Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Doctor RJ, rfall, JML9999 and Man Oh Man with guest editors annetteboardman and Chitown Kev. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the OND banner.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
McClatchy
WASHINGTON
The long-anticipated – and hotly contested – carbon pollution plan is being finalized by the Obama administration Monday, setting off a scramble in the states to comply with it and one in Congress and the courts to stop it.
First proposed a year ago, the plan had been expected to be finalized this summer – a timetable the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stuck to despite push-back from some states and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a separate clean-air rule.
Called the “Clean Power Plan” by the EPA, the rule is a centerpiece of a major push by President Barack Obama to help the United States – and the planet – attack climate change by reducing the amount of carbon pollution pumped into the air.
The rule was announced in draft form amid fanfare in June 2014, and Obama and EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy have talked up its benefits, saying it would be a boon to public health, helping to reduce asthma and other respiratory ailments.
DW
President Obama’s new climate change rules are no panacea to global warming and won’t turn the US into a green economy overnight. Still, their importance, both domestically and internationally, can’t be overestimated.
Rhetorically, at least, climate change has been a key issue for Barack Obama right from the start. He made it a central political topic during his first presidential campaign back in 2008, promising to make the US the global leader on environmental issues again, should he get elected. But after he did win the White House he first bungled the historic Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 and then dithered away his first term without making any significant progress on the issue.
Al Jazeera America
Environmental activists praised President Barack Obama’s new power plant regulations as the most important step to date in battling climate change but warn that it won't be enough without a dramatic cut in U.S. reliance on fossil fuels.
The White House is expected on Monday to announce new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, requiring states to bring their emissions down to 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. In a statement on Monday, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune hailed that change as “the most significant single action any president has ever taken.”
“With 200 coal plants announced to retire and clean energy growing at record levels, the U.S. is now taking a huge next step to curb dangerous carbon pollution,” he said. “Today is a victory for every American who wants clean air to breath and for the millions of activists and concerned citizens who organized to make sure this day would finally come.”
The Guardian
Hundreds of businesses including eBay, Nestle and General Mills have issued their support for Barack Obama’s clean power plan, billed as the strongest action ever on climate change by a US president.
The rules, announced on Monday, are designed to cut emissions from power plants and have been strengthened in terms of the long-term ambition as originally proposed by the president last year, but slightly weakened in the short-term in a concession to states reliant on highly-polluting coal.
White House adviser Brian Deese said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules represented the “biggest step that any single president has made to curb the carbon pollution that is fuelling climate change”. The US is the world’s second biggest carbon emitter after China.
Reuters
President Barack Obama challenged America and the world to step up efforts to fight global warming on Monday at the formal unveiling of his administration's controversial, ramped-up plan to cut carbon emissions from U.S. power plants.
Declaring climate change the greatest threat facing the world, Obama said the regulation requiring the power sector to cut its emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 would reduce Americans' energy bills and improve the health of vulnerable populations nationwide.
The plan, which also mandates a shift to renewable energy from coal-fired electricity, is meant to put the United States in a strong position at international talks in Paris later this year on reaching a deal to curb global warming.
Vox
School integration has shrunk steadily for nearly three decades: ever since 1988, the number of black students and white students who attend school together has decreased. And the achievement gap between black and white students has grown.
Sunday's This American Life provided a potent look at how hard it is to reverse that trend, and how strong the resistance to school integration still is. Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times Magazine reported from Missouri's Normandy School District, where Ferguson's Michael Brown went to school before he was shot by police officer Darren Wilson last August:
McClatchy
WASHINGTON
A 115-year-old U.S. law that’s grown like kudzu now hangs over the head of the Minnesota dentist who shot Cecil the lion.
But it’s one of the Supreme Court’s newest decisions that could shape how officials may handle angry members of the public who have raged against the bow-and-arrow wielding dentist, Dr. Walter J. Palmer.
Now both hunter and hunted, Palmer has ventured into a legal thicket that’s almost certainly darker than he ever could have imagined. It’s also getting thicker by the day, as lawmakers take aim on their own.
“Let’s not be cowardly lions when it comes to trophy killings,” Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., said Friday as he introduced legislation inspired by Cecil’s death.
NPR
Delta says it will no longer allow freight shipments of big game trophies. The decision follows the killing of a popular lion in Zimbabwe.
