Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, 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 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Chicago Tribune: Chicago parks shut off many drinking fountains after tests find lead by Michael Hawthorne
Long before the first winter frost, hundreds of drinking fountains in Chicago parks have been shut off after testing revealed high levels of brain-damaging lead in the water.
Chicago Park District officials said Tuesday they decided to take 459, or about 18 percent, of their 2,435 water fixtures out of service based on samples collected during the summer. The action is another response to an ongoing crisis in Flint, Mich., that has drawn nationwide attention to lingering hazards in cities where lead pipes and plumbing were used for more than a century.
Though the dangers of lead have been well known for decades, until recently there has been little testing for the toxic metal in drinking water beyond samples the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires municipal water systems to periodically collect from homes.
Consultants found a wide range of lead levels in Chicago parks and Park District facilities, similar to earlier reports from Chicago Public Schools, suburban school districts and parochial schools operated by the Archdiocese of Chicago.
Mic: 'Politico' reporter Hadas Gold was sent an anti-Semitic death threat by a Trump supporter by Ashley Edwards
A female Politico reporter was targeted by a Donald Trump supporter with a vile, anti-Semitic death threat on Twitter, just the latest incident in an election season marred by the harassment of female journalists and rampant racism.
Hadas Gold, a reporter who runs Politico's On the Media blog, was sent an edited picture of herself with a bullet hole in her head and a Star of David on her chest.
"Don't mess with our boy Trump or you'll be first in line for the camp," @HeatherBrownfl3 sent Gold through direct message. "Aliyah or line up by the wall, your choice."
According to BuzzFeed, the threat was reported and the account was suspended.
"Politico notified Twitter of the threatening and vile tweets, and Twitter acted promptly to suspend the account. There were many more tweets and emails, some even more vile if that is imaginable. A police report is in the process of being filed," a spokesperson for Politico told BuzzFeed.
The threat to Gold is, unfortunately, not unusual. Supporters of Trump, white supremacists and the alt-right have used Twitter, Reddit and 4chan to harass and coordinate virtual attacks on journalists, Jews and people of color using a series of memes and coded language.
Talking Points Memo: Trump Camp's Latest Rigged Election Myth: Voter Fraud Won Obama NC In '08 by Tierney Sneed
As Donald Trump amps up his allegations that the election will somehow be rigged against him, he and his surrogates have latched on to a myth that fraudulent votes somehow swung North Carolina to President Obama's favor in 2008.
Trump himself referenced the theory -- that was first put forward in a flimsy and controversial 2014 Washington Post op-ed -- from the stump in a speech in Wisconsin Monday evening, where he told the crowd, "It is possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina.”
He went into more specifics at campaign rally in Colorado Tuesday.
"In 2014 the Washington Post, another beauty, published an article entitled 'Could Non-Citizens Decide the November Election.'" Trump said. "The article found that 14% of non-citizens were registered to vote, 14% were registered to vote. And we're not supposed to talk about it. And your Republican leaders said ‘everything is peachy dory’ right?"
This mofo needs to stop. By the time the 2008 presidential election in North Carolina was called, Barack Obama had already been the President-Elect of the United States for about 48 hours.
I’m with Charles Blow on this one.
Fortunately, I live in a state where the early voting period has already begun and I did cast my vote for Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine to become the President and the Vice President of the United States, respectively, just a little after noon yesterday.
By then, I was already on my fourth cup of coffee.
Mashable: Michelle Obama slays final state dinner with rose gold Versace dress by Sasha Lekach
First Lady Michelle Obama is making sure no one will forget her presence at the White House.
At Tuesday night's final state dinner for the Obamas, FLOTUS appeared in a stunning, rose gold chainmail Atelier Versace gown.
It capped off an excellent few days for Michelle, who dropped the mic on Trump Thursday with a powerful speech on his leaked comments about women.
The Obamas were hosting the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and his wife Agnese Landini at the White House for their 13th and final state dinner.
Many people on Twitter quickly noticed the first lady's look and were impressed.
Vox: The WikiLeaks emails reveal why Hillary Clinton wouldn’t support a carbon tax by Brad Plumer
During the Democratic primary, one of the big climate policy differences between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton was a carbon tax. He supported one. She didn’t. Now we have some insight into why, judging from WikiLeaks’ recent release of thousands of hacked personal emails from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.
“We have done extensive polling on a carbon tax,” Podesta apparently told Clinton adviser Jake Sullivan back in January 2015. “It all sucks.”
Some of that polling can be found in this leaked presentation by Anzalone Liszt Grove Research to the Clinton campaign dating March 2015. (Note that the campaign has avoided commenting on the veracity of any of the WikiLeaks emails.) Pollsters found that when people first heard about a carbon tax, 58 percent supported it and 35 percent opposed. But after hearing more detailed arguments for and against, support plunged to 46 percent:
The Atlantic: How the LSAT Destroys Socioeconomic Diversity by Caroline Kitchener
As soon as I told my friends and family about my plans to take the LSAT, the standardized law-school admissions test, people started warning me about one particular set of questions. Analytical Reasoning, or “Logic Games,” is a section that tests your ability to order and group information. The questions are written to seem accessible and unintimidating—they ask you to analyze combinations of ice-cream flavors or animals in a zoo—but, every year, they stop tens of thousands of applicants from attending top law schools.
