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
The Guardian
Denver school officials said more than 2,100 teachers called in absent on Monday, as educators went on strike. According to district data, that is about half the teachers employed in Denver public schools.
After failing to reach a deal with administrators on pay, teachers began picketing before the start of the school day. Students joined protests outside several schools.
There has been a wave of teacher activism in the US since last spring, when teachers walked out in West Virginia. Last month, Los Angeles teachers were out for six days.
Denver schools remained open on Monday and district officials said administrators and substitute teachers would staff them. Classes for 5,000 preschool children were canceled.
The majority leader in the Colorado house, Alec Garnett, said the strike underscored the need to boost funding of public schools across the state.
The Guardian
A syndicated comic strip has been discontinued by a Pennsylvanianewspaper after an obscene anti-Trump message was found hidden in one of its panels.
The strip was an edition of Non Sequitur, a comic created by cartoonist Wiley Miller, which is printed in more than 700 newspapers. It has been running since 1992 and is better known for genteel political satire.
Today’s comic, for example, shows an older couple whose cats have taken up the whole sofa. The wife says to her husband: “They’re dug in on their position … unless you can open a can of tuna.” The caption reads: “Averting a border crisis.”
This will be news to readers of the Butler Eagle, a conservative family-owned local paper in Pennsylvania, as the comic was missing from Monday’s edition.
The offending cartoon showed a bear called Leonardo Bear-Vinci assembling a flying machine, with sketches similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s. The drawings include mostly illegible scrawled notes, but in the corner one of the scrawls reads: “We fondly say go fuck yourself to Trump.”
The Guardian
House Democratic leaders denounced the Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar for using “antisemitic tropes and prejudicial accusations” in tweets, amid a widening controversy over remarks by new members of the Democratic caucus who are openly critical of Israel.
In response, the representative “unequivocally apologized” but also compared a major pro-Israel lobbying group to “the NRA or the fossil fuel industry”.
Republicans were already threatening action against Omar and Rashida Tlaib, a Democratic representative from Michigan and the other Muslim woman in Congress, over past comments they say were antisemitic.
In a tweet on Sunday, Omar suggested Republican support for Israel was fueled by financial incentives. Replying to a user who asked who she believed was “paying American politicians to be pro-Israel”, Omar wrote: “AIPAC.”
Reuters
The top four Democratic and Republican negotiators in the U.S. Congress on border security funding plan to meet on Monday in a bid to reach an elusive deal by a Friday deadline to avert another partial government shutdown.
The talks were scheduled to resume in Washington hours before Republican President Donald Trump plans a rally in the Texas border city of El Paso, where he is expected to promote his long-promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Vox
The Republican legislature has passed legislation that would, in effect, replace the voter-approved Medicaid expansion with a more limited version that would actually cover fewer people while spending more money in the first few years. The bill passed both chambers with a two-thirds majority. It now heads to Republican Gov. Gary Herbert, who is expected to sign it.
GOP lawmakers are making a big bet: that they will be the first state to receive approval from the Trump administration for a partial Medicaid expansion. Originally, the Senate-passed legislation stipulated the entire expansion would have been repealed if the feds rejected Utah’s plan, reversing the will of the voters completely. But the state House, facing intense pressure, changed the bill at the last minute so if the Trump administration does reject partial expansion, the full Medicaid expansion as originally approved by voters would take effect instead.
Expansion supporters have still condemned Republicans for needlessly interceding to institute a scaled-back version of expansion, one will come at a higher initial cost to the state, after Utahns voted decisively just three months ago to expand Medicaid and extend health coverage to tens of thousands of vulnerable people.
Huffington Post
A new study of the intensifying concentration of wealth in the United States reveals that the 400 richest people in the nation — just .00025 percent of the population — own more than the 150 million adults in the bottom 60 percent, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.
The information on the richest Americans, in a working paper by University of California at Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, comes as pressure appears to be mounting among American taxpayers to increase taxes on the country’s ultra wealthy.
The share of the nation’s wealth held by the adults in the bottom 60 percent, meanwhile, dropped from 5.7 percent in 1987 to 2.1 percent in 2014, the Post reported, citing the World Inequality Database that’s maintained by Zucman and other economists.
New York Times
LOS ANGELES — Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced Monday that he would withdraw nearly 400 of his state’s National Guard troops from deployment along the border with Mexico and assign them to other duties.
The step to rescind state authorization for the border deployment is a sharp rebuke of President Trump’s continued warnings that undocumented migrants present a national security risk to the United States. It follows a similar move last week by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico.
Under a “general order” that Mr. Newsom plans to sign, 110 California National Guard troops will be redirected to support the state’s central fire agency, Cal Fire, and another 100 will work on statewide “intelligence operations” aimed at international criminal drug gangs.
Mr. Newsom is also seeking to expand the state’s Counterdrug Task Force with 150 National Guard troops, which would require funding from the Department of Defense.
BuzzFeed News
As Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam continues to resist calls to step down over the racist photo on his medical school yearbook page, he and his advisers are close to finalizing plans for a statewide “listening tour” to engage different communities in conversations about race.
