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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BuzzFeed News
Hurricane Maria has rapidly intensified into a potentially catastrophic Category 5 storm as it bears down on several islands in the Caribbean still reeling from the devastation of Hurricane Irma.
Maria continued to strengthen on Monday, and the eye of the storm was expected to move through the Leeward Islands near Dominica late Monday afternoon or evening.
"Maria is developing the dreaded pinhole eye," the National Hurricane Center said.
The hurricane, which has maximum sustained winds of 160 mph, is then expected to move over the extreme northeastern Caribbean Sea on Tuesday and approach Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands on Wednesday.
In preparation for more devastation, President Donald Trump on Monday approved an emergency declaration for the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. The action enables the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Emergency Management Agency to coordinate disaster relief efforts.
US NEWS
The Guardian
Sitting in a makeshift studio overlooking the Moscow river on a crisp day in November 2013, Donald Trump pouted, stared down the lens of a television camera and said something he would come to regret.
Asked by an interviewer whether he had a relationship with Russian president Vladimir Putin, the brash New York businessman could not resist boasting. “I do have a relationship with him,” Trump said.
Russia’s strongman had “done a very brilliant job”, Trump told MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts, before declaring that Putin had bested Barack Obama. “He’s done an amazing job – he’s put himself really at the forefront of the world as a leader in a short period of time.”
Trump, a teetotaler, seemed intoxicated by the buzz surrounding the glitzy event that had brought him back to Moscow: that year’s instalment of the Miss Universe contest that he then owned.
The Guardian
The toddler seems to grip the top of the steel fence as he peers into America, his attention focused on something north of the border.
The expression is playful but his scale – 65ft – dwarfs the fence, making it look puny and eminently climbable.
JR, a French visual artist, unveiled the monumental photo last week on the outskirts of Tecate, a Mexican town bordering California.
The installation has become a tourist magnet amid renewed focus on Donald Trump’s proposed border wall to block purported would-be immigrant hordes.
The toddler, it turns out, isn’t among them. Nor is his family. From their yard, they can reach through the fence and touch US soil but don’t really see the point. They prefer life in Mexico.
Reuters
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - San Diego attorney Dulce Garcia has regularly defended clients in immigration court. Now, she is the one seeking legal relief.
Brought to the United States illegally by her parents as a child, Garcia is one of six immigrants who sued the Trump administration on Monday over its decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program. Since it was authorized in 2012 by President Barack Obama, the program has provided protection from deportation and the right to work legally to nearly 800,000 young people.
Garcia’s case, filed in San Francisco federal court, is the first to be brought by DACA recipients, known as Dreamers, since U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced earlier this month that the Obama-era policy would start winding down in March 2018, according to Garcia’s lawyers.
Washington Post
For two years, a shelter for victims of domestic violence called Safe+Sound Somerset held its fundraiser golf tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.
They loved it.
Then they quit it.
“Beautiful golf course. Beautiful facilities. We were treated well. But we couldn’t go back,” said Debbie Haroldsen, the charity’s acting executive director. President Trump’s campaign-trail comments about women and Mexicans had offended staff and clients. They found another course.
In Florida this year, the president’s politics attracted a new client for one of his businesses. Steven M. Alembik, a conservative activist, is planning a $600-per-seat gala at the Mar-a-Lago Club.
His logic: Trump helped Israel. So Alembik will help Trump in return.
“He’s got Israel’s back,” Alembik said. “We’ve got his back.’”
…
Trump’s politics was a draw for Alembik, the conservative Israel backer who decided recently to hold an event at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s oceanfront club in Palm Beach.
Alembik said he will charge $600 per ticket. He expects 700 guests. That’s $420,000. In theory, Alembik said, any leftover proceeds will go to an Israeli charity called The Truth About Israel.
But, Alembik said, Trump’s club will probably keep most of the money. He said he’d recently seen an estimate of the costs. He declined to say what the number was, but said: “My God, they’re expensive. Holy crap.”
Vox
Americans are as racist as they were back in the late 1980s — at least in one crucial area: jobs.
A new study, by researchers at Northwestern University, Harvard, and the Institute for Social Research in Norway, looked at every available field experiment on hiring discrimination from 1989 through 2015. The researchers found that anti-black racism in hiring is unchanged since at least 1989, while anti-Latino racism may have decreased modestly.
