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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Reuters
Thousands of U.S. troops may be headed to the border with Mexico ahead of a caravan of migrants trekking toward the United States, U.S. officials told Reuters on Monday, offering much higher estimates than the 800 to 1,000 initially forecast.
The Pentagon declined comment on potential troop numbers, saying planning was still underway for a mission that risks drawing the U.S. military into a politically charged operation just days ahead of Nov. 6 mid-term congressional elections.
President Donald Trump, who has seized upon the Central American migrant caravan in campaign rallies ahead of the vote, said on Twitter that the military would be waiting for the procession — suggesting a far more direct role in confronting the migrants than U.S. defense officials have previously suggested.
“Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border,” Trump tweeted.
US NEWS
The Guardian
Ed note: As it happens, he is going anyway despite not being welcome by many.
A former president of the synagogue in Pittsburgh where 11 people were murdered on Saturday has said Donald Trump would not be welcome in the city and labelled the president a “purveyor of hate speech”.
Lynette Lederman, of the Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, told CNN on Monday she would rely on local political leadership in the aftermath of the mass shooting and did not want the president to visit the city.
“We have people who stand by us, who believe in values – not just Jewish – but believe in values, and those are not the values of this president and I do not welcome him to Pittsburgh,” she said.
The comments followed an open letter signed by a coalition of local Jewish leaders and published by the Pittsburgh chapter of Bend The Arc, a progressive advocacy group, that also called for the president to avoid the city.
“President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you fully denounce white nationalism,” the letter states.
The Guardian
Another suspicious package bound for CNN was discovered on Monday morning, the network said.
The package was intercepted at a post office in Atlanta, where the network is headquartered, according to a statement from CNN’s president, Jeff Zucker.
“There is no imminent danger to the CNN Center,” Zucker said.
Two of the pipe bombs sent last week to prominent political figures were addressed to CNN. Cesar Sayoc, a Donald Trump supporter from Florida, was arrested and charged with sending the devices.
It was unclear if the latest package was part of the same pattern. Authorities said last week that even after Sayoc was arrested, additional devices might be found that had already been placed in the mail.
CNN’s New York office was evacuated for hours last week after one of the pipe bombs was found there. Since then, the network has instituted additional mail security.
Reuters
A man charged with shooting 11 worshipers to death at a Pittsburgh synagogue was arraigned and ordered held without bond on Monday for the deadliest attack ever on America’s Jewish community.
Robert Bowers, 46, who has a history of posting anti-Semitic material online, faces 29 charges and could be sentenced to death if found guilty. He was wounded in a gunfight with police at the synagogue on Saturday and appeared in the U.S. federal courtroom shackled and in a wheelchair, wearing a blue long-sleeve shirt and gray pants.
Reuters
A fistfight between two North Carolina high school students turned deadly on Monday when one of them pulled out a handgun and fired at the other in a crowded hallway before the start of classes, authorities said.
The alleged shooter, identified only as a male student at David W. Butler High School in Matthews, a suburb southeast of Charlotte, was quickly taken into custody, police said.
“There are no other threats or dangers to any of the students or staff, or anyone in the area of the school,” Captain Stason Tyrrell of the Matthews Police Department told reporters near the school.
“I can just tell you that the shooter was taken into custody by Matthews Police Department, and his family is aware as well,” Tyrrell said.
Talking Points Memo
Radio Televisión Martí, a network overseen by the U.S. government that broadcasts to Cuba, pulled a video segment it produced months ago that relied on material from the conservative group Judicial Watch and referred to Democratic donor George Soros as a “multimillionaire Jew,” Mother Jones reported last week.
“George Soros has his eye on Latin America. But Judicial Watch, an American investigative legal group, also has its eye on Soros and what it sees as his lethal influence to destroy democracies,” the narrator of the segment says in the video, according to an English translation published by Mother Jones. “It describes him as a millionaire investor and stock market speculator who exploits capitalism and Wall Street to finance anti-system movements that fill his pockets.”
The video also refers to Soros as “the multimillionaire Jew of Hungarian origin whose fortune is estimated at $8 billion” and “a non-believing Jew of flexible morals,” according to Mother Jones.
BuzzFeed News
On a winter afternoon in 2015, NYPD Lt. Paul Gaglio grabbed an 11-year-old girl, threw her to the sidewalk, and cuffed her.
Gaglio stated under oath that the girl, accused of stealing a cellphone, tried to resist arrest through “intimidation, physical force, or interference,” and that the two of them had slipped on a patch of ice.
But an independent police oversight agency that reviewed surveillance footage from a nearby storefront determined Gaglio had used a chokehold, a move that New York Police Department rules ban except in “exceptional circumstances” because it can injure or even kill. The investigators also raised concerns that in describing the incident, Gaglio had lied under oath — the surveillance video shows Gaglio throwing the girl to the ground, not slipping on ice. Lying about a “material matter” is a violation of department rules that, absent exceptional circumstances, is supposed to result in firing.
