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, planter, JML9999, 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.
Chicago Tribune: Obamas to start 'conversation' with South Side over library by Katherine Skiba
Former President Barack Obama's second Chicago trip in as many weeks on Wednesday will include two events and a first look at a design for his presidential center in Jackson Park.
About 300 people are expected at a midday event at the South Shore Cultural Center, where Obama will moderate a roundtable discussion on the future Obama Presidential Center. Former first lady Michelle Obama will also attend — it will be her first trip back to Chicago since leaving the White House in January.
The Obama Foundation said Barack Obama is set to provide an update on the center. A 3-D model of the design will be shown, the Tribune has reported.
"It was important to (Obama) to make the initial announcement to community members on the South Side of Chicago and to have that conversation with them," said a source familiar with Obama's plans who spoke on condition of anonymity.
New York Times: Black Americans Are Living Longer, C.D.C. Reports by Gina Kolata
Black Americans still have a higher death rate over all than whites, but the gap is closing, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Tuesday.
Black Americans who live to 65 may now expect to live longer than whites of the same age, the federal researchers also found.
The narrowing gap in death rates first emerged at the start of this century, and it shows no signs of abating. Both black and white Americans are living longer, but the death rate among blacks has been dropping faster than that among whites.
In fact, heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States, now kills blacks and whites at about the same rates.
Fifteen years ago, black Americans had a life expectancy at birth of 71.8 years. For whites, the figure was 77.3 years.
Blacks now have a life expectancy of 75.6 years, and whites can expect to live on average for 79 years.
But disparities remain, the researchers found.
Boston Globe: Racial insults at Fenway open old wounds in Boston’s black community by Meghan E. Irons
The racial insults hurled at a professional baseball player Monday at Fenway Park have opened up old wounds in Boston’s black community.
Although the city has come a long way since people pelted yellow buses carrying black children to school, the Fenway incident involving Baltimore Orioles player Adam Jones triggered painful memories for some of the city’s civil rights leaders who are trying to move past Boston’s sordid history.
“I got sick in the pit of my stomach because we are in a different place’’ and a different time, said Hubie Jones, a long-time advocate for social change. “We are certainly nowhere where we were in 1974,’’ when court-ordered desegregation of schools tore the city apart along racial lines.
Orioles outfielder Adam Jones, who is black, told reporters after his team’s 5-2 victory over the Red Sox that a bag of peanuts was thrown at him from the stands during the game and he was called him the “N-word a handful of times.”
Reuters: NSA collected Americans' phone records despite law change: report by Mark Hosenball
The U.S. National Security Agency collected more than 151 million records of Americans' phone calls last year, even after Congress limited its ability to collect bulk phone records, according to an annual report issued on Tuesday by the top U.S. intelligence officer.
The report from the office of Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was the first measure of the effects of the 2015 USA Freedom Act, which limited the NSA to collecting phone records and contacts of people U.S. and allied intelligence agencies suspect may have ties to terrorism.
It found that the NSA collected the 151 million records even though it had warrants from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court to spy on only 42 terrorism suspects in 2016, in addition to a handful identified the previous year.
The NSA has been gathering a vast quantity of telephone "metadata," records of callers' and recipients' phone numbers and the times and durations of the calls - but not their content - since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
VICE: An FBI translator married the ISIS fighter she was supposed to be investigating by Justin Ling
A former FBI translator who held a top-secret security clearance fled to Syria and married the Islamic State fighter she had been tasked with investigating. For this, she was sentenced to just two years in prison.
That’s according to redacted documents released Monday by a federal court in Washington, D.C., which describe the bizarre saga of Czech-born Daniela Greene, who lived in the U.S. and worked as a contract translator at the FBI. She was tasked with keeping tabs on Denis Cuspert (pictured above in 2005), a German rapper turned ISIS fighter, but instead she snuck into Syria, alerted him to the FBI’s investigation, and married him.
CNN: Clinton: 'If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president' by Dan Merica
New York (CNN) Hillary Clinton delivered her most forceful critique of President Donald Trump's 2016 victory on Tuesday, taking personal responsibility for her failed campaign but also pointed to the timing of a letter from FBI Director James Comey and Russian interference as factors.
"If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president," she told CNN's Christiane Amanpour at a Women for Women International event in New York.
"I take absolute personal responsibility. I was the candidate, I was the person who was on the ballot. I am very aware of the challenges, the problems, the shortfalls that we had," Clinton said, before adding that she was "on the way to winning until a combination of Jim Comey's letter on October 28 and Russian WikiLeaks raised doubts in the minds of people who were inclined to vote for me and got scared off."
