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
New York Times
WASHINGTON — At a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons, administration officials said.
The revisions were ordered by hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. It does not call for a land invasion of Iran, which would require vastly more troops, officials said.
The development reflects the influence of Mr. Bolton, one of the administration’s most virulent Iran hawks, whose push for confrontation with Tehran was ignored more than a decade ago by President George W. Bush.
Al Jazeera
The disciplinary trial of the New York City police officer who put Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, in a fatal chokehold began on Monday, nearly five years after widely seen video of the death sparked a national outcry about policing tactics and the treatment of African Americans.
Daniel Pantaleo, who is white, could be fired after the conclusion of what is expected to be a 10-day trial at the New York Police Department's headquarters in Manhattan. The ultimate decision will rest with New York City Police Commissioner James O'Neill.
Videos recorded on bystanders' mobile phones showed Garner, who was 43, saying, "I can't breathe," 11 times before he died. The phrase became a rallying cry in the early days of the Black Lives Matter movement, which seeks to end the disproportionate use of deadly force against non-white people by US police departments.
New York Times
Investors are dealing with a painful new reality: The trade war between the United States and China could last indefinitely.
The anxiety caused by that realization rippled through the stock markets on Monday, and the S&P 500 suffered its steepest daily drop in months after China said it would increase tariffs on nearly $60 billion of American-made goods in response to a similar move last week by the Trump administration.
The American stock benchmark fell 2.4 percent, pushing its losses for the month above 4.5 percent.
Investors hammered shares in trade-sensitive sectors like agriculture, semiconductors and industrials particularly hard. Bonds and commodities, too, flashed warnings of a slowdown.
The stock losses, which have intensified in recent days, ended a recent calm that had settled over Wall Street. For months, investors assumed that the trade war, a major hazard for the global economy, would end soon. Just weeks ago, the S&P 500 reached a record.
NPR
If House Democrats ultimately begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump, last week will be remembered as one of the pivotal turning points.
Trump's decision to invoke executive privilege over the full report by special counsel Robert Mueller is prompting impeachment skeptics like Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., to reconsider.
"I have to be honest with you, I once said I would be the last person standing against impeachment, and now, I'm squatting," Cleaver told NPR.
While some Democrats hope the Judiciary Committee's decision to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt will force the administration back to the negotiation table, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders made clear the president will not budge on his executive privilege claim over the Mueller report. "This is fully consistent with that precedent and it is fully consistent with the president actually upholding the law," Sanders told reporters last week.
Washington Post
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned a 41-year-old precedent Monday, prompting a pointed warning from liberal justices about “which cases the court will overrule next.”
The issue in Monday’s 5 to 4 ruling was one of limited impact: whether states have sovereign immunity from private lawsuits in the courts of other states. In 1979, the Supreme Court ruled that there is no constitutional right to such immunity, although states are free to extend it to one another and often do.
But the court’s conservative majority overruled that decision, saying there was an implied right in the Constitution that means states “could not be haled involuntarily before each other’s courts,” in the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote Monday’s decision.
Thomas acknowledged the departure from the legal doctrine of stare decisis, in which courts are to abide by settled law without a compelling reason to overrule the decision.
NPR
Mariano Torres Ramirez woke up early on Sunday. He got out of bed just after 5 a.m. and stepped into his garden to cut a little bunch of yellow marigolds — a gift for his mother.
"I'm going to tell her I'm sorry it's been so long since I've seen her," Torres said.
It has been almost two years since the soft-spoken 82-year-old last visited his mother's grave in 2017, just a few weeks before Hurricane Maria sent a landslide rippling through the municipal cemetery in the town of Lares, Puerto Rico. It damaged nearly 1,800 tombs, uprooting caskets from their graves and sending some of them tumbling down a hillside.
On Friday, Torres heard the town's mayor announce on the radio that finally, nearly 20 months after locking the gates because of the storm damage and the exposed graves, he'd gotten permission from the island's health department to reopen a part of the cemetery for Mother's Day.
"Thank God!" Torres said to himself. When he arrived at the cemetery clutching his mother's marigolds, a crowd had already formed, an hour before it was set to open.
