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.
US NEWS
HuffPost
DETROIT (AP) — Michigan clears a threshold this week as the first state in the Midwest to allow marijuana for more than just medical purposes.
In the Nov. 6 election, voters by a wide margin endorsed recreational use by adults who are at least 21. The move comes 10 years after voters approved marijuana to alleviate the effects of certain illnesses. Many supporters believe that decadelong experience, as well as similar legalization efforts in other states, led to victory at the ballot box.
“It’s certainly going to smell like freedom,” starting Thursday, said Detroit lawyer Matt Abel, who specializes in marijuana law and whose office sign says, “cannabis counsel.”
Eleven states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational marijuana. Of course, there are many caveats in Michigan and already some tension.
Reuters
Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin and Michigan are scrambling to pass last-minute legislation to limit the powers of incoming Democratic officials before their iron grip on state governments is loosened following last month’s elections.
The Republican-dominated Wisconsin legislature began an unusual lame-duck session on Monday to consider bills that would undercut the power of Governor-elect Tony Evers and Attorney General-elect Josh Kaul, Democrats whose victories broke six years of Republican control of the state’s executive and legislative branches.
Michigan Republicans have also introduced legislation to strip some powers from the offices of the state attorney general and secretary of state, which were both captured by Democrats, along with the governorship in the Nov. 6 elections.
NPR
The 9th annual "Latkepalooza" at Congregation Beth Shalom in Pittsburgh is open to families across the Jewish community.
There's plenty of fried food, face painting and carnival-style games.
Seventeen-year-old Ariel Holstein runs the putt-putt game. For him, the past five weeks have been intense. He says there was a lot to take in after police say a shooter killed 11 people at the nearby Tree of Life Synagogue in October.
"I went to all the vigils and I helped out, I helped set up," he said. "It was very heartbreaking and I thought we had to come together as a community."
Since the shooting, there have been youth-led events like rallies and prayer services. Young people have also been engaging in ongoing conversations with each other and in their classrooms about rising anti-Semitism.
NPR
Sully, the service dog of former President George H.W. Bush, spent Sunday night lying before Bush's flag-draped casket in Houston.
Jim McGrath, spokesman for the Bush family, tweeted out a photo on Sunday night, captioning it "mission complete."
Jeb Bush retweeted the image, adding "Sully has the watch."
CNN reported that Sully would travel with the casket to Washington, D.C., where several days of remembrance ceremonies are being held.
Sully, a 2-year-old yellow Labrador retriever, is named after the pilot Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III, who on Jan. 15, 2009, landed a passenger plane in the Hudson River after hitting a flock of geese. He was portrayed by Tom Hanks in a movie about the incident.
Washington Post
In front of a sold-out crowd at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Saturday night, Michelle Obama looked like a woman who had it all. The Ivy League-educated former first lady, mother of two and now best-selling author was met with thunderous applause as she walked onstage to promote her recently released memoir, “Becoming.”
But in a brief moment of uninhibited candor — complete with some spontaneous swearing — that set the Internet ablaze, Obama said the belief that women can always “have it all” is “a lie” and voiced an unexpectedly frank rebuke of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s controversial “lean in” mantra.
“It’s not always enough to lean in because that s--- doesn’t work all the time,” she reportedly said.
Obama’s blunt assessment came as she was discussing how women can achieve the balance in life that allows for a successful career and marriage, New York magazine reported.
New York Times
CHICAGO — Inside a cramped and worn courtroom, three white police officers are on trial in connection with the fatal shooting of a black teenager, Laquan McDonald. But these officers never fired their guns. Their crime, prosecutors say, was concocting a story to cover up for a colleague who did.
As prosecutors tell it, Chicago police officers shooed away eyewitnesses after the shooting on Oct. 20, 2014, and then made up a narrative to justify the shooting. They said in official reports that the teenager had tried to stab three officers, and that he had tried to get up from the ground as 16 shots were being fired into him.
The only hitch? Dashcam video footage of the encounter contradicted their account.
Patricia Brown Holmes, a special prosecutor trying the three officers on charges of conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice, told a judge last week: “Instead of serving and protecting all citizens of Chicago, the defendants tried to protect only one — Jason Van Dyke,” the police officer who was convicted this fall of second-degree murder in the shooting.
