The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton. Please recommend and add stories or items of import or interest.
BuzzFeed
No one from the Obama administration seems to remember when they figured out they were falling victim to one of the greatest intelligence operations in history. […]
Initially, news that Russia-backed hackers had infiltrated the email systems of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) split the Obama administration. White House staffers struggled to wrap their heads around the scale of what occurred and found themselves unsure of how to respond without appearing to give Hillary Clinton a boost. The State Department's staff were torn over how far to press the matter with Russia, given other priorities like struggling to find an endgame for the Syrian civil war. Across the Potomac, the Defense Department was pushing for a strong response against Russia. "The White House was more in listening mode," a former Defense Department official told BuzzFeed News.
The official described what ensued as "endless discussion after endless discussion."
After weeks of intense debate, the White House’s ambivalence won. On Oct. 7, a Friday afternoon, they released a carefully worded, three-paragraph statement, saying that the US intelligence community was "confident" that the Russian government was behind the hack. White House staffers thought publicly blaming Russia would draw the public’s attention and keep Moscow in line by making clear the US was willing to call them out. They also functioned under the assumption that Hillary Clinton would win and take a more robust approach down the line.
Washington Post
U.S. forces in Afghanistan dropped a 22,000-pound bomb on Islamic State forces in eastern Afghanistan Thursday, the Pentagon announced, using the largest non-nuclear bomb ever used in combat.
Gen. John W. Nicholson, the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, said the bomb was “the right munition” to use against the Islamic State because of the group’s use of roadside bombs, bunkers and tunnels.
The bomb, known as the GBU-43, is one of the largest airdropped munitions in the U.S. military’s inventory and was almost used during the opening salvos of the Iraq War in 2003. By comparison, U.S. aircraft commonly drop bombs that weigh between 250 to 2,000 pounds.
A U.S. drone struck and killed at least 18 members of an allied Syrian force this week, the Pentagon said, in the worst friendly fire incident of the war against the Islamic State.
The Tuesday strike south of Tabqa, a strategic town in northern Syria, deepens questions about American targeting procedures in its ongoing air campaign over Iraq and Syria, which activists allege has resulted in a surge in civilian deaths this year.
The U.S.-led coalition said this week’s incident occurred after Syrian forces erroneously identified another allied unit as a group of Islamic State fighters.
An arm of Congress is launching an investigation into President Trump’s transition operation, including its public spending, private fundraising and how it managed communications with foreign governments.
In a letter dated April 5, the independent, nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) told Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.) that it would undertake the probe.
The investigation will focus on four major areas of interest, a GAO official wrote: federal ethics guidelines that governed Trump’s transition; the financial operation behind the effort, including expenditures by the government; conflicts of interest and financial-disclosure rules; and how the transition arranged phone calls and other contact with heads of foreign governments.
When North Korea launched its Kwangmyongsong-4 satellite into space last February, officials heralded the event as a birthday gift for dead leader Kim Jong Il. But the day also brought an unexpected prize for the country’s adversaries: priceless intelligence in the form of rocket parts that fell into the Yellow Sea.
Entire sections of booster rocket were snagged by South Korea’s navy and then scrutinized by international weapons experts for clues about the state of North Korea’s missile program. Along with motor parts and wiring, investigators discerned a pattern. Many key components were foreign-made, acquired from businesses based in China.
NBC News
The U.S. is prepared to launch a preemptive strike with conventional weapons against North Korea should officials become convinced that North Korea is about to follow through with a nuclear weapons test, multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.
North Korea has warned that a "big event" is near, and U.S. officials say signs point to a nuclear test that could come as early as this weekend.
The intelligence officials told NBC News that the U.S. has positioned two destroyers capable of shooting Tomahawk cruise missiles in the region, one just 300 miles from the North Korean nuclear test site.
American heavy bombers are also positioned in Guam to attack North Korea should it be necessary, and earlier this week, the Pentagon announced that the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier strike group was being diverted to the area.