Reuters
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter fell and broke his hip on Monday as he was preparing to leave his home in Georgia for a turkey-hunting trip, and has undergone surgery to repair the injury, a representative said.
Carter, 94, a Democrat who was elected president in 1976, was accompanied by his wife, Rosalynn, 91, while recovering from the operation, which doctors said was successful, according to a statement from his nonprofit organization, the Carter Center.
The surgery was performed at a medical center in Americus, Georgia, about 10 miles (16 km) east of the Carters’ home in Plains.
WORLD NEWS
DW News
China said on Monday that it would increase tariffs of up to 25% on $60 billion (€53 billion) worth of US goods, starting on June 1.
The "adaptation" was a "response to US unilateralism and trade protectionism," the State Council's Customs Tariffs Commission said.
Read more: Trump's China tariffs are about more than just trade
US President Donald Trump last week increased tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods to 25%and ordered US trade officials to start looking into imposing tariffs on another $300 billion worth of Chinese goods.
Talks between the United States and China on a deal to end their trade dispute ended on Friday without a breakthrough.
China had collected duties of 5% to 25% on nearly 2,500 goods before the latest hike. The Tariffs Commission did not specify which goods would be targeted by the higher rates.
DW News
EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini said on Monday that EU member states continued "to fully support the nuclear deal with Iran" ahead of a foreign ministers' summit in Brussels.
Washington has increased its pressure on the EU to isolate Iran internationally and walk away from the nuclear deal.
[...]
Holly Dagres, non-resident fellow at the Washington-based Atlantic Council, told DW that the EU's options were limited when it comes to preserving the nuclear deal.
"The one thing that the EU could do right now is stand up against the United States," Dagres said. "But the reality is that Europe is limited in terms of telling its companies to go and do business in Iran. These multinational companies don't want to because they're afraid of being sanctioned."
But she noted that the deal stands a chance if a joint effort is made along with other signatories of the agreement, including China and Russia.
"It should've been Britain, France, Germany and the EU coming out firmly against the Trump administration a year ago when they pulled out of the multilateral agreement. Now they still can. When there's a joint effort, there is strength in numbers versus if a single country is taking a stance against the United States."
Al Jazeera
Sudan’s former President Omar al-Bashir has been charged "with inciting and participating" in the killing of protesters during the mass protests that lead to the end of his decades-long rule.
The prosecutor general's announcement on Monday came as protest organisers and military rulers resumed a new round of talks on handing over power to a civilian interim body.
"Omar al-Bashir and others have been charged for inciting and participating in the killing of demonstrators," the prosecutor general's office said.
Earlier this month, the prosecutor general ordered al-Bashir to be interrogated on charges of money laundering and financing of "terrorism".
There has been no comment from al-Bashir since his removal and arrest on April 11. The former president is reportedly being held at the maximum security Kobar prison in the capital, Khartoum.
The Guardian
Tory leadership candidates from Boris Johnson to Dominic Raab are under pressure from the party’s right to oppose Theresa May’s Brexit deal in any further vote, raising the prospect that she could be defeated by an even bigger margin.
May is considering bringing forward the withdrawal agreement bill within the next two weeks, but the mood of Conservative MPs is hardening against it once again. Labour is also minded to vote against it at second reading.
A number of Eurosceptic Conservative MPs are already planning to switch back to rejecting May’s deal – adding to the 28 leavers and six remainers from the party who held out against it last time. Tory MPs said support for May’s deal was “peeling off” as the prime minister’s power was ebbing away and they wanted to show their members and constituents they were serious about a hard Brexit.
With the mood changing, neither Johnson nor Raab would confirm on Monday that they would vote for the bill whenever it was brought forward.
NPR
Sweden is resuming its investigation of Julian Assange on rape allegations and will issue a European warrant for his arrest, state prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson said Monday. Assange is currently in a British prison, where he's being punished for eluding a similar warrant in 2012.
Swedish prosecutors had idled their case while Assange was holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. But with the controversial WikiLeaks founder now in U.K. custody, Persson said, "conditions have changed in the case and I believe that there are again opportunities to push the matter forward."
