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.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
NPR
Gwen Ifill, one of the most prominent African-American journalists in the country, has died, multiple sources tell NPR. She was 61.
Ifill, the host of PBS' Washington Week, was a veteran Washington journalist who covered seven presidential campaigns and moderated the vice presidential debates in 2004 and 2008.
Ifill was also the best-selling author of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.
In 2013, Ifill was named co-host of the PBS NewsHour. In an interview with The New York Times, she reflected on what her appointment could mean to a new generation.
…
Ifill was a preacher's daughter. She was born in New York City to a Panamanian immigrant father and a Barbadian mother. She started her journalism career as a print reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun and the Boston Herald American. She went on to become a national political reporter for The Washington Post and the White House correspondent for The New York Times.
Ifill died after a battle with cancer.
US NEWS
Reuters
Demonstrations protesting the U.S. presidential election victory of Republican Donald Trump entered their second week on Monday, with thousands of students chanting phrases like "Not My President" after walking out of classes across the country.
The latest protests came as critics slammed Trump's selection of right-wing firebrand Stephen Bannon as his chief strategist, with many fearing the move could lift the white nationalist movement into the top levels of the White House.
The Los Angeles Unified School District estimated that 4,000 students walked out of classes across the city in protest of the president-elect, who campaigned on deporting undocumented immigrants and building a wall between the United States and Mexico.
Officials with Seattle Public Schools said about 5,000 students walked out of 20 high schools and middle schools on Monday. That figure represented about 10 percent of the district's student body, according to schools spokesman Luke Duecy.
Authorities in Portland, Oregon, Montgomery County, Maryland, and the San Francisco Bay Area said hundreds of young people marched in protest as well.
CNN
White nationalist leaders are praising Donald Trump's decision to name former Breitbart executive Steve Bannon as his chief strategist, telling CNN in interviews they view Bannon as an advocate in the White House for policies they favor.
The leaders of the white nationalist and so-called "alt-right" movement — all of whom vehemently oppose multiculturalism and share the belief in the supremacy of the white race and Western civilization — publicly backed Trump during his campaign for his hardline positions on Mexican immigration, Muslims, and refugee resettlement. Trump has at times disavowed their support. Bannon's hiring, they say, is a signal that Trump will follow through on some of his more controversial policy positions.
"I think that's excellent," former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke told CNN's KFile. "I think that anyone that helps complete the program and the policies that President-elect Trump has developed during the campaign is a very good thing, obviously. So it's good to see that he's sticking to the issues and the ideas that he proposed as a candidate. Now he's president-elect and he's sticking to it and he's reaffirming those issues.”
McClatchy
Here’s the post-election version of a divided America: While the nation’s streets and social media erupted in protest of the Donald Trump presidency, Washington insiders were joining together to embrace him.
Inside the Capitol, House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who a month ago was so disgusted with Trump that he said he would no longer defend him, had what he called a “fantastic, productive” meeting with the president-elect. The lobbyists and insiders Trump reviled are angling for influence and jobs. Some have become key members of his transition team.
Outside official circles there’s a very different mood. The half of America that rejected Trump and said it feared for the nation’s future under his presidency launched protests and threats in ways not seen in modern times.
...
Four of every 10 people in America told a Gallup Poll on Wednesday they’re “afraid” of a Trump presidency. After President Barack Obama was elected eight years ago, 27 percent said they felt that way.
Spiegel Online
For 100 years, the United States was the leader of the free world. With the election of Donald Trump, America has now abdicated that role. It is time for Europe, and Angela Merkel, to step into the void.
Even history sometimes leans toward pathos. In January 2017, when Donald Trump is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, the American Age will celebrate its 100th birthday -- and its funeral.
The West was constituted in its modern form in January 1917. World War I was raging in Europe at the time and in Washington, D.C., President Woodrow Wilson told his country that it was time for Americans to take responsibility for "peace and justice." In April he said: "The world must be made safe for democracy." He declared war on Germany and sent soldiers to Europe to secure victory for the Western democracies -- and the United States assumed the leadership of the Western world. It was an early phase of political globalization.
