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 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 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.
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The Guardian
After her house flooded for the third year in a row, Elizabeth Boineau was ready to flee. She packed her possessions into dozens of boxes, tried not to think of the mold and mildew-covered furniture and retreated to a second-floor condo that should be beyond the reach of pounding rains and swelling seas.
Boineau is leaving behind a handsome, early 20th-century house in Charleston, South Carolina, the shutters painted in the city’s eponymous shade of deep green. Last year, after Hurricane Irma introduced 8in of water into a home Boineau was still patching up from the last flood, local authorities agreed this historic slice of Charleston could be torn down.
“I was sloshing through the water with my puppy dog, debris was everywhere,” she said. “I feel completely sunken. It would cost me around $500,000 to raise the house, demolish the first floor. I’m going to rent a place instead, on higher ground.”
Millions of Americans will confront similarly hard choices as climate change conjures up brutal storms, flooding rains, receding coastlines and punishing heat. Many are already opting to shift to less perilous areas of the same city, or to havens in other states. Whole towns from Alaska to Louisiana are looking to relocate, in their entirety, to safer ground.
US NEWS
On Monday, people across the United States staged a walkout to support Christine Blasey Ford and survivors of sexual assault.
The walkout was arranged in response to the backlash against Ford, who recently accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were both in their teens. Ford will testify before Congress about the allegation Thursday.
Since breaking her silence, Ford has been criticized and had her credibility questioned by conservative media outlets, Republican leaders, and even President Trump. She also reportedly has been forced to leave her home due to death threats against her and her family.
The Guardian
A white Dallas police officer accused of fatally shooting her black neighbor inside his own apartment has been dismissed, the police department announced on Monday.
Dallas police fired Officer Amber Guyger weeks after she fatally shot 26-year-old Botham Jean inside his own apartment on 6 September. Court records show Guyger said she thought she had encountered a burglar inside her own home.
Guyger was arrested on a preliminary charge of manslaughter days after the shooting. She is out on bond. Jean family attorneys and protesters called for her firing following the shooting.
Guyger was a four-year veteran. She told investigators that she had just ended a shift when she returned in uniform to the South Side Flats apartment complex.
The Guardian
San Francisco’s ‘Early Days’ statue was seen by many as a symbol of colonial oppression. What does its removal say about history and public art?
In the middle of the night and with dozens of Native Americanswatching, San Francisco city workers tied safety ropes around a 124-year-old bronze statue and pulled. Carefully, they dislodged the piece from a granite platform and laid it on top of a flatbed truck. It was a moment stoked with meaning. After decades of effort, the Early Days statue, a symbol of colonization and oppression to many, was gone.
Those who gathered at the removal last week didn’t celebrate with fire torches. They only prayed, sang hymns, and looked on morosely at the empty platform. That’s what happens when civic institutions, in this case the city arts commissions, finally see a people as worthy of protection.
“I feel like it is a win. I feel good about it. [But] there is still a lot of work to be done,” Desirae Harp, a Mishewal Ona*tsáTis (Wappo) and Diné (Navajo) tribe member told me.
Reuters
President Donald Trump and U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees the special counsel investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 presidential election, will meet on Thursday to discuss Rosenstein’s future.
A source told Reuters that Rosenstein had spent the weekend contemplating whether he should resign after a New York Times report last week said he had suggested secretly recording Trump in 2017.
The White House announced the meeting on Monday after a flurry of conflicting reports about whether Rosenstein, a frequent target of Trump’s anger, would be leaving the post.
Reuters
MINNEAPOLIS/NEW YORK (Reuters) - With the Chinese billionaire Richard Liu at her Minneapolis area apartment, a 21-year-old University of Minnesota student sent a WeChat message to a friend in the middle of the night. She wrote that Liu had forced her to have sex with him.
“I was not willing,” she wrote in Chinese on the messaging application around 2 a.m. on August 31. “Tomorrow I will think of a way to escape,” she wrote, as she begged the friend not to call police.
“He will suppress it,” she wrote, referring to Liu. “You underestimate his power.”
NPR
More than a year and a half ago, the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated, millions of women worldwide took to the streets in fury over his election. It was a massive show of resistance — likely the largest protest in U.S. history, as the Washington Post reported at the time.
