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 (RIP), 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.
Washington Post
Speaking to the U.S. Central Command on Monday, President Trump went off his prepared remarks to make a truly stunning claim: The media was intentionally covering up reports of terrorist attacks.
“You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening,” he said to the assembled military leaders. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”
The comment immediately harked back to comments from senior adviser Kellyanne Conway on MSNBC last week.
“I bet it’s brand-new information to people that President Obama had a six-month ban on the Iraqi refugee program after two Iraqis came here to this country, were radicalized and were the masterminds behind the Bowling Green massacre,” she said. “Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.”
US NEWS
Ed. note: We’ll begin tonight’s OND with an uplifting story. The news goes downhill from here.
BBC
When Shelia Fedrick saw a dishevelled girl sat beside an older, well-dressed man on her flight, she was concerned.
The teenager "looked like she had been through pure hell", the flight attendant told NBC, and the man would not let her speak to the girl.
Ms Fedrick left a note for the girl in the plane's toilet - enabling the girl to explain that she needed help.
It turned out the girl was a human trafficking victim - and Ms Fedrick's instincts had helped to save her.
The pilot was able to inform the police, who were waiting when the plane landed.
The 2011 incident on Alaska Airlines was reported in US media this week, as charity Airline Ambassadors seeks to train airline staff in ways to combat human trafficking.
Reuters
California leaders pushed back on Monday against President Donald Trump's claim that the state is "out of control," pointing to its balanced budget and high jobs numbers in the latest dustup between the populist Republican and the progressive state.
The state's top Democrats called Trump cruel and his proposals unconstitutional after the businessman-turned-politician threatened to withhold federal funding from the most populous U.S. state if lawmakers passed a so-called sanctuary bill aimed at protecting undocumented immigrants.
"President Trump's threat to weaponize federal funding is not only unconstitutional but emblematic of the cruelty he seeks to impose on our most vulnerable communities," state Senate Pro Tem Kevin de Leon, a Democrat from Los Angeles, said in a statement on Monday.
State Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, an L.A.-area Democrat, said the state has the most manufacturing jobs in the nation, and produces a quarter of the country's food.
“If this is what Donald Trump thinks is ‘out of control,’ I’d suggest other states should be more like us," Rendon said.
The latest war of words between Trump and Democratic leaders in California, where voters chose his opponent, Hillary Clinton, two-to-one in November's election, began Sunday, in an interview between Trump and Fox News host Bill O'Reilly.
AFP
President Donald Trump lashed out Monday at signs of rising public opposition to his controversial travel ban as tech giants threw their weight behind a push in US courts to roll it back.
With the ban suspended since Friday, the legal battle has moved to San Francisco where a US court of appeals ordered the administration to submit a brief Monday defending Trump's January 27 decision.
The president's executive order summarily denied entry to all refugees, and travelers from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen -- a move critics charge will damage US interests.
Despite initial public support, two new polls show that a majority of Americans now oppose the ban -- findings that Trump angrily dismissed as media lies.
Spiegel Online
Those hoping to understand what the world might currently be up against should know how Stephen Bannon thinks. A corpulent man with a full head of hair at age 62, his gaze is clear and alert and he often pinches his mouth together until his lips become invisible, not unlike a street fighter. Now that he works in the White House, he has begun wearing a suit coat. Previously, though, he was fond of showing his disdain for refined Washington by wearing baggy cargo pants through the streets of the capital, shaggy and unshaven.
In November 2013, the historian Ronald Radosh visited multimillionaire Bannon in his townhouse, located in Capitol Hill. The two stood in front of a photo of Bannon's daughter Maureen, an elite soldier with a machine gun in her lap posing on what had once been Saddam Hussein's gold throne. At the time, Bannon was the head of the right-wing propaganda website Breitbart and the two were discussing his political goals. Then Bannon proudly proclaimed, "I'm a Leninist."
The historian reacted with shock, asking him what he meant. "Lenin," he answered, "wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment." By that, he meant the Democratic Party, the media, but also the Republicans.
Reuters
A U.S. federal appeals court will hear arguments on Tuesday over whether to restore President Donald Trump's temporary travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries, the most controversial policy of his two-week old administration.
In a brief filed on Monday, the Justice Department said last week's suspension of Trump's order by a federal judge was too broad and "at most" should be limited to people who were already granted entry to the country and were temporarily abroad, or to those who want to leave and return to the United States.
That language did not appear in the government’s opening brief filed at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and could represent a softening of its position.
Last Friday's ruling by U.S. District Judge James Robart in Seattle suspending the travel ban opened a window for people from the seven affected countries to enter..
The 9th Circuit in San Francisco on Monday asked lawyers for the states of Washington and Minnesota and the Justice Department to argue whether the ban should remain shelved. The court set oral argument for 3 p.m. PST on Tuesday.