On trial along with the officers is the “code of silence” that police officers across the country have been accused of operating under. In Chicago, the issue has been around for decades, bubbling up in recent years in cases involving a drunk-driving officer, an off-duty officer’s beating of a bartender and a lawsuit by two police officers who said they faced retaliation after breaking the code.
WORLD NEWS
HuffPost
BUDAPEST (Reuters) - The Central European University, founded by George Soros, said on Monday it had been forced out of Hungary in “an arbitrary eviction” that violated academic freedom, and it confirmed plans to enroll new students in neighboring Austria next year.
CEU’s statement is the culmination of a years-long struggle between Hungarian-born but U.S.-based Soros, who promotes liberal causes through his charities, and the nationalist, anti-immigrant government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
“CEU has been forced out,” said CEU President and Rector Michael Ignatieff in a statement.
“This is unprecedented. A U.S. institution has been driven out of a country that is a NATO ally. A European institution has been ousted from a member state of the EU.”
DW News
As Germany's aging population struggles to find enough care workers, the country's health minister is mulling funding training programs abroad. However, the "brain drain" risk has some authorities hesitant to sign on.
Joana Bocaj is 25 years old. She's a nurse in the city of Vlore in southern Albania, but she hopes she won't be working there much longer. Joana is preparing to leave Albania and start a new working life in the western German city of Dusseldorf. She heard about the city from a colleague. "I think I'll have a better life and a better future in Germany," she says. "Here our salaries are low, and no one values our work. That's why I'd like to live and work over there."
Joana will be welcome in Dusseldorf. Until recently, the German government had neglected chronic personnel shortages in the German care sector. The government's 2017 coalition agreement said that an additional 8,000 care workers were to be employed nationwide. That figure has since been revised upwards, with officials now talking about recruiting at least 13,000 new care workers.
DW News
An advice brochure for kindergarten teachers dealing with children and parents who express far-right views has drawn accusations of spying from Germany's right-wing media. The family minister defended the publication.
Germany's biggest newspaper, Bild, has been accused of pandering to far-right populist sentiment over a report that allegedly mischaracterized a brochure published by the anti-racist nongovernmental organization Amadeu Antonio Foundation (AAS).
The Bild report from November 29 described a 60-page AAS guide designed to help kindergarten teachers and parents deal with children who had expressed racist sentiments or appeared to be indoctrinated by neo-Nazi ideology. In a story entitled "Row over snooping manual," Bild presented the publication as an attempt to get children to spy on their parents.
The Guardian
A leaked draft legal analysis produced for the European scrutiny committee by in-house lawyers warns that the UK will face “a practical barrier” to striking a trade deal with the US or other non-EU countries if the country falls into the backstop customs arrangements.
The remarks, contained within a draft paper that leaked on Monday morning, emerged hours before the attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, was scheduled to brief the Commons about his advice on the Brexit deal negotiated by May.
The 27-page document, dated 26 November, says the UK would conform to EU customs rules if it entered the backstop, and adds that this “would be a practical barrier to the UK entering separate trade agreements on goods with third countries”.
The Guardian
Mexico’s newly inaugurated president has hit the ground running, with his pledge to govern as a common man and end decades of secrecy, heavy security and luxury enjoyed by past presidents.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador sported slightly ruffled hair at his first early morning news conference as president on Monday, which started at 7am local time.
“Isn’t that a change, that I am here, informing you?” López Obrador asked reporters. While past presidents have very seldom held news conferences, López Obrador promised to do so on a near-daily basis, much as he did when he was mayor of Mexico City from 2000 to 2005.
NPR
Qatar plans to leave OPEC in January, shaking up the alliance of oil-producing nations and furthering its dispute with Saudi Arabia. Qatar made the announcement on Monday — the same day it informed OPEC.
Qatar's Energy Minister Saad al-Kaabi said the small Persian Gulf country will leave OPEC because it wants to focus on natural gas — a sector in which Qatar is a world leader. But the move also draws another line of division with Saudi Arabia, the only country with which Qatar shares a land border.
Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Qatar in June of 2017 in a dramatic move that was matched by Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and others. Since then, Saudi Arabia has maintained a boycott against Qatar, a country that has sometimes pursued its own foreign policy goals against the will of its fellow Sunni states.
ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH, AND TECHNOLOGY
The Guardian
The collapse of civilisation and the natural world is on the horizon, Sir David Attenborough has told the UN climate change summit in Poland.
The naturalist was chosen to represent the world’s people in addressing delegates of almost 200 nations who are in Katowice to negotiate how to turn pledges made in the 2015 Paris climate deal into reality.
As part of the UN’s people’s seat initiative, messages were gathered from all over the world to inform Attenborough’s address on Monday. “Right now we are facing a manmade disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” he said. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”
The Guardian
In a hallway beneath the UN climate change headquarters in Bonn, Germany, Sue Biniaz leans on a table, scribbling some thoughts on a piece of paper.
It’s May 2018, three years after representatives from nearly 200 countries convened in France in an extraordinary display of international unity and agreed to keep global warming below 2C and to pursue a tougher target of 1.5C.
How the Paris climate agreement will achieve that remains an open question. The rules to govern the deal are due to be agreed at the next United Nations climate change conference in the coal-mining town of Katowice in south-west Poland in December. With the clock ticking, diplomats have gathered in the former West German capital for mid-year talks. Things are not going well.
Reuters
Champions of coal say the superabundant fossil fuel can be made environmentally friendlier by refining it with chemicals – a “clean coal” technology backed by a billion dollars in U.S. government tax subsidies annually.
But refined coal has a dirty secret. It regularly fails to deliver on its environmental promises, as electric giant Duke Energy Corp found.
Duke began using refined coal at two of its North Carolina power plants in August 2012. The decision let the company tap a lucrative federal subsidy designed to help the American coal industry reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides – also known as NOx, the main contributor to smog and acid rain – along with other pollutants.
In nearly three years of burning the treated coal, the Duke power plants collected several million dollars in federal subsidies. But the plants also pumped out more NOx, not less, according to data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency analyzed by Reuters.
NPR
A major international climate conference kicked off Sunday in Poland.
For the next two weeks, leaders from around the world will meet to talk about how to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and support those communities that are already being affected by climate change.
It is the most important climate meeting since 195 countries, including the U.S., signed the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015 and promised to set specific emissions reduction targets. The U.S. said it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent by 2025.
Now the question is how, exactly, countries will meet their goals.
NPR
Nearly two months after a rocket malfunction forced NASA and the Russian space agency Roscosmos to abort the launch of a Soyuz mission, a new crew blasted off on Monday for the International Space Station.
Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, American astronaut Anne McClain and Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques successfully launched at 6:31 a.m. ET from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and went into orbit a short time later.
After the Soyuz docks with the space station, the mission is expected to last 194 days, according to TASS, which means the trio will remain on board through July 2019. The crew will join American Serena Auñón-Chancellor, Germany's Alexander Gerst and Russia's Sergey Prokopyev, all of whom are already living on the orbital station.
Washington Post
POTTSVILLE, Pa. — To the state inspectors visiting the HCR ManorCare nursing home here last year, the signs of neglect were conspicuous. A disabled man who had long, dirty fingernails told them he was tended to “once in a blue moon.” The bedside “call buttons” were so poorly staffed that some residents regularly soiled themselves while waiting for help to the bathroom. A woman dying of uterine cancer was left on a bedpan for so long that she bruised.
The lack of care had devastating consequences. One man had been dosed with so many opioids that he had to be rushed to a hospital, according to the inspection reports. During an undersupervised bus trip to church — one staff member was escorting six patients who could not walk without help — a resident flipped backward on a wheelchair ramp and suffered a brain hemorrhage.
When a nurse’s aide who should have had a helper was trying to lift a paraplegic woman, the woman fell and fractured her hip, her head landing on the floor beneath her roommate’s bed.
SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
NPR
The Kansas City Chiefs cut Kareem Hunt, one of the NFL's top running backs, on Friday, hours after the release of a video showing him attacking a woman.
Now, fans are asking a familiar set of questions: What did the NFL know about the domestic violence incident, and did it try to conceal what happened?
The security camera video obtained and published by TMZ shows Hunt and a few other people in the hallway of a Cleveland apartment building. Hunt appears to argue with a woman. He shoves her several times — at one point knocking her to the ground and then kicking her — as other people try to break up the fight.