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.
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US NEWS
Bloomberg
Donald Trump’s regular attacks on the U.S. Justice Department, including accusations that the FBI spied on his campaign, strike some critics as “boiling the frog” -- seeing how far he can push his fight against a federal investigation ensnaring his administration.
Trump’s taken a series of provocative steps since Special Counsel Robert Mueller began a probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election a year ago, from accusing the investigators of being politically motivated, to declaring that a spy was embedded in his campaign for political reasons and demanding an investigation.
He keeps up the pressure almost daily,
tweeting on Sunday, for example, about “13 Angry Democrats” working on Mueller’s team, and a “Rigged Investigation!”
Agence France Presse
Ivanka Trump is facing an online backlash for tweeting what one critic called a "tone deaf" photo of herself cuddling her son as outrage grows over a federal government policy to separate the children of undocumented migrants from their parents.
The eldest daughter of President Donald Trump, who serves as an advisor to her father, posted the picture of her with her son on Sunday, with the caption: "My <3! #SundayMorning."
Critics were quick to point to a "zero tolerance" policy announced earlier this month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that authorizes border security agents to take away the children of people who enter the United States unlawfully.
The Guardian
The call to prayer bounces off the walls of the Hamtramck Islamic centre, punctuated by the sipping of lemon juice and the chewing of dates. It’s 8.53pm, the sun has set, and around 100 Yemeni-American men and boys sit cross-legged on the carpet, giving thanks and breaking fast for the seventh time this month.
“It’s like gaining a new life,” says Arif Huskic, a Bosnian-Muslim interfaith leader who has come to pray here. “In submitting to God we’re testing ourselves.”
A hundred meters down the road, in this small Michigan city’s hottest new restaurant, an alert is sent to Tharia Begum’s iPhone. Her Muslim Pro app informs her group of six Bengali-American girlfriends, all college students in their early 20s, that it’s time to sip chai and demolish the plates of chicken sheesh and tabouli ready and waiting in front of them.
“The first day is hard,” says 21-year-old Amina Ahmed. “But the second day, it’s like a boulder’s been dropped on you. It gets easier the deeper you go into the month.”
The Guardian
The US government secured a criminal conviction against Purdue Pharma in the mid-2000s but failed to curb sales of the drug after Giuliani reached a deal to avoid a bar on Purdue doing business.
The US government missed the opportunity to curb sales of the drug that kickstarted the opioid epidemic when it secured the only criminal conviction against the maker of OxyContin a decade ago.
Purdue Pharma hired Rudolph Giuliani, the former New York mayor and now Donald Trump’s lawyer, to head off a federal investigation in the mid-2000s into the company’s marketing of the powerful prescription painkiller at the centre of an epidemic estimated to have claimed at least 300,000 lives.
While Giuliani was not able to prevent the criminal conviction over Purdue’s fraudulent claims for OxyContin’s safety and effectiveness, he was able to reach a deal to avoid a bar on Purdue doing business with the federal government which would have killed a large part of the multibillion-dollar market for the drug.
The former New York mayor also secured an agreement that greatly restricted further prosecution of the pharmaceutical company and kept its senior executives out of prison.
BuzzFeed News
An air-force veteran and current Maryland National Guard member, Eddison Alexander Hermond, 39, was swept away in Sunday's devastating flash floods in Ellicott City, Maryland, officials said.
Long-term friend Joseph Lopez, who knows Hermond through the airforce, told CNN that he was at a restaurant when the water began to rise and that he left the restaurant to help a woman with a cat carrier trying to cross the waters.
“We're all yelling at him to stop, come back,” said Lopez on CNN. “The current runs him into the river and he floats away.”
Shop owners also told Bonnie Hoppa, 31, a Navy veteran who helped put together a Facebook post about Hermond's disappearance, that they saw him trying to cross the waters.
Reuters
Black leaders who are advising Starbucks Corp (SBUX.O) on its anti-bias training program, which begins Tuesday, hope it will reinvigorate decades-old efforts to ensure minorities get equal treatment in restaurants and stores, setting an example for other corporations.
Starbucks committed to the training after a Philadelphia cafe manager’s call to police resulted in the arrests of two black men who were waiting for a friend. The arrests sparked protests and accusations of racial profiling at the coffee chain known for its liberal stances on social issues such as same-sex marriage.
Anti-bias training is intended to get participants to recognize their own unconscious biases and avoid unintentional discrimination.
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
Italy's president on Monday named a former IMF economist as caretaker prime minister to lead the country into new elections, possibly as soon as the autumn, after a political storm whipped up by the collapse of a populist bid for government.
The eurozone's third largest economy lurched into a fresh crisis on Sunday when President Sergio Mattarella vetoed the nomination of fierce eurosceptic Paolo Savona as economy minister in a planned coalition of the far-right League party and anti-establishment Five Star Movement.
