Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Interceptor7, Magnifico, annetteboardman and Besame. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Man Oh Man, wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, 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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The Intercept
LAST NOVEMBER, REPORTS that a pair of U.S. Border Patrol agents had been attacked with rocks at a desolate spot in West Texas made news around the country. The agents were found injured and unconscious at the bottom of a culvert off Interstate 10. Agent Rogelio Martinez soon died from his injuries. Early reports in right-wing media outlets such as Breitbart suggested that the perpetrators were undocumented immigrants, and President Donald Trump quickly embraced the narrative to bolster his campaign for a border wall.
To people familiar with the harsh terrain and the habits of undocumented border crossers, however, the news made little sense. Why would immigrants seeking entry to the U.S. hang out in the middle of nowhere, miles from the border, waiting to randomly attack law enforcement officers?
It was four months before the FBI concluded its investigation and determined that the most likely cause of Martinez’s death was an accidental fall. Meanwhile, media outlets across the political spectrum repeated statistics showing a sharp upward trend in the number of assaults against Border Patrol agents even as the number of undocumented immigrants apprehended while crossing the southern border has dropped.
US NEWS
Bloomberg
The U.S. softened its position on sanctions against Russian metals giant United Co. Rusal, sparking a record plunge in aluminum prices.
For the first time, the U.S. Treasury discussed a path for lifting the sanctions on Rusal, saying it would provide relief if
Oleg Deripaska relinquished control. It also extended the deadline for companies to wind down dealings with the Russian aluminum producer by almost five months.
Rusal petitioned to be removed from the sanctions list and Treasury granted the extension while it considers the appeal, according to a statement from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
“Rusal has felt the impact of U.S. sanctions because of its entanglement with Oleg Deripaska, but the U.S. government is not targeting the hardworking people who depend on Rusal and its subsidiaries,” Mnuchin said.
Bloomberg
Vinod Khosla is used to playing long odds on some of the startups he backs. Now, the billionaire venture capitalist is using a similar approach for another project: a legal battle over public access to his beach south of San Francisco.
Khosla, 63, believes he has the right to cut off the lone road to the waterfront at Martins Beach, a property he paid $32.5 million for a decade ago. State law says the public owns all coastline on the ocean side of the mean high tide line. Khosla says he shouldn't have to open up his private land without compensation to allow passage to the cove, which is buttressed by cliffs and impossible to reach otherwise except by water.
By the time he shut the gate in late 2009, surfers had been hitting the waves at Martins Beach for decades. When he cut off their access, a stream of lawsuits followed.
The Guardian
Authorities have captured the gunman suspected of killing four during an attack on a Waffle House restaurant in Nashville on Sunday. The suspect was apprehended in a wooded area.
“Murder suspect Travis Reinking is in custody. Arrested moments ago,” the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department tweeted on Monday afternoon.
Reinking had been on the run since the early hours of Sunday after a customer at the Waffle House restaurant he attacked had wrestled him for the gun and he had fled half naked.
Reinking, 29, was believed to have grabbed another gun and was being hunted by federal, state and local law enforcement before being apprehended.
The Guardian
Police in Alabama wrestled a black woman to the ground, leaving her topless, and threatened to break her arm after they were called to a Waffle House for what her mother said was a dispute over paying for plastic utensils.
Video shows Chikesia Clemons being forced to the ground and handcuffed by two officers while a third leans over her during the incident in the early hours of Sunday in the Mobile suburb of Saraland.
All three are white men. One officer briefly puts a hand on her neck. Her top slips as the officers turn her over while she is lying on the floor, exposing her breasts.
“What did I do wrong?” Clemons asks in the cellphone video taken by her friend, Canita Adams, which does not show the full encounter. “I’m about to break your arm, that’s what I’m about to do,” one of the officers says. One pulls out what appears to be a stun gun.
The Guardian
The lead poisoning crisis that swept Flint was, for a time, expected to fell Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan. But the start of criminal trials of those deemed responsible for the disaster has stirred outrage in Flint at the prospect that the governor will pay no price for what happened on his watch.
Neither Snyder, nor any of his closest aides, are among the 15 people identified by Michigan attorney general Bill Schuette as being criminally responsible for allowing lead to leech into Flint’s drinking water in April 2014 and failing to deal with its deadly consequences.
Wednesday will be four years since Flint’s water switched to the Flint river, without lead corrosion controls, prompting the public health crisis.
“No one is above the law, not on my watch,” Schuette, who is running to replace term-limited Snyder this year, has vowed. But no crime has been been established against the governor, Schuette stressed.
NPR
A new exhibit that opens Monday at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum aims to honor a founding mission.
Five years in the making, "Americans and the Holocaust" contextualizes attitudes in the U.S. during 1930s and '40s persecution and mass murder of Jews in Europe.
Twenty-five years ago, when the building opened, noted Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel introduced the museum not as an answer to the horrors of genocide but to pose a glaring question: How could this happen?
The American responses "must and will be explored thoroughly and honestly," Wiesel said in a 1979 address before President Jimmy Carter, who had tasked a commission, chaired by Wiesel, with recommending an appropriate memorial for the 6 million lives lost.
