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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Seattle Times: Amtrak train was traveling 50 mph over limit when it derailed at curve before I-5 crossing by Christine Clarridge and Jessica Lee
An engineer never hit the emergency brakes before the Amtrak passenger train traveling 50 mph over the posted speed limit derailed Monday, killing at least three passengers and injuring dozens more.
Federal transportation officials said Tuesday preliminary information from the data-event recorder in the train’s lead locomotive showed an emergency brake was only automatically activated after the train left the tracks.
Officials with the National Transportation Safety Board plan to soon interview the train’s engineer and crew members, who were all hospitalized, to help determine why it hit a curve in the tracks at 80 mph, derailing and spilling onto Interstate 5 near Olympia.
Zack Willhoite and Jim Hamre, two longtime rail advocates, were among those killed. The identity of the third person remains unknown. The Pierce County Medical Examiner will formally identify the deceased, as well as determine cause of death.
NTSB board member Bella Dinh-Zarr said at a Tuesday afternoon news conference that an engineer and a new conductor who “was familiarizing himself with the territory” were in the cab during the crash. Another conductor was in a train car interacting with passengers.
Chicago Tribune: Chicago to pay $20 million to settle code-of-silence lawsuit over fatal crash caused by drunken cop, sources say by Jason Meisner
The city of Chicago has agreed to pay $20 million to settle a code-of-silence lawsuit brought by the families of two young men killed in a fiery drunken driving crash caused by an off-duty police detective, sources told the Chicago Tribune.
The agreement to pay $10 million each to relatives of Andrew Cazares and Fausto Manzera was reached in dramatic fashion earlier this month after it was revealed that key documents involving an alcohol-fueled bar fight in detective Joseph Frugoli’s past had been improperly withheld.
The amount of the agreement was not made public, but sources have since confirmed the figure to the Tribune. The settlement must still be green-lighted by the city’s Finance Committee before going to the full City Council for a vote. That could happen as soon as next month.
If approved, it would mark yet another massive payout for the city in a police misconduct suit. In the past two months alone, nearly $100 million in judgments have been assessed against the city for police-related cases, including a record $44.7 million jury verdict in October for a man who was shot by his childhood friend, Officer Patrick Kelly, in an off-duty incident. Earlier this month, the City Council approved a $31 million payout for the “Englewood Four,” who each spent some 15 years in prison for a 1994 rape and murder before DNA linked the crime to a convicted killer.
New York Daily News: Connecticut parents pull kids from school as Ivanka Trump visits by Megan Cerullo
First daughter and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump made a surprise visit to a Connecticut high school—prompting some parents who oppose President Trump’s agenda to yank their kids from classes Monday.
Trump appeared at the Norwalk Early College Academy to talk to its students about the importance of career education.
“To see the passion and enthusiasm for bringing real life skills into a classroom environment but then coupling it with real life experience through internship creates this really beautiful virtuous angle,” she said, News 12 New Jersey reported.
Parents say didn’t know that Trump was scheduled to speak to their kids—information they suspect was withheld due to security concerns.
Boston Globe: Burger King franchisee will pay $250,000 for 843 child labor law violations in Mass. by Katie Johnson
One of the country’s biggest restaurant franchisees has agreed to pay $250,000 to settle 843 child labor violations at Burger King restaurants across Massachusetts, including an instance in which a minor worked until nearly 5 a.m., Attorney General Maura Healey said Tuesday.
Northeast Foods was cited for allowing 16- and 17-year-old employees to work too many hours in a day, too late at night, and without proper work permits at nearly 30 of its 43 locations in the state. All of the infractions took place in the first five months of the year.
Northeast Foods is owned by Shoukat Dhanani, based in Sugar Land, Texas, who was profiled by Forbes in 2016 and named one of the most powerful people in food service this year by Nation’s Restaurant News.
Healey’s investigation began after her office received a complaint about a teenager in Tewksbury working past the time allowed by law. It found that in stores from Allston to Lawrence to Worcester, there were 234 instances of 50 minors working more than nine hours in one day, and 541 instances of 57 minors working past 10 p.m. on a weeknight or past midnight on weekends. One of the most egregious time violations involved a 16-year-old working until 4:47 a.m. on a school night.
Los Angeles Times: The Thomas fire is now the second largest in modern California history by Hailey Branson-Potts and Nicole Santa Cruz
After a brief respite from the relentless gusts that have driven the deadly Thomas fire for more than two weeks, powerful winds are expected to return, adding to the challenges facing firefighters working to contain the mammoth blaze.