The parties' approved nominee for prime minister, lawyer and political novice Giuseppe Conte, stepped aside following the decision to reject Savona, crashing the proposed government after nearly three months of convoluted horse-trading.
Agence France Presse
EU foreign ministers on Monday agreed to "swiftly" adopt new sanctions against Venezuelan officials involved in Nicolas Maduro's re-election, which they said "lacked any credibility".
At a regular meeting in Brussels, ministers from the 28 EU states gave their approval for work to start so that the sanctions can be formally imposed in June.
The move comes after the European Union said last week it would consider fresh measures because the election failed to comply with "minimum international standards" and there were "numerous reported irregularities".
"The EU will act swiftly, according to established procedures, with the aim of imposing additional targeted and reversible restrictive measures, that do not harm the Venezuelan population, whose plight the EU wishes to alleviate," the ministers said in their formal agreement on the move.
Al Jazeera
Two boats are set to sail from the Gaza Strip in a bid to break an Israeli-imposed 11-year siege which has prevented medical supplies from getting into the coastal enclave and patients from leaving.
Scheduled to set off on Tuesday morning, the vessels will attempt to carry a group of approximately 30 people, including protesters wounded in weeks-long demonstrations along the Gaza Strip fence with Israel.
Palestinians have been rallying since March 30 to call for the right of return for refugees to the homes and villages they were forcibly expelled from in 1948. Israeli forces have killed at least 120 Palestinians in the coastal enclave and wounded at least 13,000 people since the protests began.
Al Jazeera
Grace Lloyd got a round of applause when she walked into her classroom at Doha's Gulf English School on the first day of Ramadan, wearing a black hijab with her blue uniform.
The shy 11-year-old flushed as her fellow grade seven classmates in the Qatari capital clapped and cheered for her earlier this month.
Lloyd, a British Christian, will be covering her head for the entire duration of the holy month this year in solidarity with Muslim women who face discrimination for wearing the hijab.
"I feel very strongly about this," said Lloyd, the youngest participant of the 30-day Ramadan hijab challenge, a yearly initiative by the non-profit World Hijab Day (WHD) organisation, inviting women of all faiths to wear the headscarf for a month.
"I usually wear the black one, I feel more comfortable with it because all the people in my class wear it too," she told Al Jazeera, adding she might try a different colour later in the month.
The Guardian
As an undocumented migrant in France, Mamoudou Gassama knew it was best to keep his head down, to not draw attention to himself.
But when he spotted a young child dangling from the balcony of a fourth-floor Paris flat he felt he had to act.
In that split second, Gassama, 22, did not think of himself or the threat of discovery and deportation back to Mali.
Instead, in an extraordinary feat of strength and bravery that has earned him the nickname “Le Spider-Man”, he pulled himself up from balcony to balcony, before lifting the crying four-year-old to safety.
On Monday, after the video footage went viral and Gassama was hailed a hero, attention quickly turned to his status as one of the country’s many migrants sans papiers (without papers), who have no official access to housing or jobs, and no right to remain in France.
Washington Post
SEOUL — In the tug-of-war between the United States and North Korea over the tentative summit in Singapore, South Korean President Moon Jae-in is the man in the precarious middle, trying to broker a high-stakes meeting between two unconventional leaders.
Moon’s role as a mediator came into sharp focus in the past week, after President Trump canceled the summit in a letter to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
As Kim sought to reopen talks, he turned to Moon. In less than 24 hours, Moon’s motorcade snaked through traffic to cross the demilitarized zone for a meeting.
Then, on Sunday, U.S. officials crossed the DMZ into North Korea for talks to prepare for the potential June 12 summit, even as its fate remained uncertain.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Reuters
Subtropical Storm Alberto weakened as it neared landfall on the Florida Panhandle on Monday, a day after flooding from another storm tore through a historic Maryland town and swept away a would-be rescuer, officials said.
Alberto’s top winds fell slightly to 60 miles an hour (96 km per hour) with the storm about 50 miles (80 kph) south of Panama City, Florida, the National Weather Service said. It was expected to reach land Monday afternoon or evening as it headed north at about 8 mph (13 kph).
Forecasters said Alberto could bring life-threatening high water to southern coastal states when it slams an area from Mississippi to western Georgia with up to 12 inches (30 cm) of rain and possible tornadoes.
Climate Central (5/23/2018)
In a warming world, a supercharged water cycle ramps up evaporation and precipitation. Warmer air creates higher evaporation rates from the soil, which worsens drought, stresses water supplies, and hampers agriculture. Evaporation of surface waters, such as lakes and oceans, also increases. A warmer atmosphere can hold more water before becoming saturated, so more water is available to come down as heavy precipitation during storms. This heavier precipitation can result in more flooding, causing property damage and sending additional pollutants into waterways.