One hundred years later: Trump.
Trump, who wants nothing to do with globalization; Trump, who preaches American nationalism, isolation, partial withdrawal from world trade and zero responsibility for a global problem like climate change. And all of this after a perverse election campaign marked by resentment, racism and incitement.
The Guardian
Barack Obama spent the months before the US election denouncing Donald Trump as unfit for office. Now he must eat his words. When he makes his final visit to Europe this week, in what had been planned as a triumphant farewell tour, Obama’s awkward job is to reassure nervous allies that a Trump presidency will not be as bad as they fear.
It’s a tall order. François Hollande, France’s president, said in August that Trump’s excesses “make you want to retch”.
Obama put a brave face on the election result when he invited his successor to the White House last week. He has promised an orderly transition. But he must worry that much of what he worked for could be about to go up in smoke. When he meets the leaders of Germany, Britain, France and Italy in Berlin, it could be hard to disguise his true feelings.
Reuters
Democrats, civil rights groups and even some Republicans slammed U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Monday for choosing right-wing firebrand Stephen Bannon as a key aide, saying it would elevate the white nationalist movement into the top levels of the White House.
Making his first appointments since last week's upset win over Democrat Hillary Clinton, Trump picked Bannon as his chief strategist and counselor, and Washington insider Reince Priebus as his chief of staff on Sunday, saying the two would share the task of steering his administration as "equal partners."
The choice of Priebus was seen as a conciliatory signal of Trump's willingness to work with Congress after he takes office on Jan. 20. But critics blasted the selection of Bannon, who spearheaded a shift of the Breitbart News website into a forum for the "alt-right," a loose online group of neo-Nazis, white supremacists and anti-Semites.
"There should be no sugarcoating the truth here: Donald Trump just invited a white nationalist into the highest reaches of the government," said Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley, who called on Trump to rescind the choice.
New York Times
The F.B.I. reported Monday that attacks against American Muslims rose last year, driving an increase of about 7 percent in hate crimes against all victims.
The data, the most comprehensive look at threat crimes nationwide, expanded on previous findings by researchers and outside monitors, who have noted an alarming rise in some types of hate crimes tied to the intense vitriol of the presidential campaign and the aftermath of terror attacks at home and abroad since 2015.
…
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who mobilized a movement but not enough votes to win the Democratic presidential nomination, is stepping forward as an alternative to the party’s leadership and a stalwart against racial politics.
Taking to his campaign Twitter handle on Monday, he decried the Democrats’ loss of white, working-class voters to President-elect Trump.
He added, “The Democratic Party has to stand with working people, feel their pain and take on the billionaire class, Wall Street and drug companies.
But he also said that the new role of Stephen K. Bannon in the Trump White House as senior counselor and chief strategist should make the country “very nervous.” The country has battled “discrimination and racism and sexism and homophobia” for hundreds of years, he said in an interview on ABC’s “The View” program on Monday, and the country could not afford to move backward.
WORLD NEWS
AFP
Prosecutors were questioning WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Ecuadoran embassy in London on Monday, the latest twist in the long-running legal battle over a rape allegation against him.
Swedish prosecutor Ingrid Isgren, due to be present while Assange faced a grilling by an Ecuadoran prosecutor, entered the embassy behind the famous Harrods department store shortly before 1000 GMT, an AFP photographer said.
Assange's lawyer Per Samuelsson said the questioning is expected to last several days at the embassy where the founder of the secret-spilling website has been holed up for four years, refusing to come out over fears he could be extradited to the United States.
DW News
European Union foreign ministers on Monday reaffirmed their commitment to the nuclear agreement with Iran, saying it would continue to keep pushing to restore ties.
