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, jck, 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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Chicago police are setting up checkpoints throughout the city both to remind people about the statewide stay-at-home order during the coronavirus outbreak and to “show a strong police presence” in areas hit by violence.
A department memo obtained by the Tribune calls them “seat belt safety and informational” checkpoints, and adds that the “goal of this mission is to engage the community in a positive and informative manner while providing a visible police presence in areas affected by violence."
Each of the city’s 22 patrol districts is to have one checkpoint each day, staffed by a supervisor and an unspecified number of officers, according to the memo.
Any officer “interacting with any occupants of a vehicle will don a mask and gloves,” according to the memo. Each checkpoint will last up to an hour.
Miami Herald: Stranded tourists moved in to empty, rat-infested Miami house. ‘We have nothing.’ by Lautaro Grinspan
The four Argentine friends, ages 29 to 34, planned two years for their 10-day beach vacation in Miami. But their early-March holiday has turned into a weeks-long ordeal after coronavirus-related travel restrictions made their return to Buenos Aires impossible.
Long gone from their Hollywood Airbnb, and without the funds to stay at the hotels accepting stranded travelers, the quartet is living in an abandoned, rodent- and roach-infested house in Liberty City. The property is completely empty, save for three mattresses retrieved from the trash.
With no refrigerator in the house, the group is keeping the small amount of food they have in plastic Tupperware by the front door. It’s an upgrade from the infested kitchen, where fecal matter covers drawers and cupboards.
“We have homes in Buenos Aires, and here we are, living like indigents,” said Jonatan Lopez, 33. “It’s embarrassing. Our health insurance ran out, our hotel ran out, everything ran out. We have nothing, we’re on the floor. It’s just a really bizarre situation.”
Indianapolis Star: Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky governors to coordinate lifting of coronavirus restrictions by Chris Sikich
The governors of Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky have been in close contact throughout the coronavirus pandemic and are coordinating, to at least some degree, on when to ease their stay-at-home orders.
In Indiana, Gov. Eric Holcomb stressed that he’d make the decision to end the stay-at-home order based on what’s happening throughout the state. But he also indicated he’s thinking about the decision regionally and expects more clarity on a timeline within the next week or so.
“It’s been shown that the Great Lakes region has done a fairly good job of mitigating our connections and our travel,” he said at his daily news conference Tuesday, “and that’s had a significant positive impact, unlike in some other places. We’ll move forward together as a state, but I’ll not surprise my neighboring states by any actions we take in the future as well.”
Dr. Kris Box, the state's health commissioner, also indicated it's important to think regionally.
"We really need to look at what Indiana is doing with regards to the numbers," she said, "and what our surrounding states are doing."
Especially interesting when you consider that the northwest corner of Indiana is also part of the Chicago south suburbs.
New York Times: After Anonymous Tip, 17 Bodies Found at Nursing Home Hit by Virus by Tracey Tully
The call for body bags came late Saturday.
By Monday, the police in a small New Jersey town had gotten an anonymous tip about a body being stored in a shed outside one of the state’s largest nursing homes.
When the police arrived, the corpse had been removed from the shed, but they discovered 17 bodies piled inside the nursing home in a small morgue intended to hold no more than four people.
“They were just overwhelmed by the amount of people who were expiring,” said Eric C. Danielson, the police chief in Andover, a small township in Sussex County, the state’s northernmost county.
The 17 were among 68 recent deaths linked to the long-term care facility, Andover Subacute and Rehabilitation Center I and II, including two nurses, officials said. Of those who died, 26 people had tested positive for the virus.
Politico: Poll: Voters prioritize experienced VP for Biden over gender, race by Christopher Cadelago
Voters overwhelmingly want to see Joe Biden choose a vice presidential nominee with governing experience, and they’re far less invested in whether he chooses a woman or a person of color as his running mate, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday.
The survey — conducted just after Bernie Sanders dropped out of the 2020 presidential race, making Biden the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee — found that about two-thirds of voters said it was important Biden choose a running mate with legislative and executive experience. While Biden has vowed to select a woman to join him on the ticket, only 29 percent of voters said it was important for Biden to choose a woman, while 22 percent said it was important that he choose a person of color.