Washington Post: House Republicans just voted to change overtime rules for workers by Jena McGregor
On Tuesday afternoon, the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that Republicans have promoted since the Newt Gingrich era, one that would allow private-sector employees to exchange overtime pay for "compensatory time" off, electing to accrue extra hours off rather than extra pay in their wallets. The bill passed 229 to 197, largely along party lines.
The bill -- which supporters say would add flexibility to hourly workers' schedules while opponents worry it doesn't do enough to protect employees -- is not a new idea. It seeks to take a similar provision that has been available to government workers since 1985 and extend it to private-sector employees, making it legal for them to choose between an hour and a half of paid comp time and time-and-a-half pay when they work additional hours.
Similar bills have been introduced multiple times over the past two decades, passing the House three times before failing to pass the Senate. While its fate is unclear in the Senate this year, the White House said Tuesday it supports the bill, saying in a statement it would "help American workers balance the competing demands of family and work by giving them flexibility to earn paid time off."
The Root: Michelle Obama Explains Her Side Eye at Trump’s Inauguration by Yesha Callahan
It was the mother of all side eyes, and it happened at the most opportune time. During President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Michelle Obama’s facial expressions immediately became the stuff memes are made of, but unfortunately, shade was not involved.
Obama said that what was mistaken for shade was just her trying to hold it together as Sasha and Malia took their last walk through the White House.
FLOTUS lives by, “When they go low, we go high.” However, my opinion about her eye shade remains unchanged.
Mashable: Ugh, Tim Cook still won't tell us his big Apple Watch secret by Brett Williams
Tim Cook has a secret about the Apple Watch, and he's not any closer to telling us.
Apple's latest quarterly earnings report for Q2 2017 was yet another big showing for the company, and CEO Tim Cook was, as always, pleasant and positive on the publicly-streamed conference call disclosing the financials.
But yet again, he left us hanging when it came to the Apple Watch's exact sales numbers. Instead, he boasted that the sales of the smartwatch "doubled" from last year and lumped the wearable into the same revenue category as AirPods and Beats products (and even called Beats "wearables," LOL). Cook, you know Beats are fundamentally different than the smartwatch that's supposedly the top-selling product on the market, right?
Clearly, the Apple Watch is selling to some degree — but it's frustratingly unclear exactly how well.
Dallas Morning News: Senators would like to see Kay Bailey Hutchison as NATO ambassador by Todd J. Gillman and Katie Leslie
WASHINGTON -- Key senators said Tuesday that they'd welcome the idea of sending Kay Bailey Hutchison to NATO as the U.S. ambassador -- a pick that would reassure allies at a critical time.
Former colleagues lauded the Texas Republican's grasp of foreign policy and they, like European partners, would view her as a solid emissary at the headquarters in Brussels.
President Donald Trump hasn't filled the post yet but she has emerged as the leading contender, according to CNN. Key senators in both parties said Tuesday they'd heard nothing from the White House about Trump picking Hutchison. But without exception, they liked the idea.
"She would be a great public servant in that capacity," said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, which would review the nomination.
Guardian: Majority of Mélenchon supporters will not back Emmanuel Macron, poll finds by Kim Willsher
The majority of supporters of the hard-left French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon will abstain or spoil their ballot papers in Sunday’s second round, according to the results of a consultation of members of his France Unbowed movement.
About 450,000 of his supporters were asked to say whether they would abstain, spoil their ballots or support Emmanuel Macron in the second round runoff this Sunday. Voting for the other candidate, he Front National’s Marine Le Pen, was not an option.
The results, released on Tuesday afternoon, showed that of more than 243,000 Mélenchon supporters who responded, 87,818 (36.1%) intended to spoil their vote, 84,682 (34.8%) planned to support Macron and 70,628 (29%) would not turn out for the second round. The figures suggest a total of 65% will not vote for Macron.
Mélenchon, who came fourth in the first round vote 10 days ago with the support of 19.5% – about 7 million voters – has been heavily criticised for not advising his supporters how to vote.
Reuters: Putin, Merkel struggle to move past differences in tense meeting by Andreas Rinke and Denniis Pinchuk
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, on a rare visit to Russia, said that Berlin and Moscow had to keep talking despite their disagreements, but those same differences overshadowed her talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday.
At a news conference following a meeting in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, diverging positions were aired over Syria, Ukraine, Russian respect for civil rights, and allegations Moscow is interfering in other countries' elections.
Their body language suggested tensions: their facial expressions as they spoke to reporters were stern, and the two leaders barely looked at each other.
"I am always of the view that even if there are serious differences of opinion in some areas, talks must continue," Merkel said. "You must carry on, because otherwise you fall into silence and there is less and less understanding."
