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.
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Turkish ground troops have crossed into northern Syria as part of a major offensive to push out Kurdish militia, which Turkey regards as terrorists.
The Kurdish group targeted, known as the YPG, is active in the Afrin region, across from Turkey's southern border.
It says it has repelled Turkish troops in the area, and retaliated with rocket fire on Turkish border areas.
The militia forms a crucial part of a US-backed alliance battling Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Syria.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to crush the YPG "very quickly", but the US is urging Turkish "restraint" in order to avoid civilian casualties.Turkey believes the group has links to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a banned militant group.
An eyewitness has told the BBC of the terrifying moment gunmen burst into Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel restaurant on Saturday.
The man, who is not being named for security reasons, said he was spared after saying he was an Afghan. "Where are the foreigners?" they shouted.
Fourteen foreigners are confirmed to have died, along with four Afghans.
However, some media reports indicate the number of dead could be much higher.
The interior minister said the recent decision to transfer security to a private company had been a mistake.
Some 160 people were rescued after Afghan troops fought throughout the night to regain control of the building.
Three attackers were also killed in the siege, officials said. Ten people, including four civilians, were injured.
The government shutdown in the United States seemed closer to a resolution Sunday night after Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell made a minor concession, saying that he would allow a vote on immigration reform in February if Democrats agree to fund the government.
McConnell’s proposal represented the fruit of a bipartisan effort among moderates in both parties to resolve the shutdown that began at midnight Saturday. However, one Democratic source cautioned that no deal had been reached.
The shutdown was spurred by the inability of Congress to reach a deal to resolve the status of Dreamers, undocumented migrants brought into the United States as children.
Dreamers had been protected from deportation until the Trump Administration ended September by the Daca program, created by Barack Obama.
China’s official news agency said in a commentary on Sunday that the shutdown of the U.S. government exposed “chronic flaws” in the U.S. political system.
Funding for federal agencies ran out at midnight on Friday in Washington after lawmakers failed to agree on a stopgap funding bill.
“What’s so ironic is that it came on the first anniversary of Donald Trump’s presidency on Saturday, a slap in the face for the leadership in Washington,” China’s Xinhua News Agency said in a commentary by Xinhua writer Liu Chang.
The commentary said that the Trump administration had “backtracked” on policies supported by his predecessor, Barack Obama, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and U.S. participation in the Paris climate agreement.
“If there was any legacy that has survived the transfer of power, it was the spirit of non-cooperation across party lines,” the Xinhua commentary said.
While Xinhua commentaries are not official statements, they offer a reflection of Beijing’s thinking.
The most notable thing about Melania Trump’s tenure as first lady so far has been her absence: it took her five months to relocate from New York to the White House, a spell unheard of for a modern first lady.
Seldom seen and even more seldom heard, the former model may not be as popular as her predecessor Michelle Obama, but she is far more popular than her husband. Unfortunately for his Republican administration, she seems to have little interest in using that popularity to do anything of substance with the post.
It is a bit unclear what can fairly be expected of a first lady in 2018, given that the role is ill-defined, involuntary and – remarkably, at a time when it has expanded to be a near full-time occupation resembling political surrogacy – unpaid.
What is clear is that Melania – who greeted her husband’s election win with “tears – and not of joy”, according to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury – is in good company in her antipathy for the position.
Reuters
Amazon's automated grocery store of the future opens Monday (Another good job bites the dust)
SEATTLE (Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) will open its checkout-free grocery store to the public on Monday after more than a year of testing, the company said, moving forward on an experiment that could dramatically alter brick-and-mortar retail.
The Seattle store, known as Amazon Go, relies on cameras and sensors to track what shoppers remove from the shelves, and what they put back. Cash registers and checkout lines become superfluous - customers are billed after leaving the store using credit cards on file.
For grocers, the store’s opening heralds another potential disruption at the hands of the world’s largest online retailer, which bought high-end supermarket chain Whole Foods Market last year for $13.7 billion. Long lines can deter shoppers, so a company that figures out how to eradicate wait times will have an advantage.
Amazon did not discuss if or when it will add more Go locations, and reiterated it has no plans to add the technology to the larger and more complex Whole Foods stores.
The convenience-style store opened to Amazon employees on Dec. 5, 2016 in a test phase. At the time, Amazon said it expected members of the public could begin using the store in early 2017.
Reuters
Vietnam sentences former official to 13 years jail amid corruption crackdown: state media
HANOI (Reuters) - A court in Vietnam sentenced a former politburo member to 13 years in prison on Thursday for violating state regulations amid a widespread corruption crackdown, the state-run Voice of Vietnam reported.
