Welcome to Overnight News Digest, where the usual crew, consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors maggiejean, wader, Man Oh Man, side pocket, rfall, and JML9999, alumni editors palantir, Bentliberal, Oke, Interceptor7, jlms qkw, and ScottyUrb, guest editors annetteboardman and Doctor RJ, and current editor-in-chief Neon Vincent, along with anyone else who reads and comments, informs and entertains you with tonight's news. 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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
From the Washington Post: How the presidential campaign looks through the eyes of a foreign journalist
Things look and sound a little different when you’re a German newspaper reporter covering the American political circus.
Kolb, 35, is a digital correspondent for Süddeutsche Zeitung (literally, “Southern German Newspaper”) assigned to his second presidential campaign. If the political process occasionally strikes native-born Americans as odd, it can look positively, well, foreign to a journalist from Munich who’s just dropped into the American heartland.
For eight days leading up the Iowa caucuses, Kolb crisscrossed Iowa in a rented Jeep, steeping himself in the quadrennial spectacle. Among other things, he covered a raucous rally for Donald Trump in Des Moines, a Bernie Sanders speech near the Mississippi River in Davenport and a get-out-to-caucus event for Hillary Clinton at the Family Fun Center bowling alley in tiny Adel.
Along the way, Kolb forms one strong impression: Unlike the formal, coalition-building, consensus-driven politics of his native land, the American campaign is a bare-knuckle brawl. Other parliamentary democracies tend to see it the same way. Western Europeans typically can’t begin to comprehend, for example, the boorish insults spewed by the GOP front-runner, Donald Trump. Or even Hillary Clinton’s fervent bashing of Republican economic policies.
From the New York Times: A Multifront Republican Battle in South Carolina
Donald J. Trump’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination dug in Wednesday for a hard fight in the South Carolina primary, where Mr. Trump will seek to gain a clear upper hand in the 2016 race after his smashing victory in New Hampshire.
But the effort to stop Mr. Trump was only one element of the hard-edged, multifront campaign shaping up here among five candidates, nearly all of whom are facing immense pressure to demonstrate strength.
The Republican contest after New Hampshire has in some respects been clarified into two parallel battles: between Mr. Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, the anti-establishment duo, and among three establishment-friendly hopefuls. But on Wednesday the contenders began exchanging fire in a way that illustrated the complexities of the race — and the unique calculations each candidate is making.
Above all, there is a fight against Mr. Trump, which will be waged by both Mr. Cruz and the mainstream candidates. After largely avoiding a sustained ad assault in New Hampshire, Mr. Trump is likely to face far more attacks here, a state where campaigns can turn rough. Mr. Cruz wasted little time Wednesday in signaling how he intended to run against the New York real estate mogul in the Bible Belt.
From BBC News: North Korea 'executes' army chief of staff Ri Yong-gil
North Korea has executed its army chief of staff Ri Yong-gil, according to unconfirmed South Korean media reports.
Senior officials in North Korea have previously been absent from view for long periods only to reappear.
However, Gen Ri would be the latest of several high-ranking officials to be purged under leader Kim Jong-un.
South Korean media reported that Gen Ri had been executed earlier this month for corruption and "factional conspiracy".
Last week, a meeting of the Central Committee of the ruling Workers' Party attended by Mr Kim discussed how to deal with corruption.
While no individuals were mentioned, state news agency KCNA reported at the time that those at the meeting criticised "the practices of seeking privileges, misuse of authority... and bureaucratism manifested in the party".
From The Guardian: Oregon standoff escalates as FBI surrounds Malheur wildlife refuge
The FBI surrounded the four remaining militia members occupying a wildlife refuge in Oregon on Wednesday night, prompting a dramatic standoff that is being live-streamed on YouTube.
According to an FBI statement, one of the occupiers drove outside of the police barricades on Wednesday afternoon, and agents attempted unsuccessfully to approach the individual.
On a live-stream published by activist Gavin Seim, a woman identifying herself as Sandy Anderson shouted: “Please don’t let us die in vain tonight! If they shoot us and kill us, this is going to be a revolution!” She added: “Our weapons are at our side.” Another woman was heard shouting: “They’re going to kill us.”
“At this time, the FBI has moved to contain the remaining occupiers by placing agents at barricades both immediately in front of and behind the area where the occupiers are camping. Negotiations between the occupiers and the FBI continue. No shots have been fired,” the FBI said in the statement released at 6.20pm.
From the Los Angeles Times: Ex-L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca pleads guilty in jail scandal
tired Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca pleaded guilty Wednesday to lying to federal investigators, a stunning reversal for the longtime law enforcement leader who for years insisted he played no role in the misconduct that tarnished his agency.
