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.
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.
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Chicago Tribune: Roads still flooded, rivers close to cresting as Chicago hits wettest May on record by Jessica Villagomez, Liam Ford, and Anna Kim
Chicago passed the mark for the wettest May on record early Tuesday, as roads throughout the Chicago area remained flooded, especially near swollen rivers and creeks that were at or near cresting, according to forecasters.
With .11 inches of rain through 4 a.m. Tuesday, Chicago’s monthly rainfall total hit 8.30 inches, passing the record rainfall for May set in 2019, making three years in a row that the month has seen record rainfall, according to the National Weather Service. Tuesday was expected to be the last rainy day until the weekend.
“Cloudy and cool conditions will give way to a warming/drying trend for the remainder of the workweek,” according to the weather service. “The warming continues into the holiday weekend, but may be accompanied by periods of thunderstorms.”
River flood warnings and other flood advisories peppered northeast Illinois Tuesday afternoon as waves subsided after reaching 4 to 7 feet, causing flooding along Lake Michigan.
Cincinnati Enquirer: Ohio medical marijuana sales get a boost from coronavirus, change on purchase limits by jackie Borchardt
COLUMBUS – Ohio's medical marijuana industry had its best two months yet in March and April, which industry officials say is a a result of the new coronavirus and recent changes to the program.
Sales reached $12.9 million during four weeks in March and $14.2 million over four weeks in April, according to state reports. That's a significant increase compared to $10.7 million in sales in February and $9.6 million over four weeks in January.
Dispensaries say early to mid-March sales spikes were driven by a desire to "stock up" amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Remember the run on toilet paper? Medical marijuana was in the same vein, and it was "essential" in Ohio's public health orders.
"Early to mid-March sales spikes were driven a little bit out of uncertainty in the sense of who’s going to be permitted? What’s going to remain on the shelves?" said Todd Yaross, founder and CEO of Terrasana Cannabis Co., which owns four Ohio dispensaries. "Not just in a cannabis sense but all essential items."
Memphis Commercial Appeal: In Shelby County, more people are dying from drug overdoses than COVID-19 by Micaela A. Watts
Since the beginning of local and state-wide "Safer at Home" orders began in mid-March, 700 Shelby County residents have overdosed on narcotics. One hundred and two of those overdoses ended in a loss of life.
"We've experienced more deaths from overdoses than COVID-19," said Shelby County Health Department director Alisa Haushalter.
Haushalter was joined by Shelby County Attorney General Amy Weirich and U.S. Attorney D. Michael Dunavant on Tuesday for a joint press conference that promised resources for those battling addiction and promises of punitive actions for those that ensure the supply chain of deadly narcotics remains intact.
The uptick in overdose deaths is "unprecedented" Haushalter said. The rise in overdoses and fatal overdoses has reached record-breaking levels since the county health department began tracking community trends in January 2019.
The health department's data shows the climb in overdose activity starting around March 15.
Hartford Courant: Controversial education partnership formed between Connecticut and billionaire Ray Dalio to be disbanded; state to withdraw $100M investment by Jon Lender
The major controversy that broke out inside the public-private education partnership formed by the state and billionaire Ray Dalio has doomed the entire enterprise, as Gov. Ned Lamont announced Tuesday that it was being disbanded.
The dismantling follows a week of public dissension over disciplinary action initiated against its recently hired CEO without all members of its board of governors being briefed.
Lamont blamed a “leak” to The Courant, which resulted in two Government Watch columns since last Wednesday, for the decision to pull the plug.
“In this case I think there was a sense from the Dalios that there were some people that really wanted to undermine the mission of the board," Lamont said at a hastily called news briefing outside the state Capitol. "A lot of that was reflected in leaks, some of that was reflected in the leak just this past week — a very sensitive personnel matter that went right to the front page of the Hartford Courant and a lot of partisan comments as part of that.”
Seattle Times: Washington state ordered $227.5 million in coronavirus supplies from a Chinese firm, but deliveries have trickled in by Daniel Gilbert and Mike Reicher
As Washington state officials raced to buy protective gear for combating COVID-19, they bet big on a Chinese automotive conglomerate that has built what it calls the world’s largest face-mask factory.
Washington state has ordered $227.5 million worth of supplies — mostly masks — from a subsidiary of China’s BYD Co., accounting for more than half the value of all the state’s orders for COVID-19 supplies. Of the BYD orders, three-quarters are weeks behind schedule, while more than a million masks it has delivered are idling in a state warehouse awaiting federal regulatory approval, according to records reviewed by The Seattle Times. A federal worker safety agency on Wednesday denied initial approval for BYD’s N95s, placing the state’s order in limbo.
As delays have mounted, hospitals, nursing homes and other long-term care facilities have turned elsewhere for personal protective equipment (PPE) because the state’s pipeline has yielded just a trickle of supplies, industry leaders say. The urgency is now growing as officials ramp up testing.
“We were without the basic tools of preventing the spread of the virus,” said Deb Murphy, CEO of LeadingAge Washington, an association of nonprofit nursing homes. “We’re not sitting around waiting for the state to provide us PPE.”
