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 featureon 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.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
BBC
The US Department of Justice says it is expanding an internal inquiry after President Donald Trump suggested the FBI "infiltrated" his 2016 campaign.
The department said on Monday it will look for any "political motivation" in its own inquiry into alleged Russian election meddling in the US.
Mr Trump later backed the move after meeting top justice and FBI officials at the White House.
He is angry that a confidential source was used during the investigation.
And he has said he wants to know whether member of the Obama team ordered such a move.
What does the new expanded probe involve?
Department of Justice spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores said on Monday the agency's inspector general would "expand the ongoing review" of its applications to snoop on former Trump election campaign adviser Carter Page.
US NEWS
Bloomberg
A divided U.S. Supreme Court ruled that employers can force workers to use individual arbitration instead of class-action lawsuits to press legal claims. The decision potentially limits the rights of tens of millions of employees.
The justices, voting 5-4 along ideological lines, said for the first time Monday that a 1925 federal law lets employers enforce arbitration agreements signed by workers, even if they bar group claims. The majority rejected contentions that a separate law guarantees workers the right to join forces in pressing claims.
The ruling builds on previous Supreme Court decisions that let companies channel disputes with consumers and other businesses into arbitration. The latest decision applies directly to wage-and-hour claims, and its reasoning might let employers avoid class action job-discrimination suits as well.
Bloomberg
Big investors are starting to take a deeper look at the people who handle their money as the #MeToo movement rages. One of Silicon Valley’s top wealth-management firms just showed what can happen next.
Iconiq Capital, known for catering to Silicon Valley royalty including Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, fired its head of real estate, John Sauter, in February after a background check by a potential investor unearthed a charge for sexually assaulting a woman almost three decades ago, according to people familiar with the matter. The court handling the case had ordered it expunged, but Iconiq executives worried keeping him would hurt relations with clients, one of the people said.
Reuters
SANTA FE, Texas (Reuters) - Mourners knelt before white wooden crosses on Monday outside the Texas high school where 10 people were killed in the fourth deadly U.S. school shooting this year, an image recalling similar gatherings following February’s Florida school massacre.
A crowd of a few dozen people, including student survivors of the attack, family members, chaplains and police gathered outside the school to observe a 10 a.m. CT (1500 GMT) moment of silence called for by Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
In contrast to Florida, where the deaths of 17 teens and educators sparked a youth-led movement calling for new restrictions on gun ownership, the Texas tragedy saw elected officials and survivors alike voicing support for gun rights.
Abbott, who noted that the 17-year-old accused of the attack appeared to used weapons legally owned by his father in the Friday attack at Santa Fe High School, was due to begin a series of roundtable meetings with parents, educators and other officials on improving school safety.
Reuters
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Barack Obama and wife Michelle Obama will produce films and series for Netflix Inc, the streaming service said on Monday, giving the former first family a powerful media platform to shape their post-White House legacy.
Under the name Higher Ground Productions, the Obamas have the options to produce scripted and unscripted series, documentaries and feature films, Netflix said in a statement.
Terms of the multi-year deal were not disclosed and Netflix did not say when Obama-produced content will be released or give any specific content plans.
The agreement with Netflix, which boasts some 125 million subscribers worldwide, will give the Obamas a voice outside of the traditional public speaking, books and charity work that recent ex-presidents have relied on.
NPR
In the early days of the Iraq War, troops were riding around in Humvees with almost no armor on them. There was a scandal about it, and within a few years the trucks got up-armored with thick steel plates, which solved one problem but created another.
"Some genius thought about up-armoring. Good! But they didn't do anything with the brake systems," says George Wilmot, who was riding an armored Humvee in 2009, leaving a hilltop base in Mosul.
"We took some small arms fire ... my driver took us off a cliff," says Wilmot.
Wilmot was thrown free from the gunner's turret as the Humvee tumbled. He survived, but with a brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder and a left arm that still looks sewn-on. The Department of Veterans Affairs rates him 100 percent disabled. George gets lost easily, forgets things — like a pot on the stove — and he falls down hard sometimes, without warning. His wife, Jenn, hasn't been able to work outside the home because caring for George is a full-time job.
Vox
The Trump administration’s biggest obstacle to scaling up deportations of unauthorized immigrants is the massive backlog in immigration courts: Almost 700,000 immigrants are waiting to have their cases decided before the government can deport them.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions says he wants to fix the court backlog, but he’s just issued a policy that could add to it. Sessions opened the door to potentially reopening 350,000 deportation cases the government previously agreed to close.
Sessions’s decision was issued in the form of a ruling on an individual immigration court case, one that the Board of Immigration Appeals (the semi-appellate body for immigration court) had already ordered the judge to reopen.