"The upholding of commitments by all sides is a necessary condition to continue rebuilding trust and allow for continued, steady and gradual improvement in relations between the European Union, its member States and Iran," EU ministers said in a statement from Brussels.
The statement comes following strategy talks among ministers concerning the best course of action in dealing with United States president-elect Donald Trump. During his presidential campaign, Trump vowed to tear up the Iran nuclear deal, which was spearheaded by President Barack Obama and regarded as the great diplomatic breakthrough of his second term.
However, Trump has described the pact as a "lopsided disgrace" and "the worst deal ever negotiated."
Al Jazeera
Turkish jets hit 15 "targets" in the al-Bab area of northern Syria on Sunday in an operation with Syrian rebels that could foreshadow a push on ISIL's de facto capital Raqqa, the Turkish military said.
Ten defensive positions, command centres and an ammunition store used by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group were destroyed in the raids, the army said in a statement.
Nine Syrian rebels were killed and 52 wounded during clashes in the area, it added.
According to Al Jazeera's Osama Bin Javaid, reporting from Gaziantep on the Turkish-Syrian border, the attack on al-Bab "started a few days ago when the Turkish military resumed air strikes on the area".
"Since then, [the Turkish-backed] FSA fighters have come much closer to retaking al-Bab", he said, using an acronym to refer to the Free Syrian Army.
The Guardian
New Zealand battled severe storms and violent aftershocks as the country struggled to recover from a devastating earthquake that swallowed roads, twisted railway lines and left towns and cities smashed and deserted.
Tens of thousands of people fled their homes in the middle of the night on Monday to seek higher ground following a tsunami alert covering the entire east coast, although the warnings were later lifted. Across the country, two people have been declared dead.
Prime minister John Key was quoted as saying the damage bill from the earthquake was likely to be at least “a couple of billion dollars”.
“It’s hard to believe that the bill is going to be less than a couple of billion,” he said.
The Red Cross flagged a huge humanitarian challenge in the South Island, saying its volunteers were struggling to reach affected regions.
Reuters
Donald Trump's election as the next U.S. president presents Israel with a unique opportunity to recast its Middle East policies, a far-right Israeli cabinet member and staunch opponent of Palestinian statehood, said on Monday.
Naftali Bennett, leader of the religious-nationalist Jewish Home party and a staunch proponent of Israeli settlement building, said it was now up to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to communicate to the U.S. administration and the world what he wanted and push for it.
Referring to his own past as a high-tech entrepreneur, Bennett said not making the goals clear would result in failure.
"The combination of changes in the United States, in Europe and in the region provide Israel with a unique opportunity to reset and rethink everything," Bennett, 44, told members of the Foreign Press Association.
"We have a chance to reset the structure across the Middle East. We have to seize that opportunity and act on it."
Relying on "old paths", he said, would be a mistake.
The Guardian
US president-elect Donald Trump would be a “naive” fool to launch an all-out trade war against China, a Communist party-controlled newspaper has claimed.
During the acrimonious race for the White House Trump repeatedly lashed out at China, vowing to punish Beijing with “defensive” 45% tariffs on Chinese imports and to officially declare it a currency manipulator.
“When they see that they will stop the cheating,” the billionaire Republican, who has accused Beijing of “the greatest theft in the history of the world”, told a rally in August.
On Monday the state-run Global Times warned that such measures would be a grave mistake.
“If Trump wrecks Sino-US trade, a number of US industries will be impaired. Finally the new president will be condemned for his recklessness, ignorance and incompetence,” the newspaper said in an editorial.
The Global Times claimed any new tariffs would trigger immediate “countermeasures” and “tit-for-tat approach” from Beijing.
“A batch of Boeing orders will be replaced by Airbus. US auto and iPhone sales in China will suffer a setback, and US soybean and maize imports will be halted. China can also limit the number of Chinese students studying in the US.”
