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 Besame. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Man Oh Man, 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.
I was at work while composing this, so this OND is short, sweet, and possibly a little quirky tonight.
Boston Globe: Another nor’easter will bring snow, rain, and strong winds by John R. Ellement and Danny MacDonald
It’s still on its way.
The National Weather Service said Tuesday a new nor’easter will arrive as expected Wednesday, bringing thundersnow, rain, high winds, and 17 or more inches of snow to Central and Western Massachusetts.
Pockets of the MetroWest region are expected to receive up to 6 inches of snow — although by Tuesday afternoon forecasters were lowering snow total predictions — before the system wears itself out in the predawn hours of Thursday. The nor’easter, the second in a week, will affect the Wednesday evening and Thursday morning commutes.
Latest forecast model guidance suggest a storm track that will lower snow amounts inside [Interstate] 495 and the [southeastern/northeastern] coastal plain,’’ forecasters wrote Tuesday afternoon, urging people to stay tuned.
On Wednesday evening, the snow will be falling up to 3 inches per hour, forecasters wrote.
Detroit Free Press: 1st male Nassar victim Jacob Moore: 'I hope he rots in hell' by Brandon Patterson
Jacob Moore, the first male victim to report being abused by Larry Nassar, did not mince words about the disgraced former USA Gymnastics doctor.
"I hope he rots in hell," Moore said on NBC's "Today" show.
Moore, a male gymnast, was suffering from a shoulder injury and sought treatment from Nassar. Nassar took Moore into Nassar's basement, where he allegedly performed acupuncture on Moore's genitals. Moore was 16.
"I wasn't a dumb kid," Moore said on "Today." "I knew kind of what medical practices were and that one was out of the ordinary."
Nassar also had another female victim there seeking treatment and allegedly exposed Moore's genitalia to her, asking if she'd ever seen a male body part. Moore said he felt "uncomfortable" after leaving.
Charlotte Observer: Black Americans are more educated than ever. So why do they still lag economically? by The Observer Editorial Board
A half century after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life for the cause of civil rights and equality, black Americans find themselves in a peculiar predicament. They have attained their highest level of education in the history of the United States – but in many ways are no better off compared with white Americans than when King was still alive.
It’s among the most depressing, perplexing findings of a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute and others as we near the 50th anniversary of King’s death. Education was supposed to be the key to eliminating such gaps. And yet, the black unemployment rate stands at 7.5 percent today compared with 6.7 percent in 1968, still roughly twice as high as the white unemployment rate. The wealth of white families is about 10 times as great as the wealth of black families, whose average wealth barely increased the past half century. That’s even though black Americans have closed the high school education gap – 90 percent of black adults have high school diplomas and the share of young black adults with college degrees has doubled – even while navigating a school system that is more segregated today than it has been in decades. Black Americans with post-graduate degrees, the most educated people in the country, barely have more wealth than white Americans who have only a high school education.
Not only that, about 70 percent of white Americans own their homes, compared with about 40 percent of black Americans. And while the black poverty rate dropped to an all-time-low during the final year of President Obama’s second term, it remained more than twice as high as the white poverty rate.
New Orleans Times-Picayune: Opioid deaths increased by 27 percent last year in the U.S.: CDC by Maria Clark
Opioid overdose deaths increased by 27.7 percent nationally last year, according to new data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday (March 6).
Fifteen out of 10,000 emergency room visits involved opioid overdoses between July 2016 and September 2017. The CDC looked at Emergency Department and hospital billing data from 52 jurisdictions in 45 states.
The rate of opioid overdoses increased on average by 5.6 percent throughout the year, across all demographic groups and all five U.S. regions. The largest increases in ER visits from opioid overdoses were seen in the West, Southwest and Midwest with 7 to 11 percent increases per quarter.
"With continued increases in opioid overdoses, availability of timely data is important to inform actions taken by emergency departments and public health practitioners. Increases in opioid overdoses varied by region and urbanization level, indicating a need for localized responses," the authors for the CDC study published Tuesday (March 6) wrote.
Portland Press Herald: Meet the last man alive to have raced during Roger Bannister’s famous mile run by Glenn Jordan
News of Roger Bannister’s death Saturday revived memories of his groundbreaking run into the history books 64 years ago, when he became the first runner to break the four-minute barrier in the mile.
Bannister’s achievement is especially significant in the Bath home of the Rev. George Dole.
Dole, 86, was the lone American – and apparently the only man still living – of the five runners who competed against Bannister during that historic race in Oxford, England, on May 6, 1954.
“The memories have faded quite a bit but some of them are still vivid,” Dole said by phone Monday, before taking his thrice-weekly jog at the Bath Area Family YMCA.