Gaglio wasn’t fired. In fact, he suffered no penalty whatsoever.
WORLD NEWS
AFP
Britain on Monday ramped up its economic growth outlook for next year, when the country will exit the European Union, in an upbeat budget that vowed to boost spending after a decade of painful austerity.
The economy will grow 1.6 percent in 2019, up from the Conservative government's prior forecast of 1.3 percent, finance minister Philip Hammond revealed in his last annual budget before Britain's EU departure in March.
However, with London deadlocked in trade talks with Brussels and investors fearful of a chaotic no-deal Brexit, Hammond downgraded 2018 growth guidance to 1.3 percent from 1.5 percent.
Hammond confirmed that a disorderly Brexit would spark a new budget sooner than expected.
DW News
Right-wing president-elect Jair Bolsonaro said he would aim to unite a divided country. US President Donald Trump was one of the first to congratulate the new leader.
Jair Bolsonaro’s victory in the second round of presidential election voting on Sunday has moved Brazil sharply to the right after four elections won by the left-leaning Workers' Party. Bolsonaro won 55 percent of the votes, with about 45 percent for Workers' Party (PT) candidate
Fernando Haddad.
US President Donald Trump called Bolsonaro on Sunday and said he had had "a very good conversation" with Brazil's president-elect. "We agreed that Brazil and the United States will work closely together on Trade, Military and everything else!," Trump tweeted on Monday. "Excellent call, wished him congrats!"
Trump spoke of "a strong commitment to work side-by-side" on issues affecting Brazil, the US and beyond, the White House said.
Like Trump, Bolsonaro has suggested he might pull Brazil out of the Paris agreement on climate change and has promised to cut environmental regulations.
DW News
EU transport ministers have expressed concern at a European Commission proposal to stop daylight savings next year. One of the major issues is that the EU could end up with a patchwork of time zones.
The European Union needs more time to prepare for the European Commission's proposal to abolish daylight savings time, Austria's Transport Minister Norbert Hofer said Monday.
"If we aim to do this in 2019, as the Commission suggested, this will not be supported by the majority of member states", Hofer said at the start of an informal meeting of EU transport ministers in the Austrian city of Graz.
Hofer said there was broad support for Austria's proposal that the switch to permanent winter or summer time should take place instead in 2021.
Read more: Time change and its discontents
"Three countries [Britain, Sweden and Poland] were skeptical and one was concerned that we could end up with a patchwork of different time zones," Hofer added.
Last month, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced plans to stop changing Europe's clocks in October 2019.
Al Jazeera
Saudi Arabia has admitted Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside its consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul.
Khashoggi - a Saudi writer, US resident, and Washington Post columnist - entered the building on October 2 to obtain documentation certifying he had divorced his ex-wife so he could remarry.
After weeks of repeated denials that it had anything to do with his disappearance, the kingdom eventually acknowledged that the murder was premeditated. The whereabouts of his body are still unknown.
Here are the latest developments:
Monday, October 29Saudi and Turkish prosecutors meet
The Saudi public prosecutor leading the country's investigation into Khashoggi's death has met Istanbul's chief prosecutor at the city's court on Monday, according to Turkish state news agency Anadolu.
The meeting reportedly lasted about 75 minutes, but no information has so far been released as to what the two men discussed.
The Guardian
The communist intelligence service in Prague stepped up its spying campaign against Donald Trump in the late 1980s, targeting him to gain information about the “upper echelons of the US government”, archive files and testimony from former cold war spies reveal.
Czechoslovakia’s Státní bezpečnost (StB) carried out a long-term spying mission against Trump following his marriage in 1977 to his first wife, Ivana Zelníčková. The operation was run out of Zlín, the provincial town in south-west Czechoslovakia where Zelníčková was born and grew up.
Ivana’s father, Miloš Zelníček, gave regular information to the local StB office about his daughter’s visits from the US and on his celebrity son-in-law’s career in New York. Zelníček was classified as a “conspiratorial” informer. His relationship with the StB lasted until the end of the communist regime.
BBC
Germany's Angela Merkel has said she will step down as chancellor in 2021, following recent election setbacks.
"I will not be seeking any political post after my term ends," she told a news conference in Berlin.
She also said she would not seek re-election as leader of the centre-right CDU party in December. She has held the post since 2000.
The CDU was severely weakened in Sunday's poll in the state of Hesse, the latest in a series of setbacks.
Both the CDU and its national coalition partners, the Social Democrats, were 10 percentage points down on the previous poll there.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Al Jazeera
Gaza - The unshaven doctor with circles under his eyes enters the children's ward at Al Nassar hospital in Gaza City. It's a Thursday evening, almost the weekend. The ward is bleak and eerily quiet, but for the occasional wail of an infant.
