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 (RIP) 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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Washington Post
A dozen inmates escaped from an Alabama jail not by cutting through steel bars, drilling through walls or ripping a toilet from a wall.
They used peanut butter.
Walker County Sheriff Jim Underwood told reporters Monday that the inmates used peanut butter to make the number of a door leading outside look like the number of one of the internal cell doors. They then asked an unsuspecting jail guard, who was in the control room keeping count of inmates through a camera, to open the door. He did, thinking he was letting the inmates back into their cell.
But unknown to the guard, he had inadvertently unlocked the door that opened to the outside.
“That may sound crazy, but these people are crazy like a fox,” Underwood said.
Underwood said the inmates’ plan was “well laid out,” and they took advantage of an inexperienced employee.
US NEWS
Washington Post
On the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Germany last month, President Trump’s advisers discussed how to respond to a new revelation that Trump’s oldest son had met with a Russian lawyer during the 2016 campaign — a disclosure the advisers knew carried political and potentially legal peril.
The strategy, the advisers agreed, should be for Donald Trump Jr. to release a statement to get ahead of the story. They wanted to be truthful, so their account couldn’t be repudiated later if the full details emerged.
But within hours, at the president’s direction, the plan changed.
Flying home from Germany on July 8 aboard Air Force One, Trump personally dictated a statement in which Trump Jr. said that he and the Russian lawyer had “primarily discussed a program about the adoption of Russian children” when they met in June 2016, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deliberations. The statement, issued to the New York Times as it prepared an article, emphasized that the subject of the meeting was “not a campaign issue at the time.”
New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday removed Anthony Scaramucci from his position as communications director, the White House announced, ousting him just days after Mr. Scaramucci unloaded a crude verbal tirade against other senior members of the president’s senior staff.
“Anthony Scaramucci will be leaving his role as White House Communications Director,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Mr. Scaramucci felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team. We wish him all the best.”
Mr. Scaramucci’s abrupt removal came just 10 days after the wealthy New York financier was brought on to the West Wing staff, a move that convulsed an already chaotic White House and led to the departures of Sean Spicer, the former press secretary, and Reince Priebus, the president’s first chief of staff.
The Guardian
The former head of the US government ethics watchdog has warned that Donald Trump’s conflicts of interest put the country at risk of being seen as a “kleptocracy”.
Speaking to the Guardian, Walter Shaub, who quit this month as director of the Office of Government Ethics (OGE), condemned the president for using his hotels and other properties for government business in what is in effect a free advertising campaign.
“His actions create the appearance of profiting from the presidency, and the appearance here is everything because the demand I’m making is so much more than ‘have a clean heart’. It’s ‘Have a clean heart and act appropriately,’” Shaub said.
“The fact that we’re having to ask questions about whether he’s intentionally using the presidency for profit is bad enough because the appearance itself undermines confidence in government.”
He added: “It certainly risks people starting to refer to us as a kleptocracy. That’s a term people throw around fairly freely when they’re talking about Russia, fairly or unfairly, and we run the risk of getting branded the same way. America really should stand for more than that.”
The Guardian
“We are soldiers in this war,” Jared Taylor told an overwhelmingly male and entirely white audience of around 300 late on Saturday. “And we will win.”
The founder and editor of American Renaissance, once a print magazine and now “the internet’s premier race-realist site”, no longer thinks whites can have America to themselves. But he wants an all-white “ethnostate”, carved out of US territory.
This weekend, American Renaissance held its annual conference at a venue in Montgomery Bell state park, an hour west of Nashville, Tennessee. Attendees and speakers clearly felt a growing confidence. They have seen appreciable growth in membership of established and emerging far-right groups. They have also seen the election as president of Donald Trump.
Speakers at the event addressed subjects including “Race realism and race denialism” and “Has the white man turned the corner?” One considered “The Trump report card – so far”.
When Taylor spoke, his audience was generationally diverse. Some, well into middle age or beyond, had heard it all before. But when he asked who was attending for the first time, the great majority raised their hands.
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Senator Rand Paul said he spoke to President Donald Trump by phone about healthcare reform on Monday and told the president he thought Trump had the authority to create associations that would allow organizations to offer group health insurance plans.
NPR
Los Angeles, which hosted the Summer Olympics in 1932 and 1984, will be home to the Games again — in 2028.
The organizers of LA's Olympics bid had originally been pursuing the 2024 games. But they ceded those games to Paris, and agreed to wait for the next round.
The decision will be officially announced on Monday afternoon. NPR's Tom Goldman has confirmed the successful bid with an LA 2024 official.
