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.
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US NEWS
McClatchy News
Republicans who typically support Rep. Devin Nunes are less willing to speak up for him since he filed a lawsuit against one of his own constituents.
The lawsuit is Nunes’ third in which he alleges that political consultants conspired against him to damage his chances for re-election last year. Nunes, R-Tulare, won the race against Democratic challenger Andrew Janz, but by a closer margin than in his previous campaigns.
The previous two cases targeted social media giant Twitter and McClatchy, the parent company of The Fresno Bee. They also named Liz Mair, a Republican political strategist.
…
Two Republican consultants who have managed political campaigns in the San Joaquin Valley, Kevin Spillane and Carl Fogliani, were willing to speak on the record, both saying they were confused by Nunes’ tactics.
“There seems to be no strategy other than to attack his enemies,” Spillane said. “He should focus on working his district and stay out of the politics of Washington, D.C.”
Asked if these lawsuits helped further the perception that Nunes had become less concerned with his district — a frequent criticism of Nunes by Democrats — Spillane said, “Well, I don’t think it helps him.”
The Guardian
William Barr, the attorney general, has criticised “serious irregularities” at the Metropolitan correctional center (MCC) in New York where the billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in an apparent suicide on Saturday. Barr also vowed to pursue the federal sex-trafficking case against Epstein and said: “Any co-conspirators should not rest easy.”
Barr, who was speaking to the National Fraternal Order of Police in New Orleans, has come under increasing pressure to explain seeming lapses in jail protocol around Epstein’s death.
The case was important, Barr said on Monday, to the FBI, the Department of Justice, prosecutors at the southern district of New York and victims of Epstein “who had the courage to come forward and deserve the opportunity to confront the accused in the courtroom”.
Barr added that the federal case against Epstein was “very important to the Department of Justice and to me personally”.
Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration unveiled a sweeping rule on Monday that some experts say could cut legal immigration in half by denying visas and permanent residency to hundreds of thousands of people for being too poor.
The long-anticipated rule, pushed by Trump’s leading aide on immigration, Stephen Miller, takes effect Oct. 15. It would reject applicants for temporary or permanent visas if they fail to meet high enough income standards or if they receive public assistance such as welfare, food stamps, public housing or Medicaid.
“The Trump administration is trying to bypass Congress and implement its own merit based-immigration system. It’s really a backdoor way of prohibiting low-income people from immigrating,” said Charles Wheeler of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc.
Reuters
U.S. stocks dropped in a broad sell-off on Monday as simmering geopolitical tensions spooked equity investors and drove a bond market rally while the protracted U.S.-China trade war stoked fears of impending recession.
All three major U.S. stock indexes closed sharply lower in light trading, with little to soothe market jitters over Hong Kong protests, Argentine President Mauricio Macri’s primary election defeat, and the U.S.-China tariff dispute that has rattled markets for months.
BBC
After the apparent suicide of US financier Jeffrey Epstein, his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, has come into the spotlight.
Questions are being asked about what role she may have played in procuring underage girls for the financier.
Epstein died in a New York prison cell on 10 August as he awaited, without the chance of bail, his trial on sex trafficking charges.
Details of the allegation against Ms Maxwell emerged in documents unsealed by a US judge last week in a 2015 defamation case.
Born on Christmas Day in 1961 outside Paris, Ms Maxwell is Oxford-educated and said to speak several languages,
A well-connected socialite, she is said to have introduced Epstein to many of her wealthy and powerful friends, including Bill Clinton and the Duke of York (who was accused in the court papers of touching a woman at Jeffrey Epstein's US home, although the court subsequently struck out allegations against the duke).
Buckingham Palace has said that "any suggestion of impropriety with underage minors" by the duke was "categorically untrue".
Reuters
A friend of the Ohio man who killed nine people in Dayton was charged on Monday with lying about his drug use on a form when he bought a gun and told authorities that he bought body armor and firearm accessories for the shooter, a federal prosecutor said.
...
Glassman said during a news conference in Dayton announcing the charges that Kollie told federal agents that he had purchased body armor, an accessory for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and a 100-round double drum magazine that Betts used during the shooting.
WORLD NEWS
Reuters
Hong Kong’s airport reopened on Tuesday but its administrator warned that flight movements would still be affected, after China said protests that have swept the city over the past two months had begun to show “sprouts of terrorism”.
Despite the airport reopening, Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific (0293.HK) said it had canceled over 200 flights to and out of the airport on Tuesday, according to its website.