At each cubicle, sectioned off by curtains, it's a similar image: A baby lies alone in a bed, hooked up to tubes, wires and a generator; a mother sits in silent witness at the bedside.
Dr Mohamad Abu Samia, the hospital's director of paediatric medicine, exchanges a few quiet words with one mother, then gently lifts the infant's gown, revealing a scar from heart surgery nearly half the length of her body.
At the next cubicle, he attends to a child suffering from severe malnutrition. She lies still, her tiny body connected to a respirator. Because electricity runs only four hours a day in Gaza, the baby must stay here, where generators keep her alive.
The Guardian
Poisonous air is having a devastating impact on billions of children around the world, damaging their intelligence and leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, according to a report from the World Health Organization.
The study found that more than 90% of the world’s young people – 1.8 billion children – are breathing toxic air, storing up a public health time bomb for the next generation.
The WHO said medical experts in almost every field of children’s health are uncovering new evidence of the scale of the crisis in both rich and poor countries – from low birth weight to poor neurodevelopment, asthma to heart disease.
Dr Tedros Adhanom, WHO director general, said: “Polluted air is poisoning millions of children and ruining their lives. This is inexcusable – every child should be able to breathe clean air so they can grow and fulfil their potential.”
The Guardian
Gab, the social media site popular with the far-right, has been forced offline by its service providers after it became clear that the alleged Pittsburgh shooter Robert Bowers had a history of anti-semitic postings on the site.
Formed in August 2016 after Twitter began cracking down on hate speech on its social network, Gab has been labelled “Twitter for racists” by the website Salon but describes itself as “a free speech website and nothing more”. But the platform has proved popular among white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the “alt-right”, including the man accused of opening fire on a synagogue in Pennsylvania on Saturday, killing 11.
“I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered,” the alleged assailant wrote, moments before the murders. “Screw your optics, I’m going in.” It was his last post on the site.
Reuters
A ninth child died over the weekend in a deadly viral outbreak at a New Jersey rehabilitation center where a total of 25 young patients with compromised immune systems have been confirmed with adenovirus infections, state health officials said.
The death on Sunday at Wanaque Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in Haskell, New Jersey, was reported over the weekend by the New Jersey Department of Health.
NPR
After years of insisting that it wasn't economically feasible, the world's biggest hog producer has bowed to public pressure and agreed to change the way it handles manure on more than 1,000 farms it controls in the U.S.
Smithfield Farms, which is headquartered in North Carolina, is promising to cover the manure ponds with a layer of plastic.
Manure ponds, or "lagoons," are the most widely used method for handling hog manure in places like North Carolina that don't experience a lot of freezing temperatures in wintertime. (In Iowa or South Dakota, lagoons don't work well, and hog farms typically store manure in deep pits underneath the hog houses.) In the open-air lagoons, natural bacteria help the manure to decompose, and the liquid portion of the manure is periodically sprayed on fields as fertilizer.
NPR
On a 90-degree afternoon in July, under the shade of a tree in Philadelphia's McPherson Square Park, I watched a couple sit down, prepare syringes and inject drugs.
The man injected in his arm, the woman in her neck.
I observed them from about a hundred feet away, where I was getting ready to film an interview with someone else.
After they had finished, the woman rested against the man. She was splayed out on top of the man with her neck tilted back, her mouth open.
The next time I glanced over, her skin looked pale. The man supported her head, rubbing her breastbone, and checked her pulse.
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS
The Guardian
Fox is facing growing criticism and calls for a boycott amid accusations that language used on its programming is fueling antisemitism, prejudice and violence.
The network has even banned a guest who used incendiary language to link billionaire George Soros to the migrant caravan.
Fox Business Network condemned comments by a guest on host Lou Dobbs’s show that critics saw as an antisemitic trope.
Chris Farrell of the conservative group Judicial Watch said in an appearance on Lou Dobbs Tonight that the caravan of Central American migrants seeking to reach the United States is organized by groups whose affiliates “are getting money from the Soros-occupied state department”.
Soros is a financier and liberal donor and activist who is frequently the target of antisemitic vitriol. Last week, a pipe bomb was found in his mailbox, allegedly sent by a Florida man who promoted rightwing conspiracy theories about Soros.
NPR
The Boston Red Sox just capped a dominating season with their fourth World Series in 15 years.
Heading into Sunday night's Game 5, the Los Angeles Dodgers needed a win to stall Boston's chances at this year's title.
But Boston, led by David Price's pitching and Steve Pearce's batting, ruled the road turf to take home their ninth World Series title — and their fourth since 2004.
It came as no surprise when Pearce was crowned MVP at the post-game ceremony. At the top of the first inning, the right-hander gifted the Red Sox an early lead with a two-run home run on the sixth pitch from star Dodger pitcher Clayton Kershaw.
David Freese answered with a solo homer for LA, sending Red Sox's David Price's first pitch over the fence and cutting Boston's lead to 2-1.
OFFENSIVE