Vox
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are potentially meeting in just two months — and a flurry of weekend activity was a reminder of how frenzied the last-minute preparations for a historic face-to-face are likely to be.
On Friday, Kim announced his country would no longer test nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles, which he used to threaten the world for much of 2017. Kim said his country didn’t need to conduct more tests because he already knows how effective they are — which is scary.
[...]
“From April 21, North Korea will stop nuclear tests and launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency reported Kim decreeing. “The North will shut down a nuclear test site in the country’s northern side to prove the vow to suspend nuclear test.”
Now, it seems, Kim feels satisfied his weapons are sufficiently powerful, but there is some mystery as to why. One possibility is that he now knows the strength of his weapons arsenal. Conducting more tests wouldn’t tell him more than he already knows, but it wouldanger the US and its key regional allies South Korea and Japan — and he may think the gain doesn’t outweigh the risk.
[...]
Second, the US-led campaign to impose increasingly strong economic and diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang — through stringent sanctions and global isolation — may have taken its toll. North Korea is an extremely impoverished country, but it spends about 22 percent of its funds to bankroll the military. Meanwhile, North Koreans live on about $1,700 a year.
[...]
And finally, Kim has an important meeting with Moon, South Korea’s president, on Thursday. Both leaders will negotiate — and potentially sign — a peace treaty to end the Korean War. That conflict ended in an armistice in 1953, not a peace treaty, so the Koreas technically remain at war.
All parties to that war — including China and the United States — must sign a peace treaty for it to officially end, says Charles Armstrong, a professor of Korean history at Columbia University. Promising not to test any more weapons might make the Kim-Moon summit at the inter-Korean border a little calmer.
Reuters
Bush, 93, was admitted to Houston Methodist Hospital on Sunday, spokesman Jim McGrath said in a statement. Bush was seen in a wheelchair on Saturday at the funeral of his wife, the former U.S. first lady, who died last Tuesday. The two had been married for 73 years.
“He is responding to treatments and appears to be recovering,” McGrath said in a statement.
Bush, the country’s oldest living ex-president, served a single term in the Oval Office from 1989 through 1993. He was admitted to the same hospital about a year ago for a cough that was later diagnosed as a mild case of pneumonia, McGrath said at the time.
WORLD NEWS
BuzzFeed News
As you probably already know, there's a new royal baby in the world!
Agence France Presse
Yemen's Huthi rebels on Monday accused the Saudi-led coalition of killing their political leader, Saleh al-Sammad, in an air strike last week.
Sammad, head of the Huthis' supreme political council, was "martyred" in the eastern province of Hodeida on Thursday, the Iran-allied rebels said in a statement published via their Saba news agency.
His death comes as a major blow to the Shiite rebels who since March 2015 have been fighting pro-government forces backed by a military coalition led by Saudi Arabia.
"This crime won’t go unanswered," warned the Huthis' overall leader, Abdul Malek al-Huthi.
Agence France Presse
French President Emmanuel Macron began a pomp-filled three-day state visit to Washington on Monday, a test of whether his studied bonhomie with President Donald Trump can save the Iran nuclear deal and avoid a trans-Atlantic trade war.
Macron will get the full red carpet treatment -- payback for wooing Trump with military parades and a dazzling Eiffel Tower dinner in Paris last July.
The French leader arrived at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington and said he was looking forward to the "very important" visit.
Symbolically, he will roll into the White House from Lafayette Square -- named after the storied French general who fought in America's war for independence -- beneath dozens of fluttering tricolor French flags and a full US military color guard.
Al Jazeera
Armenia’s newly elected prime minister has resigned following days of protests against his government, according to the politician's website.
In the past 10 days, thousands of anti-government protesters took to the streets in the capital, Yerevan, accusing Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan of corruption and authoritarian rule.
On Monday, Sargsyan said he would adhere to the demands of the protesters and step down.
"[Opposition leader] Nikol Pashinyan was right. I was wrong. This situation requires solutions, but I won't participate in them. I leave the post of this country's prime minister," a statement on Sargsyan's website said.
"The movement on the streets is against my office. I will fulfil your claim," according to the statement.
Deutsche Welle
When French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel meet President Donald Trump in the White House within days of each other, it represents the most high profile European push yet to try to convince him to remain in the Iran nuclear accord, which he has repeatedly branded as the "worst deal ever."
The Franco-German charm offensive is certainly the most visible effort to prevent the Trump administration from pulling out of the deal which was signed in 2015. But it is only the tip of the iceberg.
Negotiations have been and are ongoing between the so-called E3 group, Germany, France and Britain, and the US to reach an agreement that would satisfy the demands the president made in his January 12 ultimatum when he last waived sanctions against Iran. Last week, hundreds of European legislators last week wrote an open letter urging the US Congress to support the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran nuclear accord is officially called.
Deutsche Welle
Angela Merkel's statement on Monday came against the backdrop of Germany's accepting 10,000 asylum seekers the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) has deemed particularly in need of protection. The chancellor characterized this as an attempt to open up legal avenues to Germany for refugees — to prevent practices such as human trafficking.