The airline said in a statement on Monday that, effective immediately, it "will officially ban shipment of all lion, leopard, elephant, rhinoceros, and buffalo trophies."
NPR's Jackie Northam reports that Delta is the only major American carrier that has direct flights between the U.S. and Africa. "From now on, big game hunters are going to have to find another way to get their so-called trophies home," she says.
Al Jazeera America
A white Charlotte police officer failed to give an unarmed black man any command before firing 12 bullets and killing him, a court heard Monday.
Prosecutors say 28-year-old Randall Kerrick overreacted during the incident in September 2013. But in opening statements at the officer’s trial for voluntary manslaughter, Kerrick’s defense attorney said Jonathan Ferrell — who was shot dead after knocking on doors for help after a car accident — made several bad choices that night, including drinking and smoking marijuana before the crash, screaming at a passer-by and acting aggressively towards officers.
Kerrick faces up to 11 years in prison if convicted over the incident, which has already seen Charlotte pay the dead man’s family $2.25 million in a wrongful death lawsuit.
Since the shooting, the U.S. has seen increasing debate over police tactics following a string of incidents in which black men have died during arrests or while in custody in Ferguson, Missouri; North Charleston, South Carolina; Baltimore and other places.
Al Jazeera America
The deaths last year of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray of Baltimore, two young black men — at the hands of police — changed something for everyone. The killings gave rise to Black Lives Matter, which started in 2013 after the killing of Trayvon Martin, and inscribed the words “police brutality” in the national imagination. Their deaths rocked their hometowns, sparked unrest in the streets and drew the national media attention to their oft-overlooked, predominantly black communities.
Now the megaphones have gone quiet, and the big-shot news anchors are back in their studios. With the first anniversary of Brown’s death approaching on Aug. 9, here at Al Jazeera America, we wanted to know what lasting changes, if any, the months of protests and inches of column space brought about. We turned to two residents for a local perspective. Michael Thomas of Ferguson and Glenford Nunez of Baltimore are black photographers who have worked in these cities before, during and after Brown’s and Gray’s deaths.
We asked them to submit photographs they shot in the wake of the killings. We provided them with several prompts: Who is working to improve their communities? What do the former protest sites look like now? How is the community memorializing such a tragedy and moving forward?
The Guardian
Darren Wilson has attempted to return to work as a police officer since leaving his job in Ferguson, Missouri, amid the furore over his fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old, it emerged on Monday.
Wilson said he applied for several police positions elsewhere but was turned down due to concerns that he was a liability. “It’s too hot an issue, so it makes me unemployable,” he told the New Yorker, during interviews for a profile published as the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death approaches.
The 29-year-old said he had resigned from the Ferguson police department days after a grand jury in St Louis declined to prosecute him for killing Brown, in a sharply contested incident that led to months of unrest in the city and protests around the US.
Reuters
The United States has decided to allow airstrikes to defend Syrian rebels trained by the U.S. military from any attackers, even if the enemies hail from forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, U.S. officials said on Sunday.
The decision by President Barack Obama, which could deepen the U.S. role in Syria's conflict, aims to shield a still-fledging group of Syrian fighters armed and trained by the United States to battle Islamic State militants -- not forces loyal to Assad.
But in Syria's messy civil war, Islamic State is only one of the threats to the U.S. recruits. The first batch of U.S.-trained forces deployed to northern Syria came under fire on Friday from other militants, triggering the first known U.S. airstrikes to support them.
Reuters
In the weeks leading up to a critical annual U.S. report on human trafficking that publicly shames the world’s worst offenders, human rights experts at the State Department concluded that trafficking conditions hadn’t improved in Malaysia and Cuba. And in China, they found, things had grown worse.
The State Department’s senior political staff saw it differently — and they prevailed.
A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals, shows that the government office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior American diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 strategically important countries in this year’s Trafficking in Persons report.
NPR
Facing securities fraud charges, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton turned himself in at a jail in Collin County, Texas, on Monday morning. A grand jury recently indicted Paxton on three felony charges that accuse him of misleading investors into a technology company.
"Two of the charges — first-degree felony securities fraud — carry the possibility of hefty jail sentences," reports member station KUT in Austin.
KUT adds, "Paxton can legally remain in office while under indictment, as the case could take years to run through trials and appeals."
