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, Besame and jck. 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
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning had reason to believe that leaking U.S. military reports “would cause injury” to the country, federal prosecutors alleged in a newly unsealed court filing on Monday.
In the affidavit submitted to federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, prosecutors said U.S. military reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq included information about the “identity and significance of local supporters of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan.”
When U.S. forces raided the compound in Pakistan where Osama bin Laden was hiding out, for example, they found a letter that showed the Al Qaeda leader was interested in copies of Pentagon documents published on WikiLeaks, the prosecutors said.
The Guardian
Donald Trump escalated his attack on congresswoman Ilhan Omar on Monday, saying she was “out of control” and criticizing Democrats for coming to her defense.
Omar, a Muslim American from Minnesota, has said she has received an increased number of death threats since the president tweeted a video in which she was accused of downplaying the September 11 terrorist attacks. Earlier this month, a New York man who said he supported Trump was charged with threatening to kill Omar.
Democrats condemned Trump for tweeting the video, which spliced a fraction of Omar’s comments to a Council on American Islamic Relations (Cair) conference last month, about the problem of Islamophobia, with images of the Twin Towers burning and falling.
BuzzFeed News
Twitter left up tweets threatening Rep. Ilhan Omar’s life over the weekend so law enforcement could investigate them, BuzzFeed News has learned.
Omar on Sunday said that threats on her life have increased after President Trump tweeted a video on April 12 that juxtaposed images of the World Trade Center being hit and bursting into flames with a clip of Omar saying, “Some people did something” in reference to the 9/11 attacks.
Twitter would’ve typically taken down the threatening tweets once they were reported, but the company left them up to enable potential law enforcement collaboration, a source close to the company told BuzzFeed News. The Capitol Hill police are working on the issue, the source said.
New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Trump is embracing a new tactic as he tries to rewrite the rules of global trade: Don’t believe a final deal is truly final.
Mr. Trump, who has called deal-making his “art form,” has used his unpredictability as a source of leverage in discussions with Europe, Canada, Mexico, Japan and elsewhere. He has dangled the possibility of lifting American metal tariffs while threatening to add new tariffs on automobiles at any time. He has repeatedly agreed to new trade terms with foreign partners, then talked about undoing those deals to achieve additional goals.
Mr. Trump has argued that this aggressive and unpredictable negotiating style allows him to extract greater economic concessions than past administrations — and he may be right, at least in the short run. But his approach is causing concern among business groups and foreign officials, who say the uncertainty Mr. Trump loves to sow could undermine the role the United States has traditionally played in setting and stabilizing the global rules of trade, hampering economic growth in the process.
NPR
President Donald Trump called former President Jimmy Carter for the first time this weekend.
Carter revealed that news during his regular Sunday school lesson at his home church, Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, on Sunday morning.
Earlier this year former President Carter sent Trump a letter with some advice about managing the U.S.-China relationship. Carter oversaw the normalization of diplomatic relations between the countries 40 years ago.
On Saturday evening, Trump called Carter to talk about it. It was the first time they'd spoken, Carter said. He said Trump told him he is particularly concerned about how China is "getting ahead of us."
Carter said he agreed with Trump on this issue.
Huffington Post
AUSTIN, Texas — To hear Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tell it, the threat of voter fraud in his state is clear: Look no further than the “sheer number of prosecutions” and convictions his office has secured, particularly in the last year, to see the extent of the problem in his state, his office told House Democrats in a letter last week.
But a closer look at cases Paxton’s office resolved in 2018 reveals that the vast majority ended with the defendant in a prosecution diversion program — a clear signal, experts told HuffPost, that the cases were relatively minor.
By citing a large volume of cases, allegations and investigations, Paxton helps create the impression that the voter fraud problem in Texas is greater than the punishments imply. And his office is using that impression to justify giving the attorney general more resources to pursue these crimes —while lawmakers push to ramp up penalties for voting offenses and create stricter rules, and officials haphazardly go through voter rolls hunting for alleged noncitizens. Those efforts could intimidate lawful voters from casting ballots, particularly at a time when Hispanic voters are poised to become an even more important voting block in Texas, civil rights advocates argue.
BuzzFeed News
Prosecutors in Louisiana have charged the man accused of setting fire to three black churches with hate crimes.
Holden Matthews, who was arrested last week, pleaded not guilty to three hate crime charges on Monday, along with several counts of arson involving a religious building, according to the St. Landry Parish District Attorney’s Office.