LA will be only the second city to host the modern Olympics three times. London became the first three-time Olympic City in 2012.
As The Associated Press reports, the bidding for the 2024 games was marked by reluctance, rather than fierce competition:
NPR
Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff who garnered nationwide attention for his crackdown on illegal immigration, has been convicted of criminal contempt by a federal judge in Arizona. The ruling carries a possible maximum sentence of six months in jail and a monetary fine for the 85-year-old Arpaio.
The misdemeanor criminal conviction handed down Monday by District Judge Susan Bolton found that Arpaio knowingly violated a federal judge's order in 2011. At that time, Arpaio was told he could not detain immigrants simply because they lacked legal status — but for 18 months, his deputies carried on with the practice.
NPR's Richard Gonzales explained how the controversy unfolded:
"In December 2011, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow issued a preliminary injunction ordering Arpaio and his deputies to stop targeting Latino drivers. Prosecutors allege that Arpaio's deputies defied the injunction for at least 18 months. In May 2013, Snow ruled that Arpaio's office had engaged in racial profiling.
"Arpaio and his deputies have admitted to violating the judge's order, but they claim their defiance wasn't intentional.”
Washington Post
President Trump on Monday presented the Medal of Honor to an Army veteran who 48 years ago repeatedly risked his live to save 10 fellow soldiers during a deadly days-long fight along Vietnam’s central coast.
In recognizing James McCloughan, now a 71-year-old retired schoolteacher from Michigan, Trump recounted a gripping tale of selflessness and bravery, sliding off script occasionally to emphasize just how hellish the battle was and to marvel that McCloughan and the other Americans who survived managed to overcome such extraordinary odds.
“He was one of 32 who fought until the end,” the president said, glancing at McCloughan, who stood stoically a few steps to Trump’s right, “and they held their ground against more than 2,000 enemy troops. Jim, I know I speak for everyone here when I say we are in awe of your actions and your bravery.”
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the Iraqi embassy in Kabul Monday and militants breached the compound, Afghan officials said, in a complex hours-long attack claimed by the Islamic State group.
All the attackers had been killed and the compound secured roughly four hours after the assault began, Afghanistan's interior ministry said, adding that all embassy staff were safe and only one policeman wounded "slightly".
There were conflicting reports about how the attack unfolded. The interior ministry said at least four militants had attacked the embassy, beginning with a suicide bomber who detonated his vest at the compound entrance.
"The quick-response police forces arrived in time and evacuated the Iraqi diplomats to safe place. No embassy staff have been harmed, only one policeman was wounded slightly," a ministry statement said.
Agence France Presse
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was increasingly isolated internationally on Monday following a bloody vote that handed his Socialist party almost total power to rule -- but whose legitimacy is broadly rejected.
The United States, Mexico, Colombia, Peru and other nations said they did not recognize the results of the election Sunday of a new "Constituent Assembly" superseding Venezuela's legislative body, the opposition-controlled National Assembly.
The European Union expressed "preoccupation for the fate of democracy in Venezuela" and said it, too, doubted it could accept the results.
However Russia, Cuba, Nicaragua and Bolivia have stood by Maduro, who shrugged off mass protests and US sanctions on some officials to see through the election.
The National Electoral Council claimed more than 40 percent of Venezuela's 20 million voters had cast ballots Sunday.
"It is the biggest vote the revolution has ever scored in its 18-year history," Maduro said, dressed in the red associated with the socialist revolution started by his late mentor, Hugo Chavez.
Deutsche Welle
German federal prosecutors have taken over the probe into a deadly knife attack in Hamburg. Authorities say they believe the 26-year-old suspect was a self-radicalized Islamist extremist who hoped to die as a "martyr.”
The prosecutor's office, which handles terror cases in Germany, announced Monday it had taken charge of the investigation given its "special significance."
The attacker, identified as a 26-year-old Palestinian man born in the United Arab Emirates and named only as Ahmad A., fatally stabbed one person and injured six others at a Hamburg supermarket on Friday before he was detained by passersby.
Prosecutors said in a statement that while he was a known Islamist, there was no indication he was a member of an extremist militant group like "Islamic State."
"According to ongoing investigations, the accused had self-radicalized," the statement said.
Al Jazeera
The transfer of thousands of Syrian fighters and refugees from Lebanon's border region into rebel territory in Syria in exchange for Hezbollah prisoners has been delayed to Tuesday.
A Hezbollah military media unit said that the delay was to allow for "logistical measures", including the arrival to the area of all buses being used for transportation under a local ceasefire deal.