"Our goal is to prevent illegal migration and to replace it with legal migration," Merkel told reporters as she welcomed UN High Commissioner on Refugees Filippo Grandi to Berlin for consultations.
Migration is a divisive issue in German politics as a whole and within Angela Merkel's parliamentary party. Many of her conservative colleagues insist that the country enforce a hard cap of 220,000 people allowed to enter the country annually. The UN refugees will count toward that number.
NPR
Nine people have been killed and another 16 injured after a white van struck pedestrians in the North York area of Toronto. The driver was located and arrested, said police.
"This is going to be a long investigation," said Toronto Police Service Deputy Chief Peter Yuen at an afternoon news briefing.
It's unclear why the driver of the van collided with people and the police service has not yet released a statement on the motive or cause. "When we have more information we will tweet it out," it tweeted.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
The Guardian
As a test location for a project that aims to ensure the livability of Earth, a frozen lake near the northern tip of Alaska could seem rather inauspicious.
While the North Meadow Lake near Utqiaġvik, formerly known as Barrow, may be relatively nondescript, it will be the staging ground this month for an ambitious attempt to safeguard the Arctic’s rapidly diminishing sea ice and stave off the most punishing effects of global warming.
Tiny spheres of reflective sand will be sprinkled upon the lake to see if this can prevent the lake ice from melting or slow the process down. Should testing prove successful, the project, called Ice911, has the grand vision of slathering around 19,000 sq miles of sea ice – equivalent to the size of Costa Rica – with trillions of sand grains in order to stem the loss of ice cover and prevent runaway climate change.
Climate Central
The cost of solar has dropped dramatically in recent years. Even including installation and hardware, the cost of residential solar energy has been cut in half since the start of the decade. Utility and commercial scale solar is even less expensive.
Job growth in solar is soaring, with more than 370,000 Americans working in the solar energy industry, an increase of 300 percent since 2012. Correspondingly, the total amount of solar generated in the U.S. has skyrocketed over the last decade from 1.1 gigawatts in 2007 to 47.1 gigawatts last year.
Al Jazeera
When Evgeny first heard that Russia's communications censor Roskomnadzor was going to block the popular messenger app Telegram, it brought to mind a Soviet-era slogan. The Communist Party said: "It must be done!" The Komsomol - the party's youth wing - responded: "Aye!"
Policies today get applied without much deliberation, just like Soviet times, he explained. "It feels as though it's a bunch of ignorant people who don't understand anything, who did not consult any experts, that did this," said Evgeny, who requested that his second name not be mentioned for fear of intimidation by the authorities.
On April 16, Roskomnadzor started trying to block Telegram after what it said was the company's failure to comply with a Russian law on dissemination of information. But by the time the censor told mobile operators to limit access to the app's services, Evgeny and the team of the start-up he works for had already set up a proxy service to ensure that internal communications chats and their company Telegram channel continued to work smoothly. He said he and his team would not give up using the app.
The Guardian (4/20/2018)
The Texas hornshell is a sleek green-grey mussel that once thrived in the Rio Grande watershed, its habitat stretching from southern New Mexico down into the arid Texas borderlands. Some of its habitat happens to overlap with rich deposits of oil and gas.
Amid a long-term decline in its range, the Obama administration in 2016 proposed to declare the mussel an endangered species. Upon taking office, however, the Trump administration changed tack.
A top interior department official, Vincent DeVito, appears to take credit for helping to delay federal protections for the species at the behest of fossil-fuel industry groups, one of several examples of his willingness to prioritize the needs of extractive industries with business before the government, according to public records obtained by the Guardian and Pacific Standard as well as Documented and the Western Values Project, both watchdog groups.
DeVito, a Boston energy lawyer and the former co-chair of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in Massachusetts, is a little-known figure in the US government. He is one of a host of political appointees hired by Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary whose department oversees well over 400m acres of public land and can determine the fate of species that inhabit them.
NPR
Long before it lands on a restaurant menu, Chilean sea bass takes quite a journey to arrive on land. To catch these deep-sea dwellers, fishers usually drag nets along the ocean floor a quarter of a mile, or more, beneath the ocean's surface �— a form of fishing called bottom trawling.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization tries to keep tabs on bottom trawling, which rakes in juvenile fish and lots of other ocean species that are not the desired catch, depleting future fish stocks. It asks member countries to adhere to quotas and report fishing statistics.
But recent research, published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, suggests that millions of tons of fish caught in deep-water trawl nets have gone unreported in the last 50 years.
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS
The Guardian
Canadian singer Shania Twain has apologised for an “awkward” remark quoted in a Guardian interview, in which she said she would have voted for Trump if she could have.
On Twitter on Sunday, she said the question caught her off guard and she regrets her answer. “I am passionately against discrimination of any kind and hope it’s clear from the choices I have made, and the people I stand with, that I do not hold any common moral beliefs with the current president.”
In the profile, the singer candidly discussed her divorce from long-time collaborator Robert “Mutt” Lange as well as her traumatic upbringing, which included being sexually and physically abused by her stepfather.
But towards the end of the article, she was asked about the US election and said she “would have voted for [Trump] because, even though he was offensive, he seemed honest”.
DOCTOR RJ has a post up.