Welcome to Overnight News Digest where the usual crew, consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors maggiejean, Chitown Kev, 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.
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From the New York Times: U.S. to Bar Arbitration Clauses in Nursing Home Contracts
The federal agency that controls more than $1 trillion in Medicare andMedicaid funding has moved to prevent nursing homes from forcing claims of elder abuse, sexual harassment and even wrongful death into the private system of justice known as arbitration.
An agency within the Health and Human Services Department on Wednesday issued a rule that bars any nursing home or assisted-living facility that receives federal funding from requiring that its residents resolve any disputes in arbitration, instead of court.
The rule, which would affect nursing homes with 1.5 million residents, promises to deliver major new protections.
Clauses embedded in the fine print of nursing home admissions contracts have pushed disputes about safety and the quality of care out of public view. The system has helped the nursing home industry reduce its legal costs, but it has stymied the families of nursing home residents from getting justice, even in the case of murder.
A case involving a 100-year-old woman who was found murdered in a nursing home, strangled by her roommate, was initially blocked from court. So was a case brought by the family of a 94-year-old woman who died at a nursing home in Murrysville, Pa., from a head wound. The cases were the subject of a front-page article in The New York Timeslast November.
From the Washington Post: Darkness and fear in Aleppo as the bombs rain down
The bombings at night are the worst. There is no electricity in the rebel-held portion of eastern Aleppo, and the warplanes flying overhead target any light piercing the blackness beneath.
So families huddle together in the dark, gathered in one room so that they don’t die alone, listening to the roar of the jets and waiting for the bombs to fall.
After they do, rescue workers venture out, navigating the rubble and craters left by earlier bombings, to dig out victims without headlights or lamps. They haul them to hospitals swamped with patients being treated on the floor by doctors who barely sleep and must choose which lives to save and which to let go.
In the small hours of Wednesday morning, it was the turn of two hospitals to be hit in the dark. The hospitals, the two biggest in eastern Aleppo, were struck by bombs shortly after 3:30 a.m., killing two patients and putting the buildings out of use for the victims of more bombings later in the day.
From BBC News: Trump's fortune drops $800m in one year
"Part of the beauty of me is that I'm very rich," Donald Trump once said, but according to Forbes magazine he's much less rich than a year ago.
The business magazine has reappraised the Republican White House hopeful's personal wealth and found it has haemorrhaged $800m since 2015.
Forbes now estimates the real estate magnate's net worth at $3.7bn (£2.7bn).
The publication said the decrease was mainly due to the "softening" of the New York property market.
From The Guardian: Congress overrides Obama's veto of 9/11 bill letting families sue Saudi Arabia
Barack Obama suffered a unique political blow on Wednesday, when the US Congress overturned his veto of a bill that would allow families of the victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks to sue Saudi Arabia.
The overwhelming bipartisan vote in both the Senate and House inflicted the first veto override of Obama’s presidency, less than four months before he leaves office. The White House issued an unusually scathing response.
“I would venture to say that this is the single most embarrassing thing that the United States Senate has done, possibly, since 1983,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters. “Ultimately these senators are going to have to answer their own conscience and their constituents as they account for their actions today.”
Obama expressed disappointment. “The concern that I’ve had has nothing to do with Saudi Arabia per se or my sympathy for 9/11 families, it has to do with me not wanting a situation in which we’re suddenly exposed to liabilities for all the work that we’re doing all around the world, and suddenly finding ourselves subject to the private lawsuits in courts where we don’t even know exactly whether they’re on the up and up, in some cases,” he told CNN.
From the Los Angeles Times: FBI joins probe of El Cajon police killing of African American man amid protests and anger
Just moments after an African American man was shot and killed by El Cajon police Tuesday, his sister was captured in an eyewitness video as she wept and screamed at officers, saying she told authorities her brother was mentally ill.
In the video posted on YouTube (some explicit language), the man’s sister said she told officers he was sick and needed help. She said she called police three times but instead should have called a “crisis communication team.”
“Don’t you guys have a crisis communication team to talk to somebody mentally sick?” she asked an officer.
“Why couldn’t you tase him? she asked officers. “Why, why, why, why?”
