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.
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New York Times
DARWIN, Australia — South Korea, Japan and the United States have grown accustomed to North Korea’s diatribes, but Pyongyang recently threatened a new target with a nuclear strike: Australia.
During a visit by Vice President Mike Pence to Sydney, the North warned Australia to think twice about “blindly and zealously toeing the U.S. line” and acting as “a shock brigade of the U.S. master.”
Australian and American troops have fought side by side in every major conflict since World War I, and there are few militaries in the world with closer relations: 1,250 United States Marines recently arrived in Darwin for six months of joint exercises; the two countries share intelligence from land, sea and even outer space; and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is slated to meet President Trump on Thursday on an aircraft carrier in New York.
But North Korea’s threat against the country, far-fetched as it might seem, is an example of how Australia’s most important military alliance faces a new challenge: the risk that President Trump will draw the nation into a conflict or other unexpected crisis that destabilizes the region, angers its trading partners or forces it to side with either the United States or China.
US NEWS
Reuters
Top aides to President Donald Trump on Monday said they expect the House of Representatives will vote this week to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system, but it was unclear when a vote would be scheduled, and moderate Republican lawmakers remained skeptical.
The White House is eager to move forward on legislation to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare, to make good on a key campaign promise. Republicans tried but failed to pass a replacement bill in March in an embarrassing setback for the Trump administration.
White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and White House economic adviser Gary Cohn on Monday predicted action to unwind former Democratic President Barack Obama's healthcare law would soon succeed.
"I think it will happen this week," Priebus said on CBS "This Morning" television program. In a separate interview, Cohn told CBS the White House was "convinced we've got the votes" in the House.
Republican lawmakers have struggled to unite around legislation, with moderates and conservatives within the caucus divided over key provisions.
"We are having those member-to-members conversations right now," Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Republican conference, said on Fox News.
Bloomberg
President Donald Trump said he’s actively considering a break up of giant Wall Street banks, giving a push to efforts to revive a Depression-era law separating consumer and investment banking.
“I’m looking at that right now,” Trump said of breaking up banks in a 30-minute Oval Office interview with Bloomberg News. “There’s some people that want to go back to the old system, right? So we’re going to look at that.”
Trump also said he’s open to increasing the U.S. gas tax to fund infrastructure development, in a further sign that policies unpopular with the Republican establishment are under consideration in the White House. He described higher gas taxes as acceptable to truckers -- “I have one friend who’s a big trucker,” he said -- as long as the proceeds are dedicated to improving U.S. highways.
Bloomberg
The U.S. Supreme Court let stand a California law that bans licensed therapists from working with children to change their sexual orientation from gay to straight, rejecting an appeal that said the measure violates religious rights.
The rebuff leaves intact a federal appeals court decision upholding California’s 2012 first-of-its-kind law. The measure prohibits the form of counseling known as “conversion therapy.”
The ban was challenged by three people, led by licensed therapist and minister Donald Welch, who said it interferes with their right to practice their religious beliefs.
Agence France Presse
The US Senate's top Democrat has needled Donald Trump through a playlist on Spotify, selecting songs that pointedly question the president.
[...]
His picks include The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again" and two tracks by Stevie Wonder, "You Haven't Done Nothin'" and "He's Misstra Know-It-All."
Several songs allude to Trump's relationship with truthfulness -- "Lies" by Thompson Twins, "Lyin' Eyes" by the Eagles and Beyonce and Shakira's collaboration "Beautiful Liar."
Schumer may also be hitting out at Trump's fondness for flying to his Florida estate. He chose Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" and Dolly Parton's "9 to 5.”
McClatchy DC
The U.S. Department of Energy isn’t doing enough to cut back on the risk of fraud among its many contractors, according to a government audit obtained by McClatchy.
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office issued the audit, requested by Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., after high-profile incidents of fraud by the DOE’s contractors, including two at the Hanford Site nuclear reservation in Washington state.
In one case, employees of contractor Fluor Hanford Inc. were accused of receiving kickbacks for hundreds of wasteful purchases from 2003 to 2008.
Fluor paid $4 million to settle with the government.
