Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, 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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Washington Post
Photographer Cassi Alexandra has been working for the last year to capture all their stories. She titled it “We are family” to underscore how much the community means to each other in the face of tragic circumstances. Some also identify themselves as “family” as a way of saying they are part of the LGBTQ community.
Brandon Wolf was having a hard night. Just after deciding with his love interest, Eric Borrero, that they wouldn’t be in a relationship, Eric wanted to go out that weekend as friends. That Saturday, despite dragging along his close friends, Juan Guerrero and Christopher “Drew” Leinonen, as a buffer, the air between them at the club was tense and frustrating.
But Leinonen took on the role of peacemaker. “One thing we don’t do enough is remind each other how much we love each other,” he said. “So I’m going to be the one to say to you, ‘I love you.’ I love you all,” he said.
It was the greatest blessing amid the darkest curse that Wolf was given this moment with his friends — just before a gunman began to spray the pulsating crowd at the club they were at with bullets.
Guerrero, Leinonen, and 47 other people died because of the shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Nearly one year ago, it entered the history books as the deadliest mass shooting in American history. Beyond the victims, family, friends and community members like Wolf have felt the ripple effects of the devastation.
US NEWS
New York Times
Ed. note: Well, this cannot be a good. Giving legal advice to those not your client.
WASHINGTON — A new figure has swept through the West Wing lately, a man with silver hair combed back across his head, rimless glasses perched on his nose, a white handkerchief tucked neatly into his suit pocket, a taste for legal pugilism and an uncertain role in a building confronted by a host of political and legal threats.
Marc E. Kasowitz, a New York civil litigator who represented President Trump for 15 years in business and boasts of being called the toughest lawyer on Wall Street, has suddenly become the field marshal for a White House under siege. He is a personal lawyer for the president, not a government employee, but he has been talking about establishing an office in the White House complex where he can run his legal defense.
His visits to the White House have raised questions about the blurry line between public and private interests for a president facing legal issues. In recent days, Mr. Kasowitz has advised White House aides to discuss the inquiry into Russia’s interference in last year’s election as little as possible, two people involved said. He told aides gathered in one meeting who had asked whether it was time to hire private lawyers that it was not yet necessary, according to another person with direct knowledge.
Bloomberg News
A second federal appeals court blocked President Donald Trump’s revised travel ban even as he presses the Supreme Court to reinstate it.
Monday’s order by the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco follows a May 25 ruling by a regional appeals court based in Richmond, Virginia, that concluded Trump intended to discriminate against Muslims from the six countries he targeted in his executive order. The administration on June 1 asked the nation’s highest court to let the ban take effect while the justices decide whether to review the Richmond ruling.
Trump’s order runs afoul of a federal law that prohibits nationality-based discrimination and requires the president to follow a specific process when setting the annual cap on the admission of refugees, according to the ruling by a panel of three judges appointed by former President Bill Clinton.
The appeals court said the president exceeded his authority with the sweeping travel restrictions.
McClatchy DC
“It’s not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing. It really is an American thing.”
That’s what former FBI Director James Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee about Russian meddling into the 2016 election. Yet much of the political reaction over recent days was just the opposite, providing the latest evidence that American politics is more polarized than ever, with much of the country – or at least its elected representatives — siding solidly red or blue.
“President Trump could jump off (Washington’s) Key Bridge tomorrow and half the country would believe he jumped,” said veteran political author Richard Reeves. “The other half would be convinced it was murder.”
Comey, the lawman who has served under Republican and Democratic presidents, delivered a staggering accusation: that the president of the United States had lied and had prodded him to drop an active investigation into Trump’s national security adviser.
Yet many Republicans shrugged and pointed instead to Comey’s testimony about former Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s performance in the Hillary Clinton email case and his confession that he had asked a friend to leak to the New York Times the content of a memo detailing his meeting with Trump.
Al Jazeera
A US state senator has sparked fierce criticism after appearing in a photo with a controversial anti-Muslim militia during the National March Against Sharia, a campaign that was roundly denounced by rights groups and watchdogs.