CIA Director Mike Pompeo blistered WikiLeaks in a speech Thursday, calling WikiLeaks a "hostile intelligence service" aided by Russia and accused WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of making "common cause with dictators." […]
"It is time to call out WikiLeaks for what it really is," he said, "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia. In January of this year, our Intelligence Community determined that Russian military intelligence — the GRU — had used WikiLeaks to release data of U.S. victims that the GRU had obtained through cyber operations against the Democratic National Committee. And the report also found that Russia's primary propaganda outlet, RT, has actively collaborated with WikiLeaks."
Florida health inspectors found more than a dozen violations during a Jan. 26 check of the Palm Beach, Florida estate, according to recently published reports from the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulations.
Three of those violations were labeled high priority, meaning they could contribute to foodborne illness. The club did, however, meet the minimum standards to remain in operation.
The Guardian
Britain’s spy agencies played a crucial role in alerting their counterparts in Washington to contacts between members of Donald Trump’s campaign team and Russian intelligence operatives, the Guardian has been told.
GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.
Over the next six months, until summer 2016, a number of western agencies shared further information on contacts between Trump’s inner circle and Russians, sources said.
A tiny moon of Saturn has most of the conditions necessary for life, Nasa announced on Thursday, unveiling a discovery from an underground ocean that makes the world a leading candidate for organisms as humans know them.
Scientists stressed that the discovery on a moon named Enceladus is not evidence that life has in fact developed on another world, but they have managed to establish the existence of the water, chemistry and energy sources that are necessary for it.
“We now know that Enceladus has almost all of the ingredients that you need to support life as we know it on Earth,” said Linda Spilker, a project scientist who said the finding essentially confirmed vents on the moon’s seafloor.
The Canadian government has introduced highly anticipated legislation aimed at regulating recreational marijuana use by July 2018, paving the way for the country to become the first in the G7 to fully legalise the drug.
On Thursday, the Liberal government tabled two bills designed to end more than 90 years of prohibition. “Despite decades of criminal prohibition, Canadians – including 21% of our youth and 30% of young adults – continue to use cannabis at among the highest rates in the world,” said Bill Blair, the MP and former Toronto police chief tapped to lead the government’s plans for legalisation. “The proposed legislation, which is introduced today, seeks to legalise, strictly regulate and restrict access to cannabis.”
At least once a day, Adam’s captors attached metal clamps to his fingers and toes. One of the men then cranked a handle on a machine to which the clamps were linked with wires, and sent powerful electric shocks through his body. If he managed not to scream, others would join in, beating him with wooden sticks or metal rods.
As they tortured him, the men shouted verbal abuse at him for being gay, and demanded to know the names of other gay men he knew in Chechnya. “Sometimes they were trying to get information from me; other times they were just amusing themselves,” he said, speaking about the ordeal he underwent just a month ago with some difficulty.
Adam’s testimony, as well as that of another gay Chechen man with whom the Guardian spoke, backs up reports that a shocking anti-gay campaign is under way in the Russian republic of Chechnya, involving over a hundred and possibly several hundred men. Some are believed to have been killed.
Deutsche Welle
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Thursday found a number of failings on the part of Russian authorities in the handling of the hostage crisis in Beslan in 2004. These included violations of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to life) - violations on some of which the court delivered unanimous rulings. The Strasbourg court also decided that Russia had failed to take sufficient preventative measures, saying that authorities had ignored warnings about an impending attack at an educational facility in the region, thereby putting hostages at greater risk.
At least 330 people were killed in the attack on School Number One (SNO), including 186 children. More than 100 were injured after the three-day siege at the school, in which armed Islamists from the Russian federal republics of Chechnya and Ingushetia took more than 1,100 people hostage, most of them children.
The UN Security council unanimously agreed to end the peacekeeping mission to Haiti Thursday.
The current mission, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), was deployed in 2004 after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a coup to stem political violence.
Sandra Honore, the UN envoy to Haiti, told the council on Tuesday that "Haiti's political outlook for 2017 and beyond has significantly improved."
Protests have flared up as Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was apparently hit with objects after a pro-government rally. The ongoing economic crisis in the country has seen the president's popularity spiral downward.
As protests against Maduro intensified in the slums of the South American country on Wednesday, the death count for the week rose to four individuals after the state prosecution service confirmed two deaths that had occurred the day before.