In the second case, contractors at Hanford — Bechtel National and AECOM — agreed to pay $125 million to settle a lawsuit over allegations that they had charged the DOE for 13 years for subpar parts that weren’t compliant with the agency’s strict standards for nuclear facilities.
The companies have denied wrongdoing. But these cases and others over the yearsunderscore the challenges facing the DOE, which relies more heavily on contractors than any other civilian agency in the federal government.
McClatchy DC
The Internal Revenue Service is demanding a whopping $7 billion or more in back taxes from the world’s most profitable hedge fund, whose boss’s wealth and cyber savvy helped Donald Trump pole-vault into the White House.
Suddenly, the government’s seven-year pursuit of Renaissance Technologies LLC is blanketed in political intrigue, now that the hedge fund’s reclusive, anti-establishment co-chief executive, Robert Mercer, has morphed into a political force who might be owed a big presidential favor.
With Trump in the Oval Office, Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, who has become his public voice, seem armed with political firepower every which way you look – and that’s even though presidential adviser Stephen Bannon, their former senior executive and political strategist, appears to have recently lost influence.
Since the IRS found in 2010 that a complicated banking method used by Renaissance and about 10 other hedge funds was a tax-avoidance scheme, Mercer has gotten increasingly active in politics. According to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, he doled out more than $22 million to outside conservative groups seeking to influence last year’s elections, while advocating the abolition of the IRS and much of the federal government.
The Mercer Family Foundation, run by Rebekah Mercer, also has donated millions of dollars to conservative nonprofit groups that have called for the firing of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, an Obama administration holdover whose five-year term expires in November.
The Guardian
Donald Trump expressed confusion in an interview published on Monday as to why the civil war had taken place. He also claimed that President Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the war started, “was really angry” about the conflict.
Trump also said Jackson, a slaveholder and war hero who led a relocation and extermination campaign against Native Americans, “had a big heart”.
The president made his remarks in an interview with the Washington Examiner to mark his 100th day in office, which fell on Saturday. “It’s a very intensive process,” Trump told his interviewer of the presidency. “Really intense. I get up to bed late and I get up early.”
His remarks about Jackson and the civil war appeared to arise from a discussion of a painting of the seventh president that Trump moved into the Oval Office after his inauguration. Trump has called Jackson “an amazing figure in American history – very unique so many ways” and said that he identifies with his populist forebear.
The Guardian
The city of New Orleans surrendered early during the actual Civil War, after the Confederates left it poorly defended. This time, though, reinforcements from far afield have arrived to hoist the battle flag.
“I will chain myself to that son of a bitch before I let them tear it down,” Wilford Seymour said Thursday, waving a hand toward a statue of General PGT Beauregard mounted in a bronze saddle. “By God I will ride that horse myself.”
Seymour had driven overnight from Arkansas, as soon as he got word that the city of New Orleans was pulling down some of its Confederate monuments. The city’s first maneuver was a covert one, carried out at 3am Monday. A crew wearing masks and bulletproof vests, guarded by snipers overhead, dismantled a monument to the Battle of Liberty Place. It was the most obvious of four monuments marked for removal, since it commemorated an ignoble post-war uprising by white supremacists who didn’t like the direction New Orleans was headed.
The monument’s removal was timed for maximum symbolism. Monday was the day some Southern states celebrate as Confederate Memorial Day.
The push to remove the monuments is the latest skirmish in a conflict that started almost two years ago. That’s when Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, massacred nine black members of Mother Emmanuel church in Charleston, South Carolina. In the days after the shooting, photos emerged of Roof posing with his collection of Confederate battle flags, which led to the removal of such a flag from atop the South Carolina statehouse.
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
Security forces in Venezuela fired tear gas to drive back protesters Monday as pro- and anti-government May Day rallies erupted exactly one month into a wave of deadly political unrest.
Officers clashed with some 300 protesters, some throwing stones, who tried to break through security barriers to the electoral council headquarters in central Caracas.
Opposition leaders have vowed no let-up in their protests demanding elections to get rid of President Nicolas Maduro.
They blame him for an economic crisis that has caused shortages of food and medicine.
Clashes between protesters and riot police left 28 people dead last month, according to prosecutors.
