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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
Agence France Presse
Rescue teams in boats, trucks and helicopters scrambled Monday to reach hundreds of Texans marooned on flooded streets in and around the city of Houston before monster storm Harvey returns.
Houston mayor Sylvester Turner said more than 2,000 people had been brought, soaking and desperate to rapidly-filling shelters in America's fourth largest city -- and more are yet to come.
The 911 emergency services line has received more than 56,000 calls, but city officials urged residents facing life-threatening storm water floods to remain on the line and trust that help will come.
"The goal is rescue, that's the major focus of the day," Turner said, flanked by grim-faced city officials at a televised press conference, warning that 185 "critical rescue missions" are still pending and many more are expected.
Newsweek
We do value our freedom here in Texas. As I write from soggy Central Texas, the cable news is showing people floating down Buffalo Bayou on their principles, proud residents of the largest city in these United States that did not grow in accordance with zoning ordinances.
The feeling there was that persons who own real estate should be free to develop it as they wish. Houston, also known as the Bayou City, is a great location because of its access to international shipping in the Gulf of Mexico. It is not a great location for building, though, because of all its impervious cover. If water could easily sink into the ground, there would be less of it ripping down Houston’s rivers that just a week ago were overcrowded streets.
US NEWS
Bloomberg
The number of agency warning letters is at its lowest level since 2008.
Many aspects of your daily life, the sorts of activities and purchases you take for granted, are regulated by a single federal agency.
From the toothpaste you use to the lipstick you apply, the medicines you take to the food you eat, the Food and Drug Administration is supposed to stand between consumers and faulty products that could do them harm. It oversees $2.4 trillion of the U.S. economy—some 20 cents of every dollar Americans spend.
But in the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency, the FDA has shown signs it may be retreating from its mission.
McClatchy DC
Paul Ryan was once seen as the intellectual leader of the GOP. Ted Cruz was its conservative purist. Mitch McConnell was the party's brilliant strategist, and Rand Paul, its inconvenient but consistent libertarian, pushing to broaden Republican appeal.
But as Labor Day of the president’s first year nears, party officials and veteran operatives concede that the GOP belongs to Donald Trump more than anyone else — and he is reshaping it in ways that will have dramatic implications for the party for a generation.
“Right now, it is his party,” said Peter Wehner, who has served in the last three Republican presidential administrations.
“That’s a political tragedy to me,” he said. “There will be an enormous cost. Ultimately, the Republican Party has got to reclaim its identity apart from Trump. But right now, it’s his party and we can cry if we want to.”
BuzzFeed News
A man who claimed that he was stabbed after being mistaken for a neo-Nazi now admits that he made the whole story up after accidentally stabbing himself.
Joshua Witt, 26, told police two weeks ago that he was getting out of his car in the parking lot of a Steak 'n Shake in Sheridan, Colorado, when a man came over to him and attacked him with a knife.
On Monday, the Sheridan Police Department told BuzzFeed News in a statement that Witt admitted to making the story up after police confronted him with evidence that the attack never took place.
Witt, who posted his claims on Facebook, claimed that a man asked him if he was a neo-Nazi while reaching over his open car door to stab him.
"I was just getting out of my car to go get myself a milkshake and the next thing I hear is 'You one of them neo-Nazis" as this man is swinging a knife at my head over my car door," Witt told BuzzFeed News at the time. "I threw my hands up out of natural reflex and then I kind of dived back in my car as the suspect took off running.”
NPR
Human rights groups filed two federal lawsuits Monday against President Trump and other top members of his administration, alleging that a ban against transgender people serving in the military is unconstitutional.
Plaintiffs include both transgender people who are currently serving in the military and transgender people who wish to serve but are no longer able to because of the ban.
"It is an unconscionable and unconstitutional breach of trust for the president to single out brave transgender service members and able recruits for discrimination," Human Rights Campaign National Press Secretary Sarah McBride said in a statement.
NPR
The U.S. Navy's 7th Fleet announced Sunday that the remains of all 10 missing sailors from the USS John S. McCain have been recovered.
The remains were recovered from the ship's flooded compartments by U.S. Navy and Marine Corps divers. The Navy has released the identities of the sailors.
The Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer collided with the Liberian-flagged commercial tanker Alnic MC before dawn local time last Monday, in waters east of the Strait of Malacca and Singapore. The incident is under investigation.
The waterway is one of the world's most congested shipping lanes. After the collision, the McCain proceeded to Singapore under its own power.
This is the fourth mishap this year involving a U.S. Navy warship in the Far East.
Vox
A business associate of Donald Trump tried to set up a deal to build a Trump Tower in Moscow in late 2015 — and bragged in emails to Trump’s lawyer that the deal could “get Donald elected.”
That’s the takeaway from a pair of new Washington Post and New York Times reports making clear that while Trump was running for president, his company was pursuing business opportunities in Russia.
On Sunday night, Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig, Tom Hamburger, and Rosalind Helderman wrote that in late 2015, Trump’s company signed a letter of intent to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and Russian-born developer Felix Sater seems to have been heavily involved in the project (which didn’t end up moving forward).
WORLD NEWS
The Guardian
North Korea has fired a ballistic missile that passed over Japan in the early hours of Tuesday before landing in the Pacific Ocean, according to Japanese and South Korean officials.
Japan’s J-Alert warning system advised people across a large area of northern Japan to take precautions. Japan’s self-defence forces did not attempt to shoot down the missile and there were no reports of damage from falling debris.
The public broadcaster NHK said the missile had been launched from a site near the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, and passed over Hokkaido – Japan’s northernmost main island – just after 6am local time (2100 GMT). It broke into three parts and landed in the sea east of Hokkaido.
Agence France Presse
An Indian court on Monday sentenced a controversial spiritual leader to a total of 20 years in prison for raping two of his devotees, days after his followers went on a rampage that left 38 dead.
The riots broke out on Friday when Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, 50, was convicted of raping the two women at the sprawling headquarters of his hugely popular Dera Sacha Sauda sect in the northern state of Haryana in a case that dates back to 1999.
"He has been sentenced for 10 plus 10, which is a total of 20 years of imprisonment," said Abhishek Dayal, spokesman for India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), after the sentencing hearing.
"I have the judgement which details the sentence."
Deutsche Welle
Following a three-year probe into all patients under Niels Högel's care, investigators revealed on Monday that the former nurse was responsible for 84 more deaths than initially thought.
Högel, who is already serving two separate prison sentences, was found to have injected patients with cardiovascular medication at hospitals in the northern towns of Oldenburg and Delmenhorst between 1999 and 2005. His aim was to induce heart failure or circulatory collapse before successfully resuscitating his patients to impress his colleagues.
He was sentenced in 2008 to seven-and-a-half years for attempted murder after he was discovered trying to give an overdose to a patient. He was then jailed for life in 2015 after being found guilty on six counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder and one charge of battery after his "trick" failed to work. However, prosecutors alleged that he had likely killed many more people but kept the charges low to make their case easier to prove.
Deutsche Welle
The Federal Public Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe said Monday's searches stemmed from intercepted chatroom internet conversations involving the two men, who were opposed to what they saw as Germany's misguided policy on asylum.
No arrests were made, but the potential charges were of preparing serious acts of violence endangering the state, said the prosecutor's office.
The two men, one a policeman based in the town of Ludwigslust, allegedly drew up a list of people on Germany's "left-wing spectrum," with the intention of detaining and killing them if a breakdown in public order developed.
Arrivals of asylum seekers peaked in Germany in late 2015 and early 2016 when Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government kept Germany's borders open to "Balkan route" migrants.
Al Jazeera
India and China have agreed on an "expeditious disengagement" of troops at a disputed border area in the Himalayas, where their soldiers have been locked in standoff for more than two months, according to India's foreign ministry.
The decision comes in the run-up to a summit of the BRICS nations - a grouping that also includes Brazil, Russia and South Africa - in China early next month, which Narendra Modi, India's prime minister, is expected to attend.
"In recent weeks, India and China have maintained diplomatic communication in respect of the incident at Doklam," India's ministry of foreign affairs said on Monday, referring to the area in the Himalayas close to the borders of China, India and Bhutan.