But Sessions referred the case to himself for further review — something he’s done with increasing frequency over the past several months — and issued a broad ruling that goes beyond the fate of the one immigrant involved in the case: a decree that immigration judges don’t have the authority to remove cases from the docket, even when government prosecutors are the ones asking to close the case.
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
Global stock markets mostly rose Monday after the US and China said they had agreed to hold off imposing tariffs, averting a damaging trade war at least for now.
London stocks ended the session with a gain of 1.0 percent and Paris closed 0.4 percent higher, while Frankfurt was shut for a public holiday.
The Milan stock market however dropped 1.5 percent, amid concerns that Italy is inching towards becoming the first EU founding member to have a eurosceptic government.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Wall Street was in positive territory, with the Dow Jones gaining more than one percent.
After high-level talks in Washington, economic superpowers China and the United States revealed a deal had been hammered out, ending months of tension that had sent financial markets into a spin.
Agence France Presse
Zimbabwe has applied to rejoin the Commonwealth, the group said Monday, marking a major step in the country's international re-engagement after Robert Mugabe was ousted last year.
Mugabe angrily pulled Zimbabwe out of the bloc of former British colonies in 2003 after its membership was suspended over violent and graft-ridden elections the previous year.
The Commonwealth said it had received a letter dated May 15 from Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa applying to re-join.
Member countries "very much look forward to Zimbabwe’s return when the conditions are right," said Secretary-General Patricia Scotland in a statement from London.
Deutsche Welle
Giuseppe Conte has been chosen by a coalition of two populist parties as its pick to be Italy's next prime minister. The move could set Italy on a collision course with the EU.
Giuseppe Conte, a 54-year-old law professor and something of a political novice, was named as the pick to be Italy's next prime minister by Five Star Movement (M5S) leader Luigi Di Maio.
Conte, who was born in the southern province of Foggia and has never been elected to parliament, comes from the M5S side of the coalition.
The now likely coalition government in Rome made up of the M5S and League parties is on a possible collision course with other EU member states after it announced spending plans likely to increase the country's already towering public debt.
Al Jazeera
Tehran, Iran - On Monday, Mike Pompeo is expected to chart a new course for the Trump administration's Iran policy after it pulled out of the 2015 nuclear deal earlier this month.
The new US secretary of state is likely to propose fresh talks with Iran for a more comprehensive agreement - in keeping with US President Donald Trump's stance - to replace the existing Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
That will mean including provisions in the deal to curb Iran's ballistic missile programme and mechanisms to force Iran to pull back support for its allies in the Middle East and disengage from the region's conflicts.
But as far as the Islamic Republic is concerned, there is nothing to renegotiate.
Al Jazeera
Syria's army has pushed the last ISIL fighters out of the al-Hajar al-Aswad district south of Damascus, Syrian state TV said on Monday.
The Syrian army and its allies have been battling Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) fighters for weeks to recapture a tiny enclave in al-Hajar al-Aswad and the adjacent Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, the last area outside government control in or around the capital.
State TV broadcast footage of the shattered area and said air strikes "were targeting the last terrorist remnants" in the area after reporting earlier that a temporary humanitarian ceasefire had been in place since Sunday night.
The Guardian
Livingstone’s resignation comes a little more than a week after Labour’s shadow attorney general, Shami Chakrabarti, said he should leave or be expelled.
The former director of the human rights group, Liberty, who authored a report on dealing with antisemitism and racism in the Labour party, told the BBC’s Sunday Politics she found it “very difficult to see that any rational decision-maker in the light of what has happened in the last two years could find a place for Mr Livingstone in our party at this moment”.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central (5/16/2018)
Normal temperatures, generally defined to be the 30-year average at a location, are trending up across most of the U.S. Since 1980, the average continental U.S. temperature has risen 1.4°F. In our analysis of normal temperatures in 244 cities across the country, 94 percent have risen, providing more evidence of the long-term warming trend on our planet.
The warming signals a new normal not just for our temperatures, but for the composition of our oceans and our atmosphere. In a recurring theme, Arctic sea ice is again at an exceptionally low level for this time of the year, with the lowest April level in the satellite era in the Bering Sea, just west of Alaska. There was enough open water over the winter to allow heavy surf to flood coastal homes in Alaska, where an ice-covered sea is normally in place to protect the shore.
The warming is fueled by the ongoing increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — primarily from the burning of fossil fuels. In April, CO2 passed another milestone when the monthly average concentration reached 410 parts per million for the first time in the pristine air at the top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii, where scientists conduct measurements. Concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has now climbed more than 30 percent in the 60 years of observations there.
Agence France Presse
The world's largest amphibians, giant Chinese salamanders, were once thought to be widespread but now face imminent extinction due to illegal poaching and hunting as a luxury food, researchers said Monday.