Persson said her office will seek to extradite Assange — a request that could be enforced after he serves at least half of a 50-week prison term for jumping bail. Acknowledging that the U.S. is seeking Assange's extradition, Persson added that it will be up to British authorities to determine how to prioritize multiple requests for Assange's extradition and/or arrest.
NPR
A well-known Afghan television journalist was shot dead in broad daylight in Kabul over the weekend, prompting an outcry from women's rights advocates.
Mina Mangal, who worked for several Afghan television channels and later became an adviser in Afghanistan's parliament, was apparently en route to work early Saturday morning when she was attacked.
Police spokesman Basir Mujahid told Reuters that she was killed near her Kabul home by two unknown men on a motorbike.
The motive behind the attack is not yet clear. Ariana News, one of the news outlets where she worked, quoted a security official saying that "the motive behind Ms. Mangal's assassination was a family and private matter."
ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central (5/8/2019)
While most of the country is comfortably into spring, signs of hotter weather are looming. Phoenix had its first 100 degree day in late April, more than two weeks earlier than the historical average of May 12. And the National Hurricane Center has already looked at systems for potential tropical development. As human-caused climate change continues, springs are heating up across the country.
Climate Central assessed the last half-century’s warm-up by plotting the annual number of spring days with above-normal temperatures. Of the 242 cities analyzed, 97% recorded an increase in warm spring days since 1970. There was an average increase of 10 warm spring days in that span — that’s a week and a half. Seven cities now experience more than a month of additional warm days, led by Tucson, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. All seven of those cities are in the Southwest, where spring is the fastest-warming season. The extra heat accelerates the evaporation that can lead to drought and stressed water supplies, affecting agriculture and energy systems as well as cities and towns.
Nationwide impacts of warm springs include longer pollen and pest seasons. As the spring and fall have brought more warm days, the growing season (and therefore allergy season) has lengthened by two weeks on average. Longer pollen seasons are affecting more and more Americans, as the rates of hay fever and asthma have nearly tripled in the last few decades. While a longer growing season may help some farmers, the ranges of familiar crops are shifting north. Warmer springs are also increasing the demand for air conditioning, driving up energy costs in some areas. And disease-carrying pests like mosquitoes and ticks are coming out earlier as well. Unless we quickly curb our climate-warming emissions, these warm spring days will increasingly blur into less tolerable summers.
AFP
German chemical giants Bayer admitted Monday its subsidiary Monsanto could have kept lists of key figures -- for or against pesticides -- "in other European countries", and not just in France.
Bayer apologised Sunday after it emerged that Monsanto had a PR agency collate lists of French politicians, scientists and journalists, with their views on pesticides and GM crops.
“I think it's very likely that such lists also exist in other European countries," Matthias Berninger, Bayer's head of Public Affairs, told journalists in a conference call.
Berninger said he "firmly believes that other countries in Europe will be affected.
"It is clear that we apologise for what has come to light in France," he added.
"We consider what we have seen so far to be completely inappropriate. Of course, we were not able to see everything.
"However, we were of the opinion that the reports of these dealings with journalists, politicians and activists are not in order and not in agreement with what Bayer stands for.
AFP
Scientists in the United States have detected the highest levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere since records began, sounding new alarm over the relentless rise of man-made greenhouse gas emissions..26
The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has tracked atmospheric CO2 levels since the late 1950s, on Saturday morning detected 415.26 parts per million (ppm).
It was also the first time on record that the observatory measured a daily baseline above 415 ppm.
The last time Earth's atmosphere contained this much CO2 was more than three million years ago, when global sea levels were several metres higher and parts of Antarctica were blanketed in forest.
"It shows that we are not on track with protecting the climate at all. The number keeps rising and it's getting higher year after year," Wolfgang Lucht, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), told AFP.
"This number needs to stabilise."
But far from stabilising, levels of CO2 -- one of a trinity of greenhouse gases produced when fossil fuels are burnt -- are climbing ever more rapidly.
Al Jazeera
Camotan, Guatemala - The rains in the village of Tizamarte in the eastern Guatemalan department of Chiquimula no longer arrive as they did in the past.