Baca’s plea in a downtown courtroom capped a string of prosecutions that began with low-ranking officials and worked up the chain of command.
His former No. 2, Paul Tanaka, is scheduled to stand trial in March on charges that he obstructed a federal investigation into brutality and corruption by sheriff's deputies in the county jails.
In a plea agreement filed in federal court Wednesday morning, Baca admitted that he lied when he told federal authorities that he was unaware that his subordinates planned to approach the FBI agent leading the jail investigation at her home.
From ABC News: Ferguson Sued by Justice Department Over Alleged ‘Racial Bias’ in Policing
The Justice Department has filed a federal lawsuit against Ferguson, Missouri, after the city rejected a deal that would have brought sweeping changes to its embattled police department, which allegedly engaged in "racially discriminatory policing."
The lawsuit, announced Wednesday by Attorney General Loretta Lynch, alleges a pattern or practice of law enforcement conduct that violates the First, Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments, as well as federal civil rights laws and says the citizens there "have waited decades for justice."
"The residents of Ferguson have waited nearly a year for their city to adopt an agreement that would protect their rights and keep them safe," Lynch said. "They have waited nearly a year for their police department to accept rules that would ensure their constitutional rights ... They have waited decades for justice. They should not be forced to wait any longer."
From NBC News: Two Maryland Deputies Shot Dead, Suspect Killed
Two Maryland sheriff's deputies have died after being shot by a gunman who was later killed by police, authorities said.
One of the deputies was shot inside the Abingdon, Md., Panera Bread store without warning after he spoke with the suspect, a witness said.
The sheriff's office was called to the Panera Bread for some issue with the suspect at 11:46 a.m., officials said, and a deputy was shot inside the restaurant. The gunman fled, and a second responding deputy found him at the bottom of a hill and was then fatally shot.
"Additional deputies on scene fired at the suspect. He was pronounced dead at the scene," Gahler said. "A loaded handgun was recovered ... from the suspect inside the vehicle with him," Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler said.
The suspect was identified as David Bryan Evans, 67, and the two deputies had 30 and 16 years of experience on the force, Gahler said. He asked for prayers for the deputies' families.
"There's no words to describe what they're going through right now," Gahler said.
From Bloomberg: Gold Soars Above $1,200 as Yellen Signals Go-Slow on Rates Path
Gold jumped to the highest level in eight months after Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen signaled that the U.S. central bank may delay further interest-rate increases should the turmoil in global markets continue.
Bullion for immediate delivery rallied as much as 1.5 percent to $1,214.64 an ounce, the highest since May 22, according to Bloomberg generic generic pricing. The metal, which traded at $1,207.05 at 10:36 a.m. in Singapore, is set for a ninth gain in 10 days and is the year’s best performing commodity.
Gold has surged 14 percent this year as the turmoil sweeping across financial markets stoked demand for haven assets. Yellen said Wednesday the turbulence had tightened financial conditions by pushing down stock prices, supporting the dollar and raising some borrowing costs. A Bloomberg gauge of the greenback has fallen 1.3 percent in 2016 after gaining for three years.
Yellen’s “more cautious tone and emphasis on a more elevated global risk profile, with particular focus on China, suggests the future path of interest-rate hikes will remain very much a gradual one,” said Mark Keenan, head of commodities research for Asia at Societe Generale SA in Singapore. “Gold’s move higher was intuitive and well-supported by physical inflows” into exchange-traded products.
From Ars Technica: Slow start for HBO Now with just 800,000 subscribers
Time Warner had its fourth-quarter earnings call on Wednesday morning, and HBO, a subsidiary of the network, revealed some interesting information about its new standalone streaming service, HBO Now. The highly anticipated launch of HBO Now was expected to draw a huge following from cord-cutters. But Richard Plepler, the CEO of HBO, told investors and journalists that HBO Now had only attracted about 800,000 subscribers since the service launched in April.
Plepler said he was pleased with the growth, especially considering that HBO Now hasn’t yet been released on Playstation and Xbox platforms. He added that HBO Now also hasn’t yet released content from Jon Stewart, Bill Simmons, and the Vice Daily News Show, which he said was certain to drive subscriptions. Still, 800,000 subscribers could be seen as a slow start, especially considering thatPlepler told investors in November 2014 that he was hoping to draw in four or five million new subscribers with HBO Now.
”We’re learning all the time… We see an enormous amount of subscribers ahead,” Plepler said on the call today, adding that, "HBO Now is an additive part of our growth strategy… We’re going to work in a multifaceted way to expand our sub[scriber] base.”