The airport, one of the world’s busiest, blamed demonstrators for halting flights on Monday, but the exact trigger for the closure was not clear as protesters occupying the arrivals hall for the past five days have been peaceful.
AFP
Indian troops clamped tight restrictions on mosques across Kashmir for Monday's Eid al-Adha festival, fearing anti-government protests over the stripping of the Muslim-majority region's autonomy, according to residents.
The Himalayan region's biggest mosque, the Jama Masjid, was ordered shut and people were only allowed to pray in smaller local mosques so that no big crowds could gather, witnesses said.
Kashmir police chief Dilbagh Singh said late Monday "Eid celebrations were peaceful today".
"There was a stray protest in Srinagar but nothing major," he told AFP.
Regional inspector general of police Swayam Prakash Pani added that "there is only a couple of injuries which were reported, otherwise the entire valley, the situation is normal".
Kashmir has been in a security lockdown for eight days as the Hindu nationalist government in New Delhi seeks to snuff out opposition to its move to impose tighter central control over the region.
DW News
Russia's media oversight agency has demanded Google take action to stop the spread of information about illegal mass protests. Thousands of its YouTube channels livestreamed one of Russia's biggest demos on Saturday.
Russia's media regulator on Sunday asked Google to stop sending push notifications for livestream videos of anti-government protests and arrests.
Roskomnadzor said it complained to Google about unspecified "structures" allegedly using tools, such as push notifications, to spread information about illegal mass protests, "including those aimed at disrupting elections.”
Under pressure
The Russian watchdog said that if Google failed to respond to its request, it would consider it "interference in its sovereign affairs" and "hostile influence [over] and obstruction of democratic elections in Russia."
Moscow would then reserve the right to react "appropriately," it said, without elaborating.
DW News
Journalists have been largely barred from Yemen. After a year of trying, DW's Fanny Facsar was granted a visa. On her journey, she witnessed a deeply torn country devastated by a conflict that has been all but forgotten.
It was July when I got a call from Aden, Yemen's interim capital, saying that I had been granted an entry visa for the country. It had been almost a year since my first attempt to get into Yemen. I wondered whether it would actually work out this time, or if they would send me back at Amman airport, as they had done with so many other journalists already.
I traveled from DW's studio in Lagos, Nigeria, to Cairo, then Amman, and finally into Aden, by myself and without any television equipment. Once I set foot in Yemen, I was able to start shooting footage immediately thanks to the contact I had made with a local crew 10 months prior.
Al Jazeera
Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mohammad Javad Zarif has warned against an arms race in the Middle East, saying recent US weapons sales have turned the Gulf region into a "tinderbox ready to blow up".
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera on Monday, Zarif said more warships in the Gulf would only lead to more insecurity.
"The US [sold] $50bn worth of weapons to the region last year. Some of the countries in the region with less than a third of our population spend $87bn on military procurement," Zarif told Al Jazeera in Qatar's capital, Doha.
"Let's make a comparison; Iran spent last year $16bn on all its military with almost one million people in the army. The UAE with a total population of one million spent $22bn, Saudi Arabia spent $87bn," he continued.
The Guardian
Russian scientists have indicated that they were working on miniaturised sources of nuclear energy when a rocket engine exploded last week, increasing scrutiny of the possibility that the accident occurred while testing an experimental cruise missile powered by a small reactor.
The explosion last Thursday at a military testing ground in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region killed at least five people and caused radiation readings in neighbouring cities to spike to 20 times their normal level for half an hour.
Russia’s defence ministry said the explosion had taken place during testing of a rocket engine, but the country’s nuclear agency, Rosatom, later confirmed that several of its employees had been killed during testing of an “isotope power source in a liquid propulsion system”.
Reuters
Argentine President Mauricio Macri vowed on Monday to win a second term despite a surprisingly strong performance by the opposition in the primary election that set off a shockwave through markets, crashing the peso currency and sending stocks and bonds tumbling.
Macri said he would “reverse” the result of Sunday’s primary, but acknowledged that a weaker peso triggered by the surge in support for Peronist opposition candidate Alberto Fernandez and his running mate former President Cristina Fernandez would fuel inflation.
ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
New York Times
The therapies saved roughly 90 percent of the patients who received them early in the course of infection. Doctors hope patients will seek out the cures, ending the outbreak.
Two experimental treatments to treat Ebola infection work so well that they will now be offered to all patients in the Democratic Republic of Congo, scientists announced Monday.The antibody-based treatments are so powerful — “Now we can say that 90 percent can come out of treatment cured,” one scientist said — that they raise hopes that the disastrous epidemic in eastern Congo can soon be stopped.