"The regime is betting that we will tire ourselves out. That is why, after one month of resistance, we must show our strength," said senior opposition lawmaker Freddy Guevara.
Deutsche Welle
North Korea has suggested that it will continue its nuclear weapons tests in response to what it calls US aggression. Japan has also sent out a destroyer to escort US warships as Tokyo seeks to boost its military role.
Pyongyang warned on Monday that it would conduct a nuclear test at any time determined by its leadership, in the latest comments to fuel already heightened tensions in the region.
Both North Korea and Washington have been trading off shows of force over the past few weeks. There are signs that North Korea might be preparing either its sixth nuclear test or a long-range missile launch, while the White House refuses to rule out military action in response.
A spokesman for the North's Foreign Ministry said the government was "fully ready to respond to any option taken by the US," in a statement carried by the state-run KCNA news agency.
North Korea's "measures for bolstering the nuclear force to the maximum will be taken in a consecutive and successive way at any moment and any place decided by its supreme leadership," the spokesman said, apparently referring to a new nuclear test.
Deutsche Welle
Candidates Macron and Le Pen held political rallies in the French capital to woo undecided voters. But on this Labor Day celebration, many French workers are divided over whom, if anyone, to vote for.
As is tradition, French workers take the spotlight on May 1 in Paris. But this year, there is a crucial and defining difference. Not only did various traditional rallies celebrate the annually occurring International Workers' Day, but the two French presidential candidates also held campaign events that sought to win the votes of disenchanted left-wing voters ahead of the May 7 runoff.
Both centrist independent Emmanuel Macron and his "En Marche!" party and Marine Le Pen and her far-right nationalist National Front (FN) party organized campaign rallies in the French capital on Monday.
In a sign of ongoing national division and significant voter alienation, demonstrations against both politicians and their platforms coincided with the political rallies.
Al Jazeera
Afghan security forces were killed at a "shockingly high" rate during what has historically been a winter lull in fighting against the Taliban, according to a report by a US watchdog.
The US government's Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) says 807 troops from the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces (ANDSF) died between January 1 and February 24.
"Afghanistan remains in the grip of a deadly war. Casualties suffered by [ANDSF] in the fight against the Taliban and other insurgents continue to be shockingly high," says the report, released on Monday.
Levels of violence have traditionally dipped over Afghanistan's cold winter months, but this year the Taliban continued to battle government forces, most notably in an April 19 attack on a military base outside the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.
The massacre saw fighters armed with guns and suicide bombs slaughter at least 144 recruits, a US official told AFP news agency, though multiple sources have claimed the toll was higher still.
The Afghan Taliban launched their self-styled spring offensive on Friday, heralding fresh fighting the group said would include "conventional attacks, guerrilla warfare, complex martyrdom attacks [and] insider attacks".
Spiegel Online
When German government spokesman Steffen Seibert claims a scheduling conflict as the pretext for canceling a long-planned meeting, there's usually a substantial diplomatic crisis behind the decision. Usually, the government uses the excuse to get out of meetings with autocratic regimes, but this year, it has been applied to a country that generally maintains a very close friendship with Germany: Israel.
The cabinets of both countries traditionally hold a joint meeting once a year, alternating annually between Berlin and Jerusalem. The next German-Israeli intergovernmental consultation had been planned for May, but the Chancellery announced suddenly a few weeks ago that the meeting would be "delayed." The reason provided was the "many international meetings in the scope of the German G-20 presidency."
Displeasure over Netanyahu's Settlement Policies
But that wasn't the real reason. The cancellation was Berlin's way of protesting against Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to legalize illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. That was the first diplomatic affront. A much more significant one took place Tuesday when German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel traveled to Jerusalem, where he planned to meet with the prime minister. Netanyahu , though, cancelled their planned meeting at the last minute.
The Guardian
Hamas is to try to end its own international isolation by unveiling a new version of its founding charter which called for the destruction of Israel.
The new statement will say that Hamas accepts in principle a future Palestine based on 1967 borders in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, but will not explicitly recognize the state of Israel.
The new charter will also distinguish between the group’s objection to Zionism rather than to the Jewish people.