Georgia State Senator Michael Williams, who is a Republican Party candidate running for governor, posed in a photo by with local members of the Three Percenters militia movement in Atlanta on Saturday.
In the photo, which was picked up by local media outlets over the weekend, the militiamen were armed with rifles and dressed in camouflage military garb.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil rights group, described Williams' choice to take a photograph with the group as confusing.
“In this situation, especially because Senator Williams is running for governor, this didn't really make sense to us," Ruwa Romman, the communications director of CAIR's Georgia chapter, told Al Jazeera by telephone.
"They seem to not really understand what the Three Percenters represent.”
The Guardian
Ed. Note: It appears that if you are white, male and in a position of power you receive a slap on the wrist for assault.
Congressman-elect Greg Gianforte was sentenced to community service, a $385 fine and 20 hours of sessions for anger management after pleading guilty to assaulting Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs on the eve of his election.
In a courtroom packed with journalists and spectators in Bozeman, Montana, Gianforte pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault, saying, “Although it was not my intention to hurt him, I understand Ben was injured.”
After judge Rick West repeatedly asked Gianforte whether he believed he caused injury to Jacobs, the congressman-elect said he did. West initially said he would sentence him to four days in jail, saying he could do a work program as an alternative to spending those nights in jail. But when the judge learned that the assault charge was not eligible for the program, he decided to instead sentence him to 40 hours of community service, emphasizing that he did not want the congressman-elect to go to jail.
“You accepted responsibility. You apologized,” said West, who noted the Republican tech millionaire’s business accomplishments in his sentencing. The judge also said he did not believe the maximum fine of $500 was necessary.
The Guardian
Donald Trump has committed “unprecedented constitutional violations” by failing to separate his public responsibilities as president with his private interests as a businessman, according to a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Maryland and Washington on Monday.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday by DC attorney general Karl Racine and Maryland attorney general Brian Frosh, both Democrats in the US district court in Maryland, alleges that Trump has violated the emoluments clause of the US constitution by failing to relinquish ownership of his vast business holdings.
The clause stipulates that government officials cannot benefit financially from the office they hold and prohibits them from receiving gifts, payments of anything of value from a foreign government or the states.
The attorneys general cite as examples of Trump breaching the clause reports that foreign governments and government-related entities are staying and hosting events at the Trump international hotel in Washington, buying leases in Trump buildings at Trump Tower in Manhattan, and offering trademark deals and real estate permits.
Reuters
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions will testify publicly to a Senate panel on Tuesday, its chairman said, setting up another potentially dramatic hearing on possible ties between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race.
Sessions is likely to face tough questioning from Senate Intelligence Committee members over his dealings with Russian officials during the campaign and whether he had a role in the firing of former FBI Director James Comey, who testified last week before the same panel.
Until a statement on Monday from committee Chairman Richard Burr, a Republican, it had been unclear whether Sessions would testify in an open or closed setting.
Comey told the panel last week that the FBI had information in mid-February on Sessions that would have made it "problematic" for him to continue leading a federal probe into Russian attempts to influence the presidential election.
Reuters
The stealthy F-35 fighter jets made by Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) were grounded until further notice at a U.S. Air Force base in Arizona because of irregularities in pilots' oxygen supplies, an Air Force spokesman said on Monday.
Training flights at Luke Air Force Base were grounded on Friday and had been scheduled to resume on Monday. But on Monday they were grounded indefinitely.
The pause in operations continued so the Air Force could study the issue with pilots, maintenance workers and medical professionals, said a base spokeswoman, Major Rebecca Heyse.
Lockheed Martin said it still planned to demonstrate the advanced jet at the Paris Air Show this month. Air Force officials said F-35 air operations continued at other bases.
Luke Air Force Base northwest of Phoenix is home to the 56th Fighter Wing. The base canceled local flying operations for its F-35A Lightning II aircraft due to five incidents in which pilots experienced symptoms resembling hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation, the Air Force spokesman, Captain Mark Graff, said at the Pentagon on Friday.
Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday struck down a gender distinction in U.S. immigration law that treats mothers and fathers differently when determining a child's citizenship, calling such inequality "stunningly anachronistic."
The high court, in a 8-0 ruling authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, found that a provision in federal law that defines how people born overseas can be eligible for U.S. citizenship violated the U.S. Constitution's equal protection guarantee.
The ruling, however, may not help the man who brought the case, New York resident Luis Morales-Santana, who was seeking to avoid deportation to the Dominican Republic after being convicted of several offenses.
The law requires that unwed fathers who are American citizens spend at least five years living in the United States - a 2012 amendment reduced it from 10 years - before they can confer citizenship to a child born abroad, out of wedlock and to a partner who is not a U.S. citizen.
For unwed U.S. mothers in the same situation, the requirement was only one year.
In the ruling, the Supreme Court said that until Congress revises the law, both women and men will be covered by the five-year requirement.
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
French President Emmanuel Macron's rivals on Monday warned against handing him an overwhelming majority that would stifle debate after his party cruised to victory in the opening round of elections to the National Assembly.
Macron's year-old centrist Republic on the Move (REM) party and its allies are tipped to clean up in the 577-member lower house of parliament, winning up to 445 seats -- a historic tally for a post-war president.
The opposition and French press expressed concern over what the left-wing Liberation daily called the "quasi-Stalinist result".
The leader of the rightwing Republicans in the Paris area, Valerie Pecresse, appealed for a "civic surge", warning of the risk of "groupthink".
Record low turnout of 49 percent in Sunday's first round detracted from the performance of Macron's untested team, raising concerns over the strength of his mandate.
Government spokesman Christophe Castaner admitted that voter participation -- the lowest for six decades -- was "a failure of this election" and that Macron's camp would need to reach out to those who stayed away.
Reuters
Britain's Theresa May told her party on Monday she would serve as prime minister as long as they wanted after a botched election gamble cost the party its majority in parliament and weakened London's hand days before formal Brexit negotiations.
With British politics thrust into the deepest turmoil since last June's shock Brexit vote, EU leaders were left wondering how the divorce talks would open next week.
Despite her party's expectations of a landslide victory, May lost her majority in parliament, pushing her into rushed talks on a support agreement with a small eurosceptic Northern Irish Protestant party with 10 parliamentary seats.
May faced Conservative party lawmakers at a meeting of its 1922 Committee. Despite anger at the election, she was cheered briefly at the start of the meeting.
"She said 'I'm the person who got us into this mess and I'm the one who is going to get us out of it,'" said one Conservative lawmaker who attended. "She said she will serve us as long as we want her."
Lawmakers, who are by tradition not named at such meetings, told Reuters that there were no dissenting voices and that the party had no appetite for a leadership election.
May appeared contrite, sought to apologize for her failed election gamble and gave an explanation of what went wrong.
While some members of her party have said she will have to go eventually, May is expected to stay on as prime minister at least for now.
Deutsch Welle
Putin-critic Alexei Navalny has been arrested ahead of Monday's public holiday protests, his wife said on Twitter. Around 200 people have reportedly been detained at unauthorized rallies in Moscow and St Petersburg.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was detained by police outside his Moscow home on Monday ahead of an anti-government rally he was going to hold in central Moscow.
Navalny's wife announced the arrest on Twitter around 40 minutes before the protests were due to start. "Hello, this is Yulia Navalnaya," she wrote. "Alexei has been detained in the stairwell."
The protests will still go ahead, she added.
Thousands of young Russians are marking Monday's patriotic Russia Day holiday by rallying against government corruption and exerting pressure on President Vladimir Putin. Russia Day commemorates the establishment of the Russian sovereign state in 1990, a year prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Al Jazeera
Qatar's foreign minister has said his country's priority is to address the humanitarian consequences of a land, air and sea blockade imposed against Doha by Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) amid a major diplomatic rift.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told Al Jazeera on Monday that Qatarand the United States were in touch with Kuwait, the main mediator between the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), "to calm the situation".
