Overnight News Digest, aka OND, is a community feature here at Daily Kos. Each editor selects news stories on a wide range of topics.
The OND community was founded by Magnifico.
Welcome to all, join us in the comment section to share a news articles and jump into the community chat. News is not required to pull up a chair and chat, just be kind to ceiling cat.
Paul's story changes on racial comments
Rep. Ron Paul has tried since 2001 to disavow racist and incendiary language published in Texas newsletters that bore his name, denying he wrote them and even walking out of an interview on CNN Wednesday. But he vouched for the accuracy of the writings and admitted writing at least some of the passages when first asked about them in an interview in 1996.
Some issues of the newsletters included racist, anti-Israel or anti-gay comments, including a 1992 newsletter in which he said 95% of black men in Washington "are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."
Paul told TheDallas Morning News in 1996 that the contents of his newsletters were accurate but needed to be taken in context. Wednesday, he told CNN he didn't write the newsletters and didn't know what was in them
8 Facing Charges in Wake of Death of a Fellow G.I.
By KIRK SEMPLE
One night in October, an Army private named Danny Chen apparently angered his fellow soldiers by forgetting to turn off the water heater after taking a shower at his outpost in Afghanistan, his family said.
In the relatives’ account, the soldiers pulled Private Chen out of bed and dragged him across the floor; they forced him to crawl on the ground while they pelted him with rocks and taunted him with ethnic slurs. Finally, the family said, they ordered him to do pull-ups with a mouthful of water — while forbidding him from spitting it out.
It was the culmination of what the family called a campaign of hazing against Private Chen, 19, who was born in Chinatown in Manhattan, the son of Chinese immigrants. Hours later, he was found dead in a guard tower, from what a military statement on Wednesday called “an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound” to the head.
Fitch again warns U.S. debt burden threatens AAA rating
By Daniel Bases
Fitch Ratings on Wednesday warned again that the United States' rising debt burden was not consistent with maintaining the country's top AAA credit rating, but said there would likely be no decision on whether to cut the rating before 2013.
Last month, Fitch changed its U.S. credit rating outlook to negative from stable, citing the failure of a special congressional committee to agree on at least $1.2 trillion in deficit-reduction measures.
"Federal debt will rise in the absence of expenditure and tax reforms that would address the challenges of rising health and social security spending as the population ages," Fitch said in a statement.
Latino Inmate Ernest Atencio Dies After Fight With Deputies at Sheriff Joe Arpaio Jail
ABCnews.com
The embattled Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff’s Office, which is accused of committing wide-ranging civil rights violations against Latinos in a U.S. Justice Department report, is now at the center of a new controversy.
An attorney for Ernest Atencio claims as the Justice Department’s report was being released Friday, deputies fought with his client, a scuffle that led to Atencio’s death.
After the Phoenix jailhouse fight, Michael Manning told The Associated Press, Atencio had no brain activity and had marks from a stun gun used on his body.
“At this stage, we all have to give the MCSO the benefit of the doubt, but based on prior experience with these people, I have plenty of doubt,” Manning said, adding that the Sheriff’s Department needs to release surveillance video that was captured during the scuffle.
Wal-Mart Pulls Formula After Baby's Death
by The Associated Press
Wal-Mart has pulled a batch of powdered infant formula from its stores nationwide after a newborn Missouri boy who was given the formula became gravely ill with a suspected bacterial infection and died after being taken off life support, the retailer said Wednesday.
No government recall had been ordered for the 12.5-ounce cans of Enfamil Newborn powder with the lot number ZP1J7G. Manufacturer Mead Johnson Nutrition said its records showed the lot tested negative for the bacterium before it was shipped.
But Wal-Mart spokeswoman Dianna Gee said the company decided to pull the lot "out of an abundance of caution" while health officials investigate Sunday's death of 10-day-old Avery Cornett. The product could go back on shelves depending on the outcome of the investigation, but customers who bought the cans have the option of returning them for a refund or exchange, Gee said.
What A Global Flavor Map Can Tell Us About How We Pair Foods
by Nancy Shute
There's a reason why Asian dishes often taste so different from the typical North American fare: North American recipes rely on flavors that are related, while East Asian cooks go for sharp contrasts.
That's the word from researchers at the University of Cambridge, who used a tool called network analysis to chart the relationship between chemical flavor compounds. They did it to test the widely believed notion that foods with compatible flavors are chemically similar.
It turns out that's true in some regional cuisines, particularly in North America – think milk, egg, butter, cocoa, and vanilla. But in East Asia, cooks are more likely to combine foods with few chemical similarities – from shrimp to lemon to ginger, soy sauce, and hot peppers.
Patients Want To Read Doctors' Notes, But Many Doctors Balk
by Nancy Shute
Doctors write about their patients all the time, in notes detailing office visits and treatments. But for patients, those notes are a closed book.
Maybe the doctor has scribbled that the patient was "difficult," as Elaine discovered when she peeked at her chart in a memorable Seinfeld episode. When her dermatologist saw her snooping, he grabbed the chart out of her hands.
