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.
Houston Chronicle: Barbara Bush, former first lady, dead at age 92 by Kevin Diaz, Emily Foxhall, and Cragg Hines
Barbara Pierce Bush, the fiercely loyal wife of one U.S. president and mother of another who was a champion of literacy and admired public figure in her own right, died Tuesday surrounded by her family at her west Houston home. She was 92.
Her husband, former President George Herbert Walker Bush, was at her side.
Relatives said she died of complications from congestive heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
The Texas matriarch was born June 8, 1925, to Pauline and Marvin Pierce in New York City. She grew up in nearby Rye, N.Y. Her father was a publishing executive who rose to become president of McCall Corp.
At age 16, Barbara Pierce met George H.W. Bush at a holiday party in Connecticut. She was on a break from boarding school in South Carolina. He was then a senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass.
Chicago Sun-Times: Machine shifting gears? Toni Preckwinkle poised to make history by Alexandra Arriaga
It’s a shell of the mighty make-or-break political organization it once was, but the Cook County Democratic Party could still be ready to make history.
Chicago’s ultimate insiders club is preparing to usher in a new era on Wednesday, an era that could see the longtime bastion of white men choosing its first African-American, and first woman, chairman.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle is expected to take over the county’s top political spot from Cook County Assessor Joe Berrios, who’s held the seat since he was unanimously elected in 2007.
Before Berrios, the party had never had a Latino chairman, and still has never had an African-American or woman chairman. Mayor Richard J. Daley named Jane Byrne a co-chairman, but everyone knew who was really in charge.
The anointing of Preckwinkle is an important step, but just a step, critics are quick to note.
New York Daily News: President Trump blasts immigration law ruling made by his own Supreme Court pick Neil Gorsuch by Chris Sommerfeldt
President Trump took a veiled shot at his own Supreme Court pick, Neil Gorsuch, on Tuesday, claiming that a ruling he made on immigration law perpetuates "a public safety crisis."
The Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling — an unusual alignment in which Gorsuch sided with the four liberal justices for the first time — concerns a catchall provision of immigration law that defines what makes a crime violent. Gorsuch and the four liberal justices found that a provision of the law that makes it easier to deport foreigners convicted of "a crime of violence" is too vague to be enforced.
Trump wasn't happy.
"Today’s Court decision means that Congress must close loopholes that block the removal of dangerous criminal aliens, including aggravated felons," Trump tweeted. "This is a public safety crisis that can only be fixed by Congress — House and Senate must quickly pass a legislative fix to ensure violent criminal aliens can be removed from our society. Keep America Safe!"
San Francisco Chronicle: With S.F. seawall crumbling, $425 million bond for repairs likely to make ballot by Dominic Fracassa
A proposed $425 million San Francisco bond measure to kick-start vital repairs to the city’s fragile Embarcadero seawall cleared an important hurdle Monday, pushing it closer to a spot on the November ballot.
Citing an urgent need to make the crumbling seawall more resilient to earthquakes and the effects of sea-level rise, the city’s Capital Planning Committee voted unanimously to put the bond before the Board of Supervisors, which is expected to take up the measure within a month. The proposed general-obligation bond measure needs the board’s blessing before it could go before voters.
Should the bond measure make it to the ballot and win a two-thirds approval from voters in November — as it’s
widely expected to do — the money raised would fund the bulk of the first round of planning, construction and repair work on the seawall. The century-old structure underpins historic landmarks like the Ferry Building and protects an estimated $100 billion worth of public and private property, including vital transportation infrastructure like the Transbay Tube.
Philly.com: Philly looking into other incidents at same Starbucks where two black men were arrested by Joseph A. Gambardello
The Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations is looking into reports of other incidents at the same Center City Starbucks where the arrests of two black men last week have sparked national outrage and put the Seattle coffee chain in damage-control mode.
Meanwhile, a Starbucks spokeswoman confirmed to the Washington Post that the company’s CEO, Kevin Johnson, met privately with the two men on Monday and personally apologized. Neither man has been identified.
In a summary of the city’s response to the incident, Mayor Kenney’s office said the human relations commission would “review the firm’s policies, guidelines and procedures, including whether Starbucks has written policies, whether the policies are enforced uniformly, and how much discretion is left to individual employees.”
