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.
McClatchy DC
Ed. note: I was not able to resist leading with this
It was late January, and a small group of liberal bloggers were about to lift an obscure U.S. House candidate in Georgia to political stardom.
At a time of unprecedented energy from the Democratic Party’s liberal base, an endorsement from Daily Kos Elections can make you famous – and raise a small fortune.
The website’s online fundraising pitch collected $400,000 for Jon Ossoff in a single week, more than some candidates for the House of Representatives raise in a year. Eventually, donations totaled about $1.6 million.
“We knew right away that the amount of money coming in was just enormous, far, far beyond our wildest dreams,” said David Nir, Daily Kos’ longtime political director, who authored the site’s endorsement.
Ossoff, running in a special race in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, has gone on to become the face of the backlash to President Donald Trump.
But the more lasting effect might come from this heavily trafficked blog, which is part of the larger Daily Kos online community, which has been a hub of liberal activity since the days of President George W. Bush.
US NEWS
Washington Post
President Trump asked two of the nation’s top intelligence officials in March to help him push back against an FBI investigation into possible coordination between his campaign and the Russian government, according to current and former officials.
Trump made separate appeals to the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and to Adm. Michael S. Rogers, the director of the National Security Agency, urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election.
Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate, according to two current and two former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private communications with the president.
Trump sought the assistance of Coats and Rogers after FBI Director James B. Comey told the House Intelligence Committee on March 20 that the FBI was investigating “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.”
Bloomberg
President Donald Trump said he never named Israel during an Oval Office conversation with Russian officials in which he reportedly revealed sensitive intelligence gathered by an unidentified U.S. ally.
His off-the-cuff remarks to reporters in Jerusalem before a meeting Monday with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to confirm Israel as the source. And it took Trump off script on a trip in which the president for the first few days had maintained an uncharacteristic discipline in his public comments.
Trump blurted out a defense of his conduct in the May 10 meeting with the diplomats when a U.S. reporter asked Netanyahu at a photo session whether the Israeli prime minister was concerned about sharing sensitive intelligence with the U.S.
Netanyahu said U.S.-Israeli “intelligence cooperation is terrific and it’s never been better.”
McClatchy DC
Israelis want to know what Donald Trump is thinking right now.
Trump stepped off Air Force Monday was immediately welcomed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with an elaborate red carpet ceremony at Ben-Gurion International Airport – far away from the Russia-related investigations that roil Washington.
But residents of Jerusalem can’t help wondering if Trump’s thoughts are elsewhere. They worry about his mindset, particularly as he seeks to revive a delicate peace process with the Palestinians.
Eli Harosh, 48, likes Trump. He’s decisive. He’s a strong leader who knows the world must use strength to confront terrorism and Iran, Harosh said.
But Trump is also unpredictable and stressed. He may press harder than he should for something that he can claim as a victory. And that worries Harosh.
“He could blurt something out like ‘you have to return territory to the Palestinians’,” said Harosh, a sanitation manager who supports President Benjamin Netanyahu. “Then there is a problem for both countries. It’s not easy to fix a statement like that.”
After two long days in Saudi Arabia, Trump arrived in Israel Monday on the second leg of his five country tour. He’ll visit Jerusalem and the West Bank to try to resurrect the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Al Jazeera
US President Donald Trump has concluded talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by promising to help broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal but gave little indication of how he could revive negotiations that collapsed in 2014.
"It's not easy. I have heard it is one of the toughest deals of all, but I have a feeling that we are going to get there eventually. I hope," Trump said after the meeting in west Jerusalem on Monday, without elaborating.
He chose to focus firmly on Iran, pledging he would never let Tehran acquire nuclear arms and saying the deal struck with Tehran by the Barack Obama administration needed fixing.
"The United States and Israel can declare with one voice that Iran must never be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon - never ever - and must cease its deadly funding, training and equipping of terrorists and militias," Trump said earlier on Monday.
Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Monday that shared concern about Iran was driving Israel and many Arab states closer and demanded that Tehran immediately cease military and financial backing of "terrorists and militias".
In stressing threats from Iran, Trump echoed a theme laid out during weekend meetings in Saudi Arabia with Muslim leaders from around the world, many wary of the Islamic Republic's growing regional influence and financial muscle.
Trump has vowed to do whatever necessary to broker peace between Israel and the Palestinians, dubbing a peace accord "the ultimate deal". But ahead of his Holy Land visit, he gave little indication of how he could revive talks that collapsed in 2014.