One of the biggest questions that loomed over the demonstrations that day: could the energy last?
Amy Chomsky, an ophthalmologist from Nashville, attended the demonstration in Washington, D.C., and she wanted to make it clear that she and her fellow marchers were serious in their anger.
"We're not just crazy protesters," she said the day of the march. "It's a shame that we have to still be fighting for women's rights or saying that we have a right to decide on our own reproductive health. We have a right to equal pay. It's a shame that we're still doing this.”
NPR
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, in New York this week for the U.N. General Assembly session, says he had a "very constructive" dinner meeting with President Trump at Trump Tower, where the leaders discussed trade and military ties.
Abe, who won re-election as leader of his Liberal Democratic Party last week, told reporters in New York that during their Sunday dinner, the two also reaffirmed their commitment to denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
"We agreed to make the momentum created in the historic U.S.-North Korea summit in June even stronger and to continue to coordinate closely toward the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula," Abe said.
Trump tweeted later that he had also invited Abe to dine at Trump Tower again on Monday.
NPR
As the son of a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Derek Black was once the heir apparent of the white nationalist movement.
Growing up, he made speeches, hosted a radio show, and started the website KidsStormfront — which acted as a companion to Stormfront, the white nationalist website his father, Don Black, created.
"The fundamental belief that drove my dad, drove my parents and my family, over decades, was that race was the defining feature of humanity ... and that people were only happy if they could live in a society that was only this one biologically defined racial group," Black says.
It was only after he began attending New College of Florida that Black began to question his own point of view. Previously, he'd been homeschooled, but suddenly he was was exposed to people who didn't share his views, including a few Jewish students who became friends.
ProPublica (via TPM)
Nearly half of the state’s counties are shutting down polling places, in part because of a law passed in June.
In June, the North Carolina General Assembly passed legislation mandating that all early voting sites in the state remain open for uniform hours on weekdays from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., a move supporters argued would reduce confusion and ultimately make early voting easier and more accessible.
But with the start of early voting only weeks away, county election officials across the state — who previously had control over setting polling hours in their jurisdictions — say the new law has hamstrung their ability to best serve voters. Some officials in rural counties say they’ve had to shrink the number of early voting locations to accommodate the law’s longer hour requirements and stay within their budgets.
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
Russia's ruling party suffered two rare defeats in regional elections this weekend as its candidates lost to nationalists amid widespread discontent over a pension reform backed by President Vladimir Putin.
A second round of governorship elections was held in two key regions Sunday, after support for the pro-Kremlin United Russia party saw its strongest decline in a decade during the first round on September 9.
Vladimir Sipyagin, of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), won 57 percent of the vote in the Vladimir region, 190 kilometres (120 miles) northeast of Moscow.
He defeated the incumbent United Russia governor Svetlana Orlova, who obtained 37.5 percent of the vote, results showed on Monday.
Agence France Presse
The EU on Monday gave Britain two months to recover 2.7 billion euros ($3.3 billion) in lost customs duties or risk referral to the EU's top court after London allegedly ignored a scam by Chinese importers.
The demand, part of a so-called infringement action launched by Brussels, threatens to further inflame tensions amid fraught Brexit negotiations just days after an EU summit in Austria ended in acrimony.
"The United Kingdom now has two months to act; otherwise the Commission may refer the case to the Court of Justice of the EU," said a statement by the commission, the European Union's executive arm.
The case follows an investigation last year by the EU fraud watchdog that found Britain turned a blind eye to the rampant use of fake invoices and customs claims by Chinese importers for textiles and footwear.
Agence France Presse
The strongman leader of the Maldives on Monday conceded defeat in the presidential election, easing fears of a fresh political crisis in the archipelago at the centre of a battle for influence between India and China.
"The Maldivian people have decided what they want. I have accepted the results from yesterday," President Abdulla Yameen said in a televised address to the Indian Ocean nation a day after the joint opposition candidate unexpectedly triumphed.
"Earlier today, I met with Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, who the Maldivian electorate has chosen to be their next president. I have congratulated him," Yameen said.