“Making things difficult for China politically will do him no good,” the newspaper warned.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
The Guardian
The US army corps of engineers has completed its review of the Dakota Access pipeline and is calling for “additional discussion and analysis”, further delaying completion of a project that has faced massive opposition from indigenous and environmental activists.
The statement comes amid heightened tensions between Native American activists and the surrounding community over the pipeline, which the Standing Rock Sioux tribe says could contaminate its water supply and destroy sacred sites. On Saturday, a man brandished a gun during a confrontation with protestors and fired his weapon into the air.
The Dakota Access pipeline operator announced on election day that it had completed construction of the pipeline up to Lake Oahe – a reservoir that is part of the Missouri River – and was preparing to begin drilling under the river. But the company still lacks permission from the army corps of engineering to perform the drilling.
Climate Central (11/12/16)
The election of climate change skeptic Donald Trump as president is likely to end the U.S. leadership role in the international fight against global warming and may lead to the emergence of a new and unlikely champion: China.
China worked closely with the administration of outgoing President Barack Obama to build momentum ahead of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change. The partnership of the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters helped get nearly 200 countries to support the pact at the historic meet in France's capital.
By contrast, Trump has called global warming a hoax created by China to give it an economic advantage and said he plans to remove the United States from the historic climate agreement, as well as reverse many of Obama's measures to combat climate change.
He has appointed noted climate change skeptic Myron Ebell to help lead transition planning for the Environmental Protection Agency, which has crafted the administration’s major environmental regulations such as the Clean Power Plan and efficiency standards for cars and trucks.
Climate Central (11/11/16)
A sweeping climate change lawsuit filed against the Obama Administration will move forward, a judged ruled on Thursday, setting up an extraordinary legal battle between environmentalists and President-elect Donald Trump.
The lawsuit claims the rights of 21 young Americans have been unconstitutionally violated because the federal government has allowed greenhouse gas pollution to be pumped into the atmosphere for 50 years, despite knowing the risks, “resulting in a dangerous destabilizing climate system.”
Despite the preliminary nature and uncertain future of the unusual case, Thursday’s ruling was celebrated by activists and lauded by legal scholars for going further than any other ruling on climate change in American legal history.
Federal government lawyers argued that the lawsuit should be tossed out. On Thursday, as climate scientists and experts were trying to regroup following Trump’s win, District Judge Ann Aiken ruled that the lawsuit “adequately alleged infringement of a fundamental right” and could proceed. During the campaign, Trump denied that climate change is real.
DW News
The UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said Monday that preliminary data through October showed global average temperatures this year were 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels.
The figures are getting close to the limits set by the global climate change agreement adopted by 200 countries in Paris last year. The pact calls on states to limit the temperature rise since the industrial revolution to "well below" 2 degrees Celsius, ideally 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The added heat was stoked this year by an El Nino weather phenomenon and the ongoing burning of fossil fuels. It has led to Greenland's ice caps melting and damaged Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
"The extra heat from the powerful El Nino event has disappeared," WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said. "The heat from global warming will continue."
Al Jazeera
On Monday, the full Moon will be the biggest and brightest since 1948 as it reaches its closest point to Earth to form what is known as a supermoon.
The rare proximity of "spectacular supermoon" to Earth means it will appear 30 percent brighter and 14 percent bigger as it reaches just 356,509km from Earth, according to NASA.
It will become its fullest at the same time as it makes its closest pass to Earth, causing it to appear unusually large, according to astronomers.
Since the Moon's orbit around Earth is elliptical, its distance to the planet varies between lunar cycles.
The unusually big and bright Moon will appear at its most impressive just as night falls over Asia, but astronomy enthusiasts will be able to see Earth's satellite loom large anywhere in the world shortly after sunset, weather permitting.
The Guardian
Some say they now want to run for office. Others plan to write to their local mosques to express solidarity with American Muslims and refugees, or to start preparing for the midterm elections in Congress. They are organizing in secret Facebook groups they consider safe spaces with tongue-in-cheek titles like Pantsuit Nation and Bitches For Hillary – not just to mourn but to mobilize.