Additionally, a source close to the governor said Northam is telling people privately that if the commonwealth’s legislature puts a bill on his desk that provides the authority to bring down Confederate statues that he would sign it.
BuzzFeed News first reported last week Northam and his advisers were looking at recalibrating the governor’s legislative agenda to focus closely on race and equality and that plan is now coming into focus. The plan includes the listening tour, as well as driving a possible increase in funding to Virginia’s five historically black colleges and universities. The goal of the listening tour, his adviser said, is not to just listen to Virginians but to talk about what he has learned from his own experiences. Northam hopes to regain the trust of nearly half the people in his state who believe that the events that have turned Northam into a household name have also rendered him unable to be an effective governor.
WORLD NEWS
DW News
The world is in crisis — and the US is only making things worse. That's the bold verdict of the Munich Security Report (MSR), released on Monday ahead of this week's Munich Security Conference, the annual gathering for leading representatives of all the major powers. US Vice President Mike Pence, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Chancellor Angela Merkel will be among the 100 ministers from across the world expected to discuss growing global instability.
"A new era of great power competition is unfolding between the United States, China, and Russia, accompanied by a certain leadership vacuum in what has become known as the liberal international order," wrote conference chief Wolfgang Ischinger, veteran diplomat and former German ambassador to the US, in his introductory statement.
At least one of the main sources of this instability is clear. President Donald Trump's administrationin Washington is showing little interest in holding to international agreements, and his tweets often openly question institutions including NATO and the United Nations. Even worse: Under Trump, the US appears ready to relinquish its role as a leading power in what is often still called the "free world."
DW News
People flooded Tehran's Freedom Square as they celebrated the 40th anniversary of the 1979 ousting of the monarchy. Anti-US sentiment was on show with some demonstrators chanting "death to America" and burning US flags.
Hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets of the capital Tehran on Monday to mark the 40th anniversary of the Islamic revolution, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ousted the Shah's last government.
The march is the culmination of official celebrations called the "10 Day Dawn" that marks the period in February 1979 when the revolution's leader Khomeini returned from exile and toppled the monarchy.
DW News
Forty years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini founded the Islamic Republic of Iran. There is little excitement left from those times; even pro-reform forces are exhausted, except for the women among them.
Sadegh Zibakalam is not expecting much from the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. "On the anniversary, politicians will hold speeches again. They will talk about exporting the Islamic Revolution, about the destruction of Israel and the war against the US. But what almost never appears in their speeches are the true aims of the revolution 40 years ago," the political scientist from Tehran told DW. "The revolution promised us democracy, the rule of law and freedom of the press. It promised us the right to freedom of opinion, without being arrested and tortured."
As a young student, Zibakalam had supported the revolution. During the regime of the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, he had spent two years in prison — but he is also aware of the repression taking place in Iran today. As a winner of DW's Freedom of Speech Award in 2018, he was, at first instance, sentenced to prison for 18 months. The reason: in an interview with DW, he had shown sympathy for the protesters in Iran. From December 2017 to January 2018, the country witnessed the biggest anti-government protests in a decade.
Al Jazeera
ISIL snipers and landmines have slowed a US-backed ground force as it pushes to retake the armed group's last enclave in eastern Syria.
Black smoke clouds rose over ISIL's final territory in Deir Az Zor province on Monday as coalition fighter jets fired missiles in support of the Kurdish-led militia known as the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The SDF launched an offensive on Saturday attempting to expel about 600 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, ISIS) fighters from a 4-square-kilometre area in Baghouz village, near the Iraqi border on the eastern banks of the Euphrates River.
The US-led coalition maintained a steady beat of bombings on the enclave after an early morning ISIL counter-attack caused several SDF casualties.
Al Jazeera
London, United Kingdom - Chunky, a bulldog, became an unlikely celebrity after relieving himself on a poster of Jacob Rees-Mogg - an MP and strident champion of Brexit, during a march in London.
And as the country's parliamentarians continue to scrap like cats and dogs over the terms of Britain's exit - or indeed whether to leave the European Union at all - Chunky's owner Siobhan Goodchild believes the signal sent by her pet could not have been clearer.
The press pounced on images of Chunky's mischief; bulldogs are a national icon in the United Kingdom, synonymous with a stubborn, independent spirit.
…
Organiser Daniel Elkan dreamed up the campaign to get dogs "barking out against Brexit" after talking to pet owners who voted to remain in the EU during a referendum on membership in June 2016.
He became convinced that leaving the EU would be a "dog's dinner" in this animal-loving country - Britain has more than 54 million pets and a quarter of the population owns a dog.
Al Jazeera
At least 99 people have died and scores have been admitted to hospital in northern India after drinking toxic alcohol.
News of the deaths in the states of and Uttarakhand has trickled out in over the past three days, with police suspecting the moonshine had been laced with methanol. Authorities said many victims had complained of dizziness and were taken to hospital writhing in pain.
Cheap, locally made liquor is common in parts of rural India and bootleggers often add methanol, a highly toxic form of alcohol sometimes used as antifreeze, to their product to increase its strength. If ingested in large quantities methanol can cause blindness, liver damage and death.