"The overexploitation of these incredible animals for human consumption has had a catastrophic effect on their numbers in the wild over an amazingly short time span," said co-author Samuel Turvey, a researcher at the Zoological Society of London.
"Unless coordinated conservation measures are put in place as a matter of urgency, the future of the world's largest amphibian is in serious jeopardy."
Vast surveys were conducted in 2013 and 2016 at river sites where the critically endangered salamanders -- the size of small alligators and weighing some 140 pounds (64 kilograms) -- are known to live.
The Guardian
Clean modern homes, antiseptic wipes and the understandable desire to protect small babies against any infection are all part of the cause of the most common form of childhood cancer, a leading expert has concluded after more than 30 years of research.
Childhood acute leukaemia, says the highly respected Prof Mel Greaves, is nothing to do with power lines or nuclear fuel reprocessing stations. Nor is it to do with hot dogs and hamburgers or the Vatican radio mast, as have also been suggested. After the best part of a century of speculation, some of it with little basis in science, Greaves – who recently won the Royal Society’s prestigious Royal Medal – says the cancer is caused by a combination of genetic mutations and a lack of childhood infection.
The best news, says Greaves, is that the cancer is likely to be preventable. And part of the answer could be to ensure children under the age of one have social contact with others, possibly at daycare centres.
The Guardian
Humankind is revealed as simultaneously insignificant and utterly dominant in the grand scheme of life on Earth by a groundbreaking new assessment of all life on the planet.
The world’s 7.6 billion people represent just 0.01% of all living things, according to the study. Yet since the dawn of civilisation, humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants, while livestock kept by humans abounds.
The new work is the first comprehensive estimate of the weight of every class of living creature and overturns some long-held assumptions. Bacteria are indeed a major life form – 13% of everything – but plants overshadow everything, representing 82% of all living matter. All other creatures, from insects to fungi, to fish and animals, make up just 5% of the world’s biomass.
The Guardian
A permanent visitor from interstellar space has been found in our solar system, astronomers studying an asteroid orbiting our sun have revealed.
While collisions with Earth by comets and asteroids from within our solar system are thought to have brought organic material and water necessary for life to emerge, experts say the latest discovery suggests bodies from beyond the solar system might have also have played a role.
“It would be very interesting to go and observe it more and understand its composition,” said lead author Dr Fathi Namouni from the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur.
“Before [the discovery of this asteroid], we only had to work to explain solar system phenomena with the objects that are in the solar system and thought to be part of the solar system all the time,” he said. “Now we have new sources of material that actually influenced the solar system – and so the solar system did not grow up in isolation.”
NPR
Health workers have unsheathed their experimental new weapon against the Ebola virus in the northwest reaches of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. On Monday, the World Health Organization, together with local and international partners, began administering Ebola vaccinations in the region, where at least 49 suspected cases have been reported since early April and at least 26 people are believed to have died.
More than 7,500 doses of the rVSV-ZEBOV — which is still unlicensed — are now available in the country and 8,000 additional doses will be available soon, according to WHO. Health workers in the bustling port city of Mbandaka and the remote village of Bikoro have already begun to receive their vaccines.
NPR
Lava from the Kilauea volcano is pouring into the Pacific Ocean off of Hawaii's Big Island, generating a plume of "laze" – which Hawaii County officials describe as hydrochloric acid and steam with fine glass particles — into the air. Officials say it's one more reason to avoid the area.
"Health hazards of laze include lung damage, and eye and skin irritation," says the Hawaii County Civil Defense agency. "Be aware that the laze plume travels with the wind and can change direction without warning."
The U.S. Coast Guard is monitoring the area to help keep people away from the coast; the county says that "only permitted tour boats are allowed in the area.”
ROYAL WEDDING ODDS AND ENDS
The Guardian
It’s almost a British tradition: waking up on the Monday after a frantic wedding weekend, once the fog of Sunday’s hangover has cleared, you can finally face looking back through social media feeds to see if your hazy recollections can really be true.
And after a royal wedding, a whole nation can join in the fun of recalling the odder moments during the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle.
1. The commoners DID get catering after all
Much fanfare was made of the 1,200 “commoners” invited to the wedding, albeit only at arm’s length and having to provide their own picnic food. They did get a goody bag though, which included a souvenir programme, a fridge magnet, a bottle of water, a chocolate coin, and a 20% discount voucher for the Windsor Castle gift shop.
[...]
3. Meghan cousin’s less sensible club night
Meghan Markle’s cousin Tyler Dooley had an eventful weekend, which culminated with reports that he was barred from entering a club in London for carrying a knife.
He reportedly told a bystander it was for protection: “I just brought it because Donald Trump said London was like a war zone.”
Dooley, from Oregon, had already hit headlines before the wedding for announcing he would be marketing a new brand of cannabis in the US, called Markle’s Sparkle.