Buzzfeed: This Billionaire Oligarch Is Being Investigated By A US Federal Grand Jury For Alleged Money Laundering by Michael Sallah, Tanya Kozyreva, and Christopher Miller
One of Ukraine's wealthiest oligarchs, whose name emerged in the center of the Trump impeachment saga, is under investigation by a US federal grand jury for allegedly laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in US real estate, BuzzFeed News has learned.
Billionaire Igor Kolomoisky is accused by Ukraine regulators of orchestrating a scheme to siphon money from the country's largest bank and funnel it into prime properties, including landmark office towers and steel facilities across the US.
The US grand jury is examining the finances of Kolomoisky, a key supporter of President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a probe that has tracked the money from the Ukrainian bank through a maze of offshore companies to the US, according to two sources familiar with the inquiry.
The grand jury investigation in Cleveland represents a rare effort by the US justice system to target an influential oligarch and trace the millions that he and his associates allegedly sent through US correspondent banks.
ProPublica: Substitute Pharmacists Warn Their Co-Workers: We’ll Probably Bring the Virus to You by Ava Kofman
He joined Walgreens around a decade ago, fresh out of pharmacy school and eager to learn. Like many new grads, he started as a floater — a substitute for employees who call out sick or take vacation — and he was floated as far as he was willing to go. Sometimes he would drive hours east of the Dallas area, where he lived, to pick up shifts in rural Texas, sleeping in hotels for days at a time.
The pharmacist, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media, eventually worked his way up to become a full-time manager at a store in Dallas. But recently he’s returned to floating, this time at CVS, preferring its flexible hours. In the past three months, he’s traveled between 10 stores.
As the pandemic rages on, though, he wonders if he’s made a terrible mistake. When he shows up at a store, he said, he’s not told whether any employees have shown symptoms or tested positive, so he doesn’t know if he’s at risk. On two occasions, the Dallas floater said, he only heard from colleagues after he started his shift that they had just been working alongside someone who was self-isolating with COVID-19 symptoms. Because his temporary co-workers had not shown symptoms, they were not advised to quarantine.
Reuters: NASA human spaceflight chief resigns ahead of launch by Joey Roulette
(Reuters) - NASA’s human spaceflight chief Doug Loverro has resigned, according to an internal memo seen by agency employees on Tuesday, just a week before the agency is scheduled to launch two astronauts into space from U.S. soil for the first time since 2011.
The resignation capped Loverro’s brief role at the agency overseeing future astronaut launches and landing humans on the moon by 2024.
“Associate Administrator for Human Exploration and Operations Doug Loverro has resigned from his position effective Monday, May 18,” said the memo sent to employees on Tuesday and seen by Reuters.
It added that Ken Bowersox, NASA’s deputy associate administrator and a former astronaut, would take Loverro’s place until a permanent replacement is found.
A NASA spokeswoman declined to comment.
New York Times: Johnson & Johnson to End Talc-Based Baby Powder Sales in North America by Tiffany Hsu and Roni Caryn Rabin
Johnson & Johnson is discontinuing North American sales of its talc-based baby powder, a product that once defined the company’s wholesome image and that it has defended for decades even as it faced thousands of lawsuits filed by patients who say it caused cancer.
The decision to wind down sales of the product is a huge concession for Johnson & Johnson, which has for more than a century promoted the powder as pure and gentle enough for babies.
The company said on Tuesday that it would allow existing bottles to be sold by retailers until they ran out. Baby powder made with cornstarch will remain available, and the company will continue to sell talc-based baby powder in other parts of the world.
Johnson & Johnson has often said that faulty testing, shoddy science and ill-equipped researchers are to blame for findings that its powder was contaminated with asbestos. But in recent years, thousands of people — mostly women with ovarian cancer — have said that the company did not warn them of potential risks that the company was discussing internally.
France 24: Macron loses majority as party defectors form new parliamentary group
Seven lawmakers are splintering from Macron's La République En Marche (LREM) to join the new "Ecology, Democracy, Solidarity" group, which will count 17 parliamentarians in its ranks, including one-time Macron loyalist Cédric Villani.
That means the ruling party now only has 288 MPs in the National Assembly, one short of an absolute majority, and down from the 314 Macron had after he redrew the political landscape in 2017.
However, 17 is significantly less than the 58 MPs suggested by media reports earlier this month, indicating that party bigwigs had managed to stem the flow.
"The pressure from the executive, the party and the group was such that we had to move the announcement forward," one defector told REUTERS. "Many eventually decided not to take the plunge."
DW: Coronavirus: Brazil headed for catastrophe by Thomas Milz
This past weekend scores of young revelers were out and about in Rio de Janeiro, enjoying the nightlife and gathering for beers along the city's famous beach promenades. No one was wearing the obligatory face mask. After two months of widespread lockdown measures, residents of the city's more affluent neighborhoods were happy to be out of the house, apparently unconcerned about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
But in the city's poor neighborhoods, where the coronavirus has been spreading rapidly, people are frightened. A shop clerk who delivers groceries to quarantined locals by bike hopes wearing a mask and washing his hands with disinfectant will keep him safe. His wife, who ordinarily works as a cleaner for wealthy Rio families, has been staying home out of fear of contracting the virus. The couple can barely make ends meet.