Bloomberg: IRS Gives Taxpayers an Extra Day to File After Computer Crash by Lynnley Browning and Robert Lee
The Internal Revenue Service said it would give U.S. taxpayers an extra day to file their returns electronically after a computer malfunction disrupted the agency’s website.
The IRS said in a statement on Tuesday evening that its processing systems were back online, and that the new deadline was Wednesday.
Every year the IRS processes more than 120 million tax returns that arrive by mid-April and spits back some $300 billion in refunds. Last year, about 90 percent of
returnssubmitted by April 21 were e-filed, according to IRS data. Tax Day was on April 17 this year, since April 15 was a Sunday and April 16 was a holiday in Washington.
Bruce Friedland, a spokesman for the IRS said in a statement on Tuesday afternoon that "all indications point to this being a hardware-related issue, not other factors.”
Mother Jones: Parents Didn’t Want Fracking Near Their School. So the Oil Company Chose a Poorer School, Instead. By Megan Jula
In one of the most fracked counties in the country, a fight is underway between environmental justice advocates and the Colorado commission that oversees oil and gas development. Four environmental and civil rights groups are suing the commission for allowing a company to build 24 oil and gas wells by a public school in a low-income area—after the same company tossed its original plans to build near a charter school serving mostly white, middle-class families.
Back in 2013, the company Mineral Resources was granted a permit to drill a few hundred feet from Frontier Academy, a majority white charter school in Greeley, Colorado. But after parents and neighborhood residents strongly resisted, the project was delayed. The following year, the Denver-based energy company Extraction Oil and Gas acquired Mineral Resources and abandoned the plans to frack near Frontier Academy. The site, Extraction explained in an internal analysis, was “not preferable” for oil and gas development because of its proximity to the school and its playground.
Instead, Extraction began scouting other locations in Greeley, a small city about 50 miles northeast of Denver. In May 2016, Extraction Oil and Gas filed a new application. This time, Extraction selected a site even closer to another school: Bella Romero Academy. The student population at Bella Romero is more than 87 percent Latino or Hispanic, African American, or other people of color. More than 90 percent of students at Bella Romero qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. (At Frontier, 77 percent of students are white, and about 20 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.)
Washington Post: Haley says ‘I don’t get confused’ after White House official suggests she misunderstood Russia sanctions by Anne Gearan
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley rejected a White House official’s suggestion Tuesday that she had bungled an announcement of new Russia sanctions out of “confusion.”
“With all due respect, I don’t get confused,” Haley told Fox News host Dana Perino. Perino read the quote on the air Tuesday as she discussed the fallout from Haley’s remarks about forthcoming sanctions that the White House later said were announced in error.
Haley’s office confirmed the quote but did not elaborate. Haley has been otherwise silent about the unusual dust-up over her remarks Sunday, in which she had described specific economic sanctions against Russia that she said were coming the following day.
The Washington Post reported Monday, citing several people familiar with the matter, that President Trump had become upset about public discussion of new sanctions after Haley spoke on CBS’s “Face The Nation.” Trump told aides that he was not ready to impose the new penalties, and the White House decided to characterize Haley’s remarks as an error, The Post reported.
BBC: Cuba after the Castros by Will Grant
As Che Guevara would later observe, the supposedly triumphant return to Cuban soil of Fidel Castro and his revolutionary force in December 1956 “wasn’t a landing, it was a shipwreck”.
In all, 82 men stepped off that vessel, Granma, bedraggled and dispirited.
It soon got worse. In the foothills of the Sierra Maestra they were ambushed by the Cuban army and reduced to just a handful of guerrillas, among them Fidel Castro and his younger brother, Raúl.
From that ignominious start, they eventually defeated Fulgencio Batista’s military regime. Facing 40,000 men and far superior weaponry, it was one of the most successful guerrilla campaigns of the 20th Century.
Perhaps more incredibly, though, they have stayed in power until today. Between them, the Castro brothers have spent almost 60 years at the helm.
The mark they have left on the island, shaping it into a one-party communist-run state, is indelible.