In one district of Uttar Pradesh, 59 people died after consuming toxic alcohol, a police spokesman, Shailendra Kumar Sharma, said. In a neighbouring district, a senior police officer said nine had died, adding that 66 suspected bootleggers had been arrested and samples of the liquor sent to a laboratory for testing.
ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH, TECHNOLOGY
The Guardian
Russian environmental authorities have deployed a team of specialists to a remote Arctic region to sedate and remove dozens of hungry polar bears that have besieged the people living there.
The move came after officials in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, with a population of about 3,000 people, appealed for help.
“There’s never been such a mass invasion of polar bears,” said Zhigansha Musin, the head of the local administration. “They have literally been chasing people.”
The Guardian
Ed. note: This would fit under IDIOTS OR LIARS if I had such a heading.
Donald Trump’s favourite TV show, Fox & Friends, has a reputation for giving airtime to conspiracy theories that benefit the White House agenda. But host Pete Hegseth may now have managed to upset the famously germaphobic president – by revealing that he has not washed his hands in a decade.
The admission came as Hegseth discussed eating day-old pizza that had not been refrigerated. He did not see any issue with eating the pizza, he said, then added that he didn’t think he had washed his hands in 10 years.
“Really,” he said. “I don’t really wash my hands ever.”
The Guardian
The revival of the Green New Deal framework (first developed in a report published in 2008) and popularized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Justice Democrats in the US, is a huge advance for green campaigners and, hopefully, for our threatened species. That is because it has a single radical ask: an ecological and economic transformation of the current system to end our addiction to fossil fuels and endless consumption of the earth’s finite assets.
The Green New Deal demands major structural (governmental and inter-governmental) changes (not just behavioural change) in our approach to the ecosystem. In addition, and as in the 1930s, such change to be driven by radical structural transformation of the finance sector, and the economy. It was developed on the understanding that finance, the economy and the ecosystem are all tightly bound together. Protecting and restoring the ecosystem to balance cannot be tackled effectively without transformation of the other sectors. Financing the transformation of the economy away from its dependence on fossil fuels cannot be achieved without a transformation of the finance sector.
Vox
Vaping has exploded in popularity in recent years — but not among the people it was intended for. Rather than adults trying to quit smoking, young people who’ve never picked up a cigarette are now vaping in record numbers.
According to a new Vital Signs report, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2018, some 4.9 million high school and middle school students used tobacco in the last 30 days, an increase from 3.6 million in 2017. E-cigarettes were the most popular tobacco product among the children and adolescents.
The report follows a late 2018 National Institutes of Health survey, which tracked substance use among American adolescents. It found the number of high school seniors who say they vaped nicotine in the past 30 days doubled since 2017 — from 11 percent to nearly 21 percent. That was the largest increase ever recorded in any substance in the survey’s 43-year history. And it meant a quarter of 12th-grade students are now using, at least occasionally, a nicotine device that’s so new we have no idea what the long-term health impact of using it will be.
BBC
A scientific review of insect numbers suggests that 40% of species are undergoing "dramatic rates of decline" around the world.
The study says that bees, ants and beetles are disappearing eight times faster than mammals, birds or reptiles.
But researchers say that some species, such as houseflies and cockroaches, are likely to boom.
The general insect decline is being caused by intensive agriculture, pesticides and climate change.
Insects make up the majority of creatures that live on land, and provide key benefits to many other species, including humans.
They provide food for birds, bats and small mammals; they pollinate around 75% of the crops in the world; they replenish soils and keep pest numbers in check.
Many other studies in recent years have shown that individual species of insects, such as bees, have suffered huge declines, particularly in developed economies.
Washington Post
An extremely powerful winter storm is pulling away from Hawaii after unleashing damaging winds, massive waves, coastal flooding and snow in unusual places.
The storm, which the National Weather Service office in Honolulu described as “historic,” began pounding the islands Friday. Hawaii News Now reported a 66-year-old California man died in the rough surf off northwest Maui on Friday.
Forecasters “are calling this an unprecedented event and we concur that we rarely if ever have seen the combination of record high onshore waves, coupled with gale force winds,” said Sam Lemmo, administrator of Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR).
The storm’s most extreme blow was generated on the Big Island’s towering peak of Mauna Kea, where a 191-mph wind gust blasted the mountain summit at 4:40 p.m. local time Sunday.
SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
Bob Costas, the longtime sportscaster and prime-time host on NBC, alleged in an interview that aired on Sunday that the network’s executives abruptly removed him from covering last year’s Super Bowl after he criticized the violence in football and how the “game destroys people’s brains.”
His nearly 40-year relationship with NBC Sports, first as its boyish announcer and later as elder statesman, came crashing down over five days in November 2017. At a symposium that month with fellow journalists, Mr. Costas remarked on what he saw as the life-altering dangers of the sport, devastating consequences for its players and existential questions confronting the National Football League.
“The reality is that this game destroys people’s brains — not everyone’s, but a substantial number,” Mr. Costas told the crowd at the University of Maryland. “It’s not a small number, it’s a considerable number. It destroys their brains.”