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 feature on 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.
Chicago Sun-Times: A town’s pride: This little steel city in Ohio forged Chicago’s next mayor by Lauren FitzPatrick
MASSILLON, Ohio — Around here, she’s still considered one of them, part of the family, though she hasn’t lived in town since she was a teenager, many decades before she’d commandeer a landslide victory to take charge of the country’s third-largest city.
In the same way that Lori Lightfoot will never quite be a Chicagoan to some, having had the bum luck to be born and raised a few states away, her hometown will not stop claiming her as a Massillonian.
Here in this tough old steel town, she’s still the daughter of Ann Lightfoot, remembered as bright, motivated, hard-working, easy to get along with, popular across cliques.
A joiner of school activities: a trumpeter in the Tiger Swing Band, a singer in the choir, a regular, like many of the other 32,000 of them at Friday night high school football games and the Burger Chef. A finalist for Miss Massillonian 1980 though robbed of the senior year honor.
Class president three times though she was, as an African American, in the minority at Washington High School.
A born leader, according to her former classmates, family friends, and her 90-year-old mother.
Detroit News: Ford faces class action lawsuit over mpg ratings by Ian Thibodeau
A class-action lawsuit filed Monday in U.S. District Court alleges Ford Motor Co. installed devices on 2019 Ford Ranger pickups that misrepresent fuel economy, and that the automaker deceptively advertised the truck's fuel efficiency.
The lawsuit was filed less than two weeks after Ford disclosed in a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the Department of Justice had opened a criminal investigation into Ford's emissions certifications processes. In February, the automaker said it had opened an internal investigation to check whether faulty computer modeling had caused the automaker to misstate fuel economy estimates for some vehicles.
"Ford deceptively advertised its Rangers to consumers as ‘best-in-class’ in fuel economy," said Steve Berman, managing partner of Hagens Berman, one of the firms that filed the lawsuit, in a statement. "Ford knew that consumers pay a premium for fuel efficiency and that less fuel burned means less emissions, and therefore more profits. Its own employees questioned its fuel efficiency calculations. Ford chose to blatantly ignore the clear warning signs it was given."
Miami Herald: State wants Kraft lawyers held in contempt. They, in turn, say prosecutors are desperate by Carli Teproff
Billionaire NFL owner Robert Kraft wandered into the wrong “Asian spa” and got himself charged with a crime. Now his lawyers find themselves accused by prosecutors of contempt of court.
The defense lawyers say it is all nonsense.
It’s just another day in the strange saga involving two separate-but-related court cases. One involves the misdemeanor solicitation-of-prostitution prosecution of Kraft, owner of the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots. The other involves the felony prosecution of two women who worked at the spa.
In a motion filed Tuesday, the state asked a Palm Beach County judge to hold Kraft attorneys Alex Spiro and William Burck in contempt for “knowingly and intentionally making a false statement of fact” while questioning a witness, who happens to be a cop who made traffic stops after customers left the spa. They were grilling him about a conversation supposedly picked up over a body cam.
The claim is that in questioning the cop the lawyers set up a false premise: that the officer had been recorded stating that if anyone questioned whether there was a proper justification for making a traffic stop, the cop could simply “make shit up.”
Syracuse.com: Syracuse diocese pays victims of 4 priests not on sex abuse list by Julie McMahon
The Catholic Diocese of Syracuse paid settlements to four victims of priests who have not been publicly named to a list of child sex abusers.
The diocese said it previously did not have enough information to act on claims against four priests. The four accusers, however, were among 88 people the diocese invited to participate in an independent compensation program, which found they deserved to be paid settlements.
The Syracuse diocese announced last week it had paid $11 million to 79 victims of child sex abuse suffered at the hands of clergymen. Four of the 79 people accused four priests who have not been publicly named to the diocese’s list of abusive priests, a diocesan official told syracuse.com.
The four priests are no longer active, Chancellor Danielle Cummings said in a statement. The diocese will review the cases again, and could publicly name the priests after an investigation, Cummings said.
San Francisco Examiner: SF approves ban on cashless stores by Joshua Sabatini
San Francisco outlawed cashless businesses Tuesday, ending a practice widely viewed as discriminatory against low income residents.
The Board of Supervisor unanimously approved legislation introduced by Supervisor Vallie Brown that will impose a ban on cashless businesses 90 days after its final approval.
The vote follows Philadelphia’s cashless business ban, approved in February, and New Jersey’s, which passed last month.
Brown said that the “future may be cashless,” but in the meantime denying cash payments is “excluding too many people.”
“This legislation will go far in ensuring all San Franciscans have equitable access to the city’s economy,” she said
In the United States, 17 percent of all African-American households and 14 percent of all Latino households had no bank account, according to a 2017 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation survey.
Mother Jones: Pediatrician Who Treated Immigrant Children Describes Lapses in Medical Care in Shelters by Michael Grabell
This story was originally published by ProPublica.
Inside a weathered green group home in southern New Jersey, Yosary grew weaker and weaker. She felt tired all the time, and when she got out of bed in the morning, she sometimes became so dizzy she needed to lie back down. Bruises started appearing all over her body. She craved ice, chewing cups of it whenever she could.
For months, the slender 15-year-old, who’d fled Honduras with her 2-year-old son, had been reporting her symptoms to the shelter’s staff. But they dismissed her pleas for help, she said: She was dizzy because she’d just stood up too fast. Her bruises? She probably bumped into something and didn’t remember. Chewing ice was a bad habit she needed to break.
