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.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Republican Karen Handel declares victory in Georgia race for Congress by Mark Niesse
Republican Karen Handel celebrated her win over Democrat Jon Ossoff on Tuesday to a crowd chanting “Karen, Karen, Karen” as she heads to Congress to represent Atlanta’s northern suburbs.
“This was going to be a very, very tight race, it was going to be contentious, and it was going to require all hands on deck, and that’s exactly what we had,” Handel said.
Handel thanked President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans who supported her in the nationally watched runoff, leading to cheers of “Trump, Trump, Trump” from the crowd at the Hyatt Regency in Dunwoody.
Handel, Georgia’s former Secretary of State, maintained Republican control of Georgia’s 6th Congressional District, which was previously represented by Tom Price, who is now Trump’s Secretary for Health and Human Services.
Chicago Sun-Times: Rauner calls for unity, House Dems call it campaigning by Tina Sfondeles
Legislators return to Springfield on Wednesday for the first of 10 days of a special session to try to end the historic budget impasse — with Gov. Bruce Rauner imploring them to “to do what is right,” and with the ball in Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan’s court.
Lawmakers have until June 30 to reach an agreement before a new fiscal year begins. While the pressure mounts, with billions in unpaid bills and with social service agencies and public universities left in the lurch — S&P Global Ratings has warned the state’s debt will be rated junk without a budget by July 1.
House Democrats, led by Madigan, left Springfield last month without taking up Senate budget bills.
On Tuesday evening, Rauner delivered a three-minute televised speech at the Old State Capitol in Springfield in which he pushed for a “compromise” budget plan unveiled last week, which he said would end an “unnecessary crisis.”
“Failure to act is not an option. Failure to act may cause permanent damage to our state that will take years to overcome,” Rauner said.
The governor implored lawmakers to “have the courage to do what is right, to act for the people.”
Perhaps an indication of how the special session will begin, House Democrats in turn called the televised event a “campaign speech” and accused the governor of “talking out of both sides of his mouth.”
AlJazeera: Reporters face 70 years in prison over anti-Trump march by Patrick Strickland
Even when heavily armed riot police closed off a square block and surrounded protesters, media workers and legal observers alike, independent journalist Alexei Wood did not realise he was about to be arrested.
"It didn't even cross my mind that was what was happening," the 37-year-old photographer and videographer told Al Jazeera. "I was waiting for an order of dispersal and the mass of people showed no sign of resistance when the police completely surrounded them."
Yet on that day, January 20, protesters and observers say the order to disperse never came, and more than 230 people were arrested during protests against the inauguration of right-wing US President Donald Trump.
Like other media workers who travelled to the capital from across the country for Trump's inauguration, Wood was covering the mass protests that gripped the city.
Most of the protests that took place in the city that day passed without violence or mass arrests. Wood, however, was scooped up by police during the anti-fascist bloc's march.
New York Times: Despite Concerns About Blackmail, Flynn Still Heard C.I.A. Secrets by Matt Apuzzo, Matthew Rosenberg and Adam Goldman
WASHINGTON — Senior officials across the government became convinced in January that the incoming national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, had become vulnerable to Russian blackmail.
At the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence — agencies responsible for keeping American secrets safe from foreign spies — career officials agreed that Mr. Flynn represented an urgent problem.
Yet nearly every day for three weeks, the new C.I.A. director, Mike Pompeo, sat in the Oval Office and briefed President Trump on the nation’s most sensitive intelligence — with Mr. Flynn listening. Mr. Pompeo has not said whether C.I.A. officials left him in the dark about their views of Mr. Flynn, but one administration official said Mr. Pompeo did not share any concerns about Mr. Flynn with the president.
The episode highlights another remarkable aspect of Mr. Flynn’s stormy 25-day tenure in the White House: He sat atop a national security apparatus that churned ahead, despite its own conclusion that he was at risk of being compromised by a hostile foreign power.
Washington Post: Amazon’s bid for Whole Foods sparks speculation on what it might gobble up next by Abha Bhattari
Amazon.com’s surprise announcement last week that it would buy Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion sent rival grocery stocks plummeting. It also unleashed a flurry of speculation about the retail behemoth’s next move.