"Our top priority in Qatar is to end this unlawful blockade imposed against us," he said from the UK capital, London
"Also to address the humanitarian issues caused by those arbitrary measures. Then engage in a dialogue and discuss the baseless accusations darted at Qatar."
But he said there was no foundation for dialogue just yet.
"Qatar is of the opinion that dialogue is the best answer to this crisis. However, such dialogue must be based on clear foundations, which are not yet made available," Qatar's top diplomat said.
Reuters
Qatar's financial markets stabilized on Monday after a week of losses as the government showed it could keep the economy running in the face of sanctions by its neighbors which caused the biggest diplomatic rift for years among the rich countries of the Gulf.
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic and transport ties with Qatar a week ago, accusing it of fomenting regional unrest, supporting terrorism and getting too close to Iran, all of which Doha denies.
This has disrupted imports of food and other materials and caused many foreign banks to scale back business with Qatar, the world's richest country per capita, which calls the measures an illegal blockade.
On Monday it was becoming clear that Qatar could prevent the economic damage from becoming critical. Some of its food factories are working extra shifts to process imports from nations outside the Gulf, such as Brazil. Shipping lines have re-routed container traffic via Oman instead of the UAE.
These measures may involve delays and raise costs for Qatar; on Monday Fitch put Qatar's AA credit rating on Rating Watch Negative, saying a sustained crisis could hurt its credit outlook. But they are unlikely to prevent the economy from functioning in any fundamental way, economists say.
BBC
A strong earthquake has struck off the Aegean coast of western Turkey and the Greek island of Lesbos, with tremors felt in Istanbul and Athens.
The epicentre of the 6.3 magnitude quake was 5km (3 miles) south of Plomari, a town on the coast of Lesbos, the US Geological Survey said.
Several buildings were damaged but the village of Vrisa was worst hit with 10 people taken to hospital.
Turkey and Greece sit on significant fault lines and earthquakes are common.
The initial quake struck at 15:28 (12:28 GMT) on Monday and was followed by two aftershocks minutes later.
Details of damage and casualties in Vrisa took some time to emerge, but the mayor told Greek media the place looked like it had been "flattened by bombs". A woman was trapped in the rubble of her home reportedly with a fractured spine. None of the injuries were said to be life-threatening.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central (6/11/2017)
Imagine sinking into the deepest parts of the Central Pacific Ocean, somewhere between Mexico and Hawaii. Watch as the water turns from clear to blue to dark blue to black. And then continue on for another 15,000 feet (4,600 meters) to the seafloor — roughly the distance from the peak of California’s Mount Whitney to the bottom of nearby Death Valley.
“As soon as you start to descend, all of the wave action and bouncing goes away and it’s like you’re just floating and then you sink really slowly and watch the light fade out through the windows and then you really are in another world,” says Erik Cordes, a researcher at Temple University and frequent visitor to the deep ocean.
Finally, you come to a stop 12,000 feet (3,700 meters) below the last bits of light from the surface. The water here is strangely viscous yet remarkably transparent, and the light from your flashlight extends for hundreds of yards. You are in the heart of the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone, a region of the ocean seafloor roughly the size of the United States, populated by colorless invertebrates adapted in astounding ways to the sparse, crushing conditions found here.
And all around you — as far as the eye can’t see — are small, spherical rocks. Varying from microscopic to the size of a volleyball, they look like something stolen from the set of “Gremlins” or maybe “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
The Guardian
Wholly unintentionally, Donald Trump may have sparked unprecedented determination within the US to confront the danger of climate change.
Following Trump’s decision to withdraw the US from the Paris climate accord, the president was assailed by businesses ranging from Facebook to Goldman Sachs for risking America’s economic and environmental standing. The White House was choked by phone calls from irate voters.
Perhaps most significantly, a coalition of lawmakers, companies and universities swung into action in an attempt to reassure the world that the US wasn’t completely abandoning the field.