Trump will meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Tuesday and the Palestinian leader said he hoped the meeting could be "useful and fruitful ... (and) will bring results".
But in the Gaza Strip, dozens of Palestinians rallied against Trump and burned his picture and an effigy of him.
Trump received a warm welcome in Riyadh from Arab leaders, especially over his tough line on Tehran, which many Sunni Muslim Arab states regard as seeking regional control.
In Jerusalem, in public remarks after talks with Israeli leaders on the first day of his two-day visit, he again focused on Iran, pledging he would never let Tehran acquire nuclear arms.
"What's happened with Iran has brought many of the parts of the Middle East toward Israel," Trump said at a meeting with President Reuven Rivlin.
Reuters
Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn declined on Monday to comply with a subpoena from the Senate Intelligence Committee as it investigates possible Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Flynn invoked his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, according to a letter to the Senate committee from his attorney, which was obtained by Reuters.
The retired lieutenant general is a key witness in the Russia probe.
Flynn's attorneys did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, the top Republican and Democrat on the panel, said in a statement they were disappointed by Flynn's decision, but would "vigorously pursue" his testimony.
The committee is conducting one of the main congressional probes into U.S. intelligence agency reports of Russian meddling in the election and whether there was any collusion between President Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia. Moscow has repeatedly denied the allegations and Trump denies any collusion between his campaign and Russian officials.
Flynn apparently misled Pentagon investigators about his foreign connections when he sought to renew his security clearance in early 2016, according to a document obtained by congressional Democrats and released in part on Monday.
Flynn, interviewed as part of the clearance renewal process, said that all of his foreign trips as a private citizen "were funded by U.S. companies," according to excerpts of a March 14, 2016 report compiled by security clearance investigators.
Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday ruled that Republicans in North Carolina unlawfully took race into consideration when drawing congressional district boundaries, concentrating black voters in an improper bid to diminish their statewide political clout.
The justices upheld a lower court's February 2016 ruling that threw out two majority-black U.S. House of Representatives districts because Republican lawmakers improperly used race as a factor when redrawing the legislative map after the 2010 census.
The decision came in one of a number of lawsuits accusing Republicans of taking steps at the state level to disenfranchise black and other minority voters who tend to back Democratic candidates.
The justices found that the manner in which the North Carolina voting district boundaries were sketched violated the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law. The ruling may offer a roadmap for challenging similarly drawn districts nationwide.
The justices unanimously upheld the lower court on one of the districts and split 5-3 on the other, with three conservatives dissenting.
"The North Carolina Republican legislature tried to rig congressional elections by drawing unconstitutional districts that discriminated against African-Americans and that's wrong," said North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat took office in January.
New York Times
A white student at the University of Maryland was charged on Sunday in the fatal stabbing a black college student in what the authorities are investigating as a possible hate crime.
Officials on Sunday charged the suspect, Sean C. Urbanski, 22, with assault and first- and second-degree murder in the death of the student, Richard W. Collins III, 23, the authorities said. He was being held without bond, according to a statement from Wallace D. Loh, the president of the University of Maryland.
Mr. Collins was a student at Bowie State University, in Bowie, Md., about 30 miles south of Baltimore. He was recently commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army and was to graduate on Tuesday, the statement said.
David Mitchell, chief of the University of Maryland Police Department, told The Baltimore Sun that Mr. Urbanski, of Severna Park, Md., was a member of the Facebook group “Alt-Reich Nation,” a page that contained racist posts.
Vox
The White House has punted on a key Obamacare decision, leaving health insurance plans in limbo and creating more uncertainty about what the law's marketplaces will look like in 2018.
The Trump administration faced an important deadline today. It had to let a federal court know whether it would continue to defend an Obamacare subsidy program that lowers copays and deductibles for low-income enrollees — a program that Congress argues in a pending lawsuit is illegal and should be halted.
In a joint filing, both the Trump administration and Congress asked the appeals court for the District of Columbia to put the case on hold for 90 days. They want an extension because they will "continue to discuss measures" that might negate the need for this lawsuit, such as repealing Obamacare.
This new filing doesn't explode Obamacare. But it does leave health insurance plans in limbo. The Trump administration could have said something much different today. It could have said it will no longer fund this subsidy program, an option the president was reportedly weighing as recently as last week.
