like Putin, Hitler, etc. Journalists do that for the self-glory and not for the so-called right to give everyone a voice. If Putin wants to talk, he has Twitter, Facebook, radios at his disposal. Why give him the biggest platform he could hope for?”

Do you agree or disagree with the responses above? Have more thoughts? Keep the conversation going and let us know and respond by replying to this email! 

The debate continues with the poll below and more replies below the Wraps.

Today's Poll!

Was it moral or immoral of Tucker Carlson to interview Russian President Vladimir Putin?

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

COMMUNITY
Treasure Hunt

Today marks the return of the weekly Roca treasure hunt, brought back by popular demand. The rules are simple:

  • Every day we give a hint. You get one guess, which you submit by replying to a newsletter with a Google street view screenshot

  • Unlock an extra hint each Thursday once you refer five friends

  • The first person to guess the answer wins this week’s prize: A free year of Roca premium!

Clue 1: Bill opened his window for the first time

Clue 2: But it wasn't his window that got the diagnosis

Clue 3: C6H12O6

Know the answer? Send a street view screenshot to [email protected]!

POPCORN
Some Quick Stories for Happy Hour

📺 Netflix and arrest: A 21-year-old UK woman reported “mental trauma and mistrust” of the police after CCTV captured two officers watching Netflix and using dumbbells at her home during a search for her

🎸 And after all…you’re a wank award: Former Oasis lead vocalist Liam Gallagher expressed disdain for Oasis’ nomination to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, saying, “I don’t need some wank award by some geriatric in a cowboy hat”

🎨 Some unethical Monet: A Montreal junior high school teacher allegedly sold his students’ artwork on his website, presenting himself as a “life-long student of art”

⛪️ Breaking Bad Bread: Police arrested a Connecticut pastor from a United Methodist Church for allegedly selling crystal meth out of his church’s rectory

⛳️ In my Sun Day Red: After parting ways with Nike, his sponsor for 27+ years, Tiger Woods is launching a new brand, “Sun Day Red,” with TaylorMade

💍 VP Got Us Fallin’ In Love: R&B star Usher, 45, married his longtime girlfriend Jennifer Goicoechea, 40, a senior VP at Epic Records, following his Super Bowl halftime performance

ON-THE-GROUND
Roca in Liberland

We send our co-founder Max Frost to investigate topics around the world and he writes about them here. He’s currently writing from Liberland. Subscribers receive the full stories.

Dorian is not just a cryonicist. He is also a eugenicist – a practice that is illegal in most countries and another motivation for him to build Liberland.

“I was hanging out with these biotech people and I actually got in contact with people who do embryo selection,” he began. “It's illegal in the US to select [an embryo] for intelligence but I know people who can do embryo selection for intelligence and all these other eugenic traits.”

“And I was thinking like, ‘Okay, I will find a girlfriend…to get to make 10 embryos and select the smartest and healthiest one.’”

I asked how that worked.

Dorian explained, “So they just take an egg and a sperm and they create the child in a lab essentially and then run tests…So you make many embryos [and then] you destroy the cell. And then you have the sequence genome of all these embryos and you can then read it for getting certain types of cancer, diseases, allergies.”

“But also, if you have the data set for predictors of intelligence, proxies like educational attainment, average earnings,” you can compare the embryo’s genome to see if its traits are linked to those.  Then, “you pick the best one,” Dorian says. “You pick the one you like the most and put it back in the mother.”

That practice is illegal in many countries but would be legal in Liberland. Yet Dorian admitted that his eugenics plan was already foiled: A day before my arrival, he had learned that his girlfriend – a Slovak woman who he met at Liberland – was unexpectedly pregnant. Dorian’s child therefore won’t necessarily be cancer-free or brilliant, but it will be Liberland’s first baby. 

Beyond his passion for uncontrolled scientific research, Dorian — and other Liberland officials — have a significant financial stake in the country.  They think Liberland can help people and companies avoid the inefficiency of modern governments. Dorian says their goal is to “build a whole parallel system for doing business and contracts like blockchain did for money.”

If that happens, Dorian predicts organizations will flock there to do business, research, and invest, pushing up the value of the merit, the country’s (crypto)currency. 

Dorian and other Liberland citizens own significant amounts of merits, meaning that developing the country is really a business opportunity.  

“It’s possible that as we get bigger and bigger and eventually some country recognizes us and invites us to join for like a billion dollars,” Dorian said.

“Obviously if or when Liberland becomes recognized…” 

He trailed off, but he didn’t need to finish. What he meant was, “When Liberland becomes recognized…” he and the others will get rich

ROCA WRAP
Amelia Earhart: Lost or Found? (Part 1 of 2)

Every day we take a deep dive into an interesting story, place, or person. Subscribers get full access.

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator took off from Papua New Guinea. Her plane was never seen again – or was it?

At the time of that flight, Earhart was at the peak of her fame. Born in Kansas in 1897, she had catapulted to stardom in 1928 after becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Within five years, she became the first female pilot to complete that trip solo and then to fly solo from Hawaii to California. Her aviation feats, combined with her advocacy for women’s rights, made her a global icon.

In 1937, Earhart began her most ambitious journey yet: To become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by plane.

She set out on a Lockheed Electra, a twin-engine monoplane, with former Pan Am aviator Fred Noonan as her navigator. After ~22,000 miles, they landed in Papua New Guinea in June and prepared for the next leg.

The next leg of the trip was arguably the most difficult: It required her to locate and land on Howland Island, a one-square-mile island in the middle of the Pacific. The US Coast Guard dispatched a ship, the Itasca, to wait near the island and help her find it.