They looked at two kinds of experiments: résumé and in-person audits. In the first, researchers send out résumés with similar levels of education, experience, and so on, but the names differ so some résumés have a stereotypically black or Latino name and the others have a stereotypically white name. In the second, applicants go in-person to apply for a job; they each share similar qualifications, but some are white while others are black or brown.
In total, the researchers produced 24 studies with 30 estimates of discrimination for black and Latino Americans, collectively representing more than 54,000 applications submitted for more than 25,000 positions.
Reuters
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump criticized the United Nations for bloated bureaucracy and mismanagement on his first visit on Monday to U.N. headquarters, calling for “truly bold reforms” so it could be a greater force for world peace.
Ahead of his maiden speech to the annual U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump hosted a short event to boost support for changes to the United Nations.
“In recent years the United Nations has not reached its full potential because of bureaucracy and mismanagement, while the United Nations on a regular budget has increased by 140 percent and its staff has more than doubled since 2000,” Trump said.
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the 2016 election, CNN reported on Monday.
The New York Times, citing two people close to the case, also reported that prosecutors told Manafort they planned to indict him. Federal agents had raided Manafort’s Virginia house in July.
Manafort is one of several close advisers who helped President Donald Trump win the 2016 election and who are now being investigated as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of alleged Russian interference in the U.S. vote.
Reuters
ST. LOUIS (Reuters) - St. Louis police are investigating whether some of its officers chanted, “Whose streets? Our streets” during protests over the acquittal of a white former policeman who shot a black man to death in 2011.
Demonstrations entered a fourth day on Monday after three nights of arrests and scuffles with police. More than 120 people were arrested late Sunday, when police in riot gear used pepper spray and detained activists who defied orders to disperse following larger, peaceful protests.
A St. Louis Post-Dispatch photojournalist, David Carson, tweeted that he and others heard some officers chant, “Whose streets? Our streets,” commandeering a refrain used by the protesters themselves.
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
North Korea bitterly denounced new sanctions on its economy as "vicious, unethical and inhumane" and warned the measures would only accelerate progress on its nuclear weapons programme, state media reported Monday.
The angry statement from Pyongyang's foreign ministry came as the crisis surrounding the reclusive state was set to dominate the annual UN gathering of world leaders.
The UN Security Council last week imposed a new raft of sanctions on North Korea, slapping an export ban on textiles, freezing work permits to North Korean guest workers and placing a cap on oil supplies.
Agence France Presse
Catalonia would suffer "brutal" impoverishment if it splits from Spain, with a deep plunge in its economic output, Spain's economy minister warned Monday ahead of a disputed independence referendum in the region.
"The general impoverishment of the society would be brutal. GDP could fall between 25 and 30 percent and unemployment double," Economy Minister Luis de Guindos said in an interview with radio Cope.
An independent Catalonia would find itself outside of the eurozone so 75 percent of its products would be slapped with tarifs, banks would have to relocate, and the region would have to set up its own currency, he added.
Deutsche Welle
In 2014 the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the US published the results of a survey that examined attitudes towards Jews around the world. As far as Europe was concerned, the surprising thing about this investigation was that anti-Semitic prejudices, resentments and stereotypes were most prevalent not in countries like Poland, Hungary or Ukraine, but in Greece, where they registered 69 percent.
In Greece itself the seriousness of this survey was called into question. Now, however, Greek scientists from the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki and the University of Oxford have reached similar conclusions. The new study was commissioned by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and was presented in Berlin.
Several representative surveys of around 1,000 participants looked at three central questions. Around 75 percent of the participants were convinced that the Jews exploited the Holocaust for their own interests. Around 65 percent thought that Israel treated the Palestinians exactly as the Nazis had the Jews. And 71 percent were convinced that Jews "hold power" – either as citizens, as a state or as business people. The participants' sex was not a factor in their views, but age did seem to play a part: The older a person was, the more anti-Semitic the views they expressed. By contrast, the higher their level of education, the lower their degree of anti-Semitism.
Al Jazeera
Syrian troops battling ISIL crossed to the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in Deir Az Zor on Monday, securing their hold on the war-torn city but threatening a potential standoff with US-backed forces operating nearby.
Russian-backed Syrian forces are trying to tighten the noose on Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant fighters who are still inside the city on the river's western bank.
The Syrian army sealed off Deir Az Zor on three sides as of Monday, but ISIL still controls eastern districts along the river, which both the group and civilians had used as an escape route.