While a persistent weather pattern can lead to dry and wet periods, the background climate can make them more severe. Early research suggests that the warming Arctic may play a role in changing jet stream fluctuations that can lead to these more stagnant weather patterns (the research community is hard at work on this issue). The amount of precipitation in the highest one percent of daily rainfall is increasing in the U.S., with the the largest increases east of the Rockies. In the West, even though a relatively modest increase in the amount of precipitation has been recorded during the heaviest downpours, the bigger story is that droughts are getting more intense over the past century.
Deutsche Welle
Indian officials have ordered the closure of the nation's second-largest copper smelting plant, owned by UK-based Vedanta, due to fears of pollution. Police killed 13 people in recent protests aimed at closing the plant.
The controversial copper plant in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu was permanently sealed on Monday, less than a week after security forces opened fire on demonstrators who claimed the smelting site was polluting air and ground water.
State authorities said the decision to close the plant was made in the "larger public interest."
The facility in the port town of Thoothukudi is the second-largest of its kind in India, with an annual output of over 400,000 tons per year.
For years, management has managed to stave off claims of pollution despite mass protests in the city.
Deutsche Welle
Populist politicians set the tone on European social media, while hate speech on Facebook and Twitter is less prevalent than you may think. We analyzed 40,000 comments, and that's what we found.
Political ideology is the number one determinant of rude, offensive or hateful comments on social media, according to findings of a four-month project conducted by journalists from DW and other news organizations in four European countries.
Comments posted on right-wing and populist politicians' Facebook and Twitter feeds generated the most offensive comments directed at elected officials from the center or the left. Moreover, prominent female politicians in France and Italy bore the brunt of most hurtful speech.
But the study also found hate speech was less prevalent than generally assumed, and that there is a good way to curb it: having leading politicians take the lead in toning it down.
The Guardian
Long attached to visions of clear skies and calm seas, the colour blue historically could not be more welcome, refreshing and natural. Yet, because of the proliferation of blue-emitting LEDs in our artificially lit lives, blue light has come to represent bleary eyes, sleeplessness and the poor health associated disruption of the circadian rhythm.
Of the spectrum of lightwaves emitted by the sun that our eyes can detect, it is the shorter “blue” ones that get reflected and bounced around most by the molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere. They are the reason the sky is blue. So why is blue light apparently so bad for us? Earlier this month, a studypublished in The Lancet Psychiatry looked at data from 91,105 middle-aged people and found that those with disrupted sleep patterns were more likely to have depression or bipolar disorder. The worst affected were described by one of the authors of the paper, Professor Daniel Smith at the University of Glasgow, as those with “very poor sleep hygiene – people on their mobile phones at midnight checking Facebook or getting up to make a cup of tea in the middle of the night”. He reiterated the now common advice from sleep experts: switch off electronic devices an hour before bedtime.
The Guardian
Violent hailstorms hit western France destroying swaths of vineyards and killing a girl out walking with her parents.
The sudden and powerful storms that struck the Bordeaux and Charentais winemaking regions on Saturday took residents by surprise with some describing them as the worst in 30 years.
“I’ve dozens of hectares without a single leaf or shoot left. In the space of 10 to 15 minutes the hail destroyed the whole harvest,” said Didier Gontier, the director of the Côtes de Bourg label, a small appellation that lost its 2017 production to frost. “There are a few shoots left; whether they will grow I can’t say … if I’m honest, I don’t think so.”
The Haut-Médoc region of north Bordeaux and the Cognac-producing vineyards were also affected, as was the Charente Maritime department.
Bernard Farges, vice-president of the Bordeaux winemakers’ body, the Conseil interprofessionnel du vin de Bordeaux (CIVB) told journalists the organisation was taking stock and would release details of the devastation to vineyards on Monday.
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS
VOX
In February 2016, Rotten Tomatoes — the site that aggregates movie and TV critics’ opinions and tabulates a score that’s “fresh” or “rotten” — took on an elevated level of importance. That’s when Rotten Tomatoes (along with its parent company Flixster) was acquired by Fandango, the website that sells advance movie tickets for many major cinema chains.
People had been using Rotten Tomatoes to find movie reviews since it launched in 2000, but after Fandango acquired the site, it began posting “Tomatometer” scores next to movie ticket listings. Since then, studio execs have started to feel as if Rotten Tomatoes matters more than it used to — and in some cases, they’ve rejiggered their marketing strategies accordingly.
It’s easy to see why anyone might assume that Rotten Tomatoes scores became more tightly linked to ticket sales, with potential audiences more likely to buy tickets for a movie with a higher score, and by extension, giving critics more power over the purchase of a ticket.