Together, HBO and Cinemax brought in 2.7 million new subscribers who purchased either a traditional bundle or HBO Now’s online-only package.
From CNN: Harry Potter Part 8 to publish this summer
Harry Potter is back for another round of magic, struggles with the darkness and parents. This time, Harry's the dad, struggling with his own son.
The eighth installment of the Harry Potter series, the two-part play, "Harry Potter and the Cursed Child," will be published as a book this summer, author J.K Rowling announced on her Pottermore website Wednesday.
The "special rehearsal edition" script book will be available at midnight on July 31, a day after the Harry Potter play opens in London.
The newest Potter installment, the first official Harry Potter story to be presented on stage, is based on an original new story by Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany, and is written by Thorne.
From The Daily Beast: How ‘P*ssy’ Got Its Very Rude Power
Tellingly, CNN’s Carol Costello could not bring herself to quote Trump in a segment on Tuesday, grimacing as she asked two other female panelists about “that P-word that no one can say on television but you often hear in porno flicks.”
What, pray tell, is so scandalous about Donald Trump uttering the word “pussy” as a derogatory term for a weak man beyond the fact that no presidential candidate has done so before? Indeed, no other presidential candidate has boasted that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” either. The 5,000 people at Trump’s rally likely have little knowledge of the etymological ramifications of “pussy,” just as they likely don’t immediately think of penises when they call someone a “dick.”
“Pussy” as an epithet is derived from the pejorative connotation of “girly,” as in a domesticated pussycat, but some experts say it is largely devoid of misogyny when delivered as a crude insult. “I think that for most people, you can use ‘pussy’ pretty safely without having it be interpreted as a direct reference to a woman or a woman’s body part,” Michael Adams, a lexicographer and professor of English at Indiana University, told The Daily Beast.
Adams cited “sucks” as an example of profanity that many people associate with sexual activity, despite evidence that it is rooted in the platonic phrase, “That really sucks wind.”
From USA Today: Report paints heartbreaking picture of Zika-linked birth defects
A new report paints a heartbreaking portrait of the damage suffered by babies with microcephaly, a normally rare birth defect linked to the Zika outbreak in Brazil. Babies with microcephaly have abnormally small heads, a condition that often signals incomplete brain development.
New research suggests that the damage can go far beyond the size of a baby's skull, and that babies with microceophaly who survive their infancy may need a level of intensive care that is in short supply in the developing countries and territories hardest hit by Zika.
In a report published online Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, doctors describe the case of a fetus whose autopsy showed severe brain malformations.
The fetus suffered from an "almost complete absence" of the ridges and grooves that give the brain its characteristic look, said study coauthor Tatjana Zupanc of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.
From The Atlantic: The Supreme Court's Devastating Decision on Climate
[Worrying] Tuesday was for the success of xenophobic politics in America, it might have been more worrying for the planet’s climate.
In the early evening, the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the implementation of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, a set of Environmental Protection Agency regulations which would limit greenhouse-gas emissions from the power sector.
Issued last summer, the rules are the centerpiece of the White House’s climate-change-fighting agenda, and they play a big part in the recent, tepid optimism about global warming. Without the proposal of the plan, the United States couldn’t have secured the Paris Agreement, the first international treaty to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions, last December. And without the adoption of the plan, the United States almost certainly won’t be able to comply with that document. If the world were to lose the Paris Agreement—which was not a total solution to the climate crisis, but meant to be a first, provisional step—years could be lost in the diplomatic fight to reduce climate-change’s dangers.
The plan’s ultimate legal future is unclear, for reasons I’ll get into in a minute, but the ruling is possibly devastating for the climate on a short-term basis. Moreover, it represents an early weakness in the new global strategy to mitigate climate change.
From Slate: I Was a Super Bowl Concession Worker
On Super Bowl Sunday, a few minutes before 7 a.m., I park in a crowded dirt lot behind Avaya Stadium, home to the San Jose Earthquakes soccer team. I’m carrying a black and gold card that reads, “I can make a difference at Super Bowl 50,” which I received a few weeks earlier at an orientation. It’s meant to inspire us during what promises to be a very long day. The morning is clear and beautiful; the mood is upbeat. Many of the ushers, janitors, and food-service workers assembled here have been anticipating the game all season.
But first, we have to get a seat on the bus.
“This is worse than Disneyland,” says a man to my right after we’ve been waiting for 30 minutes in a line a quarter of a mile long. “Somebody needs to put this on YouTube,” says another. An older woman is the first to raise her voice. “This is how they treat the 99 percent who gonna serve the 1 percent!” she shouts. “This is shameful.” A few cheers ring out. By the time we’ve made it to the front, the mood has begun to wilt.