The three St. Landry Parish churches, which were all empty at the time, burned to the ground within 10 days of one another, with the first fire occurring on March 26. About 77% of residents in Opelousas, Louisiana, the town the burned churches were in or near, are black.
The additional hate crime charges confirm that authorities believe that Matthews targeted the churches because of the race of their attendees, District Attorney Earl Taylor explained to BuzzFeed News, a potential motive that investigators had held off on suggesting until Monday.
WORLD NEWS
The Guardian
Thousands of Parisians watched in horror from behind police cordons as a ferocious blaze devastated Notre Dame Cathedral, destroying its spire and a large part of the roof.
Firefighters battled to contain the fire, which began at around 6pm on Monday. An investigation has been opened by the prosecutor’s office, but police said it began accidentally and may be linked to building work at the cathedral. The 850-year-old gothic masterpiece had been undergoing restoration work.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, attended the scene and later gave a speech in which he vowed that the cathedral would be rebuilt, as fire crews said the landmark’s rectangular bell towers and structure of the building had been saved.
Macron said “the worst had been avoided” thanks to hundreds of brave firefighters who battled for hours and who would continue working through the night. One firefighter was severely injured but no other casualties were reported.
Deutsche Welle
The number of non-EU citizens moving to Germany for work has risen by about 20 percent for a third year in a row. Figures show most of these foreigners are men from India, China and the United States.
The Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) on Monday reported a 20 percent jump over the past year in people from countries outside the EU coming to work in Germany.
The group makes up a relatively small portion of the country's 10.9 million foreigners.
What Destatis found:
[...]
India (12%), China (9%), Bosnia and Herzegovina (8%), and the United States (7%).
Al Jazeera
Sudan’s principle protest group has demanded the immediate formation of a civilian-led government to replace the country's new ruling military council, warning that the demonstrators' "revolution" is at threat from "the remnants of the regime" of deposed leader Omar al-Bashir.
Fearing that the core of the old establishment is far from gone, the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA) on Monday reiterated its call for the military council to be dissolved and substituted by a civilian one that will only include "limited" army representation.
The umbrella organisation, which spearheaded the months of protests that precipitated al-Bashir's removal, also demanded the sacking of Sudan's prosecutor general and judiciary head, as well as the disbanding of the former president's National Congress Party (NCP).
Al Jazeera
A United States's proposal for peace between Israeland the Palestinians, dubbed "the deal of the century", will likely not include a fully sovereign Palestinian state, the Washington Post reported.
According to sources familiar with the main elements of the deal, the agreement pledged practical improvements in the lives of Palestinians but stops short of securing a Palestinian state.
The White House is expected to reveal its long-awaited peace deal, spearheaded by Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump's son-in-law, later this year.
While officials have kept details of the plan secret, comments from Kushner and other US officials suggest that it "does away with statehood as the starting premise of peace efforts", the Washington Post reported.
The plan is likely to focus heavily on Israeli security concerns.
BBC
Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party is investigating after its official Twitter account suffered a hacking attack overnight.
Social media users were alerted to the hack by a stream of unusual activity, including anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric.
One post also claimed PM and party leader, Stefan Lofven, would resign.
It is unclear who was responsible for hijacking the account but the police have been informed.
What happened?
Early on Monday morning social media users noticed a string of odd tweets sent from the Social Democratic Party's Twitter account.
More than 20 tweets on a range of topics were shared before the party regained control of the account.
BBC
Ugly scenes of smashed and toppled headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Romania have shocked the country's dwindling Jewish community and prompted international condemnation.
Vandals badly damaged 73 gravestones in the north-eastern town of Husi earlier this month, amid a surge in anti-Semitic attacks across Europe.
"It's a very disturbing event, but it's nothing surprising," said Maximillian Marco Katz, founding director of the Centre for Monitoring and Combating anti-Semitism in Romania.
"It shows that anti-Semitism is alive, it doesn't matter who did it," he told the BBC.
"They didn't knock down two or three gravestones, they knocked down 73 gravestones - that takes some determination and it takes time."
A criminal investigation has been opened.
Spiegel Online
Once everything lay in ruins on this first day of April, anno Domini 2019, once all four alternatives to solving the Brexit dilemma had been rejected and the deeply frustrated and teary-eyed Tory MP Nick Boles (constituency Grantham and Stamford) had announced he was leaving the party, once the dozen half-naked protesters who had super-glued themselves to a pane of glass in the public gallery to call attention to species extinction had been removed, once the evening had turned to night and the session was approaching its end, only then was MP Liz Twist able to take the floor.