Under the deal between the opposition fighters and Hezbollah, about 9,000 rebels and their relatives were to leave to rebel-head areas in Syria in exchange for eight Hezbollah fighters held by the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, formerly known as the al-Nusra Front.
The first step of the ceasefire, brokered by Lebanon's internal security agency, unfolded on Sunday as the two sides exchanged the bodies of dead fighters.
The deal includes the departure of all Jabhat Fateh al-Sham fighters from Lebanon's border region around the town of Arsal, along with any civilians in nearby refugee camps who wish to go.
Al Jazeera
Kenyans will be heading to the polls on August 8 for elections that have been closely followed not just in the Horn of Africa country but across the world.
Election posters have replaced consumer goods ads on street billboards as politicians step up their campaigns to win over the 19 million registered voters.
It is the sixth presidential election since the country of more than 45 million people embraced a multiparty democratic system in 1992.
So why do the elections in Kenya matter not just to Kenyans but to the rest of the African continent and the world?
Economic hub
Nairobi is East Africa's economic hub, and the country is the second-largest economy in the region, according to figures from the World Bank and the International Monitory Fund (IMF).
Until late 2014, when its larger neighbour, Ethiopia, overtook it, Kenya had the biggest economy - at more than $60bn - of the East Africa region.
Reuters
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The U.S. embassy in Moscow accused Russian authorities on Monday of barring diplomatic staff from a property on the outskirts of Moscow, after having earlier agreed to grant access until midday on Tuesday for them to retrieve belongings.
A Russian foreign ministry official, quoted by state news agency RIA, said the U.S. embassy had sent in its trucks without first obtaining permits which, the official said, are required by law because the property is in a conservation area.
The property, in a picturesque spot on a bend in the Moskva river northwest of the capital, is leased by the U.S. embassy for its staff to use for recreation.
NPR
At 3:30 a.m. on Sunday, Israeli police say, authorities arrested five Palestinian antiquities dealers in Jerusalem and confiscated items dating back thousands of years from their homes and shops: papyrus fragments from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the bust of an Etruscan woman, a fresco from Pompeii depicting swimming fish. They also seized more modern objects — two black luxury Audi vehicles — and more than $200,000 in cash.
NPR has learned the reason for the early Sunday morning arrests: Israel's Antiquities Authority says the dealers were involved in sales of antiquities — including items that U.S. authorities determined were smuggled — to Hobby Lobby, the national U.S. arts and crafts chain.
The arrests could have a chilling effect on Jerusalem's storied antiquities market, making it harder for pilgrims, tourists and high-end collectors to legally own a piece of history from the land of the Bible.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central (7/30/17)
Queensland will have a 1,200 mile (2,000 km) network of electric vehicle charging stations that make up one of the world’s longest electric vehicle highways within six months.
The state government announced on Thursday it would build an 18-station network stretching along Queensland’s east coast from Cairns to Coolangatta and west to Toowoomba.
The stations, which recharge a vehicle in 30 minutes, will offer free power for at least a year in what the environment minister, Steven Miles, said was a bid to boost the number of electric cars on Queensland roads, currently about 700.
“This project is ambitious, but we want as many people as possible on board the electric vehicle revolution, as part of our transition to a low-emissions future,” Miles said.
The $3 million network had “the potential to revolutionize the way we travel around Queensland in the future”, he said.
Queensland’s “electric highway” will span a comparable distance to the “west coast electric highway” in the U.S., which runs from California to Oregon and Washington state. However it is dwarfed by the Trans-Canada EV highway, which, at about 5,000 miles (8,000 km), is the world’s longest.
But the U.S. in total now boasts 16,107 stations and 43,828 charging outlets, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Tesla drivers can reputedly make journeys of 12,500 miles (20,000 km).
The Queensland stations, which will range from the capital Brisbane to the small sugar town of Tully, would be powered with “green energy” bought through renewable energy credits or offsets.
Bloomberg Technology
What keeps corporate leaders up at night?
It isn’t the chaos in Washington or rising worker pay. It’s what Amazon.com Inc. is, or could be, doing to their business models. The expanding online behemoth has morphed from a retail category killer to a much broader enterprise that now competes with everything from high-end grocers to technology developers.
It’s safe to say corporate America has taken notice -- and is increasingly concerned about the competition. So much so that Amazon’s overshadowed the Trump administration’s inability to claim a signature legislative achievement after more than six months in office.
