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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
US NEWS
Washington Post
CHICAGO — Lori Lightfoot, who ran for Chicago’s top job as a first-time reform candidate with few ties to the city’s entrenched political structure, was sworn in as its 56th mayor Monday during a ceremony that noted her historic firsts.
“For years they said, ‘Chicago ain’t ready for reform.’ Well, get ready, because reform is here,” Lightfoot said to cheers inside a packed Wintrust Arena. She was joined on a stage by such Illinois Democratic power brokers as U.S. Sens. Richard J. Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, Rep. Jesús “Chuy” Garcia, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, former Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley and outgoing mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Lightfoot’s half-hour speech was deeply personal and acknowledged that she is the city’s first black female leader as well as its first openly gay one. The former federal prosecutor introduced her wife and 11-year-old daughter, then choked up when presenting her 90-year-old mother: “You and dad told me I could be anything that I wanted. . . . My gratitude to you knows no limits.”
Bloomberg
Ford Motor Co. plans to eliminate about 7,000 salaried jobs -- about 10% of its global white-collar workforce -- as pressures mount on automakers to keep pace with massive technological shifts amid signs global car demand has peaked.
Eliminating the positions will save Ford about $600 million a year, Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett wrote in a memo to employees Monday, seven months after the company
informed employees of a salaried workforce “redesign.” The majority of the cuts will be completed by May 24 in North America, and by the end of August in markets including
Europe,
China and
South America.
“To succeed in our competitive industry, and position Ford to win in a fast-changing future, we must reduce bureaucracy, empower managers, speed decision making, focus on the most valuable work, and cut costs,” Hackett wrote. “Ford is a family company and saying goodbye to colleagues is difficult and emotional.”
Ford shares briefly moved higher before the start of regular trading but were down 0.3% to $10.26 as of 10:15 a.m. Monday in New York trading. The stock has climbed 34% this year after plunging in 2018.
DW News
US President Donald Trump issued a stern warning to Iran on Sunday amid rising tensions between Washington and Tehran.
"If Iran wants to fight, that will be the official end of Iran," said Trump. "Never threaten the United States again!”
The tweet appeared to be one of Trump's most overt threats against Iran since taking office. Over the past month, the US has taken an increasingly aggressive position towards Tehran.
Washington last week deployed an aircraft carrier, bombers, an assault ship and a Patriot missile battery to the Persian Gulf to combat what it describes as Iranian "threats," prompting concerns of a military encounter.
Read more: Confrontational view of Iran reflects Trump's approach to foreign policy
Iran downplays threat
Iran responded on Monday with defiance. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said in a tweet that Trump would fail to destroy the country, just as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had in the past.
The Guardian
The US government says a 16-year-old Guatemalan died on Monday at a border patrol station in south Texas, the fifth death of a migrant child since December.
US Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the border patrol apprehended the teenager in south Texas’s Rio Grande valley on 13 May. The agency said the teenager was found unresponsive on Monday morning during a welfare check at the agency’s Weslaco, Texas, station. The teenager’s cause of death is unknown.
The agency did not say why the teenager had been detained for a week, but said he was “due for placement” in a facility for youth operated by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Federal law requires the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to send minors unaccompanied by a parent or legal guardian to HHS within 72 hours of determining that the child is unaccompanied.
The border patrol has faced months of scrutiny over its care of children it apprehends at the border. A two-year-old child died last week after he and his mother were detained by the border patrol. On 30 April, a 16-year-old Guatemalan boy died after officials at an HHS detention facility noticed that he was sick. He was hospitalized in intensive care for several days before his death.
The Guardian
A 23-year-old transgender woman who was seen on a widely circulated video being beaten in front of a crowd of people has been found shot dead in Dallas.
Muhlaysia Booker was found face-down in a street early on Saturday and no suspect has been identified, Maj Vincent Weddington of Dallas police said. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Investigators said there was no apparent link to the 12 April beating Booker suffered after she was involved in a minor traffic accident.
A police affidavit released at the time said Booker accidentally backed into a vehicle before the driver of that vehicle pointed a gun at her and refused to let her leave unless she paid for the damage.
As a crowd gathered, someone offered $200 to a man to beat the woman, who suffered a concussion, fractured wrist and other injuries, police said at the time.
Other men also struck Booker, one stomping on her head. Edward Thomas, 29, was arrested and jailed on a charge of aggravated assault.
A cellphone recording showed Booker being beaten as the crowd hollered and watched. Video of the incident was shared on social media.
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Justice Department offered President Donald Trump legal cover on Monday to block former White House counsel Don McGahn from testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, saying McGahn has “immunity from testifying” before Congress about matters related to his official duties.
The legal opinion by the Justice Department was released one day before McGahn had been due to appear before the Democratically controlled House panel by order of a subpoena to discuss matters outlined in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigative report.
The Guardian
Three major Alabama newspapers devoted their Sunday editions to letters from women across the state, offering an expansive look into the reactions after a nearly all-male state legislature passed the nation’s strictest abortion ban last week.
