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: How To Hide $400 Million
A few weeks after she realized her husband was finally leaving her, Sarah Pursglove flew down to the Bahamas to figure out how much money he really had. Like many women married to very wealthy men, she didn’t know much about the family accounts. Her husband, a Finnish entrepreneur named Robert Oesterlund, had sworn to a Canadian court that his immediately calculable “net family property” totaled just a few million dollars. Pursglove was skeptical. She could come up with several family purchases worth more than that off the top of her head. There was the 165-foot yacht, Déjà Vu — that cost a few million dollars a year just to keep on the water. There was the $30 million penthouse at the Toronto Four Seasons, which was still being renovated. It wasn’t their only home. The Déjà Vu wasn’t even their only yacht.
Pursglove grew up in a working-class family. She did not consider herself to be a complicated person, or a greedy one. Recent events in her life had, however, inculcated a newfound habit of suspicion. Her husband’s tirades, his frequent absences and threats to leave, had led inexorably to the day when she tailed him through the streets of Toronto and caught him picking up an interior designer for what appeared to be a romantic ski getaway. She had been with Oesterlund since she was 25 and scraping by as a cruise ship’s photographer. Now, as she assessed her crumbling marriage and girded for divorce, she wondered what else she didn’t know.
Her first answers came that morning in the Bahamas, as she quickly rifled through papers in their soon-to-be-former vacation home. She didn’t have long: The caretaker, Pursglove suspected, was loyal to her husband and would soon alert him that she was there. In a pile of mail was a statement from a bank in Luxembourg showing an account with at least $30 million in cash. She had never seen it before. There were two laptops — one with baby photos of their younger daughter, which she set aside. In a cupboard were documents concerning not only Xacti, the internet company she and Oesterlund had built, but also oddly named corporations in other states and countries. Finally, there was a statement from their accounting firm. She had never seen that before, either. The accountants seemed to think her husband was worth at least $300 million.
From The Washington Post: Colombia’s congress approves historic peace deal with FARC rebels
Colombia’s congress approved a historic peace deal with the country’s largest rebel group on Wednesday night, raising hopes that Latin America’s longest war was finally ending.
The vote came two months after voters narrowly rejected a similar peace accord in a nationwide referendum. But after making changes to the pact, President Juan Manuel Santos decided to get it approved by lawmakers. The war, which started in 1964, has left at least 220,000 dead and drove 7 million people from their homes.
The 130-to-0 decision by the lower house, which came one day after the senate approved the agreement, paves the way for guerrilla fighters to lay down their weapons and enter the political arena. Opponents of the peace deal abstained from voting.
From BBC News: Reddit moves against ’toxic' Trump fans
News-sharing community Reddit is taking action against what it calls its “most toxic” users.
Hundreds of members of the site have been identified, Reddit’s chief executive Steve Huffman wrote.
Specifically, attention is being directed at /r/The_Donald, a subreddit - section - of the site created and used by supporters of the US President-Elect.
Mr Huffman, who posts as “spez” on the site, said he would not ban the section entirely as he wanted to push a “spirit of healing” on the site.
But he has been under heavy criticism after he admitted he had personally edited comments left by users.
"More than anything, I want Reddit to heal, and I want our country to heal, and although many of you have asked us to ban the r/The_Donald outright, it is with this spirit of healing that I have resisted doing so,” he wrote on Wednesday.
"If there is anything about this election that we have learned, it is that there are communities that feel alienated and just want to be heard, and Reddit has always been a place where those voices can be heard."
From Deadspin: These Are Real Notes From A Real Conversation Between Donald Trump And The Prime Minister Of Pakistan
PR No. 298 PM TELEPHONES PRESIDENT-ELECT USA Islamabad: November 30, 2016
Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif called President-elect USA Donald Trump and felicitated him on his victory. President Trump said Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif you have a very good reputation. You are a terrific guy. You are doing amazing work which is visible in every way. I am looking forward to see you soon. As I am talking to you Prime Minister, I feel I am talking to a person I have known for long. Your country is amazing with tremendous opportunities. Pakistanis are one of the most intelligent people. I am ready and willing to play any role that you want me to play to address and find solutions to the outstanding problems. It will be an honor and I will personally do it. Feel free to call me any time even before 20th January that is before I assume my office.
On being invited to visit Pakistan by the Prime Minister, Mr. Trump said that he would love to come to a fantastic country, fantastic place of fantastic people. Please convey to the Pakistani people that they are amazing and all Pakistanis I have known are exceptional people, said Mr. Donald Trump.
*****
From Gothamist: Watch This Guy Steal Bucket With $1.6 Million In Gold Flakes From Armored Truck
An 86-pound container containing $1.6 million in gold flakes was stolen from the back of a briefly unguarded armored truck in midtown Manhattan—and there's video showing the alleged thief struggling with his pail of gold. One NYPD detective said, "I think he just saw an opportunity, took the pail and walked off."
