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 a Dossier, Explosive but Unverified, Set Off a Crisis
Seven months ago, a respected former British spy named Christopher Steele won a contract to build a file on Donald J. Trump’s ties to Russia. Last week, the explosive details — unsubstantiated accounts of frolics with prostitutes, real estate deals that were intended as bribes and coordination with Russian intelligence of the hacking of Democrats — were summarized for Mr. Trump in an appendix to a top-secret intelligence report.
The consequences have been incalculable and will play out long past Inauguration Day. Word of the summary, which was also given to President Obama and congressional leaders, leaked to CNN Tuesday, and the rest of the media followed with sensational reports.
Mr. Trump denounced the unproven claims Wednesday as a fabrication, a Nazi-style smear concocted by “sick people.” It has further undermined his relationship with the intelligence agencies and cast a shadow over the new administration.
Late Wednesday night, after speaking with Mr. Trump, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, issued a statement decrying leaks about the matter and saying of Mr. Steele’s dossier that the intelligence agencies have “not made any judgment that the information in this document is reliable.” Mr. Clapper suggested that intelligence officials had nonetheless shared it to give policymakers “the fullest possible picture of any matters that might affect national security.”
From The Washington Post: Democrats try to force Republicans into tough votes in Obamacare ‘vote-a-rama’
Senate Democrats made a late-night show of resistance Wednesday night against gutting the Affordable Care Act by forcing Republicans to take politically charged votes against protecting Medicare, Medicaid and other health-care programs.
The mostly symbolic votes came amid growing concerns among congressional Republicans that the party is rushing to dismantle the ACA without a plan to replace it. Democrats planned to force the frenzied vote series called a “vote-a-rama” well into Thursday morning, although they cannot prevent the GOP from following through on its repeal plans.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that Democrats intended to ensure that Republicans are held responsible for any chaos caused by ending President Obama’s landmark law providing roughly 20 million people with coverage in various ways.
From the Los Angeles Times: Is the great California drought finally quitting?
The state’s biggest reservoirs are swelling. As of this date, the Sierra Nevada have seen as much snow, sleet, hail and rain as during the wettest years on record. Rainy Los Angeles feels more like London than Southern California.
So is the great California drought finally calling it quits?
Yes. Or at least maybe. If the storm systems keep coming, state and regional water managers say, 2017 could be the end of a dry spell that has, for more than five years, caused crops to wither, reservoirs to run dry and homeowners to rip out their lawns and plant cactus.
“You’ve seen jumps in snowpack and precipitation amounts. You look at the charts, you see the line just pretty much go straight up,” said state climatologist Michael Anderson. For most of the state, the end “is in the realm of possibility now, which is kind of a nice thing to think about.”
From BBC News: Mysterious fossils find place on the tree of life
A strange animal that lived on the ocean floor 500 million years ago has been assigned to the tree of life, solving a long-held mystery.
The creature has eluded scientific classification since the first fossil was discovered 175 years ago.
The extinct hyolith has a cone-shaped shell, tentacles for feeding and appendages that acted as "feet".
It belongs to an invertebrate group that includes animals such as the horseshoe worm, say scientists.
Joseph Moysiuk, of the University of Toronto, made the discovery after analysing more than 1,500 specimens dug out of rocks in Canada and the US.
"Hyoliths are small cone-shaped sea dwelling animals. They are known from all around the world, mostly from fossils of their shells," he told BBC News.
"They appear in the fossil record about 530 million years ago and survived until about 250 million years ago.
"But the question of where hyoliths actually fit into the tree of life has been somewhat of a mystery for the last 175 years, since they were first described."
From CNN Money: Government ethics chief blasts Trump over plans for business
The director of the Office of Government Ethics is blasting President-elect Donald Trump's plan to avoid conflicts of interest as "wholly inadequate."
Speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Walter M. Shaub said Trump's plan to separate himself from his business interests doesn't follow the tradition of presidents from the past four decades.
"This is not a blind trust," he said. "It's not even close."
Shaub's office is not an enforcement agency, but it advises executive branch officials about how to avoid conflicts. It's the office combing through the financial holdings of Trump's Cabinet nominees to look for problems.
Earlier Wednesday, Trump announced that he would place his vast business holdings in a trust controlled by his adult sons, Don Jr. and Eric, and that he would relinquish his leadership of the Trump Organization.
From NBC News: IRS Warns Tax Refunds Delayed For Low-Income Americans
If your refund is delayed this year, you can thank the IRS — and identity thieves.
Millions of low-income Americans who rely on their annual tax refund to help pay their bills are going to have to wait a few weeks longer to get their check this year as the agency cracks down on fraudsters.
The delays impact 40 million working poor families claiming the earned income tax credit and the additional child tax credit.
For 2016, the maximum earned income tax credit is from $506 for no qualifying children to $6,269 for three or more qualifying children.
"For most of these people it's the biggest check they are going to get all year," IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told the Associated Press in an interview. "We are sensitive to that."
From The Atlantic: How Blackmail Works in Russia
In January 1999, Prosecutor General Yury Skuratov was summoned to the Kremlin by then-President Boris Yeltsin’s chief of staff, who showed him a videotape of “a man who looked like” Skuratov frolicking in bed with two prostitutes. Then he asked Skuratov to resign, even though the prosecutor was in the middle of investigating Yeltsin’s administration for taking bribes from a Swiss firm trying to secure lucrative contracts for Kremlin renovations. It was a grainy tape and Skuratov would later say it was fake, but he submitted his resignation nonetheless.
What happened next was one of the most decisive battles in determining who would replace Yeltsin when his second presidential term expired in 2000. Skuratov’s resignation had to be confirmed by the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament—back when it had not yet become a Kremlin rubber stamp. The Federation Council balked and asked Skuratov to testify, but the day before he appeared on the floor, RTR TV ran the tape on its evening news, calling the segment “Three in a Bed.” When the Federation Council continued to resist the Kremlin, and Skuratov tried to go back to work as if nothing happened, the tape was played on TV again, this time on the program of the notorious media hit man Sergei Dorenko. Allowing children to see the tape, Dorenko said, would make it harder for parents to raise them patriotically; this was, after all, the prosecutor general of the Russian Federation, “not Mick Jagger, who can run around the beach with a naked behind.”
From Vox: How the alt-right uses internet trolling to confuse you into dismissing its ideology
Prior to Donald Trump’s presidential victory, if you asked the average person to explain the “alt-right,” their response — assuming they’d heard of the alt-right — was likely to involve internet trolls.
Before the alt-right movement became more widely known for neo-Nazism and white supremacism, its members were frequently described as internet trolls. But in the wake of Trump’s ascent to the White House and many subsequent public displays of neo-Nazi behavior in celebration of it, many people are asking whether “trolling” was ever the correct term to describe the alt-right’s behavior.
From Vice: Will a Sex Robot BJ Cafe Actually Ever Happen?
The promise of a robot fellatio cafe in London may be a marketing stunt, but some are convinced it's possible—while others pray that it's not.
Businessman Bradley Charvet caused tabloid commotion earlier this year when he announced his plan to open a fellatio cafe in London. Inspired by Thailand's blowjob bars, he envisioned a place where men could enjoy a 15-minute blowjob along with their morning coffee. But local laws outlawing brothels made the project impossible—at least while human sex workers were in the picture. So with that in mind Charvet announced he'd found a way around this legal impasse by replacing human escorts with robots.
But are we ready for a Starbucks of sex robots?