Deutsche Welle
Angela Merkel conceded that the coalition's decision to remove ex-intelligence chief Hans-Georg Maassen from his post only to reward him with a higher-paid job, and effectively, a promotion to a post in the Interior Ministry "could not convince people."
In an unprecedented move, she admitted that she had been too focused on the "proceedings in the Interior Ministry" and had not paid enough attention to "what people are rightly preoccupied with when they hear about a promotion."
"I'm sorry that we allowed that to happen," she said at a news conference.
Deutsche Welle
Syrian regime troops will receive S-300 missile defense systems from Russia within the next two weeks, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Monday.
The modernized version of the Soviet-era system "is capable of intercepting aerial attacks at the distance of over 250 kilometers and simultaneously countering several targets," the minister said.
The move comes after Moscow blamed Israel for indirectly causing the destruction of a Russian Il-20 reconnaissance plane last week. The incident claimed the lives of 15 Russian soldiers.
"We are convinced that these measures will cool down the 'hot heads' and keep them from ill-conceived actions threatening out troops," Shoigu said in his televised address.
Deutsche Welle
Italy's far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, asserted Monday that his bill was a "big step forward" in what he termed the "fight" against migrant arrivals, including greater police powers to "make Italy safer."
Salvini told the broadcaster La7 his intended decree against "excessive immigration" would save billions of euros, once debated in parliament and signed into law by President Sergio Mattarella.
At a press conference in Rome, he said future asylum bids could be voided if the applicant was declared "socially dangerous."
Those convicted in the first instance of crimes such as drug dealing or shoplifting would be rejected. "Terrorists" would be stripped of Italian citizenship.
Al Jazeera
At least 349 civilians have been killed in Yemen's Houthi-held city of Hodeidah since June 13 when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Yemeni government forces launched an offensive to retake the strategic seaport.
Citing numbers collated by the monitoring group, ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data), Save the Children said on Monday that Hodeidah accounted for 51 percent of all civilian casualties between June and the end of August.
At least 685 civilians had been killed across the country during that period, the organisation added.
NPR
One of the biggest challenges of Aldi Novel Adilang's job was supposed to be boredom, as the sole caretaker of a wooden fishing hut miles out at sea. Instead, he was forced to survive more than a month on the ocean after his hut lost its mooring and drifted from Indonesia to waters around Guam.
For 49 days, Aldi survived by stretching out his meager supplies, reportedly subsisting on fish and partially strained seawater. He had been living aboard a floating hut called a rompong more than 77 miles off Indonesia's coast. But the line anchoring the hut snapped in high winds on July 14, turning Aldi into a castaway.
Lacking any way to steer or power the unwieldy raft that bore his hut, the 19-year-old drifted across the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. The small hut sat on a rectangular wooden platform and was protected by a thatched roof. Inside, he had a walkie-talkie, a small stove and a generator. Aldi's supplies of food, water and fuel had been meant to last him only a week.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Agence France Presse
Five years after he was paralysed in a snowmobile accident, a man in the US has learned to walk again aided by an electrical implant, in a potential breakthrough for spinal injury sufferers.
A team of doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota say the man, using a front-wheeled walker, was able to cover the equivalent of the length of a football pitch, issuing commands from his brain to transfer weight and maintain balance -- all previously thought impossible for paralysed patients.
The man, now 29, severed his spinal cord in the middle of his back when he crashed his snowmobile in 2013. He is completely paralysed from the waist down, and cannot move or feel anything below the middle of his torso.
In the study, the results of which were published on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, doctors in 2016 implanted a small electronic device in the man's spine.
The Guardian
A new sculptural work, Coralarium, created by artist and environmentalist Jason deCaires Taylor, was demolished last week after it was deemed anti-Islamic. The semi-submerged artwork was criticised by religious leaders and scholars in the Maldives, where Islam is the official religion. The depiction of human figures in art is discouraged under Islamic law.
The government ordered the destruction of the artwork, after a court ruled it to be a threat to “Islamic unity and the peace and interests of the Maldivian state”, the Malaysian Independent reported, despite the authorities previously granting permission.