Al Jazeera
Iraq’s top court has ordered the suspension of the Kurdistan Regional Government's (KRG) planned referendum on independence.
The Supreme Court declared the ruling on Monday, which calls for all preparations for the September 25 vote to be halted, following a review of multiple "requests to stop the referendum".
"The supreme court has issued the order to suspend organising the referendum set for September 25 ... until it examines the complaints it has received over this plebiscite being unconstitutional," it said in a statement.
Haider al-Abadi, Iraq's prime minister, had previously demanded the suspension of the referendum.
Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel-Hamid, reporting from Erbil, said: "So far there has been no reaction after the court order, but this state order is very significant.
"What we see at the moment is that the Iraqi parliament is trying to use all the legal mechanisms that exist in this country and say that the referendum is against the constitution, which the Kurds have signed and helped write in 2005.”
The Guardian
A Soviet officer whose cool head and quick thinking saved the world from nuclear war has died aged 77.
Stanislav Petrov was on duty in a secret command centre outside Moscow on 26 September 1983 when a radar screen showed that five Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles had been launched by the US towards the Soviet Union.
Red Army protocol would have been to order a retaliatory strike, but Petrov – then a 44-year-old lieutenant colonel – ignored the warning, relying on a “gut instinct” that told him it was a false alert.
“The siren howled, but I just sat there for a few seconds, staring at the big, back-lit, red screen with the word ‘launch’ on it,” he told the BBC’s Russian Service in 2013. “All I had to do was to reach for the phone; to raise the direct line to our top commanders.”
Reuters
COX‘S BAZAR, Bangladesh (Reuters) - Rohingya Muslims fleeing a Myanmar military offensive arrived in Bangladesh on Monday with fresh accounts of violence and arson as a rights group called for sanctions and an arms embargo to stop what the United Nations has branded ethnic cleansing.
The latest wave of violence in western Myanmar’s Rakhine State began on Aug. 25, when Rohingya insurgents attacked police posts and an army camp, killing about 12 people.
The Myanmar military response has sent more than 410,000 Rohingya Muslims fleeing to Bangladesh, escaping what they and rights monitors say is a campaign aimed at driving out the Muslim population.
Reuters
LONDON (Reuters) - Around 10,000 finance jobs will be shifted out of Britain or created overseas in the next few years if the UK is denied access to Europe’s single market, according to a Reuters survey of firms employing the bulk of workers in international finance.
Frankfurt was by far the most popular destination for the new roles, the survey showed, with Paris a distant second.
The results from 123 firms came from the first comprehensive public survey to ask the biggest banks, insurers, asset managers, private equity firms and exchanges in Britain about the specific details of their plans so far in case of a so-called “hard” Brexit.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
General Electric Co. is working on a way to use artificial intelligence in electricity grids, a technology that it expects will save $200 billion globally by improving efficiency.
“We’re also putting a lot into the machine learning side, a lot,” said Steven Martin, chief digital officer at GE’s energy connections business, at an interview at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance summit in London. “We have a lot of people working on this.”
The technology would optimize how electricity flows in and out of storage devices such as batteries and points of consumption, in real time. This is expected to significantly increase the efficiency of the grid and save consumers money.
Agence France Presse
France on Monday led a push at the United Nations to keep the United States in the Paris climate agreement, as Donald Trump's administration insisted it was not changing gears.
Gary Cohn, the chief White House economic adviser, reiterated Trump's opposition to the landmark accord as he met over breakfast with officials from other major economies at the start of the UN General Assembly, an annual week of diplomacy.
But French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, whose government has made preserving the agreement reached in the French capital in 2015 a top priority, held out hope.
"We take note of President Trump's statements on not respecting it, but for the moment no action has been taken and we can still hope to persuade him," he told reporters.
The Guardian
President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser said at the United Nations on Monday the US has not changed its plans to withdraw from the Paris climate pactwithout a renegotiation favorable to Washington, a step for which there is little appetite in the international community.
Trump in June announced his decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate agreement, saying it would put US industries at a disadvantage, cost jobs, weaken American national sovereignty and put the country at a permanent disadvantage to the other countries of the world.
“We made the president’s position unambiguous, to where the president stands, where the administration stands on Paris,” Gary Cohn said after the informal breakfast meeting with ministers from about a dozen countries on the sidelines of the annual gathering of world leaders at the United Nations.