The incident occurred around 4:30 p.m. on September 29th, outside of 48 West 48th Street. The NYPD says, "An armored truck company making a pick up discovered that a 5 gallon aluminum pail weighing 86 pounds containing gold flakes (valued at 1.6 million dollars) was stolen from the rear of their armored truck... The unidentified individual is then seen lifting the 5 gallon pail from the truck and fleeing East bound on West 48 Street toward Third Avenue."
The suspect is described as being around 50-60 years old, 5'6" and 150 pounds, and the video shows him wearing a black vest, green shirt, blue jeans carrying a black messenger bag. The footage also features him observing the truck for a while before going for it.
From The Guardian: Teen becomes seventh 'faithless elector' to protest Trump as president-elect
A teenager from Washington state has become the seventh person to indicate that she will break ranks with party affiliation and become a “faithless elector” in an attempt to prevent Donald Trump being formally enshrined as president-elect when the electoral college meets on 19 December.
Levi Guerra, 19, from Vancouver, Washington, is set to announce that she is joining the ranks of the so-called “Hamilton electors” at a press conference at the state capitol in Olympia on Wednesday.
The renegade group believes it is the responsibility of the 538 electors who make up the electoral college to show moral courage in preventing demagogues and other threats to the nation from gaining the keys to the White House, as the founding fathers intended.
“I stand behind Hamilton electors,” Guerra said in a statement to the Guardian. “I promised those who elected me that I would do everything I could to keep Donald Trump out of office.”
From the Los Angeles Times: Breitbart News sees advertisers exit, calls Kellogg's decision 'un-American'
The Breitbart News Network is seeing some of its advertisers head for the exit doors and is responding in typical Breitbart fashion: by going on the counteroffensive, labeling one of them as “un-American” and calling it a war on conservatism.
Since Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, Los Angeles-based Breitbart has experienced a backlash from some advertisers who say that the online site conflicts with their corporate values.
Breitbart took a pro-Trump stance during the campaign, supporting the Republican candidate’s views on immigration and national security. The company’s executive chairman, Steve Bannon, who is on a leave of absence, was Trump’s campaign manager and has been named chief White House strategist.
From the A.V. Club: Dan Harmon’s universal theory of storytelling gets an animated explainer
Grand, unified artistic theories don’t get much grander and unified than Dan Harmon’s storytelling process. As detailed in an article on Wired some five years ago, Harmon boiled down Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey into a simple circle. And once he grasped this storytelling principle he couldn’t stop seeing it: in plot arcs, in character arcs, in the arc of a single joke. The circle reappears over and over in Harmon’s work on Community and Rick And Morty—and also, according to the theory, everywhere else. And it’s not just in storytelling, but in pop music, sports fandom, and our everyday lives. The theory itself isn’t super complicated, but its applications are vast. Handily, the video essayist Will Schoder teases it out in an insightful new video.
The theory boils down to two sentences: 1) A character is in a zone of comfort, 2) but they want something. 3) They enter an unfamiliar situation, 4) adapt to it, 5) get what they wanted, 6) pay a heavy price for it, 7) then return to their familiar situation, 8) having changed. Harmon plots those eight points along the quadrants of a circle, but then overlays that circle with great dualities like life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, and order and chaos, and finds within that very literal geometry storytelling needs, like internal and external conflict.
If that all sounds a little much, well—that’s where the video comes in. Schoder sells it as part of Die Hard, The Lion King, The Lord Of The Rings, and, most aggressively, Star Wars, and Harmon has sounded off himself, in much more depth, elsewhere on the internet.
From Rolling Stone: 50 Best Songs of 2016
All corners of the music world kept booming in 2016 – even when everything else about our world looked like it was on the verge of blowing apart. From rock & roll legends to rap upstarts, from future-shock R&B visionaries to rootsy country story-tellers, from teen-pop smoothies to leather guitar heroes, from the dance floor to the mosh pit, great songs seemed to keep coming out of nowhere. Some became worldwide hits; others were lurking in the shadows. But these were the songs that hit hardest and rang truest all year long.
From Gizmodo: German Mission to the Moon Will Prove the Apollo Landings Weren't a Hoax
A German Lunar X-Prize team has announced its intentions to send two mobile probes to the Moon to inspect the lunar rover left behind by the Apollo 17 mission. Finally, something that’ll get the Moon landing conspiracy nutters to shut the hell up.
The group, known as PT Scientists, is one of 16 teams currently vying for the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize, a competition requiring a private group to land an autonomous vehicle on the Moon, travel more than 500 meters (1,640 feet), and transmit high-definition photographs back to Earth. The group is currently working with German automobile manufacturer Audi to develop the rover, and it has signed a deal with broker Spaceflight Industries to secure a ride on a commercial launch vehicle (which rocket company is yet to be determined).