AlJazeera: 'Dozens killed' in ISIL attack on northeast Syria
At least 37 people, including dozens of civilians, have been killed in an attack by ISIL fighters targeting a crossing along Syria's northeastern border with Iraq, according to a monitoring group.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said five suicide bombers detonated explosives before dawn on Tuesday in Rajm al-Salibi, a village in Hasaka province that is home to a temporary camp sheltering hundreds of displaced people.
The explosions were followed by gun battles between other ISIL attackers and US-backed Kurdish fighters of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) at a nearby checkpoint, leaving dozens of people wounded.
"The area where the attacks took place is where many refugees escaping violence in Iraq were gathering," Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of Observatory, told the DPA news agency, adding that the attackers might have come from Iraq.
The Conversation: How Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda machine changed American journalism by Christopher B. Daly
When the United States declared war on Germany 100 years ago, the impact on the news business was swift and dramatic.
In its crusade to “make the world safe for democracy,” the Wilson administration took immediate steps at home to curtail one of the pillars of democracy – press freedom – by implementing a plan to control, manipulate and censor all news coverage, on a scale never seen in U.S. history.
Following the lead of the Germans and British, Wilson elevated propaganda and censorship to strategic elements of all-out war. Even before the U.S. entered the war, Wilson had expressed the expectation that his fellow Americans would show what he considered “loyalty.”
Immediately upon entering the war, the Wilson administration brought the most modern management techniques to bear in the area of government-press relations. Wilson started one of the earliest uses of government propaganda. He waged a campaign of intimidation and outright suppression against those ethnic and socialist papers that continued to oppose the war. Taken together, these wartime measures added up to an unprecedented assault on press freedom.
The Hollywood Reporter: WGA Deal Decoded: Big TV Gains But Movie Writers Have Less to Celebrate by Jonathan Handel
The Writers Guild of America achieved a deal Tuesday morning that addresses many issues vexing its members and seemingly vindicated its high-stakes strategy of negotiating down to the wire in a fashion that stretched the nerves of many in the industry.
At a macro level, the guild said it achieved a deal that was $130 million better than the agreement it would have gotten had it simply accepted a deal modeled on the one the Directors Guild of America achieved several months earlier. If true, the DGA may be perturbed. No doubt its leaders will be taking a hard look at the WGA package. So, too, will the SAG-AFTRA leadership, as their negotiations start in two weeks, and if the WGA claim is valid, the actors might be inclined to up their contract demands.
But those observations come with a caveat: It was not immediately possible to determine the validity of the WGA claim, as the guild did not provide figures for the value it ascribed to the DGA deal or for the deal that the writers achieved — whereas as recently as Friday, they had publicly valued their proposal.
Deutsche Welle: German research organization to identify Nazi victims that ended up as brain slides by Brigette Osterath
They are kept deep in the archive of the Max Planck Society in Munich - human brain specimens, elaborately prepared and neatly labeled.
Some of the brain specimens belong to Nazi victims. They were murdered because they were mentally ill or disabled and considered "unworthy of life," according to Hitler.
About 300,000 people including children were killed in the Nazi's so-called "euthanasia program, T4."
But the victims' brains were preserved.
"These Nazi crimes [committed during] the euthanasia program were a good opportunity for scientists to get their hands on brain tissues and examine rare neurological diseases," says Herwig Czech, a historian at the University of Vienna.
Doctors could even order the brain of a certain patient - a patient they found interesting for research.
A major part of the brains of Nazi victims, though, were preserved in formalin and kept for later. It was thought research would improve after the war.
Even until the 1970s, researchers experimented on those brain parts to find out more about the origins of diseases and conditions, including Down syndrome.
Racked: What a Physicist Sees When She Looks at a Fancy Gown by Mika McKinnon
Every year, I’m blown away by the intricate gowns at the Met Gala. I’m impressed not just by the creativity, but by how much math, physics, and engineering is lurking beneath the layers of silk and lace.
The gowns live at the perfect intersection of my interests: I’m a physicist and geophysicist, but I also love textile arts. For my graduate work, I crunched statistics on millions of data points, and my next big project is investigating the mechanics of landslides on asteroids and comets. I’ve invented internally-consistent imaginary physics frameworks for science fiction
television series. But I also got my first sewing machine when I was six years old, and my stash of yarn is both a treasured collection and raw material to feed my weaving and knitting. I’ve dabbled in crochet, flirted with needle felting, and have a complete set of tools for hooking rugs. I’ve yet to meet a textile art I don’t want to try at least once.
This pairing of interests has given me insight into how textile arts are another application of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Sometimes it’s blatant — I knit a hat featuring the home mountain range of the first landslide I studied, and my big brother burst out laughing when I gave him a binary-encoded scarf — but all of it is essential to understanding what’s going on in the creation of a gorgeous couture gown.
(You have to click on the tweet that I added here to get the “full flavor.”)
Don’t forget that Hunter is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a great evening!