"On this basis, expeditious disengagement of border personnel at the face-off site at Doklam has been agreed to and is ongoing.”
Spiegel Online
Declan Fearon is standing with one leg on a grave while his second is in a different country. "The border runs right here," he says, pointing to a wall covered with moss. The wall is part of the Church of the Sacred Heart in Jonesborough, as is the cemetery behind the church. But an invisible line runs in between, dividing those saying their prayers from those lying in eternal repose. For almost 100 years, the line has also divided the largely Protestant Northern Ireland from the Catholic southern part of the island.
Fearon walks over to a gravestone. In gold lettering on a black background, it reads: "Brian Fearon" and "Rest in Peace." The dead man's son grins: "After Brexit I'll have to bring my passport along when I visit dad, just to be on the safe side.”
...
Ever since a small majority of United Kingdom citizens voted in favor of leaving the European Union in June 2016, the border has been back in the minds of the Irish. And in the future, it likely won't just be there. If the UK leaves the EU in 2019, the European Union's external border will run directly through the island of Ireland -- 500 kilometers across 300 streets, including bridges that were only recently built using EU funds. The plaques on those bridges read: "Investing in your future.”
Reuters
OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday reshuffled his cabinet to put more emphasis on helping aboriginal people, who complain he has broken repeated promises to improve their lives.
Trudeau is splitting the federal indigenous and northern affairs ministry in two, with the most important role given to Jane Philpott, who has been praised across the political spectrum in her previous job as health minister.
Trudeau, who took office in 2015 promising to repair ties with Canada’s 1.4 million aboriginals, said the former ministry had been designed in an earlier colonial era when governments dictated to indigenous peoples rather than talking to them.
“There’s a sense we have pushed the creaky old structures around (the ministry) about as far as they can go ... it could not deliver the reconciliation that we need,” Trudeau told reporters after the reshuffle.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Bloomberg
Amazon.com Inc. spent its first day as the owner of a brick-and-mortar grocery chain cutting prices at Whole Foods Market as much as 43 percent.
At the store on East 57th Street in Manhattan, organic fuji apples were marked down to $1.99 a pound from $3.49 a pound; organic avocados went to $1.99 each from $2.79; organic rotisserie chicken fell to $9.99 each from $13.99, and the price of some bananas was slashed to 49 cents per pound from 79 cents. The marked-down items had orange signs reading “Whole Foods + Amazon.” The signs listed the old price, the new price and “More to come...”.
The Guardian
What can we say about the role of climate change in the unprecedented disaster that is unfolding in Houston with Hurricane Harvey? There are certain climate change-related factors that we can, with great confidence, say worsened the flooding.
Sea level rise attributable to climate change – some of which is due to coastal subsidence caused by human disturbance such as oil drilling – is more than half a foot (15cm) over the past few decades (see here for a decent discussion). That means the storm surge was half a foot higher than it would have been just decades ago, meaning far more flooding and destruction.
In addition to that, sea surface temperatures in the region have risen about 0.5C (close to 1F) over the past few decades from roughly 30C (86F) to 30.5C (87F), which contributed to the very warm sea surface temperatures (30.5-31C, or 87-88F).
Reuters
Expedia Inc Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi is poised to accept Uber Technologies Inc’s [UBER.UL] offer to become its new CEO, according to an internal memo sent to Expedia staff, putting him in charge of turning around the loss-making, scandal-ridden ride-services company.
The Uber board of directors on Sunday chose Khosrowshahi as its next leader after about two months of searching, according to sources with knowledge of the matter.
NPR
No matter where you go in Kenya — from the vast expanses of the Great Rift Valley to the white-sand beaches off the Indian Ocean — one thing is a constant: plastic bags.
They hang off trees and collect along curbs. And in Kibera, a sprawling slum in Nairobi, there are so many of them that they form hills.
But beginning today, almost all plastic bags are illegal in Kenya. Beginning today, if you're carrying your groceries in a plastic bag or put out your trash in a disposable one, you could be fined up to $38,000 or be sent to jail for up to four years.
"It is a toxin that we must get rid of," Judi Wakhungu, the country's Cabinet secretary for the environment, told reporters. "It's affecting our water. It's affecting our livestock and, even worse, we are ingesting this as human beings."