Many families in the epidemic zone have been hiding their sick or bringing them in near death, too late to save. The epidemic has infected about 2,800 known patients and has killed more than 1,800 of them, according to the World Health Organization.
The Guardian
The GuardianAbout 40% of all forests across the US are at risk of being ravaged by an army of harmful pests, undermining a crucial resource in addressing the climate crisis, new research has found.
Tree-damaging pests have already destroyed swathes of US woodland, with the American chestnut virtually wiped out by a fungal disease and elms blighted by Dutch elm disease. About 450 overseas pests that damage or feed on trees have been introduced to US forests due to the growth in international trade and travel.A PNAS-published study of the 15 most damaging non-native forest pests has found that they destroy so many trees that about 6m tons of carbon are expelled each year from the dying plants. This is the equivalent, researchers say, of adding an extra 4.6m cars to the roads every year in terms of the release of planet-warming gases.
The Guardian
The Trump administration is scaling back the US government’s latitude to protect species nearing extinction, as world scientists warn that a biodiversity crisis will soon put humanity at risk.
The changes to how the government implements the Endangered Species Act, lauded by industry, will make it harder to protect the most vulnerable creatures.
Several unique animals, including the North American wolverine, the northern spotted owl and the American burying beetle, demonstrate how the changes could hamper species protection.
More than 1,600 species are considered officially at risk in the US. A United Nations report this spring found humans are disrupting the natural world and putting a million species at risk of extinction worldwide. At least 680 vertebrate species have gone extinct in the last 400 years.
The Guardian
A spate of huge fires in northern Russia, Alaska, Greenland and Canada discharged 50 megatonnes of CO2 in June and 79 megatonnes in July, far exceeding the previous record for the Arctic.
The intensity of the blazes continues with 25 megatonnes in the first 11 days of August – extending the duration beyond even the most persistent fires in the 17-year dataset of Europe’s satellite monitoring system.
Mark Parrington, a scientist in the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, said the previous record was just a few weeks. “We haven’t seen this before,” he said. “The fire intensity is still well above average.”
He said the affected regions previously registered unusually high temperatures and a low level of soil moisture, which created the perfect conditions for ignition. Globally, June and July were the hottest months ever measured.
BuzzFeed News
Verizon has agreed to sell the microblogging platform Tumblr to Automattic, the company behind the blogging tool WordPress.com. Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg said he intends to keep the ban against NSFW content.
The Tumblr acquisition is the largest buy for Automattic in terms of both price tag and staff size, Mullenweg told the Wall Street Journal.
BuzzFeed News has reached out to both Tumblr and Automattic for comment.“Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety,” Mullenweg said on Hacker Newson Monday. “It’s a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there. I personally have very liberal views on these things, but supporting adult content as a business is very different.”
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS
DW News
Here you go side pocket. Edited into the OND with you in mind.
Mark Knopfler's unique guitar playing made Dire Straits world famous. But he has never enjoyed life in the spotlight. As the musician who marked rock history turns 70, here's a look back at the anti-star's career.
Nostalgia is not guitarist Mark Knopfler's strong suit. The successful British band Dire Straits' frontman, who now turns 70, finds looking back as unpleasant as life in the limelight.
Knopfler was born on August 12, 1949 in Glasgow. His mother was a teacher, his father was a Hungarian architect who had fled his country in 1939 because he was close to the Communists. Knopfler discovered music as a child. His uncle's piano playing sparked his passion for music, and his parents gave him his first guitar. While he was a student, Knopfler worked first as a reporter and farm hand and later as an English teacher, until he founded Dire Straits with his younger brother David in 1977.
The Guardian
If you think it’s bad enough sharing a planet with Donald Trump, spare a thought for poor Woody Harrelson. Because according to the man himself, Harrelson once shared a dinner table with the president, and it went just as well as you would expect. In a recent Esquire interview, Harrelson deployed a Trump anecdote for the ages.
In 2002, then Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura invited Harrelson to “a brutal dinner” at Trump Tower, because Trump was trying to convince Ventura to be his 2004 Democratic running mate. Over two and a half hours, Harrelson, Ventura, Trump and his fiancee, Melania Knauss, enjoyed each other’s company. Except Harrelson had a terrible time. Here’s how he described it:
“Now, at a fair table with four people, each person is entitled to 25% of the conversation, right? I’d say Melania got about 0.1%, maybe. I got about 1%. And the governor, Jesse, he got about 3%. Trump took the rest. It got so bad I had to go outside and burn one before returning to the monologue monopoly.”