The Alabama Media Group, which operates the Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times and the Mobile Press-Register, filled their Sunday papers with 200 essays from Alabama women of various backgrounds, ages and political leanings. The essays were also available as a package online under the title “It’s time to hear Alabama’s women”.
Though the state was “the talk of the nation last week”, wrote Alabama Media Group’s vice-president, Kelly Ann Scott, in an introduction to the series, “missing from many of those conversations were the voices of women from this state”.
Scott continued that in less than 24 hours, more than 200 Alabama women wrote in with their perspectives.
WORLD NEWS
Al Jazeera
Kabul, Afghanistan - For years, the Kabul landscape has been undergoing increasing transformation.
New high-rise apartment buildings, where rents can top out at $1,000 a month, restaurants and wedding halls jostle for space as efforts to make the city more green result in more trees and flowers on pavements and traffic dividers.
But the biggest change is still taking hold, one that harks back to the city's peaceful past. Scores of Afghans are busily restoring the iconic Darul Aman Palace.
Over the last 40 years of conflict, the building went from a symbol of modern Afghanistan that King Amanullah Khan wanted to create when he ordered its construction in the 1920s, to a physical embodiment of the ravages of war.
DW News
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz on Monday called on the president to sack Interior Minister Herbert Kickl (top photo) of the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ), triggering an announcement from the FPÖ that it was withdrawing the rest of its ministers in solidarity.
The events come as fallout grows from a hidden-camera corruption sting that has led to the downfall of Austria's coalition government. Kurz said that "complete transparency" and "total clarification" were necessary after the scandal. He said he found that Kickl's response to the scandal had not displayed the "necessary sensitivity." Under the Austrian system, the chancellor can propose the removal of a government minister but this needs to be approved by the president.
The move toward ousting Kickl, announced at a press conference in Vienna, will have serious consequences for the Austrian government's ability to rule, as the departure of the FPÖ ministers will leave Kurz without people in key portfolios.
Kurz said he had discussed with President Alexander Van der Bellen that ministerial posts would be taken over by civil servants and technocrats should the FPÖ withdraw its remaining Cabinet members. The defense, labor, foreign and transport portfolios have been held by FPÖ or FPÖ-linked lawmakers.
The Guardian
The Electoral Commission has said it will attend the offices of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party to “review its systems” after Gordon Brown urged them to investigate concerns over the legality of the party’s funding.
The former prime minister told a Labour rally in Glasgow the commission had the powers to carry out live investigations during elections, and issue interim statements on whether it believes there are unanswered legal questions about party funding.
Brown said there were clear risks democracy was being damaged if the Brexit party was allowed to accept foreign and untraceable donations via the online payments service PayPal. Political gifts of under £500, whether made via PayPal or another route, do not have to be declared.
Farage “is not going to be remembered, as he wants, as the man of the people. He’s going to be remembered as the man of the PayPal, because that is where the money is coming from,” Brown declared.
Following the speech, the Electoral Commission issued a statement, saying it planned to attend the party’s offices on Tuesday. A spokesperson said: “The Brexit party, like all registered political parties, has to comply with laws that require any donation it accepts of over £500 to be from a permissible source.
SPAIN
The Guardian
Parents who received paid paternity leave took longer to have another child and men’s desire for more children dropped, a study in Spain has found. The progressive reform towards gender equality may have changed the way men in the Mediterranean country see fertility.
The introduction of paternity leave in Spain, like in other countries, was part of a set of policies designed to promote gender equality both in the labor market and at home, said Libertad González, one of the researchers behind the report. It was also to promote fertility. “Spain is a low-fertility country,” González said. But it seemed to have the opposite effect.
According to the study, which was recently published in the Journal of Public Economics by González and Lídia Farré, professors from Spain’s Universitat Pompeu Fabra and University of Barcelona, respectively, the introduction of paid paternity leave has led to delays in fertility for eligible Spanish couples, with many waiting longer to have additional children. Additionally, the reform made men drop their desired number of children.
This is not necessarily a negative outcome. The researchers found fathers spent more time with their offspring. “They’re spending more time with the child they already have,” González said, so her theory is that “they could value investing more in this child versus having more of them”.
NPR
There's an evening show on North Korea's state TV that brings soldiers news from their hometowns.
Last September, the show on the regime-run Korean Central Television, or KCTV, was interrupted for an urgent update.
"Another piece of news from our families on the home front, just in from the Kangson steel factory," an announcer says. "Soldiers from Kangson will be happy to hear that," the anchor replies, beaming.
The update: A soldier's father says he and fellow factory workers are so motivated, they will beat production targets by 50%.
The spirited labor message is decades old. But the presentation, including the staged interruption, hints at a change in propaganda tactics.
The news presenters are fresh-faced. Their attire is business casual. Their dialogue is chatty. You might almost think it's a South Korean show. One giveaway that it's not is the anchors' red lapel pins bearing images of old North Korean leaders, worn only in the North.
ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND HEALTH
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency plans to change the way it calculates the health risks of air pollution, a shift that would make it easier to roll back a key climate change rule because it would result in far fewer predicted deaths from pollution, according to five people with knowledge of the agency’s plans.