The project by DeCaires Taylor, who is known for his underwater sculptures and galleries around the world, was commissioned by the Fairmont Maldives Sirru Fen Fushi resort, owned by the Accor hotel group, as an “intertidal gallery”, and was completed in July. The large steel frame with cutouts aiming to mimic the marine world was intended to allow sea life to explore freely within, acting as a new habitat for coral and other species. Thirty human figures were positioned on top and inside the frame at tidal level, with others submerged beneath. The sculptures were based on life-casts of people, around half of them Maldivian, with some reimagined as hybrid forms including coral or root-like elements.
Home Solar (via Reuters)
Power companies are fighting an uphill battle they are sure to lose and they’re blaming customers who are taking advantage of massive government savings programs. Specifically, they are blaming California State Rebates that incentivize homeowners to use clean energy by reducing solar power projects to $0 installations.
Until now, solar panels were less about saving money and more about environmental protection. In order to get more people to switch to clean solar energy the federal and state governments are highly incentivizing homeowners who live in specific zip codes to go solar with $1000’s of dollars in rebates and incentives that can cover 100% of the costs associated with a new solar panel installation.
The Guardian
For the first time, scientists have demonstrated that a controversial new kind of genetic engineering can rapidly spread a self-destructive genetic modification through a complex species.
The scientists used the revolutionary gene-editing tool known as CRISPR to engineer mosquitoes with a "gene drive," which rapidly transmitted a sterilizing mutation through other members of the mosquito's species.
After mosquitoes carrying the mutation were released into cages filled with unmodified mosquitoes in a high-security basement laboratory in London, virtually all of the insects were wiped out, according to a report in Nature Biotechnology.
The mosquitoes were created in the hopes of using them as a potent new weapon in the long, frustrating fight against malaria. Malaria remains one of the world's deadliestdiseases, killing more than 400,000 people every year, mostly children younger than five years old.
BBC
Weight Watchers has unveiled a slimmed down version of its name, rebranding itself WW, in what it says marks "the next stage of the company's evolution".
The company says the new name reflects its development from focusing on weight loss to overall health and wellness.
But the chief executive was unable to explain what the letters WW stood for.
Mindy Grossman said they did not stand for Weight Watchers or "Wellness that Works", a phrase the company has trade marked, but were simply "a marque".
"That marque represents our heritage and history and what we are going forward," she said.
The Guardian
Just 10 minutes of light physical activity is enough to boost brain connectivity and help the brain to distinguish between similar memories, a new study suggests.
Scientists at the University of California studying brain activity found connectivity between parts of the brain responsible for memory formation and storage increased after a brief interval of light exercise – such as 10 minutes of slow walking, yoga or tai chi.
The findings could provide a simple and effective means of slowing down or staving off memory loss and cognitive decline in people who are elderly or have low levels of physical ability.
The scientists asked 36 healthy volunteers in their early 20s to do 10 minutes of light exercise – at 30% of their peak oxygen intake – before assessing their memory ability. The memory test was then repeated on the same volunteers without exercising.
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS
The Guardian
Bill Cosby is facing prison time as he is sentenced this week for sexual assault, capping a stunning fall from grace for a man who was once one of America’s most popular entertainers.
Cosby arrived in court on Monday morning for a two-day sentencing hearing, where Judge Steven O’Neill will decide his fate at the Montgomery county courthouse in Norristown, Pennsylvania.
More than 60 women have accused the 81-year-old Cosby – a once-beloved actor and comedian known as “America’s Dad” – of sexual assault, but it’s a single case, the only one to result in criminal charges, that could land him behind bars.
BBC
An emotional Tiger Woods completed an astonishing comeback to win the season-ending Tour Championship by two shots and record his first win in five years.
The 42-year-old's victory in Atlanta was his 80th PGA Tour title - only fellow American Sam Snead has more - but his first since August 2013.
Less than a year ago he was 1,199 in the world after spinal fusion surgery - the latest of multiple operations.
"I was having a hard time not crying on that last hole," Woods said.
"I just can't believe I've pulled this off."
Thousands of fans spilled on to the 18th fairway to follow Woods to the green chanting "U-S-A" and "Tiger, Tiger" after his approach found a bunker on the edge of the green.