NPR
Toy guns that look real should no longer be sold in New York.
NPR's Joel Rose reports that retailers who were selling realistic-looking toy guns have agreed to halt their sales of the product. Wal-Mart, Amazon and other retailers have also agreed to pay $300,000 in fines as part of a settlement announced Monday.
An investigation by the New York attorney general's office found more than 6,000 toy guns that violate New York law were sold in the state in the past three years.
New York law requires toy guns that are made in realistic colors like black blue, silver or aluminum, to have a bright, 1-inch-wide orange stripe "down both sides of the barrel and the front end of the barrel," according to the attorney general office's press release.
Vox
On August 3rd, the island of Puerto Rico officially went into default on its $72 billion in debt. The announcement is the culmination of several years of economic woes, but the island's debt has now become an urgent problem for the US territory — and therefore, for the US.
The problem is especially tricky because US bankruptcy laws don't allow government institutions in Puerto Rico to declare bankruptcy, as those in US states can. US policy did a lot to create the problem, and people on both sides of the debate — Puerto Ricans and the creditors who own their bonds — are Americans.
The worst news: The island's fate is in the hands of Congress.
DW
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has joined two of her ministers in casting doubt on a treason probe into two internet journalists. She said authorities needed to be sensitive where press freedom was at stake.
Merkel's deputy spokesperson, Christiane Wirtz, said on Monday that the chancellor gave her "full support" to Justice Minister Heiko Maas (seen with Merkel in above photo), who on Friday voiced doubts as to whether two journalists at the center of a federal investigation had committed treason by publishing sensitive documents from the domestic intelligence agency.
Wirtz declined to comment on whether Merkel still had confidence in Federal Prosecutor General Harald Range, who instigated the investigation against the journalists from the Internet blog Netzpolitik.org, Markus Beckedahl and Andre Meister.
Spiegel Online
Turkish President Erdogan claims to be battling the terrorist Islamic State, but in reality he is mainly fighting against the Kurdish PKK militia. By doing so, he has shown that he is willing to derail the peace process in his country for the sake of clinging to power.
Newal Bulut grew up in war, and now she fears it could return. She is a 27-year-old graphic designer from the predominantly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey. Sometimes she asks herself whether that night in June, when the pro-Kurdish party HDP won seats in the Turkish parliament thanks in part to Turkish voters, was only a beautiful, ephemeral dream?
The Guardian
European shares shrug off Athens slump
The Greek stock market ended 16.23% lower, its worst daily performance since 1985 when modern records began, with banking shares inevitably the main fallers. There were only nine gainers, including furniture maker Dromeas which gained around 29% after announcing - somewhat ironically given Greece’s problems with the EU - that it had wond a €30m deal to supply European Commission offices.
Elsewhere though, European shares held up remarkably well despite the slump in Athens. For a start, the decline had been expected after a five week suspension of the Greek market. There were also some reasonable eurozone PMI manufacturing figures (ignoring a shocking decline in Greece). And even though Greek banks dropped up to 30%, elsewhere the sector was buoyed by positive results from HSBC and Commerzbank.
Reuters
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Qatar on Monday and invited him to visit Moscow, a Hamas official said, extending a diplomatic welcome to the Palestinian group shunned by the West.
Meshaal, who is based in Doha, last traveled to Moscow in 2010, four years after his first official visit to the Russian capital.
In a statement released in Gaza, the Hamas official said a delegation led by Meshaal briefed Lavrov on conditions in the Gaza Strip, which the Islamist movement rules, in the aftermath of last summer's war with Israel.
Meshaal also discussed with Lavrov "Zionist terrorism in the West Bank and its assaults on Muslim and Christian sites in Jerusalem", the official said, three days after an arson attack by suspected Jewish militants killed a Palestinian toddler.
NPR
Eight months ago, Mexico's first lady, Angélica Rivera, known for her fondness of designer clothes and European vacations, made a public promise to sell a multimillion-dollar mansion bought under controversial circumstances. She purchased the home, at below market rates, from a contractor with lucrative connections to her husband.
The scandal has been one of the biggest to rock President Enrique Peña Nieto's administration. Months later, many questions remain regarding the purchase — and Rivera has yet to sell the house.
Last November, just back from a state visit to China, she distributed a videotaped message.
