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.
AlJazeera: 'Chemical attack' in Syria draws international outrage
A suspected chemical attack in Syria has drawn international condemnation, with the United States, France and Britain all pointing the finger at President Bashar al-Assad's forces.
At least 58 people, including 11 children, were killed in the rebel-held Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib province on Tuesday, doctors and a monitor said.
The United Nations said it would investigate the bombing raid as a possible war crime, and an emergency Security Council meeting was scheduled for Wednesday.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the attack caused many people to choke or faint, and some to foam from the mouth, citing medical sources who described the symptoms as signs that gas was used.
Local health workers said the death toll could rise and eventually reach 100. A member of the White Helmets, a rescue group that operates in rebel-held areas, told Al Jazeera that up to 300 people had been injured.
The Syrian National Coalition, an opposition group, accused government planes of carrying out the attack, and said they used a gas similar to sarin.
Syria's military denied the accusation in a statement, saying the army "denies using any toxic or chemical agents in Khan Sheikhoun today, and it did not and never will use it anywhere".
Mother Jones: On the 49th Anniversary of MLK's Assassination, Activists Are Marching for the Causes He Championed by P.R. Lockhart
On April 4, 1967, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech, titled "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," to a group gathered at New York City's Riverside Church. He addressed the importance of connecting the trauma faced by civilians fleeing the devastation of the Vietnam War to the struggles of black Americans fighting for equality in the United States. Arguing that materialism, racism, and militarization were all rooted in the same absence of compassion and "proneness to adjust to injustice," King said it was necessary for various social movements to work together.
One year later, King traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to support a group of black sanitation workers who had gone on strike after two local garbage collectors were killed in a work-related accident. The striking workers argued that the incident reflected a larger pattern of neglect when it came to black employees in the city and, as conditions of their return to work, demanded better safety standards, increased wages, and recognition of their recently organized union. For King, the fight in Memphis exemplified the convergence of economic inequality and racial injustice, issues that he hoped to address nationally with his Poor People's Campaign.
On April 4, 1968, one day after addressing sanitation workers in the city, King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
FERGUSON, Mo. (AP) — The Latest on Ferguson, Missouri, municipal elections (all times local):
10:05 p.m.
Ferguson, Missouri's top elected official in the tumultuous 32 months since the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown has won another three-year term.
Mayor James Knowles III on Tuesday held off a challenge from city Councilwoman Ella Jones, who was seeking to become the St. Louis suburb's first-ever black mayor. Knowles won with 56 percent of the vote to Jones' 44 percent.
It will be Knowles' final term in office, due to term limits. He was first elected to the City Council at age 25, and was just 31 when he was elected mayor. Jones, a retired Mary Kay executive, was elected to the council in 2015, her first elected position.
Ferguson became a flash point of racial unrest following the 2014 shooting of Brown, a black and unarmed 18-year-old, by white officer Darren Wilson. A grand jury and the U.S. Department of Justice cleared Wilson of wrongdoing and he resigned in November 2014.
A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that workers may not be fired for their sexual orientation, becoming the highest court in the country to find that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects gays from workplace discrimination and setting up a possible Supreme Court battle.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit, based in Chicago, found that instructor Kimberly Hively was improperly passed over for a full-time job at Ivy Tech Community College in South Bend, Ind., because she was a lesbian. While the Civil Rights Act does not explicitly prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, it bars sex discrimination; the court concluded that the college engaged in sex discrimination by stereotyping Hively based on her gender.
“Hively represents the ultimate case of failure to conform to the female stereotype … she is not heterosexual,” Chief Judge Diane Wood wrote in Tuesday’s opinion. “Hively’s claim is no different from the claims brought by women who were rejected for jobs in traditionally male workplaces, such as fire departments, construction, and policing.”
New York Times: Richmond Fed President Resigns, Admitting He Violated Confidentiality by Richard Appelbaum
WASHINGTON — Jeffrey M. Lacker, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in Virginia, resigned abruptly on Tuesday, saying that he had broken the Fed’s rules in 2012 by speaking with a financial analyst about confidential deliberations.
Mr. Lacker said he also failed to disclose the details of the conversation even when he was questioned directly in an internal investigation.
The confession and resignation shed light on a nearly five-year-old mystery. In October 2012, Medley Global Advisors, a firm that tracks policy developments for financial investors, sent a note to its clients describing previously undisclosed details of the Fed’s plans for a new phase in its bond-buying campaign.
The information was potentially valuable to investors, who could have made money by anticipating the market’s reaction when the Fed’s plans were publicly disclosed.