The fire, which began near Santa Paula in the foothills above Thomas Aquinas College on Dec. 4, has burned through 272,000 acres as of Tuesday evening, making it the second-largest wildfire in modern California history.
On Tuesday, the Thomas fire surpassed the lightning-sparked Rush fire, which burned 271,911 acres in Lassen County in 2012.
The Thomas fire was 50% contained, and fire officials do not anticipate full containment until Jan. 8, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Washington Post: A single vote leads to a rare tie for control of the Virginia legislature by Gregory S. Schneider
NEWPORT NEWS — The balance of power in Virginia’s legislature turned on a single vote in a recount Tuesday that flipped a seat in the House of Delegates from Republican to Democratic, leaving control of the lower chamber evenly split.
The outcome, which reverberated across Virginia, ends 17 years of GOP control of the House and forces Republicans into a rare episode of power sharing with Democrats that will refashion the political landscape in Richmond.
It was the culmination of last month’s Democratic wave that had diminished Republican power in purple Virginia.
Democrat Shelly Simonds emerged from the recount as the apparent winner in the 94th House District, seizing the seat from Republican David Yancey. A three-judge panel still must certify the results, an event scheduled for Wednesday.
Of the 23,215 votes cast in the district on Election Day, Yancey held a lead of just 10 votes going into Tuesday’s recount.
But five hours later, after a painstaking counting overseen by local elections officials and the clerk of court, Yancey’s lead narrowed — and then reversed
Guardian: Mexican journalist shot dead at son's school Christmas pageant by David Agren
A Mexican journalist has been shot dead while he attended his son’s school Christmas pageant as attacks on the country’s press continue unabated.
Gumaro Pérez Aguilando was attending the school event in the town of Acayucan on Friday, when a pair of gunmen burst into the building and killed him in front of a classroom full of schoolchildren, witnesses told local media.
His death marked the 12th murder of a media worker in Mexico in 2017, according to the press freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders (RSF). The killing puts Mexico alongside Syria as the most murderous country for journalists, according to RSF.
Pérez covered police matters for several publications and founded the news site La Voz del Sur in the violent city of Acayucan, in Veracruz state, where drug cartel and organised crime activities have been rife.
AlJazeera: Saudi forces intercept Riyadh-bound Houthi missile
A Saudi-led coalition battling Yemen's Houthi rebels says it has intercepted a missile fired from the neighbouring country towards the kingdom's capital, Riyadh.
Houthi rebels said on Tuesday they had launched a ballistic missile targeting al-Yamama royal palace to mark 1,000 days since the coalition started its bombing campaign in Yemen.
"This is our answer to them and to the whole world," Abdulmalik al-Houthi, the rebels' leader, said in a televised address.
"The more crimes you perpetrate, the more tyrannical you are, you will meet nothing but more missiles."
The Saudi-led coalition said that the missile was directed at residential areas and that there were no casualties, according to SPA, the Saudi state-run news agency.
Spiegel Online: 'We Know Everything, But We Have No Proof' by Nicola Abé
Ghariani, in his mid-50s, shoves a Snickers into his mouth. On the TV, men with bad teeth and angry eyes describe what was done to them under the dictatorship of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. They talk of the arrests, the house searches and the torture. Ben Ali was toppled on Jan. 14, 2011, in the first rebellion of the Arab Spring, and Ghariani was his personal advisor and secretary general of the governing party, the Democratic Constitutional Rally (RCD). "We need to go through this," he says. "We are now a democracy."
The show Ghariani is watching is a sitting of the Tunisian Truth and Dignity Commission. Since 2014, the commission has assembled over 62,000 cases with the aim of coming to terms with over 50 years of dictatorship. It's an attempt to spur reconciliation despite the horrifying things that happened.
The goal of this "transitional justice" is to bring to light the truth about the old regime. There will be no verdicts. Instead, it's about recognizing the experiences and, especially, the suffering of the victims. It's also about preventing these kinds of crimes from ever again being committed by the state so that Tunisian society can find peace. But can it work?
Reuters: How a secretive police squad racked up kills in Duterte's drug war by Clare Baldwin and Andrew R. C. Marshall
QUEZON CITY, Philippines – The police who burst into Kathrina Polo’s house on a rainy night in August 2016, then shot her husband in the head and heart, spoke a language she recognized but didn’t understand: Visayan.