"Before it was beautiful, we used to have two harvests a year," Transito Gutierrez told Al Jazeera.
"Now not one [crop] survives," she said. "Now we cannot do anything. This drought does not end."
Gutierrez's hardship goes deeper than the lost crops, however. Last month, her 16-year-old son, Juan de Leon, died while in US custody after migrating to the US to find work and send money back home to his family.
"[Juan] told me that the coffee plants were dying. He said he was desperate," Gutierrez told Al Jazeera earlier this month. "He said he could earn more there in the United States than here. He could earn more than the $4 a day working in the field."
The Guardian
The escalating trade dispute between the US and China could prove damaging to Apple and its customers by pushing up the cost of iPhones and driving down the share price.
According to a report by Morgan Stanley, the new Trump-imposed tariff of 25% on $200bn of Chinese-made goods could add about $160 (£124) to the cost of a Chinese-made iPhone XS, which starts at $999.
Apple could shield consumers from the price hike, but concern over the trade dispute pushed shares down more than 5% on Monday, to $186. Apple shares are down 11% since the start of the month.
In further bad news for Apple, the US supreme court on Monday allowed a major antitrust class action to move forward. By a 5-4 vote, with the conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the four liberals on the panel, the court ruled that plaintiffs should be given the chance to try to prove Apple used monopoly power to raise the prices of iPhone apps.
Shipments of iPhones to North America, Apple’s largest market, fell 19% to 14.6m units in the first three months of the year. Tariffs could also affect iPhone sales in China, where Apple commands 7.4% of the market and where it has seen sales drop 25% in the past six months.
Reuters
U.S. health authorities recorded 75 new cases of the measles in the latest week, mostly in New York state, bringing the nationwide total to 839 cases in the country’s worst outbreak of the virus since 1994, federal health officials said on Monday.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a 9.8% increase in measles cases as of May 10, a resurgence that public health officials have attributed to the spread of misinformation about the measles vaccine. Data are updated every Monday.
In New York, 66 cases were reported according to CDC spokesman Jason McDonald, with 41 in New York City and 25 in Rockland County, about 40 miles (64 km) north of New York city.
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS
CNN
Boston (CNN)Felicity Huffman pleaded guilty Monday to paying $15,000 to a fake charity that facilitated cheating when her daughter took the SATs.
When she appeared in federal court in Boston, prosecutors recommended a sentence of four months prison time for the "Desperate Housewives" TV star for her role in the college admissions scandal. They also suggested a $20,000 fine and 12 months of supervised release for the charge, which is a felony.
She will be sentenced September 13.
The charity was associated with Rick Singer, who has confessed to helping wealthy parents cheat on standardized tests for their children. Singer also bribed college coaches to falsely designate students as recruited athletes, smoothing their path to admission, a criminal complaint says.
USA Today
The Kentucky Horse Racing Commission has suspended Maximum Security jockey Luis Saez for 15 racing days after determining he interfered with other riders in the controversial 2019 Kentucky Derby.
Days after race stewards met with the jockeys involved in the inquiry that led to Maximum Security’s disqualification, the commission announced Monday that Saez is suspended for 15 racing days.
The KHRC cited "failure to controI his mount and make the proper effort to maintain a straight course thereby causing interference with several rivals that resuIted in the disqualification of his mount," in its ruling against Saez.
His lawyer, Ann Oldfather, said in an email that she was present for a film review Friday and that "every single jockey in the room" said Saez was not at fault and that he "did everything he could to control the horse."
She said the jockeys included Jon Court, Julian Leparoux and Chris Landeros.
In Memoriam
BBC
Hollywood legend Doris Day, whose films made her one of the biggest stars of all time, has died aged 97.
The singer turned actress starred in films such as Calamity Jane and Pillow Talk and had a hit in 1956 with Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be).
Her screen partnership with Rock Hudson is one of the best-known in the history of romantic movies.
In a statement, the Doris Day Animal Foundation said she died on Monday at her home in Carmel Valley, California.
It said she had been "in excellent physical health for her age, until recently contracting a serious case of pneumonia".
"She was surrounded by a few close friends as she passed," the statement continued.