The ultimate aim of the new charter is to repair divisions within the Palestinian movement and strike a deal that allows international reconstruction to start in war-ravaged Gaza by allowing some opening up of Gaza’s economy.
One diplomatic source said: “This could be the one last chance to put Gaza on a sensible path before it utterly destructs.”
The new charter was due to be unveiled at a press conference in Qatar by the head of the movement’s political bureau, Khaled Meshal, and follows nearly two years of only partially resolved internal debate.
The new charter will still contain language to which Israel, the US and Europe object – and there will be questions about why the new charter is additional to the existing charter first issued in 1988 rather than supplanting the existing version. Assurances have been given that Arabic text is the same as the English text.
But some western diplomats are likely to interpret the new charter as sign that Hamas is at least willing to accept a regional peace initiative largely sponsored by Egypt.
NPR
At a pro-U.S. rally in central Seoul over the weekend, supporters of impeached South Korean President Park Geun-hye chanted for the destruction of their enemy, North Korea. They've formed an encampment outside City Hall, where they express support for Park and the U.S., and criticize left-wing politicians.
Park was removed from office in March, a first in South Korea's history. She goes on trial Tuesday for corruption, and faces life in prison if convicted. On May 9, there's a presidential election to replace her.
At the polls, South Koreans are expected to punish Park's fellow conservatives, and elect a liberal instead. The vote also has become a referendum on U.S. relations — about how close South Koreans want to be with the United States.
Park is an icon of South Korea's conservative establishment. Her backers tend to be older, Christian, conservative and pro-U.S. — people who lived through the 1950-'53 Korean War as children.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Al Jazeera
An unusually active spring blizzard has hit the US states of Kansas and Oklahoma, stranding vehicles, downing trees and power lines and building snow drifts of more than two metres in depth.
The travel-stopping, destructive snow storm is one of the strongest snowstorms to blanket the region so late in the spring.
On Saturday, the temperature difference between Dallas (at 33C), and Amarillo (at 4C), was 29 degrees Celsius. This despite them both being in Texas, though 600km apart.
Even adjusting for the fact that Amarillo is 800m higher, so should be colder, this is still a temperature difference of more than 20C.
Tornadoes are spawned where two contrasting air masses collide and push up thunderstorms. Generally speaking, the bigger the contrast, the bigger the storms and the bigger the tornadoes.
The Guardian (4/30/2017)
A shark attacked a woman wading in the ocean with friends, tearing away part of her upper thigh in the ocean off a popular southern California beach, authorities and witnesses said on Sunday.
The attack occurred on Saturday near San Onofre State Beach in northern San Diego County.
“All of the back of her leg was kind of missing,” Thomas Williams, one of several witnesses who pulled the woman ashore, told the Orange County Register.
“If she didn’t receive immediate care, it was life-threatening.”
Williams said the woman was conscious and talking while onlookers used a rubber surfboard leash as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.
“She was not calm, of course,” he said. “But she was coherent.”
The beach is adjacent to the Camp Pendleton marine base. Marine Sgt Asia Sorenson said the victim, a civilian, was airlifted to a hospital in unknown condition.
The injury was probably caused by a great white or a seven-gill shark, said Chris Lowe, director of the Shark Lab at California State University, Long Beach. Several sharks have been sighted in the area recently.
Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday tossed out a lower court's ruling that had allowed an American oil drilling company to sue Venezuela over the seizure of 11 drilling rigs in 2010 but allowed the business another chance to press its claims.
Siding with Venezuela, the justices ruled 8-0 that a lower court that had given the go-ahead for the suit must reconsider whether claims made by Oklahoma-based Helmerich & Payne International Drilling Company (HP.N) can proceed.
Writing for the court, Justice Stephen Breyer said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2015 used the wrong standard in denying Venezuela immunity from the lawsuit.
Helmerich & Payne shares fell about 2 percent in midday trading after the ruling.
The company sued both the Venezuelan government and state-owned oil companies under a U.S. law called the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, saying among other things that the property seizure violated international law.
The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act allows for foreign governments to be sued in U.S. courts under certain circumstances, including when private property is seized.