To get into one of the best law schools in the United States (known as the “Top 14”), you generally need an LSAT score of 165 or higher, out of 180. The first time I took a practice Logic Games section, with no preparation, I only got one of the 24 questions right. That meant that, before I even started any of the other sections, I had a 160. That score wasn’t going to get me into a top school.
Luckily, most people who study for the LSAT get a lot better at Logic Games. Every LSAT tutor I interviewed agreed that the Logic Games section is the most teachable part of the test. But in order to improve your score, you need tools—and those tools can be expensive. The average LSAT in-person prep class costs $1,300.
I’ve taken practice versions of the Logic Games section of the LSAT on a couple of occasions and I did pretty good (but not great) on those sections. For the most part, I looked at the format of hat particular practice section and I love doing logic puzzles in magazines. Even though I’ve never formally sat for the LSAT, I think that the practice and the sheer fun that I had (and still have) in doing those puzzles is a pretty good preparation on the cheap; I did get more right in those sections of the practice sets than wrong.
Deutsche Welle: The northernmost US city is now Utqiagvik
A razor-thin margin of six votes approved a referendum this month to change the Alaska community's name to reflect its heritage and identity as a community with more than 60 percent Inupiat Eskimo.
The October 4 plebiscite passed 381-375 after a city councilman, who is Inupiat through his mother's family, introduced a petition as an initiative to reclaim the Arctic native culture that was suppressed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
"It's important to me and many of us because our language is severely threatened and I think it's time we begin healing and this is a literal step into to that decolonization," city councilman Qaiyaan Harcharek told Alaska Public Media in an interview broadcast Friday.
The town was named in 1826 for Sir John Barrow, 2nd Secretary of the British Admiralty. In 1889, a whaling station was established. Explorers, surveyors and scientists also used it as a base of operations as they mapped the Arctic coastline and conducted meteorological research 515 kilometers (320 miles) north of the Arctic Circle.
Aljazeera: A look into America's NSM neo-Nazis by Julie Planter
I first met Jeff Hall in a supermarket car park 11 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles. I had driven there in a beat-up Dodge pick-up I'd borrowed in the hope of blending in, and immediately noticed the tall, dark-eyed man pacing back and forth as he spoke on his mobile phone. A large Iron Cross tattoo adorned the back of his clean-shaven head.
I braced myself as I approached. "Hi, I'm the photographer," I said. He looked towards me without making eye contact and mumbled something about needing to wait for the other media. Then, with a faint smirk, he said: "Nice truck. I'm driving around in my wife's crappy little piece of shit."
I spent the next year documenting the Detroit-based National Socialist Movement (NSM) of which Hall was a member. I wanted to get a first-hand glimpse of a group organising around the ideals and rhetoric of white nationalism in a US nowhere near entering the "post-racial" epoch many hoped would be ushered in by Barack Obama's election.
Hall was the NSM's West Coast Unit leader. An unemployed plumber and father of five who bought his family's groceries with food stamps, he was charismatic and politically active in his community; once running for office with Riverside California's Western Municipal Water District and securing 33 percent of the vote.
Guardian: Taliban and Afghanistan restart secret talks in Qatar by Sami Yousafzai, Jon Boone and Sune Engel Rasmussen
The Taliban and representatives of the Afghan government have restarted secret talks in the Gulf state of Qatar, senior sources within the insurgency and the Kabul government have told the Guardian.
Among those present at the meetings held in September and October was Mullah Abdul Manan Akhund, brother of Mullah Omar, the former Taliban chief who led the movement from its earliest days until his death in 2013.
The two rounds of talks are the first known negotiations to have taken place since a Pakistan-brokered process entirely broke down following the death in a US drone strike of Omar’s successor, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor.
Doha has been a centre for Taliban diplomacy since the movement was granted permission to set up an office in the Qatari capital in 2013, although that initiative became one of the many attempts to start a peace process that ultimately came to nothing following complaints from the Afghan government.
Mullah Omar’s son, Mohammad Yaqoob, is expected to soon join the Doha group, a Taliban source said, in a move that would further bolster the authority of the office.
Reuters: U.S. expects Islamic State to wield chemical weapons in Mosul fight by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali
The United States expects Islamic State to use crude chemical weapons as it tries to repel an Iraqi-led offensive on the city of Mosul, U.S. officials say, although adding that the group's technical ability to develop such weapons is highly limited.
U.S. forces have begun to regularly collect shell fragments to test for possible chemical agents, given Islamic State's use of mustard agent in the months before Monday's launch of the Mosul offensive, one official said.