The E.P.A. had originally forecast that eliminating the Obama-era rule, the Clean Power Plan, and replacing it with a new measure would have resulted in an additional 1,400 premature deaths per year. The new analytical model would significantly reduce that number and would most likely be used by the Trump administration to defend further rollbacks of air pollution rules if it is formally adopted.
The proposed shift is the latest example of the Trump administration downgrading the estimates of environmental harm from pollution in regulations. In this case, the proposed methodology would assume there is little or no health benefit to making the air any cleaner than what the law requires. Many experts said that approach was not scientifically sound and that, in the real world, there are no safe levels of the fine particulate pollution associated with the burning of fossil fuels.
Fine particulate matter — the tiny, deadly particles that can penetrate deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream — is linked to heart attacks, strokes and respiratory disease.
Climate Central (5/15/2019)
Climate change is making the wettest days wetter, heightening flood risks.
In the spring of 2019, floodwaters overwhelmed levees across the Midwest, drenching towns and causing billions of dollars in infrastructure and crop damage. Record downpours in Tennessee provoked a state of emergency and led to mudslides. In California, heavy precipitation damaged thousands of buildings. Extreme rain events have devastated communities around the nation — and the frequency and severity of such events are expected to worsen in a warming world.
Human-caused climate change intensifies the heaviest downpours. More than 70% of the planet’s surface is water, and as the world warms, more water evaporates from oceans, lakes, and soils. Every 1°F rise also allows the atmosphere to hold 4% more water vapor. So when weather patterns lead to heavy rain, there is even more moisture available for stronger downpours, increasing the risk and severity of flooding.
Floods often happen on the rainiest day of the year — the single calendar day with the most precipitation. Climate Central tracked how these wet days are trending over time, analyzing data for 244 cities around the country. In most areas, rainfall extremes have intensified as the climate has warmedXXXXX
Al Jazeera
Maryam Moghadam was deep in thought as she stepped out of her home to walk to work last week; there was a lot on her mind, the recent worry shared by many Iranians about US sanctions and rising regional tensions adding to that.
But as she walked down the verdant Keshavarz Boulevard in central Tehran, something caught her eye. The air was filled with beautiful little butterflies, their colourful wings catching the light as they fluttered in small clouds.
She stopped to look up, joining a group of people who were already there, talking excitedly and filming the diaphanous kaleidoscope overhead.
Painted Ladies have also been seen migrating en masse in the US and Israel.
Esmaeil Kahrom, environmentalist and researcher on biodiversity, attributed the presence of the Painted Ladies to the unprecedented rains.
"You might not see them next week," he told Al Jazeera. "Adult butterflies lay eggs and die. Their caterpillars will be born next year."
In Tehran, the butterfly migration helped elevate the public mood as tensions with the US rise and the future seems uncertain.
The Guardian
The US ban on sharing technology with Huawei was a “cynically timed” blow in the escalating trade war between the US and China, the Chinese firm’s top executive in the UK has said.
Huawei denounced Donald Trump’s ban on the sharing of US tech with “foreign adversaries”, after a string of US tech companies followed Google in restricting the company’s access to their products on Monday.
Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s World At One, Huawei’s executive vice-president in the UK, Jeremy Thompson, said the dispute was about trade, not security.
“We’re in the middle of a trade war between two big countries so the timing of this is to inflict maximum hurt on our organisation. We’re a football in between this trade war,” he said.
After failing to convince European allies to block the use of Huawei technology, the Trump administration issued an executive order last week aimed at cutting off the Chinese firm from US suppliers.
NPR
The first named tropical storm of the 2019 Atlantic season could form late Monday or Monday night, according to a special bulletin from the National Hurricane Center. The low-pressure system is a few hundred miles southwest of Bermuda.
Currently dubbed "Disturbance 1," the system has a 70% chance of developing into a tropical storm over the next 48 hours, the weather agency said in an update at 1:30 p.m. ET. The NHC says rain and thunderstorms inside the system are "showing signs of organization."
[...]
The storm would likely devolve on Wednesday as it runs into a cold front over the ocean, the NHC says. But the system that's currently dubbed "Disturbance 1" is still drawing attention, as it forced the weather agency to issue a special alert over the weekend — some two weeks before the hurricane season officially begins on June 1.
NPR
The toddler looking up at Dr. Melanie Seifman in her Washington, D.C., exam room seems a little dazed.
It could be because she just woke up from a nap at daycare. It could be that she remembers the shots she got last time, and she knows what's coming.
The little girl is catching up on some vaccines she's behind on: missing doses of the DTaP and polio vaccines. She's over two years old — both of those shots are supposed to happen at a baby's six-month check up.
"It happens a lot," Siefman says. The Unity Health Care clinic, where Siefman practices, serves mostly low-income, mostly African-American patients. She says her patients often miss vaccinations because of struggles in their parents' lives. The reasons include: "transportation, couldn't get off work, didn't have insurance and didn't know that they could come in without insurance."
During this recent measles outbreak, there's been a lot of discussion about the religious and ideological reasons behind low vaccination rates, especially in places like Washington state and New York.