"I am very pleased to have secured this adjournment debate on the Blaydon Quarry landfill site. It is a matter of great concern ..."
Twist spoke for a quarter of an hour about plastic garbage swirling around in the wind and the disgusting stench making life extremely unpleasant in the Blaydon constituency in northern England.
There are, after all, other issues that need to be addressed aside from the fate of the European continent.
ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
The Guardian
West Jefferson, Alabama, a somnolent town of around 420 people north-west of Birmingham, was an unlikely venue to seize the national imagination. Now, it has the misfortune to be forever associated with the “poop train”.
David Brasfield, a retired coalminer who has lived in West Jefferson for 45 years, thought at first the foul stench came from the carcass of a shot pig. By the time he realized that human feces was being transported from 1,000 miles away to a nearby landfill site, a scene of biblical pestilence was unfolding upon West Jefferson.
“The odor was unbearable, as were the flies and stink bugs,” said Brasfield, who sports a greying handlebar moustache and describes himself as a conservative Republican. “The flies were so bad that you couldn’t walk outside without being inundated by them. You’d be covered in all sorts of insects. People started getting headaches, they couldn’t breathe. You wouldn’t even go outside to put meat on the barbecue.”
The landfill, called Big Sky Environmental, sits on the fringes of West Jefferson and is permitted to accept waste from 48 US states. It used a nearby rail spur to import sewage from New York and New Jersey. This epic fecal odyssey was completed by trucks which took on the waste and rumbled through West Jefferson – sometimes spilling dark liquid on sharp turns – to the landfill.
Climate Central (4/10/2019)
As winter’s last freeze comes and goes for more of the country, spring planting season is gaining momentum. Your area’s preferred flowers, shrubs, and trees depend on your climate — a plant that’s happy in North Carolina might be miserable in North Dakota, and vice versa. A warming climate is affecting the natural ranges of plants around the country.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has formalized these ranges into “hardiness zones” — strips of similar climate that run roughly east-to-west across the country (except in the high mountains and coasts). NOAA has created similar maps based on the annual lowest temperature climate normals for a 30-year period. Zone 3 (average annual lowest temperature of -40 to -30°F) only allows the hardiest of plants, such as garlic and asparagus. Zone 10 (30 to 40°F) allows for tomatillos and other heat-tolerant species. The map shows most regions in between, with occasional inconsistencies due to local microclimates.
As temperatures rise and habitats shift due to human-caused climate change, these planting zones are shifting north. Compared to a 1951-1980 baseline, the average coldest temperatures of 1989-2018 are more than 3°F warmer for the average city. Temperatures have increased for more than 95 percent of the 244 stations analyzed.
Deutsche Welle
The over 90-year-old female turtle died a day after an aborted attempt at artificial insemination. The Suzhou city government said experts have collected the turtle's ovarian tissue for future research.
The only known female member of one of the world's rarest and most endangered turtle species has died in a Chinese zoo, authorities at the zoo in the East Chinese city of Suzhou confirmed on Sunday.
The Suzhou zoo also houses a male Yangtze giant softshell turtle. The other two live in Vietnam, but their genders are unknown.
China's state-run People's Daily newspaper said the deceased turtle was over 90 years old. She had been inseminated five times since 2008, with the last operation taking place shortly before her death.
Although the last insemination went smoothly and the turtle appeared to be in fine health after the procedure, her condition deteriorated the following day.
The Guardian
George Monbiot
No one is coming to save us. Mass civil disobedience is essential to force a political response.
Had we put as much effort into preventing environmental catastrophe as we’ve spent on making excuses for inaction, we would have solved it by now. Everywhere I look, I see people engaged in furious attempts to fend off the moral challenge it presents.
The commonest current excuse is this: “I bet those protesters have phones/go on holiday/wear leather shoes.” In other words, we won’t listen to anyone who is not living naked in a barrel, subsisting only on murky water. Of course, if you are living naked in a barrel we will dismiss you too, because you’re a hippie weirdo. Every messenger, and every message they bear, is disqualified on the grounds of either impurity or purity.