Kenya isn't the first country in the region to ban plastic bags. Rwanda banned them in 2008, and the East African Community has talked on-and-off about issuing a regional ban.
NPR
If you like coleslaw — or kimchi or sauerkraut on your hot dog — you should worry about cabbage. This staple veggie has been under constant threat for decades, along with broccoli, cauliflower, collard greens, Brussels sprouts, kale and other leafy greens belonging to the Brassica genus. The danger? A tiny insect called the diamondback moth, an invasive marauder that has spread across the world and mutated to become immune to each new chemical pesticide designed to slay it.
To curb the billions of dollars of damage caused by this lepidopteran's larvae every year, scientists in New York are trying to turn the critter's own DNA against it. In a small cabbage patch near the Seneca Lake town of Geneva, a Cornell University entomologist is letting loose thousands of genetically modified diamondbacks to test their ability to disrupt the moth-mating scene in farmers' fields. Each moth, bred in a laboratory, carries a deadly gene designed to kill offspring that inherit it. The toxic gene offers a biological alternative to the chemical warfare farmers have been waging for decades.
BBC
Anti-inflammatory drugs could cut the risk of heart attacks and strokes, a study of 10,000 patients suggests.
A trial of the drug canakinumab could represent the biggest breakthrough in treatment since the advent of statins to lower cholesterol, its authors say.
The study reported a 15% reduction in the risk of a repeat heart attack among patients - but others questioned the drug's efficacy, side-effects and cost.
Recipients of the drug had an increased risk of potentially fatal infections.
However, the British Heart Foundation (BHF) said the "exciting and long-awaited trial" could still help save lives.
Arthritis drug
Heart attack patients are routinely given cholesterol-lowering statins and blood-thinning drugs to help reduce the risk of repeat attacks.
In this study, 10,000 patients who had previously had a heart attack were treated with the anti-inflammatory drug once every three months.
The trial, held in almost 40 countries, monitored the individuals for up to four years.
The Guardian
Fourteen people have died from an outbreak of hepatitis A in San Diego, and experts believe it to be the deadliest outbreak of the disease in the US in decades, the Guardian has learned.
In large part, the victims were homeless people who have had to contend with a lack of 24-hour public restrooms, even though hand-washing is one of the best defenses against infection.
The number of cases has exceeded other large outbreaks, said a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) spokesperson, and is “likely the most deaths in an outbreak in the US in the past 20 years”, the period in which the CDC has operated its electronic reporting system. In 2003, three people died and at least 124 were hospitalized after eating contaminated salsa at a Pennsylvania restaurant. In 2013, 69 people across 10 states were hospitalized after eating contaminated pomegranate seeds.
SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
NPR
'Game Of Thrones' Season 7 Finale: 'We've Been Here For Some Time’
First off: 85 minutes! Long for an episode of Game of Thrones, sure, but put that in perspective: It's roughly equal to the running time of any given movie based on a '90s SNL sketch. So even if you're one of the many who have found this season lacking, consider that "The Dragon and the Wolf" ate up the same amount of your lifespan as A Night at the Roxbury.
Also: The final season, when it comes, is going to be just six episodes long, and most if not all of those will clock in at durations we big-time professional media critics classify as "It's Pat!-or-longer."
Before tackling this season finale, with its artisanal mix of feelings-meetings and head-fakes, a few thoughts on Season 7, writ large:
BBC
Artists spoke out against white supremacy and urged suicide awareness during the awards on Sunday night.
Transgender military personnel attended, days after President Donald Trump signed a directive to ban them.
Kendrick Lamar was the night's big winner, picking up six awards including video of the year for HUMBLE.
…
But it was politics that has grabbed most of the night's headlines.
There was an appearance from the mother of Heather Heyer, killed during a protest against a far-right march in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Susan Bro handed out the Fight Against the System Award, 15 days after Ms Heyer's death.
Paying tribute to her daughter, she said: "I miss her, but I know she's here tonight."
All six nominees for the award shared the prize. Somali nominee K'naan, whose cover of a Hamilton track paid tribute to the work of immigrants, wore a mock Make America Great Again slogan written in Arabic.