It’s a common language in the southern Philippines. But in Polo’s poor neighborhood in Quezon City, hundreds of miles to the north, Visayan is rarely heard. “The police kept talking in Visayan because they knew I didn’t understand,” she recalled. Their use of Visayan was a clue to the identity of her husband’s killers.
The officers belonged to what would become the deadliest police station in Quezon City Police District. Called Station 6, or Batasan Station, it is on a violent frontline in President Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs.
Of the 12 police stations in Quezon City, which is part of Metro Manila, Station 6 was by far the most lethal. Its officers killed 108 people in anti-drug operations from July 2016 through June 2017, the campaign’s first year, accounting for 39 percent of the city’s body count, according to Quezon City Police District crime reports reviewed and analyzed by Reuters.
Almost all of these killings were carried out by Station 6’s anti-drug unit, the reports show. The officers who formed the core of that unit hailed from or near Davao, the southern hometown of President Duterte. They called themselves the “Davao Boys” - and spoke in the region’s language, Visayan.
New York Times: Espionage Bills in Australia Stir Fears of Anti-Chinese Backlash by Damien Cave
SYDNEY, Australia — When Craig Chung, an up-and-coming Sydney city councilor, meets with former officials from the United States, neither the media nor his constituents seem to care.
But for events with fellow ethnic Chinese, he errs on the side of caution. He researches the people involved. He sidesteps certain photographs and publicly declares whom he talks to and why — all to ensure he doesn’t end up accused of associating with someone tied to the Chinese Communist Party.
“There is this fear that we may work closely with somebody who is accused of being an agent of another government,” said Mr. Chung, 49, a fourth-generation Chinese-Australian. “We’re in a position now where people are running scared.”
Australia has been thrown into turmoil over allegations that China is trying to buy its politicians and sway its elections, charges that have led to increased scrutiny of the rising superpower’s efforts to influence Australia — and fears that a campaign to stamp out Chinese influence risks becoming a McCarthy-esque witch hunt.
Smithsonian: In World War II America, Female Santas Took the Reins by Greg Daugherty
The Second World War saw American women break into many male-dominated jobs: riveters, crane operators, cab drivers, and professional baseball players, to name a few.
But perhaps the most unusual breakthrough of all occurred 75 years ago this Christmas, when department stores began hiring women to play Santa, sitting in thrones previously monopolized by men. Pretty soon, still more women in red Santa suits and matching hats could be seen ringing bells on street corners and ho-ho-ho-ing it up for charity.
Even before the U.S. officially entered the war, some astute observers saw it coming. “It is customary in wartime for women to take over numerous fields of employment conventionally reserved for men,” the St. Louis Star-Times noted in 1941. But while the paper conceded that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt might be right that a “woman’s place is in the office, factory, courtroom, marketplace, corner filling station, and other locations too numerous to mention,” it drew a line in the snow at Santa.
“There is one male domain, however, that should be defended at all costs,” it insisted. “A woman Santa Claus? Heaven forbid! That would be stretching the credulity of guileless little children too far.”
Hyperallergic: Christmas Cheer from a Lean Year: The 1950 Holiday Cards of Langston Hughes by Allison Meier
Christmas in 1950 was a low time for the writer Langston Hughes. The opera for which he’d written a libretto — The Barrier — was a commercial and critical failure; his recently published book Simple Speaks His Mind was critically praised, but not a bestseller. He was living with his friends Toy and Emerson Harper at 20 East 127th Street in Harlem, and attempting to work on a new book and opera. So instead of giving his large community of friends Christmas gifts, he sent out typewritten postcards that expressed both his financial state, and enduring holiday cheer. One proclaimed:
If times were not so doggone hard
I might send you a gift.
But since I’m broke as broke can be,
Here’s just a Christmas lift:
Merry,
Merry,
Christmas!
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University is exhibiting a pop-up display through December 20 of Hughes’s 1950 postcards, as well as Christmas cards he received from friends. The two cases of ephemera were selected from 17 holiday card boxes at Yale that hold material dating from 1935 to 1966. They’re part of Hughes’s donation of his papers to Yale, which began in 1941 and continued until his death in 1967. Yale now has 305 linear feet of archives from Hughes in its James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Art and Letters in the Yale Collection of American Literature (YCAL).
Don’t forget that Mr. Meteor Blades is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a good evening!