"I have nothing to hide," said Rivera, reading from prepared remarks. The former soap opera actress said she was buying the house with her own earnings.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Al Jazeera America
Rescue workers in Myanmar are racing to help tens of thousands of people facing severe floods, as the official death toll from the deluge climbed to at least 46.
The country's Relief and Resettlement Director Daw Phyu told Al Jazeera that at least 217,000 people have been affected in the country, after monsoon rains triggered flash floods and landslides, destroying thousands of houses, farmland, bridges and roads.
Alongside the 46 people confirmed dead, four individuals remain missing, he said.
Authorities have declared the four worst hit areas in central and western Myanmar “national disaster-affected regions.”
In the northern Sagaing region, residents said the floodwaters caught them off guard as they swept into villages, engulfing homes and fields.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
The Rocky fire slowed overnight with favorable weather conditions but continued to devour drought-dry wildlands, topping out at 60,000 acres, a fire spokesman said Monday.
Cooler temperatures and an increase in humidity kept the fire from growing the way it did over the weekend, when it tripled in size, spokesman Rick Frawley said.
It increased overnight by 6,000 acres and the level of containment grew from 5 percent to 12 percent, Frawley said.
The Guardian
Wildfires blazing across western US states have destroyed forests and threatened residents, particularly in northern California where dozens of blazes are raging and homes have been evacuated.
The biggest California wildfire – raging in the Lower Lake area north of San Francisco – spread throughout Sunday to cover even more drought-stricken ground. The fast-moving blaze had charred 84 square miles by Sunday night, an area almost twice as big as San Francisco.
The fire has destroyed 24 homes and 26 outbuildings and was threatening a further 6,300 homes. However, no homes were lost on Sunday, state fire spokesman Jay Smith said.
Wildfires are also burning in Washington and Oregon.
NPR
Bumblebees are important pollinators of crops and wildflowers across the U.S., and they gather heavy loads of nectar and pollen from flowers. A study published Monday shows that the type of food they carry affects how they fly.
That's because they store nectar in a special pouch inside their abdomen, while pollen gets packed into little hollows in their hind legs. When bumblebees carry a pollen load rather than a nectar load, "they are more stable, but less maneuverable in flight," according to an online report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Despite what you may have heard, bumblebees do not defy the laws of physics when they fly.
Decades ago, this idea entered popular culture, maybe because engineers could not explain bumblebee flight using models developed for fixed wing aircraft, like airplanes, explains Andrew Mountcastle, a biologist at Harvard University.
NPR
Oil prices took another drop Monday, rattling the stock market and putting more downward pressure on gasoline prices.
For oil companies, the price slump is hitting hard at profits, but for U.S. motorists, the downshift has brought savings at the pump.
"Oil prices took a pretty strong hit in the month of July," said Chris Christopher, an economist for IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm. But August is off to an even rougher start, with price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate oil dropping another 3.6 percent Monday at 4:00 p.m. to $45.43. One year ago, the price was about $93.
NPR
A new paper, just published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease, provides insights into the risks and benefits of coffee consumption.
It's the latest scientific study to hit the media. But different headlines give a very different picture of what the study found.
Some headlines depict good news:
"Here's More Evidence That Coffee Is Good For Your Brain" (Forbes.com)
"Coffee Guards Against Mild Cognitive Impairment, Says Study" (Bustle.com)
"Drinking Coffee In Moderate Amounts May Protect Your Brain From Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer's" (MedicalDaily.com)
Others, not so much:
"Study: Increasing Coffee Intake Harmful To Brain" (CBS Atlanta)
"Here's why that extra cup of coffee is bad for your brain" (India Today)
NPR
The flooded streets and destroyed homes of the New Orleans neighborhood known as the Lower Ninth Ward were among the most powerful and iconic images from Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath 10 years ago.
Now, much of New Orleans is back — more than half of the city's neighborhoods have recovered some 90 percent of their pre-storm population.
That's not the case for the Lower Ninth.Today, there's a feeling of desolation on nearly every block of the predominantly African-American neighborhood.
One of the first things you notice is the many empty lots, several on every street. Instead of houses, they now hold weeds and tall grass.
After Katrina, only about 37 percent of households returned to this once-vibrant neighborhood, which had a population of about 14,000 in 2000.