Reuters
Airbnb and the city of San Francisco have settled a lawsuit over a local ordinance that had forbidden the home-rental company from taking bookings from hosts who have not registered their homes.
City officials across the United States have sought to maximize tax collection on rental units, sparking legal fights with tech advocates who say internet firms should not be hamstrung by myriad local rules on what they can publish.
In a statement on Monday, San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said the settlement will require new Airbnb hosts to register with the city before posting rentals on the site.
Airbnb will set up a simple way for hosts to register with the city through its website. The company will give the city a monthly list of San Francisco listings so the city can verify whether a host has registered.
Airbnb, which is based in San Francisco, will cancel future stays and deactivate listings if there is an invalid registration, Herrera said.
Airbnb global policy chief Chris Lehane said the settlement will have to be endorsed by the mayor and the city's board of supervisors.
NPR
In July 2012, a science reporter for The Washington Post, Brian Vastag, was in Wisconsin visiting his family when a high fever hit. He became instantly bedridden with flu-like symptoms that never went away.
"It didn't feel like anything I'd ever had before. ... The things that distinguished it were the dizziness and the feeling of unreality in the head," Vastag says.
Now, nearly five years later, the 45-year-old can no longer concentrate or read even a few sentences without becoming exhausted. A short walk to the mailbox means lying down for the rest of the day. In September, he'll qualify for Medicare due to his disability.
That level of severity isn't the picture most people, including doctors, think of when they hear the term "chronic fatigue syndrome." But that was the diagnosis Vastag finally received after 18 months of visiting numerous doctors, submitting countless vials of blood and initially being misdiagnosed with West Nile virus.
NPR
On July 17, 2014 Kurt Hinrichs, of Gladstone, Mo., went to bed early. As often happens, he woke in the middle of the night. When he tried to get out of bed, he crashed to the floor, which woke his wife, Alice.
"At first it was like, 'What's going on?' " Alice says. "Are you dreaming? Are you sleepwalking?"
Kurt wasn't responding to anything Alice asked him, so she called 911. "I [was] thinking, 'this is a nightmare,' " Kurt says.
By the time the ambulance arrived, just a few minutes later, Kurt wasn't speaking and his entire right side was paralyzed. Paramedics recognized that Kurt was having a stroke.
When they wheeled Kurt out of the house, Alice thought he might never come home again. And if he did, he would be bedridden or in a wheelchair. "I really didn't have a lot of hope that my husband would be normal again, ever," she says.
Speeding towards St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Mo., Kurt realized this was no nightmare. He was awake, "but there was something major and massively wrong with me," Kurt says.
NPR
"Yo-yo dieting" — where people lose weight and gain it back again — doubles the risk of a heart attack, stroke or death in people who already have significant heart disease.
That's the conclusion of an international study published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Researchers reviewed weight data gathered over several years from 9,509 people with significant heart disease who had taken part in a trial of a cholesterol-lowering statin drug. The study was sponsored by the drugmaker Pfizer.
"Our findings suggest that we need to be concerned about weight fluctuation in this group that is already at high risk due to coronary disease," says lead researcher Dr. Sripal Bangalore, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City.
Over a period averaging 4.7 years, people who had the greatest fluctuations in weight — about 8.6 pounds — had double the risk of a heart attack, stroke or death, when compared with those who experienced weight fluctuations of less than 2 pounds.
ENTERTAINMENT
NPR
The new Starz series American Gods is based on Neil Gaiman's fantasy novel of the same name, and it's many things: a road novel, a collection of mythologies, and a reflection of the immigrant experience.
The story follows an ex-convict named Shadow Moon, newly released from prison when he meets a mysterious man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday and offers Shadow a job as a bodyguard and chauffeur.
After some initial hesitation, Shadow accepts the job, and he and Mr. Wednesday head out on the open road, where much of American Gods takes place.
"It's a glorious American tradition," says Neil Gaiman. "If you take some people, you put them on the road, you see what happens to them, and you find out who they meet on the way."
The "who" that Shadow and Mr. Wednesday meet are far from ordinary, though. They're gods from different mythologies around the world. These gods are living as humans all over the United States, brought here when their believers first came to this country — as explorers, slaves, or immigrants.