It didn't go that far. The White House left the option of paying the subsidies on the table. Still, this isn't huge comfort to insurers that sell on the Obamacare marketplaces. They need to decide whether to sign up for 2018 by June 21. In order to set prices for those plans, insurers need to know whether this funding stream will still exist. Last year, it paid out $7 billion. Insurers want to know if those billions of dollars will be around next year too.
Tampa Bay Times
The revelations weren't over.
Officers found a garage stocked with bomb materials as they arrived to investigate the double homicide, leading to federal explosive charges against Brandon Russell — a Florida National Guardsman and admitted neo-Nazi who kept a framed photo of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh on his dresser.
Russell, 21, was the man Tampa police officers found crying outside his door Friday evening when murder suspect Devon Arthurs led them back to the apartment that the four had shared in an affluent suburb north of the University of South Florida. Russell, wearing camouflage, had just returned from National Guard duties.
Police went to the apartment in the Hamptons at Tampa Palms after Arthurs, 18, told them he fatally shot his roommates Jeremy Himmelman, 22, and Andrew Oneschuk, 18, according to a Tampa police report.
While searching the garage, investigators found a cooler full of a white, cake-like explosive material known as HMTD, or hexamethylene tiperoxide diamine, according to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court. Nearby, they found explosive precursors — chemicals that can be mixed to create explosives — including potassium chlorate, potassium nitrate, nitro methane and more than a pound of ammonium nitrate in a package addressed to Russell.
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
Brazilian President Michel Temer said Monday that he was "naive" to hold the late-night meeting which sparked an explosive corruption scandal, but insisted he'd done nothing wrong and wouldn't resign.
Temer, who faces multiple impeachment demands, told Folha newspaper he had innocently stumbled into the crisis threatening to bring him down just over a year since he replaced impeached president Dilma Rousseff.
"Naivety. I was naive," he said.
The scandal erupted last week when Globo newspaper revealed a secret audio recording in which Joesley Batista, an executive from the JBS meatpacking giant, can allegedly be heard getting the president's green light for paying hush money to a politician imprisoned for corruption.
Agence France Presse
Killers gunned down a Mafia boss in Sicily on Monday as the Cosa Nostra flexed its muscles on the eve of the 25th anniversary of one of its most notorious murders.
Giuseppe Dainotti, 67, was shot in the head as he cycled along a street in Palermo, almost 25 years to the day since anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone was killed in a bomb blast on a motorway on the Italian island.
Photographs of Monday's crime scene evoked decades of violence in the Sicilian capital, showing Dainotti's body covered by a sheet, only his shoes on show, and the white bicycle he was riding lying where it fell.
Palermo prosecutor Francesco Lo Voi said the slaying was a warning to the state that Cosa Nostra ("Our Thing") may have been lying low, but was far from beaten.
"When some people claim the Mafia no longer exists or has been destroyed, something always happens to confirm it is still there," he said.
"When necessary, it shoots again, in a clear and symbolic way," he said.
Deutsche Welle
US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday hailed their countries' friendship and reiterated their commitment to working with Arab leaders to bring an end to violence in the region, with a special emphasis on the threat they say is posed by Tehran.
Trump emphasized the enduring friendship between the US and Israel while also complimenting the leaders he met during his previous stop-over in Saudi Arabia.
"We can truly achieve a more peaceful future for this region and for people of all faiths and all beliefs and frankly all over the world," Trump said.
The US president also expressed optimism that peace could be achieved between Israelis and Palestinians, while acknowledging the challenge of achieving such a deal. "I've heard is one of the toughest deals of all," he said.
Al Jazeera
Lesbos, Greece - Odysseas Elytis, the Greek Nobel laureate and poet, once wrote: "If you disintegrate Greece, in the end you'll see that what you have left is an olive tree, a vineyard, and a ship. Which means: with these you can rebuild it."
Having endured eight years of a deepening economic crisis, thousands of young Greeks are taking heed of Elytis' words by leaving the cities to work on the land.
One of them is 35-year-old Alexandros Kleitsas, who until four years ago had spent his entire life in Athens, the capital of Greece, working for a private company that certified organic products.
After spending two years being unemployed, Alexandros decided he had no other option but to leave everything behind and move to his grandparents' village in Kalabaka, four hours' drive north of Athens. There he started a farm with his brother and three friends.
"Someone has to start producing again in this country," Alexandros says. "We can't all be in the service sector and so I left the city. I started from zero, without any land or experience."