Among Democrats, about 8 in 10 said it was important that Biden’s vice-presidential selection have legislative and executive experience. Meanwhile, about half of Democrats said it’s important for Biden’s running mate to be younger than him (77 years old) and for his pick to be a woman.
Fewer Democrats say it’s significant that they be more liberal than Biden (41 percent), a person of color (36 percent) or religious (31 percent).
Reuters: Exclusive: Democrats, furious with Trump, much more keen to vote now than four years ago - Reuters/Ipsos by Chris Kahn
NEW YORK (Reuters) - When Republicans in Wisconsin pushed through state elections last week in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, Jessica Jaglowski donned a protective mask and headed for the ballot box, determining her best shot at self-preservation was not to stay home but to vote Republicans out of office.
Come November, when Republican President Donald Trump is up for re-election, Jaglowski, a 47-year-old Democrat in Milwaukee, says she will be even more determined to vote, even if the deadly virus continues to ravage her community.
“He’s half the reason we’re in this mess right now,” she said, criticizing Trump for downplaying the threat of COVID-19 before it hit the country hard. “If I have to wait in line for 12 hours, in a storm, I don’t care. I’m voting for whoever can get Trump out.”
After three years in the White House, this much about Trump is clear: Those who want to deny him the presidency are much more determined to vote now than they were four years ago.
Democrats’ intention to vote is also rising more than it is among Republicans, both nationally and in historically competitive battleground states like Wisconsin that Trump narrowly won in 2016, according to more than 66,000 U.S. adults who took the Reuters/Ipsos online poll in the first quarter of 2020 or 2016.
Washington Post: Trump’s attempt to enlist businesses in reopening push gets off to rocky start by Robert Costa, Ashley Parker, Josh Dawsey, and Felicia Sonmez
President Trump’s attempt to enlist corporate executives in a push to reopen parts of society amid the coronavirus pandemic got off to a rocky start Wednesday, with some business leaders complaining the effort was haphazard and warning that more testing needs to be in place before restrictions are lifted.
The president spent much of his day hosting conference calls with company executives, industry groups and others that he announced Tuesday as part of a hastily formed outside advisory council devoted to the issue.
Advisers said the effort was aimed at building national momentum to reopen much of the country’s economy by next month. Trump said guidelines for such an effort will be announced Thursday.
“Today, I spoke with the leaders of many of our nation’s most renowned companies and organizations on how to achieve the full resurgence of the American economy,” Trump told reporters at the daily coronavirus briefing in the Rose Garden on Wednesday evening. “. . . We want to get our country open again.”
Mother Jones: Wellness Influencers Are Spreading QAnon Conspiracies About the Coronavirus by Ari Breland
Wellness influencers have been having a field day over the coronavirus, with some taking advantage of people’s fears to hawk unproven supplements and drive traffic to their sites. A few have even touted forsythia as a natural treatment, stealing a plot point verbatim from Contagion, the prescient 2011 Hollywood film that warned about the danger of medical misinformation in a pandemic.
Some have fused wellness hoaxes and pseudoscientific homeopathic treatments with QAnon and other far-right conspiracies. One such notable influencer is Joseph Arena, a chiropractor who uses the title “Dr.” and has more than 40,000 followers. Arena has pushed explicit QAnon theories about massive pedophile rings run by the deep state on his Instagram account and has directed his followers to pro-QAnon pages to find “the truth.”
“All of the FEMA camps and hospital beds that are being created to take in the millions of people who we are about to save. Get ready, it is about to start,” Arena said in a Instagram story last Tuesday, regurgitating a modified version of a conspiracy theory that first surfaced in the 1970s about Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to put people in concentration camps under the pretense of martial law. (Arena responded to a request for comment by threatening legal action if his name was included in this story.)
Related: New Statesman: Why pandemics create conspiracy theories by Richard J. Evans
BBC News: Coronavirus: Trump's WHO de-funding 'as dangerous as it sounds'
US President Donald Trump has been heavily criticised for halting funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) amid the global coronavirus pandemic.
Philanthropist Bill Gates, a major funder of the WHO, said it was "as dangerous as it sounds".
President Trump said on Tuesday that the body had "failed in its basic duty" in its response to coronavirus.
The head of the WHO said it was reviewing the cuts' impact "to ensure our work continues uninterrupted".