“Could GrubHub be Amazon’s next big purchase?” asked the website Consumerist.
“Amazon’s next acquisition target could be Nordstrom,” declared Inc. Magazine.
“Amazon might go after Lululemon or Warby Parker next,” said cable business channel CNBC.
Shares of CVS, Walgreens and RiteAid also fell Friday as drugstore chains feared that the online giant could be heading their way next, making inroads into the highly regulated prescription-retail and pharmaceutical businesses.
In other corners of the Internet, analysts and investors speculated that Seattle-based Amazon could be setting its sights on organic grocer Sprouts, discounters DollarTree and Dollar General, and used-goods purveyors such as Plato’s Closet and Once Upon a Child. The Whole Foods deal, analysts said, signaled that Amazon — which until now had focused mostly on scooping up niche businesses and technology start-ups — is serious about buying established bricks-and-mortar businesses.
Interesting story...feel a bit dirty about posting it, though.
Buzzfeed: The Secrets Of The Spy In The Bag by Tom Warren, Jason Leopold, Alex Campbell, Richard Holmes, Jane Bradley and Heidi Blake
A British spy whose naked body was found decomposing in a padlocked sports bag in his bathtub is among at least 14 people suspected of having been killed by Russian assassins on British soil, BuzzFeed News can reveal.
Police declared the death of Gareth Williams “probably an accident” – but British intelligence agencies have been secretly communicating with their American counterparts about suspicions that the spy was executed by Russian assassins, four US intelligence officials told BuzzFeed News.
An ongoing BuzzFeed News investigation has revealed that British and American spy agencies have intelligence connecting a string of suspected assassinations in the UK to Russian state agents or organised criminals – who sometimes cooperate. One high-ranking US intelligence source said: “The Kremlin has aggressively stepped up its efforts to eliminate and silence its enemies abroad over the past couple of years – particularly in Britain.” A second serving official said the circumstances of Williams’ death and 13 others “suggest Russian involvement” and demand “more investigation from the UK”. In all 14 cases, police ruled out foul play while intelligence agencies secretly compiled information connecting the deaths to Russia.
Williams, a 31-year-old codebreaker for Britain’s Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ), had been assigned to MI6, and in the months before his death, sources said, he was working with the US National Security Agency. Two senior British police sources with direct knowledge of the case said some of his work was focused on Russia – and one confirmed reports that he had been helping the NSA trace international money-laundering routes that are used by organised crime groups including Moscow-based mafia cells. The NSA did not respond to requests for comment.
Nature: Macron consolidates electoral victory by Declan Butler
A wave of fresh faces — including that of Cédric Villani, the flamboyant French mathematician and 2010 Fields medallist — swept to victory in the French parliamentary elections on 18 June. Together with the science- and innovation-friendly policies announced so far by President Emmanuel Macron, who was elected on 7 May, the results have stoked optimism among many in the research community both in France and abroad.
With 43% of the vote, Macron’s newcomer party, La République en Marche! (LREM), completed a political grand slam as it won a comfortable majority of 308 seats in the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament. That was well over the 289-seat bar needed to control the 577-seat body — even without counting the 42 seats won by its allied party MoDem. The outcome gives Macron a clear mandate to push his ambitious pro-business, pro-innovation and pro-European Union agenda.
The large victory of LREM, whose policies span the moderate left, right and centre, is all the more surprising in that the party was born barely a year ago and announced its list of candidates only on 11 May, just a month before the first round of the elections. Half of them were women, and a majority had no previous political experience.
I am really getting a kick out of the fact that Nature magazine is celebrating the French elections.
Wired: How an Entire Nation Became Russia’s Test Lab for Cyberwar by Andy Greenberg
The Cyber-Cassandras said this would happen. For decades they warned that hackers would soon make the leap beyond purely digital mayhem and start to cause real, physical damage to the world. In 2009, when the NSA’s Stuxnet malware silently accelerated a few hundred Iranian nuclear centrifuges until they destroyed themselves, it seemed to offer a preview of this new era. “This has a whiff of August 1945,” Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, said in a speech. “Somebody just used a new weapon, and this weapon will not be put back in the box.”