Alexandros isn't alone in his thinking. For the first time in 20 years, employment in the agricultural sector has been rising, from 11 percent in 2008, a 35-year low, to 12.9 percent in 2015, according to the latest available report by the Greek Statistical Service. Almost half of all new farmers come from the cities.
The Guardian
The US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross’s praise for the lack of protests during Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia has been criticized by civil rights activists who pointed out that protesting in Saudi Arabia is illegal.
Ross travelled with the US president to Saudi Arabia in the first stage of his first international tour since taking office. Speaking with CNBC on Monday morning, Ross said there was “no sign of” protesters and seemed to suggest this was a sign of the country’s goodwill towards the US.
“There was not a single hint of a protester anywhere there during the whole time we were there,” Ross said. “Not one guy with a bad placard.”
Thousands of people are expected to protest Trump’s appearance in Brussels on Wednesday, but there was no sign of dissent in Saudi Arabia.
“There was not a single effort at any incursion, there wasn’t anything,” Ross said. “The mood was a genuinely good mood.”
But Adam Coogle, Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch, said “anyone who follows the situation in Saudi Arabia will not be surprised at all” by the lack of protesters.
“Protesting is a serious offence in Saudi Arabia. It’s been de facto criminalised for many, many years, and specifically criminalised since 2011,” Coogle said.
“The stakes for protesting are extremely high. No one wants to sit in jail for ten years because they protested Trump.”
The Guardian
Turkey has summoned the American ambassador to complain about the behaviour of US security personnel during a US visit by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that turned violent when Erdoğan’s diplomatic escort beat up protesters outside the Turkish diplomatic mission in Washington.
Videos of the altercation, in which Erdoğan’s bodyguards were shown beating demonstrators outside the Turkish embassy as the president looked on, elicited condemnations by American lawmakers, with John McCain saying the country’s ambassador should be “thrown out”.
On Monday, however, Ankara said it had lodged a verbal and written protest at the behavior of US security personnel, saying they had taken actions that were “aggressive and unprofessional” and “contrary to diplomatic rules and practices”.
It was an apparent reference to Washington DC Metropolitan police officers’ attempts to break up the scuffles, sometimes using batons.
“It has been formally requested that the US authorities conduct a full investigation of this diplomatic incident and provide the necessary explanation,” the foreign ministry said in its statement.
Reuters
British Prime Minister Theresa May was forced to backtrack on one of her most striking election pledges on Monday to force elderly people to pay more for their social care after her party's opinion poll lead halved in just a few days.
In her biggest misstep of the campaign so far, May set out plans on Thursday to make some elderly people pay a greater share of their care costs, before hastily announcing on Monday there would be a limit. Questioned at an election event, she grew irritated at suggestions she was backing down.
Six opinion polls published in the past three days have all shown the Conservative Party's lead over the opposition Labour Party narrow by between 2 and 9 percentage points, though all project May will win the election.
May said Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and other opponents had tried to scare the elderly by spreading "fake claims" about her plan to transfer more of the cost from taxpayers to recipients who can afford to fund care themselves.
Dubbed the 'dementia tax' by opponents, the proposal had raised concerns that some seniors might see their houses sold off to pay for care, rather than passed on to their descendants.
Reuters
A blast on Monday night at a concert in the northern English city of Manchester where U.S. singer Ariana Grande had been performing left an unknown number of people dead and injured, police said.
Police said they were responding to reports of an explosion and that there were a number of confirmed casualties and others injured.
"We were making our way out and when we were right by the door there was a massive explosion and everybody was screaming," concert-goer Catherine Macfarlane told Reuters.
"It was a huge explosion -- you could feel it in your chest. It was chaotic. Everybody was running and screaming and just trying to get out."
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central
Swiss voters backed the government's plan to provide billions of dollars in subsidies for renewable energy, ban new nuclear plants and help bail out struggling utilities in a binding referendum on Sunday.
Provisional final figures showed support at 58.2 percent under the Swiss system of direct democracy, which gives voters final say on major policy issues.
The Swiss initiative mirrors efforts elsewhere in Europe to reduce dependence on nuclear power, partly sparked by Japan's Fukushima disaster in 2011. Germany aims to phase out nuclear power by 2022, while Austria banned it decades ago.
"The results shows the population wants a new energy policy and does not want any new nuclear plants," Energy Minister Doris Leuthard said, adding the law would boost domestic renewable energy, cut fossil fuel use and reduce reliance on foreign supplies.
"The law leads our country into a modern energy future," she told a news conference, adding some parts of the law would take effect in early 2018.