Vox
In 1912, an antiques dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came across a remarkable manuscript. It wasn’t gilded or beautifully illuminated, like the manuscripts with which it was bundled, but it caught his eye nonetheless: It was in code.
It was long — 234 pages — filled with pictures of plants and naked women and what appeared to be astrological diagrams, and line after line of script. And not a word of the script was comprehensible. It wasn’t in any known shorthand or variation of medieval Latin or English or French or any other known language. The entire thing was in code.
“The fact that this was a 13th century manuscript in cipher convinced me that it must be a work of exceptional importance, and to my knowledge the existence of a manuscript of such an early date written entirely in cipher was unknown,” Voynich said. “Two problems presented themselves — the text must be unravelled and the history of the manuscript must be traced.”
To this date, no one has successfully solved either problem.
The text that came to be known as the Voynich manuscript is now housed at Yale, and dozens of medievalists and cryptologists study it every year. Earlier this September, scholar Nicholas Gibbs published an article in the Times Literary Supplement claiming to have cracked the code, only to be pooh-poohed by medievalists across the internet.
Gibbs may have failed to decipher the Voynich manuscript, but he joins a long and illustrious lineage of failures. Cryptologists across the world have tried and failed to decode the Voynich since at least the 17th century, when an alchemist described it as “a certain riddle of the Sphinx.”
Here are the questions posed by that Sphinxian riddle.
Vox
Estimates for the cost of Hurricane Harvey’s damage have come in at $65 billion, $180 billion, and as high as $190 billion — the last of which would make it the costliest disaster in US history.
The numbers from the second record-breaking storm that hit the US this summer, Hurricane Irma, meanwhile, are still rolling in. But totals range from $50 billion to $100 billion.
To appreciate how staggering these figures are, consider that they could be enough to make the $18.57 trillion US economy lose a step, knocking between 0.6 percent and 0.8 percent off of US GDP growth this quarter, according to projections from investment banks.
While these estimates vary based on how different factors are measured and modeled, what’s consistent is that Harvey and Irma are just the latest in a growing stream of increasingly expensive megadisasters, some of them linked, as these storms were in part, to climate change. And the numbers have huge implications for the insurance industry, city planning, decisions about rebuilding, and the lives of millions of Americans.
Let’s unpack them and explore what they mean not just for Texas and Florida, but for all communities at risk of intense hurricanes in the future.
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS
The Guardian
The Handmaid’s Tale gave Hulu its first ever best drama win at the Emmys on a night where new shows had the edge over old favorites, and political barbs – mostly aimed at Donald Trump – punctuated proceedings.
Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s classic dystopian novel fought off competition from other front-runners including The Crown, Stranger Things and This Is Us to make history by becoming the first show produced by a streaming site to take the evening’s most-coveted award.
Politics were at the forefront at an evening, which featured a surprise appearance from former White House press secretary Sean Spicer. Host Stephen Colbert set the tone with an opening monologue, that repeatedly made fun of the president’s long-running annoyance over not winning an Emmy during his time hosting The Apprentice.
NPR
Awards shows often mirror current events, from politically pointed acceptance speeches to winners whose subject matter feels especially relevant in the moment. The 69th Emmy Awards, held Sunday night, didn't skimp on either, as The Handmaid's Tale, Saturday Night Live and Veep posted strong — even dominant — showings over the course of the night.
...
It was a big night for juggernauts. The evening's final honoree, Outstanding Drama Series winner The Handmaid's Tale, gave star Elisabeth Moss her first Emmy in nine nominations; Ann Dowd also won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, Reed Morano took an award for her work as one of the show's directors, and Bruce Miller won Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. (The Handmaid's Tale author Margaret Atwood even took the stage at the end of the night.) Big Little Lies stormed the Outstanding Limited Series categories in which it was nominated — with wins for actors Nicole Kidman, Laura Dern and Alexander Skarsgard — and won a directing award for Jean-Marc Vallée.
New York Times
During his surprise comedy skit at the Emmys on Sunday, Sean Spicer may have made light of his six-month tenure as the White House press secretary, but a message was also embedded in his performance.
In an interview on Monday morning, Mr. Spicer said he now regrets one of his most infamous moments as press secretary: his decision to charge into the White House briefing room in January and criticize accurate news reports that President Barack Obama’s inauguration crowd was bigger than President Trump’s.
“Of course I do, absolutely,” Mr. Spicer said.