Born in Fryeburg, Dole moved to Bath as a young child and graduated from Morse High in 1948. He didn’t begin running competitively until his senior year, after the basketball coach started a track program. “Much to my surprise,” Dole said, “I did quite well.”
Los Angeles Times: With Supreme Court challenge, tech billionaire could dismantle beach access rights — and a landmark coastal law by Rosanna Xia
The California Coastal Act for decades has scaled back mega-hotels, protected wetlands and, above all, declared that access to the beach was a fundamental right guaranteed to everyone.
But that very principle could be dismantled in the latest chapter of an all-out legal battle that began as a local dispute over a locked gate.
On one side, property owner and Silicon Valley billionaire Vinod Khosla wants Martins Beach, a secluded crescent-shaped stretch of sand and bluffs, to himself. On the other, generations of beachgoers demand continued access to a path long used by the public. The squabble has spurred a spate of lawsuits that now focus on whether Khosla needs state permission to gate off the road — and a string of California courts has said he does.
Unwilling to back down, Khosla is now appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court over his right to shut out the public. His latest argument not only challenges the constitutionality of the Coastal Act — if taken up by the nation's highest court, it would put into question long-established land use procedures and any state's power to regulate development anywhere.
The Atlantic: Why So Many of Us Die of Heart Disease by Olga Khazan
The Assyrians treated the “hard-pulse disease” with leeches. The Roman scholar Cornelius Celsus recommended bleeding, and the ancient Greeks cupped the spine to draw out animal spirits.
Centuries later, heart disease remains America’s number one killer, even though medical advances have made it so that many more people can survive heart attacks. Some parts of the country are especially hard-hit: In areas of Appalachia, more people are dying of heart disease now than were in 1980.
Haider Warraich, a fellow in cardiovascular medicine at the Duke University Medical Center (and an occasional Atlantic contributor), is at work on a book about how heart disease came to be such a big threat to humanity. We recently spoke about some of the insights he’s come across in his research and practice. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
by Brianna Sacks
The FBI has been paying and using Best Buy Geek Squad employees to flag and turn over illegal content that they find on devices while doing repairs, according to documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The newly obtained records detail how the agency regularly relied on Geek Squad employees as tipsters and confidential human sources, developing a process in which repair technicians in Louisville, Kentucky, would call the agency after finding illegal content, such as child pornography, on a customer's device.
Agents would then show up at the Geek Squad's repair facility, review the photos or videos to determine whether they were illegal, and then seize the device and send it off for further review. In certain cases, agents would obtain a search warrant. In one case, the FBI paid a Geek Squad employee $500 for turning over child abuse images and used him as an informant in the case.
EFF filed a Freedom of Information Act last year to investigate how the FBI uses Geek Squad employees after a 2017 child pornography case unveiled that the bureau paid a repair technician for turning over thousands of child abuse images that he found while repairing the computer of Mark Rettenmaier, a prominent California doctor. The judge ended up dropping the charges against Rettenmaier, citing concerns about "false and misleading statements" by an FBI agent.
Washington Post: Justice Dept. to sue California over ‘sanctuary’ laws that aid those in U.S. illegally by Matt Zapotosky
The Justice Department plans to dramatically escalate its war on “sanctuary” jurisdictions by alleging in a lawsuit that the state of California has violated the Constitution with a collection of laws that are friendly to undocumented immigrants, senior officials said Tuesday.
In a suit that was expected to be filed in federal district court in Sacramento, the Justice Department will allege that three recently enacted California laws intentionally obstruct enforcement of federal immigration law and harm public safety.
The Justice Department will ask a federal judge to block the California laws, which restrict how state businesses and law enforcement agencies can cooperate with immigration authorities. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is to address the lawsuit in a speech Wednesday at the California Peace Officers Association’s 26th Annual Law Enforcement Day, saying, in part: “We are fighting to make your jobs safer and to help you reduce crime in America. And I believe we are going to win,” according to an excerpt of his prepared remarks.
New York: Gray Hat by Reeves Wiedeman
Marcus Hutchins was still recovering from the night before as he settled into a lounge at the Las Vegas airport one afternoon this past August. Hutchins, a 23-year-old cybersecurity researcher, had come from his home in rural England in part to attend DefCon, the world’s biggest computer-hacking conference, and in part to take a well-deserved vacation.
Three months earlier, a North Korean cyberattack known as WannaCry had crippled the British health-care system and caused a billion dollars in losses across 150 countries. The damage could have been much worse — tens of billions, by one estimate — but a few hours after the attack began, Hutchins figured out how to stop it, almost by accident, while sitting at a computer in his bedroom at his parents’ house.