The Guardian
The Kremlin has demanded an apology from Fox News over what it said were “unacceptable” comments one of the channel’s presenters made about Russian president Vladimir Putin in an interview with US counterpart Donald Trump.
Fox News host Bill O’Reilly described Putin as “a killer” in the interview with Trump as he tried to press the US president to explain more fully why he respected his Russian counterpart. O’Reilly did not say who he thought Putin had killed.
“We consider such words from the Fox TV company to be unacceptable and insulting, and honestly speaking, we would prefer to get an apology from such a respected TV company,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on a conference call.
Fox News and O’Reilly did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
NPR
Charles Lindbergh became an instant American hero when he piloted the Spirit of St. Louis from New York to Paris in 1927, becoming the first person to fly solo and nonstop across the Atlantic.
Lindbergh was an icon in Europe as well, and he moved to England in the late 1930s. By 1941, though, he was back home, touring the U.S. as the leading voice of the America First Committee — an isolationist group of some 800,000 members that claimed England was trying to drag America into a war he thought it should avoid.
"I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England regardless of how much assistance we send. That is why the America First Committee has been formed," Lindbergh said in 1941, just months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that launched the U.S. into World War II.
A few momentous years later, after the devastation of the war, isolationism was out of fashion. Instead, America became the driving force in establishing a global web that defines the world to this day — NATO, the United Nations, a strong U.S. military presence in Asia, open seas, a host of trade agreements.
NPR
When the country elects a Republican president, and there's an opening on the U.S. Supreme Court, that president will nominate a conservative to fill the seat. The question is: What kind of a conservative?
There are different kinds of conservative judges, from the pragmatist to the originalist. Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Trump's nominee, is a self-proclaimed originalist.
The late Justice Antonin Scalia spent decades on the Supreme Court promoting originalism, which he defined this way:
"The constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means today not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.”
Judge Gorsuch, who would succeed Scalia if confirmed, has a similar but less blunt way of putting it.
WORLD NEWS
AFP
French presidential candidate Francois Fillon on Monday apologised for the "error" he made in hiring his wife as a parliamentary aide while denying she was paid for a fake job.
"I apologise to the French people," conservative candidate Fillon told a press conference, admitting it was an "error" that he regretted "deeply".
In an aggressive performance that saw him accuse the media of trying to destroy him politically, Fillon said his British-born wife Penelope's salary was "perfectly justified" and he would continue in the presidential race.
DW News
Scotland's parliament has underscored its displeasure with Prime Minister's Theresa May's plans for the UK to exit the European Union. The vote, though nonbinding, could signal a renewed push for Scottish independence.
On Tuesday, Scotland's devolved Parliament will hold a nonbinding vote on whether to reject the UK government's plans to trigger Brexit.
The motion presented by the Scottish government will argue that Westminster has not set the necessary provisions with the devolved administrations (of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) on reaching a UK-wide approach on Brexit.
Lawmakers in the Edinburgh assembly accused British Prime Minister Theresa May of failing to answer "a range of detailed questions covering many policy areas regarding the full implications of withdrawal from the single market."
Push for independence
Though nonbinding, the vote could serve as a basis for a renewed push for a Scottish independence referendum. Scottish MPs have continued to voice their support for independence in the wake of the UK's decision to leave the EU in June, despite London’s refusal to back a second vote.
DW News
Donald Trump's US presidential victory made clear to Poland how dire its geopolitical situation is. Media are shifting ever more attention to neighboring Germany. On Tuesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel will make a brief, but appointment-packed visit to Warsaw.
"The Merkel of last resort: Poland and Germany are bound to each other," wrote "Tygodnik Powszechny," a Roman-Catholic weekly based in Krakow. Poznan's weekly, "Wprost," calls the relationship between the two countries a "marriage of convenience," with photographs of the chancellor in a near embrace with Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
The chancellor's trip is an in-kind gesture after last year's Berlin visit by Beata Szydlo, the Polish prime minister. Merkel also plans to meet with President Andrzej Duda, opposition leadership and representatives of Poland's German-speaking community. Her most important meeting is with Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the rulingnational-conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS). It is their first face-to-face in years - the invitation coming from the Polish side, German officials said.
Al Jazeera
Syrian government forces have advanced on the ISIL-held city of al-Bab, cutting off the last supply route that connects it to the armed group's strongholds further east towards Iraq, according to a monitoring group.
ISIL fighters in the area are now effectively surrounded by the Syrian army from the south and by Turkish-backed rebels from the north, as Damascus and Ankara race to capture the largest stronghold of the armed group in Aleppo province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Monday.
The British-based war monitor, which tracks developments in Syria's conflict, added that the army and allied militia had made gains southeast of al-Bab overnight and fought ISIL there on Monday.
Backed by air strikes, they severed a road that links the city to other ISIL-held territory in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor provinces, it said.