At one point, the woman yelled, “Oh, my God, you killed my brother!” several times.
“I called for help. I didn’t call you guys to kill him,” she told officers as she shrieked.
From Reuters: Congress passes funding bill averting government shutdown
The U.S. Congress approved a stop-gap funding bill on Wednesday that averts a looming federal government shutdown and provides urgently needed money to help battle an outbreak of the Zika virus.
Passage of the bipartisan legislation came shortly after Republicans and Democrats ended a months-long fight over whether Washington should provide aid to the city of Flint, Michigan, as it struggles with a crisis over contaminated drinking water.
Separate legislation was approved by the House of Representatives earlier in the day setting aid for Flint. It must now be reconciled with a somewhat different bill passed by the Senate.
The House voted 342-85 in a late-night session on Wednesday to approve stop-gap funding to keep the U.S. government operating from Oct. 1, the start of the new fiscal year, until Dec. 9, when lawmakers will attempt to approve longer-term money.
From CNN: SC shootings: Three wounded at school, man dead at home
A South Carolina teenager is suspected of opening fire at an elementary school playground, wounding two students and a teacher -- just one minute after placing a teary phone call that led to the discovery of his father's body at a nearby home.
As the shooting unfolded Wednesday afternoon behind Townville Elementary School, the teenager, who was not identified because of his age, was taken to the ground by a volunteer firefighter and taken into custody by deputies, authorities said.
The father of the suspected shooter was found dead after being shot, Anderson County Coroner Greg Shore told reporters. Shore identified him as Jeffrey Osborne, 47, who was found at a house about 2 miles from the school.
From U.S. News & World Report: OPEC reaches preliminary accord to curb oil production
OPEC nations reached a preliminary agreement Wednesday to curb oil production for the first time since the global financial crisis eight years ago, in an effort to reduce a global glut of crude that has depressed oil prices for more than two years and weakened the economies of oil-producing nations.
The deal was reached after several hours of talks in the Algerian capital, though output levels must still be finalized at an OPEC meeting in Vienna in November.
The preliminary deal will limit output from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to between 32.5 million and 33 million barrels per day, said Mohammed Bin Saleh Al-Sada, Qatar's energy minister and current president of OPEC. Current output is estimated at 33.2 million barrels per day.
Benchmark U.S. crude jumped $2.38, or 5.3 percent, to close at $47.05 a barrel in New York. Brent crude, the international standard, was up $2.72, or 5.9 percent, to $48.69 a barrel in London.
From Vice: How America Lets Down the Children of Immigrants
Daniel Connolly grew up in Memphis in the 1980s, and back then, it seemed like everyone in the city was either black or white. It wasn't until the 1990s, when he was in college, that he started noticing the influx of Mexican immigrants attending services at the Catholic church where his family went. Connolly, who is white, decided to start learning Spanish, and later volunteered to teach English to the immigrants at his church. As he got to know the immigrant families in his community, and later, as he pursued a career as a journalist and wrote stories about immigration, he started to see immigration in a new light.
His new book, The Book of Isaias: A Child of Hispanic Immigrants Seeks His Own America, which comes out October 4, is the culmination of five years of research and interviews with children of immigrants in the United States. Connolly follows Isaias Ramos, an 18-year-old high school student, and his friends as they weigh options for their future. Connolly discovers that for the Hispanic teens, the options quickly fizzle out. Finding a place in American society for a child of Hispanic immigrants isn't as easy as people think.
VICE spoke to Connolly about his experiences writing the book, what he sees as the major immigration challenges of today, how they affect the children of Hispanic immigrants.
From Vox: The sudden, incredible decline in teen births since 2009
Teen births hit a new low in 2015 — and have fallen by nearly half over the past seven years.
New federal data shows there were 22.3 births for every 1,000 girls ages 15 to 19. That’s a 47 percent decline from the teen birthrate in 2009 — and a 64 percent decline from the teen birthrate in 1991.
The reduction in teen births is arguably one of the biggest public health victories of the 21st century. It’s rare to see such significant changes in a health metric in just a few years. Imagine if obesity rates, for example, tumbled 40 percent in seven years.
That’s what’s happening with teen births.