The Guardian
There is only a 5% chance that the Earth will avoid warming by at least 2C come the end of the century, according to new research that paints a sobering picture of the international effort to stem dangerous climate change.
Global trends in the economy, emissions and population growth make it extremely unlikely that the planet will remain below the 2C threshold set out in the Paris climate agreement in 2015, the study states.
The Paris accord, signed by 195 countries, commits to holding the average global temperature to “well below 2C” above pre-industrial levels and sets a more aspirational goal to limit warming to 1.5C. This latter target is barely plausible, the new research finds, with just a 1% chance that temperatures will rise by less than 1.5C.
“We’re closer to the margin than we think,” said Adrian Raftery, a University of Washington academic who led the research, published in Nature Climate Change. “If we want to avoid 2C, we have very little time left. The public should be very concerned.”
NPR
A privacy watchdog group has filed a complaint with the FTC over Google's system for tracking purchases Internet users make in person, at physical store locations.
Google announced the new service — a way for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of an online ad campaign — in May. It combines Google's search and app records with credit card purchase data acquired from third-party sources. "We invested in building industry-leading privacy protections before launching this solution," the company tells NPR in a statement. "All data is encrypted and aggregated."
The Electronic Privacy Information Center is concerned that Google's methods, the details of which are not public, may not sufficiently safeguard users' privacy. The center, also known as EPIC, is asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate.
NPR
It's the end of only the first week of the official Atlantic sturgeon fishing season on the St. John River in New Brunswick, Canada. But the two fishermen who supply Cornel Ceapa's Acadian Sturgeon and Caviar company have already landed close to half of the season's catch.
This seems impressive, until you learn that the total quota for the river — the last legal wild caviar sturgeon fishery in the world — is only 350 fish per year: 175 males and 175 females. By comparison, on this same river, between 1880, when the fishery opened, and 1886, about 712 metric tons of sturgeon were harvested before it was closed for 10 years because of overfishing.
But Romanian-born aquaculture and fisheries expert Ceapa, who wrote his PhD thesis on sturgeon ecology, is jubilant, calling this year "one of the best seasons up until now."
That would mean since 2005, when he launched his bid to both play a role in the stewardship of New Brunswick's small wild fishery and build a thriving commercial aquaculture business for one of the most expensive and prized products of the ocean. Both pieces are important, he says, because farmed and wild must go hand in hand.
ENTERTAINMENT and SPORTS
The Guardian
Playwright, director and actor Sam Shepard has died at the age of 73.
The Pulitzer prize winner died of complications from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as motor neurone disease) at his home in Kentucky on 30 July surrounded by family. Shepard had written 44 plays including Buried Child, which won him the Pulitzer prize for drama in 1979. He also received an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor for his role in The Right Stuff.
Shepard started writing plays in the 60s. “Back then, there was a dearth of American theatre,” he told the Observer in 2014. “There was nothing going on. American art was starving.”
His work included Angel City, Cowboy Mouth (in collaboration with Patti Smith that was written in just two nights) and a screenplay for Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. He received Tony nominations for both Buried Child and a 2000 revival of True West.
NPR
The Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tenn., is country music's Holy Land. It's home to the weekly radio show that put country music on the national map in 1925. And it's where this summer, 30 people with Williams syndrome eagerly arrived backstage.
Williams syndrome is a rare genetic disorder that can cause developmental disabilities. People with the condition are often known for their outgoing personalitiesand their profound love of music. Scientists are still trying to figure out where this musical affinity comes from and how it can help them overcome their challenges.
That's why 12 years ago, researchers at Vanderbilt University set up a summer campfor people with Williams syndrome. For a week every summer, campers come to Nashville to immerse themselves in country music and participate in cutting-edge research.
The Guardian
Steve Bartman, the Chicago Cubs fan vilified and blamed for ending the team’s championship hopes in 2003, has been awarded a World Series ring to commemorate Chicago’s title win last year.
The Cubs were mired in their legendary title drought – which ended after 108 years last season – when Bartman made his mark on history in 2003. The team appeared to be headed for the World Series when he stretched out to catch a foul ball with the Cubs leading late in Game 6 of the National League Championship Series against the Miami Marlins. Bartman instead deflected the ball away from a Cubs fielder, the Marlins came back to win the game and then sealed a place in the World Series with victory in Game 7.
Bartman’s name later appeared online, and he and his family were given police protection. The governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, even jokingly offered Bartman a place in witness protection. The incident was infamous enough for ESPN to make a 100-minute documentary on the subject in 2011. Bartman, still scarred by the abuse he had received, chose not to appear.