That act made Hutchins the closest thing cybersecurity had ever had to a global celebrity. “Oops! I Saved the World,” read the cover of the New York Daily News. “Cyber Geek Accidentally Stops Huge Hack Attack.” Edward Snowden congratulated Hutchins, and strangers recognized him at Heathrow. Hutchins had gone to DefCon the year before and found the convention unpleasant — “I remember slowly moving down a packed hall in a sea of people who smelled like they hadn’t showered in days” — but in 2017, Cisco invited him into the VIP section at its party. “A year earlier, I’d never have gotten in,” Hutchins said. At six-foot-four, with hair that adds an inch or two, Hutchins was easy to spot, and conferencegoers asked him to pose for photos that they put online with the tag #WannaCrySlayer.
Guardian: US investigation into BAE Saudi arms deal watered down, leaked memo suggests by Clayton Swisher, Ewan MacAskill and Rob Evans
The outcome of a US criminal investigation into alleged bribery in a £43bn arms deal between Britain and Saudi Arabia was watered down following a secret lobbying campaign, according to a leaked document.
The confidential memo seen by the Guardian provides a rare insight into behind-the-scenes negotiations between an American law firm hired by a Saudi prince and the US Department of Justice (DoJ).
The discussions took place in the runup to the DoJ’s completion in 2010 of an investigation into the deal between Saudi Arabia and Britain’s biggest arms firm, BAE.
The Washington-based law firm boasted in the memo that it had wrung a string of concessions from investigators that led to the removal of potentially embarrassing details from an official document announcing their conclusions.
The memo sheds new light on one of the most contentious arms deals in history, and underlines the lengths taken to prevent disclosure of any material that might damage the west’s relationship with the Saudis.
BBC: Russian spy: Boris Johnson warns Kremlin over Salisbury incident
The UK would respond "robustly" to any evidence of Russian involvement in the collapse of former spy Sergei Skripal, Boris Johnson has said.
Mr Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33, are critically ill in hospital after being found unconscious in Salisbury, Wiltshire.
The foreign secretary said he was not pointing fingers at this stage, but described Russia as "a malign and disruptive force".
Russia has denied any involvement.
Downing Street said Home Secretary Amber Rudd will chair a meeting of Cobra, the government's emergency committee, on Wednesday to discuss the Salisbury investigation.
Counter Terrorism Police have taken over the investigation from Wiltshire Police.
But in a statement, the unit said the inquiry had not been declared a terrorist incident and there was no risk to the wider public.
Hindustan Times: Sri Lanka declares emergency as Buddhist mob ransacks Muslim properties in Kandy
Sri Lanka has declared a state of emergency for 10 days to rein in the spread of communal violence, a government spokesman said on Tuesday, a day after Buddhists and Muslims clashed in the Indian Ocean island’s central district of Kandy.
The move comes hours before India is scheduled to play their opening match against Sri Lanka in the Tri-Nation Nidahas Twenty20 Cup in Colombo on Tuesday.
The announcement came after Buddhist mobs swept through the hill town of Kandy on Monday, burning at least 11 Muslim-owned shops and homes, after a Buddhist man was reportedly killed by a group of Muslims
Lakshman Kiriella, a lawmaker from Kandy, said in Parliament that the attacks were “carried out by outsiders.”
“I am ashamed as a Buddhist and we must apologize to the Muslims,” he declared.
So far no violence has been reported in any other part of the island nation.
AlJazeera: Iran's Ahmadinejad: From populist president to oppositionist by Saeed Jalili
Sari, Iran - In a village in northern Iran, a truck driver and three other men struggle to tow a truck on a muddy road, like trainers pulling a giant elephant from a slippery riverbank.
The path had been dug by construction workers all the way from the main road, stretching out of the city of Sari, capital of Mazandaran province, to extend a gas pipeline to their village.
Until the project is finished, villagers will have to make do with LPG canisters for cooking and charcoal to keep their houses warm during winter in this mountainous outpost.
For now, though, the national gas network project does little to bring a sense of financial security for the truck driver and his community, as construction was done by outsiders.
Variety: Weinstein Co. Sale to Ron Burkle Investor Group Collapses by Gene Maddaus and Brant Lang
A deal to sell the Weinstein Co. to an investor group led by billionaire Ron Burkle has collapsed, according to his partner, Maria Contreras-Sweet.
“We have received disappointing information about the viability of completing this transaction,” Contreras-Sweet said in a statement Tuesday. “As a result, we have decided to terminate this transaction.”
The failure of the deal likely means that the Weinstein Co. will be forced to file for bankruptcy protection in the coming days. The studio behind “The King’s Speech” and “The Artist” has been teetering on the brink of financial ruin after numerous allegations of sexual abuse and harassment allegations its co-founder Harvey Weinstein were made public in October.
In a memo to employees, chairman Bob Weinstein said he would explore options outside of bankruptcy. He also denied a report that the company would fail to make payroll.
Everyone have a great night and since this coming Saturday is the 2nd Saturday, I will see you for Science Saturday!