Earhart’s planned route to Howland

Yet as Earhart approached the island, she wasn’t able to hear operators on the Itasca, although they could hear her. As the minutes passed, Earhart’s messages became increasingly dire.

A radio log aboard the Itasca at 7:30 AM reported that Earhart was “OUT OF GAS ONLY ½ HOUR LEFT CANT HR US AT ALL.”

Around 7:42 AM, Earhart’s plane transmitted, “CLNG ITASCA WE MUST BE ON YOU BUT CANNOT SEE U BUT GAS IS RUNNING LOW BEEN UNABLE TO REACH YOU BY RADIO.”

Earhart’s final transmissions were so loud that the Itasca’s operators looked into the sky, expecting to see her plane. Yet it never appeared. At 8:43 AM, the Itasca received the last verified transmission from Earhart, in which she said she was traveling on a “line north and south.”

The US responded to Earhart’s disappearance by launching what was then its largest-ever search and rescue operation. Yet the search, centered around Howland Island, never found any sign of Earhart or her plane, thus sparking one of aviation’s great mysteries.

Now, a US Air Force intelligence officer-turned-explorer believes his team has found Earhart’s long-lost plane.

Tony Romeo is the founder of Deep Sea Vision, a deep-sea exploration and mapping company. The son of a former Pan Am pilot, he became fascinated with the Earhart mystery as a child. Last year, he and his coworkers set out on an $11M expedition to find the long-lost plane.

Romeo told Roca that he believes Earhart’s plane crash-landed in the ocean near Howland Island.

While that area has already been extensively searched, Romeo’s team set out to search it late last year anyway using a cutting-edge deep-sea autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). Weeks of scouring the seafloor revealed nothing resembling plane wreckage – until the last day.

Photo courtesy of Deep Sea Vision

On the final day of the 90-day expedition, Romeo and his team were examining data from the AUV when they spotted the image shown above.
The image, taken ~16,000 feet underwater, appears to depict a plane, which, based on Romeo’s measurements, would fall within the general size range of Earhart’s Electra. As it was near the end of their trip, though, Romeo’s team decided not to go back to image the suspected plane again.

The image has since provoked a fierce debate.

Not only does it resemble a plane, some believe, but it shares specific features of Earhart’s Electra, such as its tail design.

Yet other experts feel strongly that it isn’t the missing plane. “Bullsh*t,” one researcher told Roca. “I know for certain that’s not Amelia Earhart’s plane.”

ROCA WRAP
Amelia Earhart: Lost or Found? Part 1

Every day we take a deep dive into an interesting story, place, or person. Subscribers get full access.

July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart and her navigator took off from Papua New Guinea. Her plane was never seen again – or was it?

At the time of that flight, Earhart was at the peak of her fame.

Born in Kansas in 1897, she had catapulted to stardom in 1928 after becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Within five years, she became the first female pilot to complete that trip solo and then to fly solo from Hawaii to California. Her aviation feats, combined with her advocacy for women’s rights, made her a global icon.

In 1937, Earhart began her most ambitious journey yet: To become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe by plane.

She set out on a Lockheed Electra, a twin-engine monoplane, with former Pan Am aviator Fred Noonan as her navigator. After ~22,000 miles, they landed in Papua New Guinea in June and prepared for the next leg.

The next leg of the trip was arguably the most difficult: It required her to locate and land on Howland Island, a one-square-mile island in the middle of the Pacific. The US Coast Guard dispatched a ship, the Itasca, to wait near the island and help her find it.

Yet as Earhart approached the island, she wasn’t able to hear operators on the Itasca, although they could hear her. As the minutes passed, Earhart’s messages became increasingly dire.

A radio log aboard the Itasca at 7:30 AM reported that Earhart was “OUT OF GAS ONLY ½ HOUR LEFT CANT HR US AT ALL.”

Around 7:42 AM, Earhart’s plane transmitted, “CLNG ITASCA WE MUST BE ON YOU BUT CANNOT SEE U BUT GAS IS RUNNING LOW BEEN UNABLE TO REACH YOU BY RADIO.”

Earhart’s final transmissions were so loud that the Itasca’s operators looked into the sky, expecting to see her plane. Yet it never appeared. At 8:43 AM, the Itasca received the last verified transmission from Earhart, in which she said she was traveling on a “line north and south.”

The US responded to Earhart’s disappearance by launching what was then the largest-ever search and rescue operation. Yet the search, centered around Howland Island, never found any sign of Earhart or her plane, thus sparking one of aviation’s great mysteries.

Now, a US Air Force intelligence officer-turned-explorer believes his team has found Earhart’s long-lost plane.

Join Roca Nation

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COMMUNITY
Roca Reader Takes

On Monday we asked: Do you think there is anyone — past or present — who should inherently be “off limits” from a media interview? 

Beth from New York: “Yes.Those running for public office should be required to be interviewed without exception. It would be their prerogative to answer the questions or not, but the questions should be asked.”

Linda from Connecticut: “If the interview with a foreign leader that is engaged in a war could be fair and balanced, then yes interview him/her.
However violent criminals or those who commit mass murder, such as school/public shooters, should not be interviewed. There is no need to showcase them. It seems to me that this just gives others ideas of how to handle problems, or get famous. It serves no purpose.”

EDITOR’S NOTE
Final Thoughts

We hope you enjoyed part one of our deep-dive on Amelia Earhart’s long last plane! Nothing like unsolved cold cases for Valentine’s Day feels.

On a completely different note, today we had a serious case of the Mandela effect (when a large group of people believe something occurred when it did not) when searching for a robber emoji for one of the Rundown stories. All of us swore that existed, but turns out that it never did. Has that ever happened to you?

See you tomorrow, Roca!

— Max, Max, Jen and Alex