The prosecutors confirmed that a teenage boy had died in the western city of Barquisimetro on Tuesday night, with opposition politician Alfonso Marquina stating on Twitter that the boy "was shot in the abdomen last night" and reporting his name as Brayan Principal.
Al Jazeera
Military force cannot resolve tension over North Korea, China said on Thursday, while an influential Chinese newspaper urged the North to halt its nuclear programme in exchange for Chinese protection.
With a US aircraft carrier group steaming to the area and tension rising, South Korea said it believed the United States would consult it before any preemptive strike against the North.
Fears have been growing that the reclusive North could soon conduct its sixth nuclear test or more missile launches in defiance of UN sanctions and stark warnings from the United States that a policy of patience was over.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said a suspected chemical weapons attack was a "fabrication" to justify a US military strike, AFP news agency reported.
In his first interview since the April 4 incident prompted a US cruise missile attack on Syrian forces, Assad insisted his army gave up all of its chemical weapons three years ago and that Syrian military power was not affected by the US strike.
"Definitely, 100 percent for us, it's fabrication," Assad said of the poison gas incident.
Somewhere deep in the blue waters of the Gulf of California, off the coast of northern Mexico, swim the last of the vaquitas.
They are a distinctive small porpoise, with permanently smiling expressions and dark rings around their eyes. And, according to the last count in November 2016, there are only around 30 left. That makes them the most endangered marine mammal species on the planet. […]
The Vaquita might not entirely welcome its newfound fame. It's so shy and rarely seen that it has been known to science only for the past five decades.
But that time has been enough for humankind to bring it to the brink of extinction.
The Sydney Morning Herald
Unprecedented back-to-back annual coral bleaching events have affected two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef, with this year's event already leading to mortality of half the corals in some key tourist tracts, scientists say.
Record-breaking warm waters along the Queensland coast has triggered widespread bleaching over 1500 kilometres of the World-Heritage-listed reef over the two summers, said Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies. [...]
"It's been a huge blow to the reef after last year the northern third was hit and now this year's it's the middle third," Professor Hughes said.
The Hindu
Minutes before the Rajya Sabha adjourned sine die on Wednesday, Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju made a statement to the House, calling the Alwar incident an “altercation between two groups.”
Pehlu Khan, 55, a dairy farm owner from Haryana, was allegedly lynched by cow vigilantes while transporting cows bought at Bahrod in Alwar, Rajasthan.
According to the statement: “Eleven persons were detained on April 1 after the Bahrod police received information that certain cows and a calf was being smuggled out of the State in canters and pick-up jeeps. Subsequently, the station received a complaint that some people stopped two pick-up vans in which there were cows, and there was an altercation between two groups. On reaching the spot, the Station House Officer found 200 people had gathered there. There was an altercation and five persons were injured. An FIR was filed. After Mohammad Pehlu Khan died of injuries, Section 302 of the IPC was added to the FIR.”
The New York Times
Trump signed legislation on Thursday aimed at cutting off federal funding to Planned Parenthood and other groups that perform abortions, a move cheered by conservatives who have clamored to impose curbs on reproductive rights.
The measure nullifies a rule completed in the last days of the Obama administration that effectively barred state and local governments from withholding federal funding for family planning services related to contraception, sexually transmitted infections, fertility, pregnancy care, and breast and cervical cancer screening from qualified health providers — regardless of whether they also performed abortions. The new measure cleared Congress last month with Vice President Mike Pence casting the tiebreaking vote in the Senate.
The last time someone heard from Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam apparently was on Tuesday when she called her chambers in the Graybar Building in Manhattan to say she wasn’t well and would not be coming in. At some point, she had left her apartment in Harlem, law enforcement officials said, departing without her wallet and cellphone, and locking the door behind her. […]
In the hours after her body was found, the police said they were treating her death as a suicide. The judge, 65, had recently told friends and a doctor that she was suffering from stress. And tragedy had followed her closely: On Easter in 2012, her mother committed suicide at age 92, according to two law enforcement officials. Two years later, around the same holiday, her brother shot himself to death, the officials said.
But by Thursday afternoon, investigators had reached no clear conclusion, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing.