Al Jazeera
About seven percent of Catholic priests in Australia were accused of sexually abusing children between 1950 and 2010, but few allegations were investigated, an inquiry in Sydney has heard.
The scathing figures, released as hearings began on Monday over the allegations dating back decades, were compiled with the cooperation of the church as part of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
The commission, Australia's highest level of inquiry, reported 4,444 alleged incidents of sexual abuse by Catholic priests between 1980 and 2015.
The inquiry also heard that 1,265 priests and religious brothers and nuns had been accused during a 60-year period ending 2010.
"These numbers are shocking. They are tragic and they are indefensible," Franklin Sullivan, head of the church's Truth, Justice and Healing Council, told the commission in Sydney.
Reuters
Israel passed a law on Monday retroactively legalizing about 4,000 settler homes built on privately owned Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank, a measure that has drawn international concern.
The legislation has been condemned by Palestinians as a blow to their hopes of statehood. But its passage may only be largely symbolic as it contravenes Israeli Supreme Court rulings on property rights.
Israel's attorney-general has said it is unconstitutional and that he will not defend it at the Supreme Court.
Though the legislation, passed by a vote of 60 to 52, was backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing coalition, it has raised tensions in the government.
A White House official said that, given the new law is expected to face challenges in Israeli courts, the Trump administration "will withhold comment on the legislation until the relevant court ruling.”
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central (2/5/2017)
Toxic mercury is once again increasing in some Great Lakes fish and birds after decades of consistent, promising reductions.
Scientists are still trying to figure out what’s going on, but one of the suspected culprits in reversing decades of mercury reductions in wildlife is a climate change-induced increase in water temperatures.
Mercury is a known toxic — in wildlife it impairs reproduction, growth, behavior, or just flat-out kills them. The reports of increases are a surprise as there’s been steady progress on mercury since the 1970s. Fewer domestic coal plants, accountable for about half of U.S. mercury emissions, helped decrease pollution.
From the 1970s to the early 2000s, Great Lakes wildlife saw regular, consistent reductions in mercury loads.
But mercury travels the globe, and as coal has taken off in places such as Asia over the past 20 years so, too, has the atmospheric export of toxic mercury. Those additions have offset coal reductions in the U.S. and Europe. In addition, climate change is altering how legacy chemicals are stored, transformed and transported in land, water and air.
Warmer water more quickly converts mercury to its more toxic form — methyl mercury. This form also more quickly accumulates in fish and birds, with each step of the food chain more contaminated than the previous.
AFP
Scientists unveiled a trove of newly-discovered gene variants on Monday to help predict who will most likely develop a killer lung disease, both among smokers and non-smokers.
The world's biggest probe of the genetics of lung health yielded 43 new gene variants linked to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a major cause of death.
COPD is a bundle of incurable lung ailments, including emphysema and chronic bronchitis.
People with the wrong genetic makeup who also smoke are especially at risk, a team of scientists wrote in the journal Nature Genetics.
"As a result of this work, we can now better predict who will develop COPD -- opening up the possibility of using this information in prevention," said Martin Tobin from the University of Leicester, one of the leaders of the research team.
"This genetic information guides future treatments including the development of new drugs."
The Guardian
Australia’s chief scientist has slammed Donald Trump’s attempt to censor environmental data, saying the US president’s behaviour was comparable to the manipulation of science by the Soviet Union.
Speaking at a scientific roundtable in Canberra on Monday, Alan Finkel warned science was “literally under attack” in the United States and urged his colleagues to keep giving “frank and fearless” advice despite the political opposition.
“The Trump administration has mandated that scientific data published by the United States Environmental Protection Agency from last week going forward has to undergo review by political appointees before that data can be published on the EPA website or elsewhere,” he said.
Reuters
A meteor plummeted in a fireball over Lake Michigan early on Monday, lighting up the night sky in bright blue just before scattering over the lake in many pieces, according to a police video and an expert's description.
Lisle, Illinois, police officer Jim Dexter recorded the meteor's descent on the dash camera of his patrol car at 1:25 a.m.
Aside from Lisle, which is less than 30 miles (48 km) east of Chicago, and other parts of Illinois; witnesses reported seeing the meteor from Wisconsin, Michigan and as far away as New York state and the Canadian province of Ontario, according to a description on the website of the American Meteor Society.
NPR
The innovation of synthetic fleece has allowed many outdoor enthusiasts to hike with warmth and comfort. But what many of these fleece-wearing nature-lovers don't know is that each wash of their jackets and pullovers releases thousands of microscopicplastic fibers, or microfibers into the environment — from their favorite national park, to agricultural lands, to waters with fish that make it back onto our plates.
This has scientists wondering: are we eating our sweaters' synthetic microfibers?
Probably, says Chelsea Rochman, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Toronto, St. George. "Microfibers seem to be one of the most common plastic debris items in animals and environmental samples," Rochman says.