Now, a turning point beckons. The Father of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, died in late 2016 and Raúl Castro is retiring from the presidency. Cuba is about to be governed by someone other than a Castro for the first time since 1959.
So, after six decades, what kind of country will they pass on?
Guardian: Home Office destroyed Windrush landing cards, says ex-staffer by Amelia Gentleman
The Home Office destroyed thousands of landing card slips recording Windrush immigrants’ arrival dates in the UK, despite staff warnings that the move would make it harder to check the records of older Caribbean-born residents experiencing residency difficulties.
A former Home Office employee said the records, stored in the basement of a government tower block, were a vital resource for case workers when they were asked to find information about someone’s arrival date in the UK from the West Indies – usually when the individual was struggling to resolve immigration status problems.
Although the home secretary, Amber Rudd, has promised to make it easier for Windrush-generation residents to regularise their status, the destruction of the database is likely to make the process harder, even with the support of the new taskforce announced this week.
DW: Slovakia: Police chief resigns after public outcry over investigative journalist's death
Slovakia's controversial national police chief, Tibor Gaspar, will step down at the end of May, Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini said on Tuesday.
"I see he was the target of enormous political pressure, even attacks on all the police force," said new Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini. "We agreed that in order to calm the tensions and free the police from media pressure, he will resign by the end of May."
Gaspar's decision is the latest high level resignation in response to public outcry over the murder of Slovakian investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee in February.
The death of Kuciak, who had been investigating links between Slovakian politicians and the Italian mafia, sparked country-wide protests against the government of then-prime minister Robert Fico.
The fallout led the left-wing prime minister and the rest of his Cabinet to step down in March. On Monday, the man who succeeded as interior minister in March, Tomas Drucker, also resigned.
AlJazeera: New mobile apps are shaping Iran's civil society by Yarno Ritzen
A popular uprising took hold of Iran in the final week of 2017, with thousands taking to the streets to protest against the dire economic situation in the country.
Using smartphone apps such as Telegram and Instagram, demonstrators quickly spread their message, and within days, protests erupted in dozens of cities across Iran.
In the government crackdown that followed, more than 25 people were killed and hundreds arrested.
The spread of protests once again showed the power of technology and social media, highlighted by repeated efforts by the government to block access to the mobile apps used by the protesters.
After realising the potential of these apps, many in Iran - a country with about 48 million smartphones - are looking at ways to leverage technology in their pursuit of civil liberties.
Hindustan Times: Etah rape case: Family attended wedding on victim’s insistence by Hemendra Chaturvedi
It was on the insistence of the seven-year-old girl that the family decided to attend the wedding in Etah where she was raped and murdered allegedly by a 19-year-old man early on Tuesday morning.
“I was very tired on Monday and had decided to stay back at home. But my daughter asked me who would come to her aunt’s wedding if the family did not attend the weddings in the locality. She left me speechless and I had no other option but to attend the function,” the girl’s father recalled.
He said while a ritual was on after the arrival of the groom, a relative asked his daughter to carry something inside the house. “The accused was already there managing the tent put up for the function,” he said.
“My daughter might have shouted for help but no one could hear her due to the loud music. We looked for her but failed to locate her. I rushed inside an under-construction house where I found the accused who tried to hide my daughter’s body but her feet were visible,” he said.
New York/The Cut: Who Is This Man? by Lisa Ryan
On Tuesday, Stormy Daniels’s attorney released a sketch of the man who allegedly threatened the adult-film star in an attempt to keep her from discussing her affair with President Donald Trump. The incident apparently went down in 2011, when Daniels was standing at her car in a parking lot and a man she didn’t know approached her. He allegedly said, “Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.” Daniels also claimed that the man said of her daughter in the backseat, “That’s a beautiful girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.”
Threatening someone, particularly a mother and her child, and causing them to fear for their lives is absolutely no laughing matter. However, Daniels’s sketch and description of the man — he’s between 5’9” and 6 feet tall, is in his 30s to early 40s, has some light facial hair, and is “lean but fit” — seems to fit, well, every generic white male celebrity. So internet sleuths (by that we mean, Twitter users) have come to some hilarious conclusions about the man’s identity:
Don’t forget that Hunter is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a great evening!