As of May 19 Brazil had recorded the world's third-highest number of COVID-19 infections, with more than 262,000 confirmed cases and at least 17,500 deaths attributed to the pandemic, according to official figures collected by Johns Hopkins University.
But health experts believe that, due to a lack of testing, the real number of infections is likely 15 times higher. They also suspect that at least twice as many people have died from the virus; with state hospitals at overcapacity, an increasing number of COVID-19 victims are dying in their homes.
Guardian: Trump, Putin and Bolsonaro have been complacent. Now the pandemic has made them all vulnerable by Simon Tisdall
If Boris Johnson is mishandling the pandemic, he is not alone. Falsely claiming everything is under control, dodging responsibility, hiding from public view, exploiting the crisis for political gain, mounting artificial distractions and blaming the media: these are common behaviour patterns exhibited by some of the world’s most powerful – and shifty – leaders.
Will they pay a price for their lethal incompetence and cynicism? It’s possible some will, though it may take a while. The pandemic is changing political calculations around the globe. Leaders who looked invulnerable suddenly appear less so. That in turn could shift the strategic calculus and alter the balance of power between countries in ways both unexpected and permanent.
Donald Trump’s performance is a lesson in how not to handle an emergency. It may become a compulsory case study for future students of crisis management. Trump minimised the threat early on, offered phoney assurances, and failed to make a plan. He has since accused China of deliberately spreading “plague” while weaponising the crisis to smear his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.
BBC News: Sudan 'must pay' US East African embassy attack victims
Sudan is required to pay punitive damages to some of the victims of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania carried out by al-Qaeda, the US Supreme Court has ruled.
More than 200 people died and thousands were injured in the attacks.
Sudan was accused of giving al-Qaeda and its leader Osama Bin Laden technical and financial support.
The Supreme Court ruling applies to US nationals, embassy employees and contractors.
The ruling comes at a time when Sudan's new government is pushing to be removed from the US's list of state sponsors of terrorism.
South China Morning Post: Coronavirus patient puzzles New York doctors with rare symptoms by Stephen Chen
Doctors in New York have reported a rare set of symptoms in a
coronavirus patient – a case so puzzling that the medical team could not confirm the man had Covid-19 until just before he was discharged from hospital.
In a study published in the medical journal The Lancet on Monday, the doctors said scans of the patient’s lungs indicated a fungal invasion, tests showed no telltale sign of the coronavirus in the upper respiratory tract and the patient had an immune response called a cytokine storm within just hours of the disease’s onset.
“For a disease that was unknown only five months ago, it might … be too early for clinicians to be certain of which manifestations are typical,” the team led by Timothy Harkin from Mount Sinai Hospital’s pulmonary division, said in the paper.
The patient was a 34-year-old male anaesthesiologist in otherwise good health. He initially tested positive for influenza A and the symptoms disappeared following a routine treatment.
STATnews: Life as a Covid-19 contact tracer: sleuthing, stress, and veering off-script by Suzanne Sataline
All Maddie Bender knew when she called the New Haven, Conn., family was that a child had tested positive for Covid-19. Anyone who lived with the child was at risk of catching the new virus, and Bender needed to find out if they had symptoms, if new cases were taking root. What she learned was that public health work during a pandemic is four parts shoe leather and intuition, one part empathy.
On the phone, the child’s mother complained she was breathing in short, sharp gasps. The woman had thought about seeking help at an emergency room, but heard on TV that “it was so bad at the hospitals.” In a state where the governor has repeatedly urged residents to stay home, the woman had the impression she shouldn’t go to an ER.
Bender, a Yale University graduate and public health master’s student, tried to stick with the script she’d been given by the New Haven Health Department. “But I felt this woman should have called her doctor. She hadn’t had a physical in three years,” Bender recounted. She told the woman she needed to self-quarantine for 14 days, but altered the line about contacting a physician first before getting urgent care. “It is OK to go to the emergency room if you need to go,” she said.
Guardian: Mind your language: is it ever OK to correct someone's grammar? By Poppy Noor
After Sunday’s episode of reality TV drama 90 Day Fiancé, people were left with an important question: is it ever OK to correct someone’s grammar?
The show follows long-distance couples in a pressure cooker: when the foreign lovers of American citizens move to the US, with just 90 days to decide whether to get married before their visas run out. Sunday’s episode saw couple Stephanie Matto and Erika Owens hash out what went wrong in their failed relationship, and some viewers suggested that a screenshot showing an exchange between them might sum their problems up.
“I’m so sad about this,” Owens texts Matto, seen in a WhatsApp chat. Then she adds: “I feel so lead on.”
“*Led,” responds Matto.
Ouch.
There are a select number of situations in which someone is allowed to correct someone else’s grammar: if you are a teacher; if you are paid to correct grammar or proofread work; or if you are a parent. Then it’s acceptable to say: “Actually, it’s you’re, not your.”
Don’t forget that Meteor Blades is hosting a Tuesday night owls thread tonight.
Everyone have a good and safe evening!