NPR
Plants that feed on flesh have fascinated scientists going all the way back to Charles Darwin, and researchers now have new insight into how these meat-eaters evolved.
Even plants that evolved continents away from one another rely on strikingly similar tricks to digest their prey.
"The pathways to evolving a carnivorous plant, and in particular, to a pitcher plant, may be very restricted," says Victor Albert, a biologist at the University at Buffalo.
In the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, he and his colleagues say they've found genetic changes related to carnivory in Australian, Asian and American pitcher plants.
Unlike the famous Venus flytrap, which has jaws that snap shut, pitcher plants trap insects by luring them into a cup-shaped leaf with slippery sides.
BBC
A herd of plains bison have been successfully reintroduced to Canada's oldest national park, more than 100 years after they were nearly hunted out of existence.
The 16 bison were moved to the Banff National Park in Alberta last week.
On Monday officials said the transfer had gone smoothly and the animals were adapting well to their new home.
The move will restore their role in the park's ecosystem, officials say, and has been welcomed by indigenous groups.
The bison will be kept under observation in an enclosed pasture of the park in the foothills of the Rockies until the summer of 2018, Parks Canada officials say.
SPORTS and ENTERTAINMENT
McClatchy DC
President Donald Trump’s relationship with the New England Patriots has been well-documented: He considers their star quarterback to be a personal friend, he picked them to win the Super Bowl on Sunday and he has sided with them against the team’s most notorious enemy: commissioner Roger Goodell.
But unlike Trump, the Patriots entered Sunday’s game as the favorites, limiting the similarities one might draw between the two.
The Patriots took care of that Sunday, going down 21-0 at one point. Suddenly, the Atlanta Falcons looked unstoppable. But at that moment, Donald Trump Jr. took a moment to note something.
San Jose Mercury News
As Tom Brady has for months sidestepped questions about his friendship with Donald Trump, his wife Gisele Bündchen has sent out messages via social media that she — if not her quarterback husband — never supported the president’s candidacy and has more recently opposed his crackdown on immigration from predominantly pro-Muslim countries.
...
Richard Spencer, a fervent white supremacist supporter of Trump was positively giddy about the Patriots’ win. He took to Twitter to proclaim that “a Patriots’ victory was a victory for the #AltRight,” the International Business Times reported.
The president of the National Policy Institute — a white supremacist think tank — also posted a photo of Brady giving his former supermodel wife a post-win kiss accompanied by the message: “For the White race, it’s never over.”
It’s safe to guess that Bündchen would be horrified by that message. She has long used her Instagram account to show her support for progressive causes, such as concerns about the effects of climate change, the Washington Post reported.
Meanwhile, right before election day, Bündchen seemed to dispute Trump’s claims that the politically coy Brady had called him to tell him that he voted for him, the Post reported.
McClatchy DC
Some, though, argued Gaga included a veiled message with her song choices. Much
has been noted of her set's inclusion of "Born This Way," "a melodic celebration of 'gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgender life.'"
Most, though, seem to think that was her only subversive choice on Sunday.
What many of the commentators may have missed, though, was that Gaga's decision to sing "This Land Is Your Land" may have been an inherently political statement.
Though many consider the song to be an unblinkingly patriotic anthem - the American flag set-to-music - it was originally conceived as a sarcastic protest song by legendary folk singer and labor agitator Woody Guthrie.
By the 1940s, Guthrie was sick of hearing Kate Smith singing Irving Berlin's "God Bless America" (ironically, the song Gaga opened her set on before slipping in a couplet from "This Land is Your Land.")
The Guardian
The shine is coming off of La La Land. The box-office smash and owner of a record-tying 14 Oscar nominations premiered to rapturous reviews at film festivals last fall, but in the weeks that followed, and as the film screened for more and more critics, a backlash began to grow. Representatives of various marginalized communities – women, African Americans, and jazz lovers – emerged to take the film down a peg. What ensued was an all-out war (albeit one waged mostly on Twitter) between the film’s fans and its detractors. While it might seem odd that a movie as guileless and nostalgic as La La Land – which draws as its inspiration from the classic musicals Singin’ in the Rain and The Umbrellas of Cherbourg – has provoked such ire, this is the pop cultural world we live in. Every piece of art is now politicized and parsed for its problematic elements. These complaints may take some of the joy out of a film intended only to entertain, but they also reveal vital perspectives that have been hidden for too long from our white-male dominated discourse.
Most of these criticisms come with an admission that La La Land is, on its surface, great entertainment. The snappy songs, brightly colored clothes and the virtuosic film-making are diverting enough that the film’s persistence in entertaining you is emotionally moving. For the millions of Americans who are depressed and anxious about the state of the nation, La La Land is a trifle that seems more substantial because of our desperate need for distraction.