The decline in teen births is happening across different racial groups, too. The birthrate for black and Hispanic teenagers is still above average but has dropped significantly over the past two decades, and especially since 2009.
From The Atlantic: Even Black Preschool Teachers Are Biased
The trend is a familiar one, documented across grade levels: Black students aredisciplined more harshly than their white classmates. They’re about four times as likely to be suspended and almost twice as likely to be expelled. The pattern also extends to the youngest black learners. Federal education data released in June revealed black preschoolers were 3.6 times more likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions. Yet even with this recurring outcome, one aspect remained largely unknown: What was the major contributing factor in the highly disproportionate suspension and expulsion rates for black pre-k children?
A new study from the Yale Child Study Center, a leader in early-childhood research, set out to address this perennial question and answer why black children make up an overwhelming share of the youngsters pushed out of preschool. Multiple studies show that implicit bias—harboring unconscious stereotypes that shape educators’ behaviors and decisions—influences teacher expectations and gifted-and-talented placements for older schoolchildren. The link was missing, however, in early-childhood settings.
In what’s believed to be a first-of-its-kind analysis, Walter Gilliam, a Yale professor and noted expert in preschool discipline, discovered both black and white early-childhood educators showed signs of implicit bias in administering discipline, seemingly rooted in different, though equally harmful, race-based judgements. “Implicit biases do not begin with black men and police,” Gilliam said. “They begin with young black boys and their preschool teachers, if not earlier.”
From Slate: The Death of the Telephone Call
When Slate was founded in 1996, people all over the world spent much of their day speaking into telephones. In 2016, as Slate celebrates its 20th birthday, the phone call is a thing of the past.
Not entirely of the past, of course; phone conversation lives on in roughly the same way that swing dancing lives on, or Latin declension, or manual transmission. You can still find it, but you have to look a lot harder, because it’s no longer a way of life.
The phone call died, according to Nielsen, in the autumn of 2007. During the final three months of that year the average monthly number of texts sent on mobile phones (218) exceeded, for the first time in recorded history, the average monthly number of phone calls (213). A frontier had been crossed. The primary purpose of most people’s primary telephones was no longer to engage in audible speech.
Some were still, of course, making phone calls on their “landlines.” But by 2007, landlines were already being displaced rapidly by mobile phones, in part because you couldn’t send a text on one. Today, we’remere seconds away from a majority of U.S. households possessing no landline at all, and text messages are five times more frequenton mobile phones than phone calls. You can still call your best friend on the telephone, but he probably won’t pick up. Instead he’ll text you, or ping you on Facebook, and wonder when the hell it was you became so emotionally needy.
From Rolling Stone: 'Amanda Knox' Doc Sets Record Straight on Infamous 2007 Murder
Imagine someone digging through your old Myspace accounts looking for evidence to take completely out of context and defame your character. Terrified yet? You should be, because that's how the press came up with "Foxy Knoxy," the tabloid headline used in the internationally covered case against Amanda Knox for the murder of her roommate in 2007. While studying linguistics in Italy, 20-year-old Knox became the public target of an eight-year investigation that wrongfully convicted her for murder – twice. The media took hold of the information as it leaked, resulting in an overblown media fiasco that destroyed Knox's reputation along with any possibility of a normal life.
"Google the name Amanda Knox and you get 7.1 million hits," says Knox inAmanda Knox, a riveting new Netflix documentary that uses exclusive interviews with the key players involved to illustrate the chain of events that led a seemingly normal girl from Seattle to becoming one of the most hated women in the world.
The film starts off with the facts: On the morning of November 2nd, 2007, the body of Knox's 21-year-old British roommate Meredith Kercher was discovered locked in the bedroom of the hilltop home they shared in Perugia, Italy, where they were both living while studying abroad. They were two of several housemates living peacefully in what was considered a safe neighborhood until Kercher was found with her throat slit, lying in a pool of blood. Knox claimed that she arrived home that morning after spending the night at her boyfriend's apartment to find drops of blood on the bathroom floor. She nonchalantly assumed one of other girls had cut themselves shaving, and proceeded to take a shower as if nothing were wrong. The blood hadn't startled her, but the sight of someone else's feces in the toilet led her to believe she wasn't alone.