By the time someone finally took her to one of the shelter’s pediatricians last summer, Yosary was in such bad shape she had to be hooked up to an IV at a local hospital. The pediatrician, Elana Levites-Agababa, recognized the telltale signs of severe anemia, which, untreated, could have resulted in heart failure and damage to other organs. The staff should have known—the teen’s history of anemia was documented in the shelter’s records.
Bloomberg: John Kelly Says Trump Family Must Be ‘Dealt With’ in White House by Justin Sink
Former White House chief of staff John Kelly said members of President Donald Trump’s family serving on the White House staff needed to be “dealt with” as he sought to implement a more orderly process in the West Wing.
“They were an influence that has to be dealt with,” Kelly said Tuesday during an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “The David Rubenstein Show,” when asked whether it was complicated to have the president’s family working at the White House. “By no means do I mean Mrs. Trump -- the first lady’s a wonderful person.”
Kelly’s remarks pointed to his long-running and low-simmering frustration with the role of the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, in the White House. The Washington Post previously reported that clashes between the president’s family members and senior advisers came so frequently that the relationship became uncomfortable.
Reuters: New York prosecutors allege sex cult leader was 'predator' by Brendon Pierson and Joseph Ax
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former self-help guru Keith Raniere was a “predator” who preyed on young women, including a 15-year-old girl, and turned them into sex slaves as part of a cultlike organization, a federal prosecutor told a jury at the start of his trial on Tuesday.
“The defendant took advantage of them emotionally and sexually,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Tanya Hajjar said in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. “He sold himself as the smartest, most ethical person in the world. ... He compared himself to Einstein and to Gandhi.”
But defense lawyer Marc Agnifilo told jurors that all the women joined Nxivm voluntarily and that Raniere was merely a tough taskmaster, not an abusive criminal mastermind.
“This is something these people signed up for,” Agnifilo said. “Control can be very bad. Control can also make Marines. Control can make gold medal winners.”
New York Times: Fear of Intensifying Trade War Ricochets Through Economy by Matt Phillips, Ana Swanson, and Alan Rappeport
Fears of an escalating trade war between the United States and China ricocheted through the American economy on Tuesday, sending stocks down sharply and prompting businesses large and small to brace for fallout.
For months, investors and companies had been lulled into a sense of security that the world’s two largest economies appeared to be getting closer to a deal to resolve their battle. That calm was shattered this week when the Trump administration threatened to impose a new round of tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese products.
A delegation of Chinese leaders is preparing to travel to Washington for talks later this week, and Trump administration officials pledged to try to get trade negotiations back on track. But it is unclear whether the two sides can defuse the newest tensions.
DW: Measles infected 34,000 in Europe in two months, says WHO by Richard Connor
The World Health Organization on Tuesday said there had been a sharp rise in the number of measles cases across Europe in January and February of this this year, with more than 34,000 people catching the disease.
Cases recorded across 42 countries resulted in 13 deaths. The number of cases was almost three times greater than for the first two months of 2018.
In Germany on Tuesday, local authorities in the northern state of Lower Saxony said that an adult had died of measles, though they did not give an age or gender for the victim.
The WHO is urging authorities to ensure that vulnerable people are vaccinated, with the disease currently spreading in many parts of the world.
"If outbreak response is not timely and comprehensive, the virus will find its way into more pockets of vulnerable individuals and potentially spread to additional countries within and beyond the region," the WHO said in a statement.
AlJazeera: Venezuela's top court targets opposition leaders
Venezuela's supreme court, the Supreme Tribunal, has said it asked the country's Constituent Assembly, a pro-government legislative super body, to determine whether to open criminal proceedings against seven opposition politicians.
In a statement on Facebook, the court said on Tuesday that the assembly would determine if proceedings could be opened to investigate crimes including conspiracy, treason, and rebellion, without detailing which actions the politicians had taken that could be considered criminal.
The politicians include Henry Ramos Allup, a former National Assembly president.
In April, following a similar request from the Supreme Tribunal, the Constituent Assembly approved a measure allowing for a future trial of opposition leader Juan Guaido.
BBC: South Africa election: ANC faces tough test 25 years after apartheid
Anger over corruption, the faltering economy and land reform are key issues as South Africans vote in the sixth democratic nationwide election since apartheid ended 25 years ago.
The African National Congress (ANC), which led the fight against apartheid, has governed the country since 1994.
But its support has eroded as large inequalities have remained.
The centrist Democratic Alliance (DA) and left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) are providing the main challenge.
Apartheid, in place from 1948 to 1994, legalised racial discrimination privileging white people, and land ownership has remained a contentious issue.
The white minority still owns disproportionately more land than the black majority. The EFF has led the charge in trying to change this.
Vulture: The College Admissions Scam Is, of Course, Being Made Into a Series by Jordan Crucchiola
The college admissions scandal that felt sensational enough to have been written by Hollywood screenwriters is … now going to be written by Hollywood screenwriters. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Annapurna has optioned the forthcoming book Accepted, from Wall Street Journal reporters Melissa Korn and Jennifer Levitz, and will develop it into a limited series. D.V. DeVincentis, who wrote the High Fidelity screenplay and for The People v. O.J. Simpson, will handle the script. Operation Varsity Blues, the code name for the federal investigation into manipulating the college admissions system, has swept up dozens of parents already, and it’s possible even more indictments are coming...
Don’t forget that Meteor Blades is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a good night and I will see you this Saturday for...science!