Washington Post: Omidyar network gives $100 million to boost journalism and fight hate speech by Margaret Sullivan
The philanthropy established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar will contribute $100 million to support investigative journalism, fight misinformation and counteract hate speech around the world.
One of the first contributions, $4.5 million, will go to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the Washington-based group behind last year’s Panama Papers investigation, which revealed offshore businesses and shell corporations, some of which were used for purposes such as tax evasion.
“We think it’s really important to act now to keep dangerous trends from becoming the norm,” Stephen King, who heads the Omidyar Network’s civic engagement initiative, told The Washington Post in the philanthropic group’s first public comments on the three-year funding commitment.
The Silicon Valley-based philanthropy will make the official announcement Wednesday at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship in Oxford, England.
In an interview, King referred to “an urgent need” and said the $100 million is “the largest-ever contribution” of its kind.
Vanity Fair: How Ex-Spy Christopher Steele Compiled His Explosive Trump-Russia Dossier by Howard Blum
There’s a row of Victorian terraced houses on a side street in London’s Belgravia district, each projecting a dowdy respectability with its stone front steps leading to a pair of alabaster pillars and then a glossy black door. And at 9–11 Grosvenor Gardens there is a small, rectangular brass plate adjacent to the formidable door. Its dark letters discreetly announce: ORBIS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, LTD.
By design, the company’s title was not very forthcoming. Orbis, of course, is Latin for “circle” and, by common parlance, “the world.” But “intelligence”—that was more problematic. Just what sort of international business information was the company dealing in? Advertising? Accounting? Management consulting?
For a select well-heeled set scattered across the globe, no further explanation was necessary. Orbis was a player in a burgeoning industry that linked refugees from the worlds of espionage and journalism to the decision-makers who ran the flat-earth multi-national corporations and who also, from time to convenient time, dabbled in politics. In their previous lives, the founding partners of Orbis, trained and nurtured by the Secret Intelligence Service, had been in the shadowy business of finding out secrets in the name of national interest. Now they performed more or less the same mission, only they had transferred their allegiance to the self-interests of the well-paying customers who hired them.
Reuters: North Korea test-fires missile into sea ahead of Trump-Xi summit by Ju-min Park and jack Kim
North Korea test-fired a ballistic missile into the sea off its east coast on Wednesday, South Korea's military said, ahead of a summit between U.S. and Chinese leaders who are set to discuss Pyongyang's arms program.
The missile flew about 60 km (40 miles) from its launch site at Sinpo, a port city on the North's east coast, the South Korea's Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. Sinpo is home to a North Korean submarine base.
The launch comes just a day before the start of a summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping, where talks about adding pressure on the North to drop its arms development will take center stage.
"The launch took place possibly in consideration of the U.S. -China summit, while at the same time it was to check its missile capability," a South Korean official told Reuters about the military's initial assessment of the launch.
The missile was fired at a high angle and reached an altitude of 189 km (117 miles), the official added.
Any launch of objects using ballistic missile technology is a violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions. The North has defied the ban, saying it infringes its sovereign rights to self defense and the pursuit of space exploration.
Sydney Morning Herald: Record haul: 900kg of ice worth $900m found in floorboard shipment by Tammy Mills
Authorities are calling it Australia's largest seizure of ice, and the drugs – all 903 kilograms of them – were found in floorboards.
The drugs, which police say are valued at almost $900 million, were seized when a suspect shipment of floorboards from China was found in a nondescript warehouse in Melbourne's outer east. The drugs had been hidden between the wooden slats.
Justice Minister Michael Keenan said it showed that ice was still being used in epidemic proportions.
"This ice shipment would have resulted in millions of single drug deals, with every single hit potentially taking a life, destroying a family and devastating a community," Mr Keenan said.
Most of the haul was uncovered at a warehouse in Business Drive, Nunawading, where it was hidden inside 70 boxes sent from China.
It is likely authorities had been monitoring the shipment coming through Melbourne's ports before they raided the premises on February 6.
Guardian: China plans to build new city nearly three times the size of New York by Tom Phillips
A hitherto anonymous region near China’s smog-choked capital has been overrun by house buyersafter Beijing unveiled “historic” plans to build a new city there in a bid to slash pollution and congestion.
Plans for the Xiongan New Area, a special economic zone that authorities say will eventually cover anarea nearly three times that of New York, were announced by the Communist party’s top leaders on Saturday with a flurry of government propaganda.