Now, in Ukraine, the quintessential cyberwar scenario has come to life. Twice. On separate occasions, invisible saboteurs have turned off the electricity to hundreds of thousands of people. Each blackout lasted a matter of hours, only as long as it took for scrambling engineers to manually switch the power on again. But as proofs of concept, the attacks set a new precedent: In Russia’s shadow, the decades-old nightmare of hackers stopping the gears of modern society has become a reality.
Reuters: Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman appointed Crown Prince-SPA
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef has been relieved of his post and replaced by Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a royal decree published by state news agency SPA reported.
Guardian: 'Trump-style' border wall between Ecuador and Peru causes fierce dispute by Dan Collyns
It is just over a mile long and only a few feet tall, but a wall which Ecuador is building along its frontier with Peru has prompted a fierce diplomatic row between the two South American countries.
Peru’s top diplomat for the Americas, Hugo de Zela, has demanded an urgent bilateral meeting over the structure, warning that it could create a flood risk for the Peruvian border town of Aguas Verdes.
Ecuadorean officials say the structure is a concrete embankment shoring up the construction of a $4.4m park, part of an urban regeneration plan for Huaquillas, the border town on Ecuador’s side.
But Ricardo Flores, governor of Tumbes, the tiny region on Peru’s side, said: “This is more like Trump’s wall, which is dividing two cultures.”
Stretching for 2.2km and measuring between 1.5 and 4 metres in height, the wall runs along one side of the busiest crossing point on the two countries’ 1,500km border, which extends from the Pacific ocean to the Putumayo river in the Amazon.
Smithsonian: Australian Expedition Dredges Up Crazy Creatures From the Deep Sea by Jason Daley
Last week, a month-long expedition to explore the deep sea off the coast of eastern Australia came to an end. According to Calla Wahlquist at The Guardian, the expedition, entitled Sampling the Abyss, racked up a final tally of finds that includes about 1,000 freaky deep sea creatures—a third of which have never been described before by science.
According to
a press release, the venture was a collaboration between Museums Victoria, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) as well as other museums and agencies. For 31 days, a crew of 40 scientists aboard the research vessel
Investigator looked into the “abyssal” areas from Tasmania to central Queensland—unexplored habitat 13,000 feet under the surface of the ocean.
“The abyss is the largest and deepest habitat on the planet, covering half the world’s oceans and one third of Australia’s territory, but it remains the most unexplored environment on Earth,” Tim O’Hara of Museums Victoria and the project's chief scientist says in the press release. “We know that abyssal animals have been around for at least 40 million years, but until recently only a handful of samples had been collected from Australia’s abyss.”
That makes many of the animals unique, including the “faceless fish” which made news last month when it was found in Australian waters. But as Wahlquist reports, new species are just the tip of the fishy iceberg. The team used a metal box that was dragged along the seafloor to collect the deep sea animals. They pulled up anglerfish and coffinfish, toothy dragonfish and a new species of blobfish from the crushing depths.
Hollywood Reporter: Daniel Day-Lewis Says He's Quitting Acting by Gregg Kilday
Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis has announced his retirement from acting.
Day-Lewis' publicist, Leslee Dart, said Tuesday in a statement: “Daniel Day-Lewis will no longer be working as an actor. He is immensely grateful to all of his collaborators and audiences over the many years. This is a private decision and neither he nor his representatives will make any further comment on this subject. ”
Day-Lewis' last film, which has a Dec. 25 release, will reunite the actor with his There Will Be Blood director Paul Thomas Anderson. While it has been reported to have the working title Phantom Thread, the film is still officially listed by its distributor as Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Project. From Annapurna Pictures and Focus Features, it is set in 1950s London and will see Day-Lewis playing a fashion designer who caters to high society. According to Dart, the actor plans to participate in promotion for the movie, which is expected to be an awards-season contender.
Extremely selective about the roles he chooses and slow to sign on to any movie, Day-Lewis retreated from film once before, in the late 1990s, in what he described as "semi-retirement" to return to one of his main loves, woodworking, and at the time also moved to Florence, Italy, where he took up shoemaking.
Everyone have a good evening!