“This is a huge wake-up call,” said Meghan Myszkowski, 36, of Donald Trump’s win last week.
Myszkowski, a single mother and who runs a social media agency in Pasadena, California, is a member of several invitation-only Facebook groups where disappointed voters – particularly women – are pledging to ignite a novel liberal comeback in the US.
Pantsuit Nation was started during the Democratic primary and now has 3 million members, all by invitation only. A new group, Still Stronger Together, was created last Wednesday, just 12 hours after the election result became clear, and already has more than 6,000 members.
The Guardian
Adult dating and pornography site company Friend Finder Networks has been hacked, exposing the private details of more than 412m accounts and making it one of the largest data breaches ever recorded, according to monitoring firm Leaked Source.
The attack, which took place in October, resulted in email addresses, passwords, dates of last visits, browser information, IP addresses and site membership status across sites run by Friend Finder Networks being exposed.
The breach is bigger in terms of number of users affected than the 2013 leak of 359 million MySpace users’ details and is the biggest known breach of personal data in 2016. It dwarfs the 33m user accounts compromised in the hack of adultery site Ashley Madison and only the Yahoo attack of 2014 was larger with at least 500m accounts compromised.
NPR
Grapefruit's bitterness can make it hard to love. Indeed, people often smother it in sugar just to get it down. And yet, Americans were once urged to sweeten it with salt.
Ad campaigns from the first and second World Wars tried to convince us that "Grapefruit Tastes Sweeter With Salt!" as one 1946 ad for Morton's in Life magazine put it. The pairing, these ads swore, enhanced the flavor.
In our candy-crushed world, these curious culinary time capsules raise the question: Does salt really make grapefruit taste sweeter? And if this practice was once common, why do few people seem to eat grapefruit this way today?
Turns out, grapefruit and salt did have a history together. But, like a sham romance between co-stars dreamed up by Hollywood publicity departments to drum up studio revenues, the pairing of the two in mid-century advertisements seems to have largely been manufactured buzz, hyped by companies with an interest in increasing sales of both products.
Still, this doesn't mean that the chemistry between salt and grapefruit isn't real. It is, and there's science to prove it.
BuzzFeed News
SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook employees have formed an unofficial task force to question the role their company played in promoting fake news in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s victory in the US election last week, amid a larger, national debate over the rise of fake and misleading news articles in a platform used by more than 150 million Americans.
The task force, which sources tell BuzzFeed News includes employees from across the company, has already rebutted a statement made by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at a conference last week that the argument that fake news on Facebook affected the election was “a pretty crazy idea.”
“It’s not a crazy idea. What’s crazy is for him to come out and dismiss it like that, when he knows, and those of us at the company know, that fake news ran wild on our platform during the entire campaign season,” said one Facebook employee, who works in the social network’s engineering division. He, like the four other Facebook employees who spoke to BuzzFeed News for this story, would only speak on condition of anonymity. All five employees said they had been warned by their superiors against speaking to press, and feared they would lose their jobs if named.
Please don’t forget to visit:
Doctor RJ
If one had any faith left in the Washington press corps, it probably evaporated in the wake of their behavior since last Tuesday. The reason? When push comes to shove, they care more about their fucking seating arrangements in the press room, being invited to dinner parties, their invitations to inaugural balls, and giggling it up at the next correspondent’s dinner than actually doing their damn job. That’s why a senior adviser to the next leader of this country with a history of racist behavior and ties to white nationalists can be announced, and most of the major newspapers don't think it's worth mentioning on their front pages.
Coupled with the incessant message of "just give Trump a chance” and "respect the office” the media has latched on to, it's as if we’re supposed to act like because Trump has the title “president-elect” attached to his name, he’s not the same prick he’s been for the past year.
During times like these, it's easy to believe the House of Cards depiction of the media, with reporters willing to whore themselves and their dignity out to secure sources and stories.