From Rolling Stone: ‘The Walking Dead': What to Know for Season 6 Midseason Premiere
Even the hardest of hardcore Walking Dead fans would probably admit that after a rip-roaring start to the sixth season last fall, the story stalled a little. The past eight episodes have covered the same few bloody days from multiple perspectives, as our scattered heroes executed a botched plan to secure their new home in northern Virginia's "Alexandria Safe Zone." Give credit to the show's writers for trying something different, making all the usual zombie attacks and violent infighting feel fresh by focusing on just a few characters per hour, and jumping around in the timeline. But the result, ultimately, was two months of only intermittently exciting post-apocalyptic action, while the plot spun around in circles.
Still, there was some advancement though last year. So as The Walking Dead prepares to resume its sixth season this Sunday night, here's a refresher on where we left everybody — and where they may be headed over the next several weeks.
From /Film: ‘House of Cards’ Season 4 Trailer: “You Have No Idea What It Means to Have Nothing”
House of Cards really does have something to prove this season. It has to relocate its misplaced mojo and allow showrunner Beau Willimon a graceful exit as he moves on to other pastures. Sure, the series has already been renewed for a fifth season and Frank Underwood will continue to terrorize the American public for as long as he possibly can, but this could be the batch of episodes that defines Willimon’s run with the series.
Here’s the official synopsis for the new season:
The critically acclaimed Emmy®-nominated drama has its Golden Globe® winning stars Kevin Spacey (as Francis Underwood) and Robin Wright (as Claire Underwood), whose characters have always been each other’s’ strongest allies, showing cracks in their relationship. In an election year, the stakes are now higher than ever, and the biggest threat they face is contending with each other.
From the A.V. Club: Who knew Donald Trump was the comeback role Johnny Depp needed?
As satire, this version of the tycoon succeeds in drawing a line between the trash-talking Lonesome Rhodes of 2016 and the redheaded Gordon Gekko of 1986. Set before The Apprentice or before the Saturday Night Live hosting gigs, on Trump’s 40th birthday, The Art Of The Deal catalogs the man’s sins—discriminatory housing practices, bogus lawsuits, the destruction of architectural artifacts—in dramatizations that are only slightly more ridiculous than his modern-day TV theatrics. Period details are occasionally tossed aside for jokes about sloganeering hats or truly heroic Vietnam War veterans, but the humorous thrust is in the contradictions, Trump’s facile boardroom pointers for everyday people bumping up against the bullying, manipulative, prejudicial tactics that made him a Master of the Universe. One running gag involves Trump describing rivals like Barron Hilton (Stephen Merchant) as charmed beneficiaries of wealthy fathers, never once stopping to acknowledge the leg up he got from Frederick Trumps Sr. and Jr. This is lampooning by way of illustration.
The Art Of The Deal manages the traditional Funny Or Die trick of drawing top flight talent to a very silly project, but the real coup is Depp as Trump. The Garbage Pail Kids hair and makeup do a lot of heavy lifting, but the actor’s vocal inflections and mannerisms create an incredible facsimile of Trump—albeit one that’s rooted in the twitchy kookiness of Captain Jack Sparrow or Raoul Duke. For once in his post-Pirates Of The Caribbean career, an entire production can actually keep up with Depp’s whims and tap into his wavelength, striking a tone that’s as big and brassy as the character he’s playing. It helps that he’s unrecognizable beneath the makeup; it also helps that there’s no Mortdecai-like ambiguity about whether or not the character is supposed to be a lovable rake or a despicable scoundrel. The ugliness of the performance holds Trump up for ridicule, and Depp commits to that ugliness better than anyone short of the genuine article. Like the real Trump, he delivers a bizarrely magnetic performance, and that magnetism is enough to hold the whole enterprise together, even as the intentional incompetence of the film-within-the-film threatens to sink the final act.
From Cosmo: The Crazy Place Republicans Have Sex More Than Democrats
Where do Republicans come from? Well, when a girl Republican loves a boy Republican very much, they get married and consummate their loving union with a good old fashioned romp in some literal hay, probably, because haha, did you know that Republicans have sex outdoors 50 percent more than Democrats do?
Yes it's true. According to an analysis by the dating app Clover, Republicans are 50 percent more into doing the dirty in the actual dirt, grass, sand, rocky mountain terrain, etc. than Democrats are. So if you have a penchant for doing it animal style, like outside in a yard like a real animal, maybe date a Republican!
Who knew Republicans were so adventurous though. I really had this whole political party pegged (😈) wrong. Outdoor sex can be fun, so long as you take the proper precautions.