Within this group committing itself to the Paris targets are 17 governors – two of them Republicans – and 125 cities, including New York City, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh, which was cited, somewhat mistakenly, by Trump as somewhere that would benefit from exiting the Paris agreement.
With the federal government casting off the task of emissions reduction, the onus is now on cities and states to make up the shortfall. We look at what four major US cities – New York City, Houston, Miami and San Francisco – are doing to stave off the threat of climate change.
Agence France Presse
US allies in the G7 said Monday that action to contain devastating climate change was irreversible and could even be accelerated, despite Donald Trump's decision to pull the United States out of the Paris accord.
A two-day meeting of environment chiefs from the Group of Seven club of industrialised democracies ended with the US again disassociating itself from a statement underlining the importance of implementing the 2015 Paris deal on curbing carbon emissions.
Trump's representative at the meeting, Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environment Protection Agency, was unrepentant, insisting US action spoke louder than words.
"Respective of the importance to engage with longstanding allies and key international partners, we approached the climate discussions head on from a position of strength and clarity," he said in a statement.
"We are resetting the dialogue to say Paris is not the only way forward to making progress ... (Paris) is not the only mechanism by which environmental stewardship can be demonstrated," added Pruitt, who had left the meeting on Sunday evening to attend Trump's first full cabinet meeting on Monday.
The Guardian
Being overweight – even without being obese – is killing millions of people around the world, according to the most extensive and authoritative study of the global impact ever carried out.
More than two billion adults and children are suffering from health problems in the world because of their weight, says a team of 2,300 experts led by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IMHE), based at the University of Washington in Seattle.
In 2015, nearly four million people died from disease related to their weight, most commonly from heart disease. But only 60% were technically obese, which is defined as a body mass index over 30. The other 40%, or 1.6 million people, were overweight but not obese.
The authors of the paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, describe “a growing and disturbing global public health crisis”.
The study has figures for 195 countries, using data from 1980 to 2015. In the UK, nearly a quarter of the adult population – 24.2% or 12 million people – is considered obese. One million British children are obese – amounting to 7.5% of all children in the UK.
NPR
There's no doubt about it: Zika is on the retreat in the Americas.
In Brazil, cases are down by 95 percent from last year. Across the Caribbean, outbreaks have subsided. And in Florida, the virus seems to have gone into hiding. Health officials haven't investigated a new Zika case for more than 45 days in Miami-Dade County.
Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifted the last travel warning for southern Florida. The agency is no longer recommending that pregnant women avoid the region.
"That's really exciting news," says Dr. Christine Curry, an OB-GYN at the University of Miami and Jackson Memorial Hospital. "Everybody has sort of exhaled."
But the threat to pregnant women, whether residents or travelers, isn't over — not in the least — Curry says, neither in Florida nor abroad.
So what should pregnant women and their families, or women who are trying to get pregnant, do? Let's start with Florida. Then we'll swing back to the international question at the end.
Climate Central
Rifts between the United States and its leading industrial allies over climate change deepened on Monday when Washington refused to subscribe fully to a Group of Seven statement on the environment.
The U.S. said it would not sign up to a pledge by Italy, Canada, Japan, France, Britain and Germany which called the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change "irreversible" and key for the "security and prosperity of our planet."
As a consequence, Washington formally refused to back multilateral development banks — bodies designed to finance poorer nations and help them reduce their pollution emissions.
U.S. President Donald Trump pulled out of the Paris deal earlier this month and the U.S. position was laid out in a brief note at the bottom of a general communique following a meeting of G7 environment ministers in this northern Italian city.
"The U.S. is now left as a footnote to climate action and that's very sad," said Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna. "Everyone expressed their deep disappointment with the U.S. decision," she said.
The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, only attended the first day of the meeting on Sunday, held as an early summer heatwave settled over Italy, before flying back to Washington.
In a statement on Monday, he defended the U.S. position.
"We are resetting the dialogue to say Paris is not the only way forward to making progress," he wrote.