In a joint statement two of China’s most powerful political bodies, the central committee and state council, described the new city, which will straddle three counties about 100km southwest of Beijing, as “a strategy crucial for a millennium to come”.
“[This is a] major historic and strategic choice made by the Chinese Communist party’s central committee with comrade Xi Jinping as the core,” the joint notice added using the latest political title to be bestowed upon China’s paramount leader.
BBC: Argentina ex-leader Cristina Fernandez charged with money laundering
A judge in Argentina has brought charges of money laundering and corruption against former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her two children.
Two business associates have also been charged in the case and all five are barred from leaving Argentina.
Ms Fernandez, 64, already faces other charges including fraudulently administering state funds.
She has denied wrongdoing and says she is the victim of political persecution.
In a statement on Tuesday, legal officials said Federal Judge Claudio Bonadio had brought formal charges against Ms Fernandez for alleged money laundering in property dealings.
Her daughter, Florencia, and son, Maximo, have also been charged along with businessmen Cristobal Lopez and Lazaro Baez.
About $8m (£6.4m) of Ms Fernandez's assets have been frozen, the statement added.
Last month, a judge ruled that Ms Fernandez, who governed from 2007 to 2015,should stand trial on charges of financial mismanagement while in office.
She is accused of ordering the central bank to sell dollars on the futures market at artificially low prices ahead of a widely expected devaluation of the Argentine peso.
Vice: How Squats Can Shape the Cities They're in by Yohann Koshy
There was a moment after the Second World War when The Daily Mail considered squatting – the occupation of property without the owner's consent – to be an act of patriotism. The war had produced a glut of homeless families and veterans without access to social housing. Many decided to house themselves, occupying empty properties throughout the country, especially across the south coast and London. Although the government clamped down on the phenomenon, the Communist Party and the Women's Voluntary Service helped organise it. By 1946 there were almost 40,000 people squatting in England and Wales, in everywhere from luxury flats in Kensington to holiday homes in Brighton. The press looked on sympathetically.
The next wave of squatting in London was in the 1960s and 70s. A new generation of radicals seized empty council properties that the Greater London Council had left to rot. This time the squatters were more political, but the GLC generally tolerated the practice and even licensed a few squats. Today, however, London is not a welcoming place for those who make their homes on someone else's land. Property rights have only sharpened during the housing crisis; the last government criminalised squatting in 2012.
Guardian: Marvel executive says emphasis on diversity may have alienated readers by Sian Cain
Marvel’s vice president of sales has blamed declining comic-book sales on the studio’s efforts to increase diversity and female characters, saying that readers “were turning their noses up” at diversity and “didn’t want female characters out there”.
Over recent years, Marvel has made efforts to include more diverse and more female characters, introducing new iterations of fan favourites including a female Thor; Riri Williams, a black teenager who took over the Iron Man storyline as Ironheart; Miles Morales, a biracial Spider-Man and Kamala Khan, a Muslim teenage girl who is the current Ms Marvel.
But speaking at the Marvel retailer summit about the studio’s falling comic sales since October, David Gabriel told ICv2 that retailers had told him that fans were sticking to old favourites. “What we heard was that people didn’t want any more diversity,” he said. “They didn’t want female characters out there. That’s what we heard, whether we believe that or not.”
He added: “I don’t know that that’s really true, but that’s what we saw in sales … Any character that was diverse, any character that was new, our female characters, anything that was not a core Marvel character, people were turning their nose up.”
The Root: Georgetown Hires Patrick Ewing as Head Basketball Coach, and That Was the Right Thing to Do by Stephen A. Crockett, Jr.
It’s about time Patrick Ewing became a head basketball coach. According to several reports, Ewing will take over the head coaching responsibilities at Georgetown University, where he played in the ’80s. The position of coach was left vacant after John Thompson III, son of Ewing’s former coach John Thompson Jr., was fired. The nepotism of the Hoyas is enough to make the Trumps blush, but I kind of love it.
Look, it was time for Thompson III to go. He “spent 13 years at Georgetown and made the NCAA tournament eight times, but he missed it in three of the last four years and finished below .500 in the last two. His total record on the hill was 278-151 in in 429 games. Thompson coached some great players and some great offenses in the late 2000s, but he fell off,”
SB Nation reports.
Ewing has always been a tower of basketball excellence; whether starring at Georgetown 1982-1985, back when the shorts were shorter and the play was violent, or suring his NBA Hall of Fame career, 1985-2002, Ewing epitomized basketball greatness.
Everyone have a great evening!