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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
From the Washington Post: Four women accuse Trump of forcibly groping, kissing them
Four women accused Donald Trump of groping or kissing them without their consent in news reports published Wednesday, just days after the Republican presidential nominee insisted in a debate that he had never engaged in such behavior.
One of the women alleges that Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt during a flight more than three decades ago, the New York Times reported. Another says he kissed her on the mouth outside an elevator in 2005, according to the same report. A third woman says Trump groped her rear end at his Mar-a-Lago resort 13 years ago, the Palm Beach Post reported. The fourth, then a People magazine reporter, says Trump kissed her without her assent when the two were alone in 2005 right before an interview she was about to conduct with Trump and his wife.
Trump denied the first two allegations in an interview with the Times. Trump, who was in Miami Wednesday, was considering filing a lawsuit against the Times and was consulting with advisers about his legal options, according to two people close to him. The two people, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations, said Trump is furious about the accusations made against him in the story and with the newspaper for publishing them.
In a statement issued by his campaign after the Times report was published, spokesman Jason Miller said, “This entire article is fiction.” Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told the Palm Beach Post "there is no truth" to the third allegation. His campaign denied the fourth allegation, People reported.
From ABC News: Wells Fargo CEO Out Amid Accounts Scandal
Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf will retire from the company effective immediately the bank said on Wednesday, as it continues to deal with an accounts scandal that has rocked it for over a month.
Since regulators slapped the bank with a $185 million fine on Sept. 8, Stumpf has faced near constant calls to step down and has been subject to two bruising congressional hearings.
In a statement released by the company, Stumpf said: "While I have been deeply committed and focused on managing the Company through this period, I have decided it is best for the Company that I step aside."
The bank's board, of which Stumpf was the chairman, elected Tim Sloan who had been the company for 29 years and most recently served as the company's Chief Operating Officer and President to replace the outgoing CEO immediately, the bank said.
From NPR: U.S. Official: Navy Fires At Radar Sites In Yemen After Navy Destroyer Was Targeted
A U.S. official says the Navy has destroyed three radar locations in Yemen after missiles were fired at a U.S. destroyer off the Yemeni coast.
The official says:
"Earlier this evening (9 p.m. EDT / 4 a.m. local time in Yemen), the destroyer USS Nitze launched Tomahawk cruise missiles targeting three coastal radar sites in in Yemen along the Red Sea coast, north of the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. Initial assessments indicate that all three targets were destroyed.
"Destroying these radar sites will degrade their ability to track and target ships in the future. These radars were active during previous attacks and attempted attacks on ships in the Red Sea, including last week's attack on the USA-flagged vessel "Swift-2", and during attempted attacks on USS Mason and other ships as recently as today.
"The three radar sites were in remote areas, where there was little risk of civilian casualties or collateral damage. ...
"All of these are in Houthi-controlled territory."
From the New York Times: Some in G.O.P. Who Deserted Donald Trump Over Lewd Tape Are Returning
Stung by a fierce backlash from Donald J. Trump’s ardent supporters, four Republican members of Congress who had made headlines for demanding that Mr. Trump leave the presidential race retreated quietly this week, conceding that they would still probably vote for the man they had excoriated just days before.
From Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the only member of the Republican leadership in either chamber who had disavowed Mr. Trump, to Representative Scott Garrett of New Jersey, who is in a difficult re-election fight, the lawmakers contorted themselves over Mr. Trump. Some of them would not mention him by name, preferring instead to affirm their support for the generic “Republican ticket,” still grasping for a middle ground.
They said that if Mr. Trump would not make way for his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, to lead the party after the release of a recording on Friday showing Mr. Trump bragging about groping women, they had little choice but to vote for their embattled nominee. But the collective about-face owed less to his refusal to exit a race in which ballots are already being cast than to the fury his supporters unleashed at the defectors at rallies and on social media.
From SF Gate: U.S. Justice Department urges changes in SFPD after fatal shootings
A six-month investigation of the San Francisco Police Department by the U.S. Justice Department, prompted by the killing of Mario Woods and other fatal police shootings, concludes that the department does a poor job of tracking and investigating officers’ use of force, has ineffective antibias training and shields its disciplinary process from public view.
“We found a department with concerning deficiencies in every operational area assessed: use of force; bias; community policing practices; accountability measures; and recruitment, hiring and promotion practices,” Ronald Davis, director of the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, wrote in the report’s executive summary.
The department released its report Wednesday, along with 272 recommended changes for a police force racked over the past year by racist and homophobic text message scandals and fatal shootings that have frayed relationships between the department and minority communities.
The report found no proof of “racial bias by officers of the SFPD or by the agency as a whole,” and said race and ethnicity were not “significantly associated with the severity of force” that officers use. But it did conclude that police stop African American drivers in disproportionate numbers and that black and Hispanic drivers are more likely to be searched than whites.
From BBC News: Battle for Mosul: A row between Turkey and Iraq could derail the offensive
Usually it's Western states that bear the brunt of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's anger, with tirades about their alleged support for terrorism, interference in Turkish affairs, or love of gold and cheap labour in the Muslim world. But this week, his target shifted.
"The Iraqi prime minister - know your place!" President Erdogan told Islamic leaders. "You are not at my level… the army of the Turkish republic has not lost such standing as to receive instructions from you," he added. "You should know that we will do what we want to do."
The cause of the escalating row is the presence of Turkish troops in northern Iraq. Around 2,000 Turks have been in the Bashiqa military camp since last year, training Sunni fighters and Iraqi Kurdish forces, known as Peshmerga, for the impending operation to retake the city of Mosul from the so-called Islamic State.