As the environmental crisis accelerates, and as protest movements like YouthStrike4Climate and Extinction Rebellion make it harder not to see what we face, people discover more inventive means of shutting their eyes and shedding responsibility. Underlying these excuses is a deep-rooted belief that if we really are in trouble, someone somewhere will come to our rescue: “they” won’t let it happen. But there is no they, just us.
The Guardian (4/13/2019)
Bea Ruiz, a veteran progressive coordinator, has been telling scores of first-time climate change protesters they face being harassed and beaten by police next week. Most seem happy with the deal.
“I told a 72-year-old volunteer that he will probably be targeted by police,” said Ruiz, who is based in Eureka, California and is helping organize the first US rollout of Extinction Rebellion, a group founded in the UK that has grabbed attention through disruptive protests leading to mass arrests.
“He paused and then said: ‘OK, yes.’”
Following a foray into New York in January, several thousand protestors will aim to cause similar mischief in dozens of US cities next week.
“This is a coordinated rebellion that targets industry and government indefinitely, to shut the country down,” Ruiz said. “In my 30 years plus of activism I’ve never seen so many everyday people worried in such a visceral way, for themselves, their children, their grandchildren. It’s unprecedented.”
Reuters
The number of confirmed cases of measles in the United States this year jumped by nearly 20 percent in the week ended April 11 in the country’s second-worst outbreak in nearly two decades, federal health officials reported on Monday.
As of April 11, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded 555 cases of the disease since the beginning of the year, up from 465 cases confirmed by April 4. The cases were found in 20 states spanning the country.
The measles virus is highly contagious and can lead to deadly complications, particularly in children. The CDC report did not say whether there have been any fatalities.
The U.S. outbreak is part of a worldwide rise. The World Health Organization reported on Monday that global cases had risen nearly four-fold in the first quarter of 2019 to 112,163 compared with the same period last year.
A growing and vocal fringe of parents in the United States oppose measles vaccines believing, contrary to scientific evidence, that ingredients in the vaccines can cause autism or other disorders.
Reuters
Severe thunderstorms blasted the U.S. East Coast with gusts of wind up to 50 miles per hour on Monday morning, knocking out power in thousands of homes and putting several states on flood watch, the National Weather Service said.
More than 54,000 homes and businesses were without power in Pennsylvania, according to the tracking site PowerOutage.US, with 139,000 more outages reported across New York, Rhode Island, Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland and New Jersey.
The National Weather Service forecast heavy rains and flash flooding would exist for the Northeast later on Monday.
SPORTS AND ENTERTAINMENT
CNN
In the closest finish in the men's race since 1988, Kenya's Lawrence Cherono, making his Boston Marathon debut, held off two-time Boston Marathon champion Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia to barely clip the finish line tape first. Cherono was two seconds ahead, in a time of 2:07:57. Right behind in third place was Kenneth Kipkemoi of Kenya, in 2:08:07.
Desisa won this race in 2013 and 2015.
Scott Fauble and Jared Ward were the top-finishing American men, in seventh and eighth, respectively. The last American man to win in Boston was Meb Keflezighi, in 2014. He was the
Grand Marshal for this year's race
Golf Channel
AUGUSTA, Ga. – Tucked between the men’s locker room and the grill at Augusta National is an anteroom. It’s predictably appointed and posh, with a flatscreen TV in a corner, fireplace adjacent to a large window that overlooks the iconic course and an assortment of leather chairs.
It’s normally a serene place – no phones, no connection to the outside world, no stress. But this was far from normal or serene.
The final hours of every major are always tense, but on this particular Sunday – with a storm approaching – the strain was as evident.
Amid the chaos of the anteroom, Tiger Woods’ longtime agent. Mark Steinberg. paced nervously, darting between a scoring computer in the grill and the TV next to the fireplace. Woods, some 11 years removed from his last major moment, was in the hunt at the place that has defined his career.
As Woods stepped on the 12th tee, trailing Francesco Molinari by two strokes, there was a sense that time is running out. Even in threesomes, things move fast on the back nine on Sundays at Augusta National, and Molinari had played perfectly mundane golf up until that moment. But then Molinari's 8-iron into the 12th green hopelessly faded into a bank and tumbled into Rae’s Creek. Woods made par and Molinari made double bogey for a two-shot swing and an all-square match.
Editor’s Note: A special shout out to my daughter water willow for returning my 6 Year old MacBook Pro to factory settings. Although the battery isn’t what is once was, the computer is fast and flawless making the OND much easier to put together.