Debate on the "Energy Strategy 2050" law had focused on what customers and taxpayers will pay for the measures and whether a four-fold rise in solar and wind power by 2035, as envisaged in the law, can deliver reliable supplies.
Climate Central
Climate change, and its impacts on extreme weather and temperature swings, is projected to reduce global production of corn, wheat, rice and soybeans by 23 percent in the 2050s, according to a new analysis.
The study, which examined price and production of those four major crops from 1961 to 2013, also warns that by the 2030s output could be cut by 9 percent.
The findings come as researchers and world leaders continue to warn that food security will become an increasingly difficult problem to tackle in the face of rising temperatures and weather extremes, combining with increasing populations, and volatile food prices.
The negative impacts of climate change to farming were pretty much across the board in the new analysis. There were small production gains projected for Russia, Turkey and Ukraine in the 2030s, but by the 2050s, the models “are negative and more pronounced for all countries,” the researchers wrote in the study published this month in the journal Economics of Disasters and Climate Change.
Bloomberg
Some Nebraska corn fields are so flooded that farmers are posting videos of themselves wakeboarding. The image is amusing, but the realities of the heavy spring downpours are pummeling U.S. grain farmers with soggy fields and threats of crop disease.
In the past 30 days, about 40 percent of the Midwest got twice the amount of normal rainfall, with soils saturated from Arkansas to Ohio, according to MDA Weather Services. While spring showers usually benefit crops, the precipitation has come fast enough to flood some corn and rice fields and trigger quality concerns about maturing wheat.
“I’ve never seen that much water on that field,” said Quentin Connealy, a Tekamah, Nebraska, farmer who posted a wakeboarding video on social media after 4.8 inches of rain (12 centimeters) fell from May 16 to May 20, creating ponds of standing water in the area. Planting at the farm had started about three weeks later than normal because of cool, wet weather, and now will be pushed back again. “We’re losing days, ” he said in a telephone interview.
The Guardian
The latest crisis threatening to swallow Donald Trump’s administration has surfaced at the US president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida: a 4ft-wide sinkhole that has mysteriously opened up in the roadway outside.
Officials said repair crews were conducting an “exploratory dig” on Monday to find the cause of the hole that suddenly appeared in the road close to the southern entrance of Trump’s private waterfront club in Palm Beach, which he has dubbed his “winter White House”.
While the initial threat to Mar-a-Lago appeared to have been contained, the hole was “probably not” going to get any bigger, according to Kathleen Walter, communications director for the city of West Palm Beach – but the search for answers continued.
“I’m sure there are many theories,” Walter said. “Hopefully we’ll know more in a little while.”
NPR
If you have ever noticed an itchy or tingly sensation in your mouth after biting into a raw apple, carrot, banana or any of the fruits and veggies listed here, read on.
People who are allergic to pollen are accustomed to runny eyes and sniffles this time of year. But some seasonal allergy sufferers have it worse: They can develop allergic reactions to common fruits and vegetables.
The allergic reactions — which are usually mild — can come on suddenly. And people can react to foods they had been eating with no problem for most of their lives.
The condition is called oral allergy syndrome. "I do think that this is one of the most underreported and underrecognized conditions, " says Dr. Carah Santos, an allergist at National Jewish Health in Denver.
People who have OAS are allergic to plant pollens. Many fruits and vegetables contain proteins that are similar to these pollens. So the immune system can mistake the fruit and vegetable proteins for the plant pollens that caused the allergy.
"We call it cross-reactivity," explains Santos. "Your immune system sees something as looking very similar to something it already reacts to."
NPR
Kids under the age of 1 should avoid fruit juice, older kids should drink it only sparingly and all children should focus, instead, on eating whole fruit, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.
The pediatricians' group previously advised against giving fruit juice to infants under 6 months, but expanded that recommendation given evidence linking juice consumption to tooth decay and to gaining too much or too little weight.
For older kids who are at a healthy weight, 100 percent juice is fine in moderation, but should make up less than half of the recommended fruit servings per day, the AAP says.
"We want to reinforce that the most recent evidence supports that fruit juice should be a limited part of the diet of children," says Steven Abrams, a professor of pediatrics at Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, and an author of the guidelines, which were published Monday in Pediatrics.
Whole fruit is a much better way to get all the vitamins and nutrients of fruit, the guidelines say. Whole fruit contains fiber, which slows the absorption of sugar by the body, and it also makes you feel fuller than juice, which can prevent overeating.