From Variety: Box Office: ‘Deepwater Horizon’ No Match for Tim Burton’s ‘Miss Peregrine’s’
Tim Burton has had a rough spell at the box office. “Big Eyes” was an Oscar contender that failed to grab any gold, “Frankenweenie” was a bridge too bizarre for family crowds, and “Dark Shadows,” starring Johnny Depp, revived a campy ’70s show that most of America had forgotten. Burton, once a reliable purveyor of popcorn hits, hasn’t scored since 2010’s “Alice in Wonderland.”
But the director of “Batman” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” is on firmer ground with “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” an adaptation of the best-selling novel about a young boy who is taken in by an orphanage populated by children with extraordinary powers. It’s mixture of the magical and the macabre seems a perfect fit for Burton’s quirky sensibility. The film is expected to open in first place, with roughly $26 million when it debuts in 3,520 locations. Fox is distributing the film, which will need to do well overseas if it wants to recoup its $110 million budget and start a franchise.
It’s been a difficult month at the multiplexes. Clint Eastwood’s “Sully” was an awards-season successand should close its run with more than $100 million in ticket sales, but the likes of “Blair Witch,” “Bridget Jones’s Baby,” and “Storks” all failed to connect with consumers. This weekend is shaping up to be another difficult year-over-year comparison, with newcomers such as “Miss Peregrine’s” and “Deepwater Horizon” failing to match the windfall enjoyed by “The Martian.” That Matt Damon blockbuster opened over the same weekend in 2015 to a massive $54.3 million.
From The Hollywood Reporter: 'Saturday Night Live' Casts Alec Baldwin as Its New Donald Trump
Saturday Night Live viewers who tune in for the Oct. 1 season premiere are going to see a very familiar face in a very important role.
Alec Baldwin will debut his Donald Trump impression on the episode — a part he will play for the entire season, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.
The reality star turned Republican presidential nominee was played last season by Darrell Hammond, a onetime castmember (and SNL Trump) who returned to the show in 2014 as its announcer. Hammond will remain with the series as its announcer and continue to appear on the show periodically. Before Hammond, Trump was played by castmember Taran Killam, whose contract was not picked up for season 42.
Trump himself hosted the show in November 2015, amid much controversy and calls for SNL to "#DumpTrump" over the candidate's perceived racial bias.
From Billboard: Dolly Parton Is First Artist With Top 20 Hits on Hot Country Songs Chart in Each Decade Since the '60s
Thanks to her new featured turn on Pentatonix's "Jolene," Parton is the only artist with top 20 hits on the chart in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, '00s & '10s.
As previously reported, "Forever Country," by the superstar-infused collective dubbed Artists of Then, Now & Forever, vaults in at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart (dated Oct. 8). It also launches at No. 21 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100. "Forever" is a medley of three songs, including Dolly Parton's classic "I Will Always Love You," with the icon earning the closing scene in the official "Forever" video.
Parton adds even more country chart honors, as she notches her first top 20 hit on Hot Country Songs in 10 years, as "Jolene," another reworking of a beloved title from her catalog, by vocal quintet Pentatonix featuring Parton, debuts at No. 18.
From the A.V. Club: “Remake me! Remake me!”: 19 films improved by second takes
Seeing as the world is apparently out of new creative ideas (case in point: nü-MacGyver), it’s not surprising that so many movies are now superhero-themed, sequels, or remakes. Inferior cinematic remakes are a dime a dozen: Just over the past few weeks we’ve seen pale versions of Ben-Hur, Beauty And The Beast, andThe Magnificent Seven, a remake of a remake of Seven Samurai. But occasionally, a remake outpaces its original source material, stoking the fire that revisiting previously released films might actually be worth it. As unlikely as it may seem that a valuable movie was salvaged from 1977’s Pete’s Dragon (or 1960’s The Little Shop Of Horrors), many of the films below started with exemplary originals, and then surpassed them.
From Cosmo: 5 Non-Penetrative Sex Positions That Will Have You Rethinking Everything
Sometimes you're just not in the mood to have something inside you. That's literally all there is to it. For all those times and everything in between, here are five non-penetrative sex positions that will redefine sex for both of you.