In a previously undisclosed incident, U.S. forces confirmed the presence of a sulfur mustard agent on Islamic State munition fragments on Oct. 5, a second official said. The Islamic State had targeted local forces, not U.S. or coalition troops.
"Given ISIL's reprehensible behavior and flagrant disregard for international standards and norms, this event is not surprising," the second official told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity, and using an acronym for Islamic State.
U.S. officials do not believe Islamic State has been successful so far at developing chemical weapons with particularly lethal effects, meaning that conventional weapons are still the most dangerous threat for advancing Iraqi and Kurdish forces - and any foreign advisers who get close enough.
Associated Press: DiCaprio says he’s cooperating with DOJ in Malaysian scandal by Sandy Cohen
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Leonardo DiCaprio says he's awaiting direction from the U.S. Justice Department regarding any ill-gotten funds that may have supported his environmental foundation or 2013 film "The Wolf of Wall Street."
The Oscar-winning actor released a statement through his representatives Tuesday saying he will return any gifts or donations connected to a Malaysian wealth fund, pending a fraud investigation of that fund by the U.S. and other countries. Court filings in connection with the investigations allege a complex money laundering scheme intended to enrich top-level officials of the Malaysian government-controlled wealth fund.
"Both Mr. DiCaprio and (the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation) continue to be entirely supportive of all efforts to assure that justice is done in this matter," the statement said. "Mr. DiCaprio is grateful for the lead and instruction of the government on how to accomplish this."
The Justice Department says that at least $3.5 billion has been stolen from the wealth fund, known as 1MDB, by people close to Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak. Najib created the fund in 2009 shortly after he took office to promote economic development projects in the Asian nation, but the fund accumulated billions in debts over the years.
The Hollywood Reporter: Christian Film Stirs Controversy Over Columbine Massacre by Paul Bond
A Christian movie opening Friday that re-creates a portion of the Columbine massacre has taken some criticism from atheists, sight unseen, objecting to the premise that Rachel Joy Scott, the first student killed that day, is deemed a Christian martyr.
In the film, killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold approach Scott as she’s lunching with a friend, Richard Costaldo, on a school lawn. After the pair are shot multiple times, they chastise Scott for her faith in God before finishing her off.
The filmmakers provided the scene, embedded below, to The Hollywood Reporter. The movie, I’m Not Ashamed, is based on Scott, who became an outspoken Christian before she was murdered.
What some are objecting to most is the conversation she had with her killers that day, given there’s no mention of it in official police reports.
Guardian: IOC may move some Tokyo 2020 Olympic events to South Korea by Justin McCurry
The International Olympic Committee is considering moving the rowing and canoeing events at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to South Korea in an attempt to cut soaring costs, according to Japanese media reports.
Depriving Japan of the events risks provoking a backlash from the Tokyo 2020 organisers, and would make a mockery of the city’s vow to hold a “compact” Games.
Kyodo News and the Asahi Shimbun on Tuesday cited unnamed sources as saying that the events could be held in the South Korean city of Chungju – one of the venues for the 2014 Asian Games – if organisers and Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, fail to agree on a site in Japan.
The option of moving the sports out of the country is reportedly being considered after a panel of experts Koike set up to review costs recently proposed moving the rowing and canoe sprint several hundred miles from the capital to a venue in north-east Japan, rather than building a new venue in Tokyo Bay.
The panel also suggested renovating existing venues in Tokyo for volleyball and swimming and scrapping plans to construct new stadia for the sports. It put the cost of hosting Tokyo 2020 at 3 trillion yen (£23bn), four times the original estimate and almost three times higher than London 2012.
BBC: 'It was an ancient form of sex tourism' by Andrea Watson
In 2017, Paphos will enjoy the title of European Capital of Culture. Who would have believed that this holiday resort in Western Cyprus, a concrete jungle of hotels, Chinese and Indian eateries, pubs, tired souvenir shops, pinball parlours and all the detritus of 1970s-style mass market tourism could win this honour? Even some local people were astonished.
What did the European Union, which determines the title, see in this bid? Scratch the surface – literally – and you have the answer. A chance discovery by a farmer ploughing land in 1966 brought to light a vast archaeological site near the harbour where glass bottom boats ply their trade.
What came out of the ground during excavations was a Graeco-Roman city of unsurpassed importance in Cyprus, with villas, palaces, theatres, fortresses and tombs – and one of largest Roman residences in the whole of the Mediterranean.
AP: College Football Top 10 (first place votes in parenthesis)
1) Alabama (60)
2) Ohio State
3) Michigan (1)
4) Clemson
5) Washington
6) Texas A&M
7) Louisville
8) Nebraska
9) Baylor
10) Wisconsin
The one Top Ten game this coming week is a big one: #6 Texas A&M @ #1 Alabama.
Everyone is already talking about The Game the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
Don’t forget that Mr. Meteor Blades is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.\
Everyone have a great evening!