Their presence was with the consent of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of northern Iraq, but apparently not of Baghdad. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi has called them an "occupying force", risking "a regional war". Both Ankara and Baghdad have withdrawn ambassadors for consultation.
From the New York Daily News: Slain California cops were ambushed by armored gang member who ‘wanted to kill police officers,’ prosecutor says
A gang member laid in wait with an AR-15 and killed two Palm Springs, Calif., police officers when they showed up to his home, officials said Wednesday.
John Hernandez Felix, 26, was charged with first-degree murder and a slew of other crimes that make him eligible for the death penalty in the Saturday shooting and standoff, according to Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin.
"This individual wanted to kill police officers. He armed himself with a weapon to kill police officers. He put on a vest so that he would be protected, so that he could kill police officers," Hestrin said. "That's the motive. He wanted to gun down police officers because they wore the uniform."
From The Guardian: François Hollande: France has 'a problem with Islam'
The French president, François Hollande, has said his country has “a problem with Islam” and that there are too many illegal migrants arriving in France.
He also suggested that today’s “veiled woman” could become a Marianne, the female symbol of the French republic, and attacked his rival Nicolas Sarkozy as “the little De Gaulle”.
The controversial remarks are published in a 660-page book, A President Should Not Say That: Secrets of Five Years in Office.
Hollande, 62, also spoke of the women in his life and how his actor girlfriend, Julie Gayet, wanted to be de facto first lady of France, which he said was a “hot topic” between them. He admitted he is feeling lonely and betrayed in the Elysée Palace, where he sometimes feels like a “ghost”.
From Bloomberg: Fed Minutes Suggest Yellen Made the Difference in ‘Close Call’
Divided in their views over the labor market, most Federal Reserve officials last month ultimately listened to Chair Janet Yellen’s argument for holding off on a rate hike, for now.
“A growing number of committee members are pulling in the direction of hiking, so it’s becoming increasingly harder for Yellen to hold them back,” said Roberto Perli, partner at Cornerstone Macro LLC in Washington and a former Fed economist.
At their Sept. 20-21 session, the Federal Open Market Committee voted 7-3 to leave interest rates unchanged. Minutes released Wednesday showed “several” of those who supported the decision to wait on tightening policy said the decision was a “close call.” Several also indicated it would be appropriate to raise rates “relatively soon.”
Following the minutes’ release, investors continued to see about a two-thirds chance of a rate increase in December, based on prices in federal funds futures contracts. They assigned a 17 percent chance to a move in November, when the Fed meets a week before the U.S. presidential election.
From the A.V. Club: Aliens is nothing like Alien—and all the better for it
Alien is not an action movie. You probably already knew this. It’s also only barely a sci-fi movie. Instead, Ridley Scott’s 1979 original is a primal-horror movie, a movie about confronting death and the vast, screaming unknown. It’s about being forced, in an instant, to contemplate the idea that there are forces at work in the universe that you will never understand and that these forces will be happy to kill you. It’s not thrilling. It’s dank and nasty. It’s slow and contemplative and in love with its set design, and it will absolutely prey on the lizard part of your brain. It’s a powerful piece of work, but it is absolutely, categorically not an action movie.
Its sequel, on the other hand, is very much an action movie. Moreover, it’s a great action movie—one of the best ever made—and it’s a transparent product of an era when action movies had been getting faster and flashier and more overblown. James Cameron’s Aliens, from 1986, is a movie full of gigantic guns and gleaming muscles and gallows humor one-liners. It’s a story of triumph over impossible odds, and of bullets being fired into anonymous hordes of quickly killed evildoers. It has moments of near-unbearable tension—like the scene where the face-huggers are loose in the medical lab—but it’s a fist-in-the-air movie, not a creeping-dread movie. And like Rambo: First Blood Part II—a movie that Cameron wrote at the same time as he was writing Aliens—it’s got that weird post-Vietnam intensity that affected so many American action movies of the era.
Sigourney Weaver has talked about how she played Ellen Ripley, heroine ofAliens, as Rambolina, and Ripley and Rambo have more in common than you might think. They’re both hardened warriors, reluctantly but willingly returning to the war zones where they were lucky to survive the first time. Like Rambo, Ripley gets a chance to kick spectacular levels of ass, something she never really got to do the last time she met an alien. Ripley’s also got something in common with a Cameron hero who would show up later: The Sarah Connor of Terminator 2: Judgment Day. Like Connor, Ripley is a tough, cold-tempered mother-warrior, her warnings of apocalypse ignored by corrupt forces.
From /Film: ‘Black Mirror’ Season 3 Featurettes Tease More Technological and Social Media Horror Tales
Black Mirror returns to Netflix on October 21 with its third season and I couldn’t be more excited and horrified. Charlie Brooker‘s technology-centric anthology series is the closest thing we have to a modern version of The Twilight Zone, a show that blends science fiction and horror and satire and tragedy into a delicious, mortifying, and addictive stew. Almost every episode so far has chilled me to my core and I love it to pieces and I love that a fourth season is already in the works.
But while we’re waiting, how about we all settle in and watch a pair of new Black Mirror season 3 featurettes that explore the concepts of two new Black Mirror episodes?
The first of the Black Mirror season 3 featurettes offers a look at “Nosedive,” an episode starring Bryce Dallas Howard, directed by Joe Wright, and written by Charlie Brooker, Rashida Jones and Michael Schur. The premise is classic Black Mirror, taking social media concepts and making them literal in the most uncomfortable ways imaginable. In this case, what would the world be like if you could rate other people based on personal interactions? And what if having a higher score meant discounts and other various perks?