A judge on Brazil’s Supreme Court authorized new corruption investigations on Tuesday involving dozens of the country’s most powerful politicians, dealing yet another blow to the beleaguered government of President Michel Temer.
The ruling by Justice Luiz Edson Fachin allows federal prosecutors to start new inquiries of at least eight ministers in Mr. Temer’s cabinet, including his chief of staff, Eliseu Padilha, and his foreign minister, Aloysio Nunes Ferreira, as well as much of the Senate.
Altogether, this means that nearly a third of the cabinet and nearly a third of the Senate will be the target of inquiries in this new phase of the colossal scandal that emerged three years ago into graft around Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company.
Reuters
The United Airlines passenger dragged from a plane in Chicago in an incident that sparked international outrage and turned into a corporate public relations nightmare suffered a concussion and broken nose and will likely sue, his attorney said on Thursday.
"For a long time airlines, United in particular, have bullied us," Thomas Demetrio told a news conference in Chicago, outlining the potential causes of action they may pursue against United and the city of Chicago. […]
David Dao, a 69-year-old Vietnamese-American doctor, was hospitalized after Chicago aviation police dragged him from the plane to make space for four crew members on the flight from the city's O'Hare International Airport to Louisville, Kentucky.
Never in recent times has Turkey, one of only two Muslim members of the NATO military alliance, been so central to world affairs, from the fight against Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, to Europe's migrant crisis and Ankara's shifting allegiances with Moscow and Washington.
The campaign has split the country of 80 million down the middle, its divisions spilling over to the large Turkish diaspora in Europe. Erdogan has accused European leaders of acting like Nazis for banning rallies on security grounds, while his opponents overseas say they have been spied on.
Erdogan's fervent supporters see his drive for greater powers as the just reward for a leader who has put Islamist values back at the core of public life, championed the pious working classes and delivered airports, hospitals and schools.
Opponents fear a lurch toward authoritarianism under a president they see as addicted to power and intolerant of dissent, chipping away at the secular foundations laid by modern Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and taking it ever further from Western values on democracy and free speech.
BBC News
More than $43m (£34m) has been seized from a flat in Nigeria's main city, Lagos, the anti-corruption agency says.
Officials raided the flat after a tip-off about a "haggard-looking" woman in "dirty clothes" taking bags in and out of it, the agency added. The money was believed to be from unlawful activity, but no arrests have as yet been made, the agency added.
This is the latest in a series of raids which uncovered bundles of cash in Nigeria, Africa's biggest economy.
A university student in Pakistan accused of blasphemy against Islam has been killed by a mob of fellow students on campus, police say.
Many students have been arrested after the brutal attack in the northern city of Mardan, and the campus has been closed. Reports suggest that two young men were accused of posting offensive content on Facebook. One survived with injuries.
Blasphemy is a highly sensitive and incendiary issue in Pakistan.
The Syrian government was "highly likely" to have been behind last week's chemical weapons attack, Prime Minister Theresa May has said.
Mrs May said British scientists had analysed material from the site of the attack that killed 80 people in rebel-held Khan Sheikhoun on 4 April.
They had said it was "very clear" sarin or a sarin-like substance was used.
Bloomberg
France will look very different depending on whether they can enact their agendas. Le Pen wants to return to the franc, leave the European Union’s single market and change the constitution to institute priority for French citizens in jobs and welfare — measures that are opposed by a majority of the French. Macron wants to cut government spending, reduce the scope of the wealth tax and eliminate a housing tax that funds local government — all of which he might have trouble getting through a fractured parliament.
“Our primary worry is not that Marine Le Pen wins the election and takes France out of the euro zone, but that because of a volatile coalition France abandons reforms and loses the confidence of Germany and its other European partners,” said Stephane Monier, head of investments at Lombard Odier private bank in Geneva.
France’s most unpredictable election in a generation looks like it could deny the two main party groupings, now called the Republicans and the Socialists — a place in the May 7 runoff for the first time in the 59-year-old Fifth Republic. Of the four contenders whom polls suggest have a chance to make it through to the second, decisive, round, just one — Republican Francois Fillon — has the backing of an established political force with proven credentials in contesting legislative elections.