Dinh La Thang, a former chairman of state oil and gas group PetroVietnam, is the most senior politician to be charged in decades.
The court also sentenced high-profile official Trinh Xuan Thanh, whom Germany said Vietnamese agents kidnapped in a Berlin park, to life in prison. They were among a group of more than 20 oil executives facing trial.
Buzzfeed
Coca-Cola Is Grappling With Our Karmic Anxiety Over All That Trash We Make
Coca-Cola — a creator of massive amounts of garbage around the world — announced Friday that it aims to "to help collect and recycle the equivalent of 100% of its packaging by 2030."
Again, that's the equivalent of 100% because, the company said in a statement, "It would be impossible to collect each of the packages we sell globally." So Coca-Cola will make it up by "collecting packaging from other companies."
The company told BuzzFeed News it sells 128 billion bottles per year, and nearly all the plastic bottles are made from new plastic, not recycled. Yet globally, the average rate of collection of Coca-Cola's bottles and cans by local sanitation systems is 51.5% — which means the problems are both that tons of used bottles never get recycled (ending up instead in landfills, the ocean, and as everyday litter), and that the majority of the millions of new bottles Coca-Cola sells daily aren't made from whatever fraction of plastic does get collected, but from new plastic. This unending churn all means that every minute there's more plastic junk piling up in the world.
Raw Story
Judge says God asked him to tell jury to deliver a not guilty verdict in a sex trafficking case.
Texas state judge says that God called on him to intervene and ask the jury to deliver a not guilty verdict in a sex trafficking case.
The Comal County Judge Jack Robison reportedly told jurors last week that when “God tells me I gotta do something, I gotta do it.”
Robison asked jurors for a not guilty verdict in the case of a woman accused of trafficking an underage girl, according to The Dallas Morning News.
But the jury didn’t seem to agree with Robison’s interjection. The jury found Gloria Romero-Perez guilty of continuous trafficking of a person and slapped her with a sentence of 25 years.
Robison recused himself ahead of Romero-Perez’s sentencing and another judge stepped in to fill his place.
The defendant's attorney request for a mistrial was denied.
NPR
Cancer Patients Get Little Guidance From Doctors On Using Medical Marijuana
Even three queasy pregnancies didn't prepare Kate Murphy for the nonstop nausea that often comes with chemotherapy.
In the early months of 2016, the Lexington, Mass., mother tried everything the doctors and nurses suggested. "But for the most part I felt nauseous 24/7," she said.
Murphy, then 49 and fighting breast cancer, dropped 15 pounds from her already slim frame in just two months. Then, she remembered what a fellow cancer patient had advised while she was waiting for her first dose of chemo: "Make sure you get some medical marijuana."
Scientific research, mostly in animals, supports the idea that cannabis can effectively treat the nausea of cancer therapy, in addition to some types of cancer-related pain, according to the National Cancer Institute's cannabis information page.
And roughly a quarter of cancer patients use cannabis in Washington state, where both medical and recreational marijuana is legal, a study from September found.
In Massachusetts, medical marijuana has been legal for six years, but it's still a challenge for cancer patients to get a state-issued medical marijuana ID card, or then figure out what kind of cannabis to use.
N Y Times
Watching a Ridge Slide in Slow Motion, a Town Braces for Disaster
UNION GAP, Wash. — Jackie Rodriguez drives by the crack at about 9:30 p.m. most nights, as she heads home from her evening classes in dental hygienics, past the big spotlights aimed up at the mountain. She says it spooks her just about every time.
“You know that queasy feeling you get in your stomach?” she said.
The fissure was first spotted in October on Rattlesnake Ridge in south central Washington State, overlooking Interstate 82 and the Yakima River. Since then, a 20-acre chunk of mountainside — roughly four million cubic yards of rock, enough to fill 25 football stadiums to the top of the bleachers, eight stories up — has been sliding downhill. Geologists can measure its current speed — about two and a half inches a day — but they cannot say for certain when, or if, it might accelerate into a catastrophe. And they are powerless to stop it.
“The mountain is moving, and at some point this slide will happen — it’s just a matter of when,” said Arlene Fisher-Maurer, the city manager in Union Gap, population about 7,000, just north of the ridge.
“So we wait and see and prepare,” said Ms. Fisher-Maurer, who keeps a police scanner on her desk for alerts. “The preparation has been key, and I think it’s going to do us well.”