Well, patients seem ready to take that risk. When asked if they'd like to see their doctors' notes, patients in two new studies overwhelmingly say yes. But doctors aren't nearly as enthusiastic.
The idea of opening up doctor's notes has been around for decades. Advocates figure that patient oversight will reduce medical errors and help patients be more engaged. Patients have a legal right to see their records. But actually getting those notes can be expensive and slow.
Army Does An ‘About Face’ On Chaplain’s Beard
Stewart Ain
One year after filing suit against the U.S. Army for refusing to allow him to enlist as a military chaplain unless he shaved his beard, Rabbi Menachem Stern is to be sworn-in this week — beard and all.
Rabbi Stern, 29, of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, is to take the oath Friday in a ceremony in the Surfside, Fla., office of the Aleph Institute, an agency authorized by the Department of Defense to recruit, vet and endorse rabbis for the military chaplaincy.
“I’m ecstatic,” Rabbi Stern said. “It’s the ultimate feeling of — I don’t want to say a dream come true, but I’m answering the call and feeling it through and through.”
As a member of the Chabad Lubavitch community, Rabbi Stern said it was unthinkable that he would have to shave his beard to become an Army chaplain.
J. Lynn Helms, FAA chief who fired striking air controllers, dies at 86
By Elaine Woo
J. Lynn Helms, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration who carried out President Ronald Reagan’s order to fire more than 11,000 striking air traffic controllers and oversaw efforts to keep airlines flying during the crisis, has died. He was 86.
He died Dec. 11 of cardiopulmonary failure at his home in Westport, Conn., a family spokesman said.
Helms had a reputation as a decisive, technically brilliant aviation industry executive who led a number of companies out of financial straits, including Piper Aircraft, which he ran for six years. A former test pilot, he was the first FAA chief in a decade capable of designing an airplane that could fly.
Several months into his tenure, in August 1981, more than 12,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, known as PATCO, walked off the job after contract negotiations stalled over the union’s call for a reduced workweek and higher pay.
Texas family rescued from snowdrift in NM
The Associated Press
Rescuers on Wednesday pulled a Texas family from an SUV that had been buried in a snowdrift on a rural New Mexico highway for nearly two days.
State police said rescuers had to dig through 4 feet of ice and snow to free the Higgins family, whose red GMC Yukon got stuck on U.S. 56 near Springer when a blizzard moved through the area Monday.
Rescuers found David and Yvonne Higgins and their 5-year-old daughter Hannah clinging to each other and lethargic early Wednesday morning. The family is recovering at Miners Colfax Medical Center in Raton.
David Higgins told The Associated Press he and his wife both have pneumonia but his daughter is fine. He said he was glad to be able to talk about his ordeal because he had feared that he and his family might not be found.
"By 9 or 10 Monday night, I realized there was solid snow outside my window. I tried to shove my arm through the top of the window. I thought it can't be that deep," the 48-year-old father said. "I pushed as hard as I could. My arm went about 16 inches and there was still snow."
‘The Iron Lady’ shows Margaret Thatcher still divides Brits
LONDON — With hairdo, handbag and hubris, she dominated — and divided — Britain for a decade. Now a film about Margaret Thatcher is doing it all over again.
"The Iron Lady" stars Meryl Streep as Britain’s first female prime minister, whose neo-Victorian values and free-market ideology helped transform a battered post-imperial country into an economically dynamic but industrially depleted and increasingly unequal society.
But it’s the film’s focus on the personal, rather than the political, that has made Thatcher’s enemies apprehensive and her allies unhappy.
"The Iron Lady" depicts Thatcher, now 86, as a frail, elderly figure with dementia, holding imaginary conversations with her dead husband Denis (a genial Jim Broadbent) as she looks back on her life as a double outsider — both a woman and a lowly grocer’s daughter in a male-dominated, patrician Conservative Party.
]
How Ethiopia's Adoption Industry Dupes Families and Bullies Activists
In 2008, a 38-year old Oklahoma nurse whom I'll call Kelly adopted an eight-year old girl, "Mary," from Ethiopia. It was the second adoption for Kelly, following one from Guatemala. She'd sought out a child from Ethiopia in the hopes of avoiding some of the ethical problems of adopting from Guatemala: widespread stories of birthmothers coerced to give up their babies and even payments and abductions at the hands of brokers procuring adoptees for unwitting U.S. parents. Now, even after using a reputable agency in Ethiopia, Kelly has come to believe that Mary never should have been placed for adoption. She came to this determination after hiring what's known as an adoption searcher.
Adoption searchers -- specialized independent researchers working in a unique field that few outside the community of adoptive parents even know exists -- track down the birth families of children adopted from other counties. In Ethiopia, searching has arisen in response to a dramatic boom in international adoptions from the country in recent years. In 2010, Ethiopia accounted for nearly a quarter of all international adoptions to the U.S. The number of Ethiopian children adopted into foreign families in the U.S., Canada, and Europe has risen from just a few hundred several years ago to several thousand last year. The increase has been so rapid -- and, for some, so lucrative -- that some locals have said adoption was "becoming the new export industry for our country."