"We regret the decision of the President of the United States to order a halt in the funding to the WHO," Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference, adding that the US has been "a long-standing and generous friend... and we hope it will continue to be so".
AFP: South Korea ruling party wins parliamentary majority
South Korea's left-leaning ruling party has won a landslide election victory, partial results showed Thursday, after the coronavirus pandemic turned the political tide in President Moon Jae-in's favour.
His Democratic party secured an absolute majority in the National Assembly, its first for 12 years, on a turnout of 66.2 percent -- the highest at a parliamentary election since 1992.
Just a few months ago Moon was threatened by scandals over power abuse and sluggish economic growth, while critics called his dovish approach towards North Korea unrealistic.
But the South's relatively quick and effective handling of the epidemic -- it has also exported test kits to at least 20 countries -- has been a boon for Moon and his party ahead of the polls, largely seen as a referendum on his performance.
Guardian: Brazil congress demands Jair Bolsonaro release results of his Covid-19 tests by Dom Phillips
Brazil’s congress has given President Jair Bolsonaro an ultimatum to release the results of his coronavirus tests within 30 days, amid widespread speculation that he has been infected with Covid-19.
“Brazil needs the truth! Was the president infected?” said the motion proposed by the leftist congressman Rogério Correa and agreed by leaders of the chamber of deputies.
The motion noted that 23 people who accompanied Bolsonaro on a visit to the US in March had since tested positive. Several of them attended a dinner at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Since then, Bolsonaro has refused to share the outcome of two coronavirus tests he underwent – even refusing a freedom of information act request – leading to widespread speculation that he had contracted some form of Covid-19.
In March, he said that his athletic background meant that if he did catch coronavirus he “wouldn’t feel anything or at the very worst it would be like a little flu or a bit of a cold”.
Bolsonaro has attacked social isolation measures and state governors who introduced them, ignoring the advice of his own health minister, Luiz Mandetta, to mingle with supporters. Last week he was filmed shaking an elderly woman’s hand after wiping his nose on the back of his wrist.
DW: Japan losing patience with government over COVID-19 response by Julian Ryall
The Japanese public appears to be losing patience with the government over its dithering response to the coronavirus. Along with a new spike in COVID-19 cases and deaths, there are increasingly stark indications that Japan's health authorities are struggling to stay on top of the outbreak.
More than 80% of people responding to a survey conducted on Monday by Kyodo News said the government's declaration of a state of emergency in the nation's biggest cities on April 7 came too late.
The government's overall approval rating fell more than 5% in the poll to marginally above 40%.
An overwhelming 82% of those surveyed also stressed that the state needs to provide financial support to companies that are struggling due to a government recommendation to halt operations. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has so far resisted applying financial aid measures.
Public anger, and fear, is also being stoked by alarming reports from the frontlines in the fight against the virus.
There were 482 new cases reported on Tuesday, bringing the nationwide total to 8,173. Nineteen people died of the virus on Tuesday, bringing the total number of fatalities to 174.
Phys.org: Questionnaire survey identifies potential separation-related problems in cats
The first questionnaire survey to identify possible separation-related problems in cats found 13.5 percent of all sampled cats displayed potential issues during their owner's absence, according to a study published April 15, 2020 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Daiana de Souza Machado, from the Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora, Brazil, and colleagues.
Though many studies have been conducted on owner separation problems in dogs, little work has been done to assess potential separation-related problems in cats. Despite the common belief that cats are happy being left alone for long periods of time, recent studies in cats and their owners suggest that pet cats are social and develop bonds with their owners.
In order to assess separation-related problems in cats, de Souza Machado and colleagues developed a questionnaire for use with cat owners. Based on surveys in similar studies with dogs, the questionnaire asked owners to provide basic information on each cat; describe whether their cat displayed certain behaviors when the owner was absent; and describe themselves and their cat interactions, as well as the cat's living environment. The questionnaire was given to 130 owners of adult cats living in the city of Juiz de Fora in Minas Gerais, Brazil, for a total of 223 completed questionnaires (one per cat).
Finally tonight, I have seen so many of these Twitter quizzes that they have begun to get on my nerves but I found this one to be interesting.
My own choice was 3-4-B...but it would be 3-4-A if it happened to be my first cup of coffee of the morning.