The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the eschaton. Please recommend and then add news stories of import or interest in the comments.
OneWest Bank, which Donald Trump’s nominee for treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, ran from 2009 to 2015, repeatedly broke California’s foreclosure laws during that period, according to a previously undisclosed 2013 memo from top prosecutors in the state attorney general’s office.
The memo obtained by The Intercept alleges that OneWest rushed delinquent homeowners out of their homes by violating notice and waiting period statutes, illegally backdated key documents, and effectively gamed foreclosure auctions.
In the memo, the leaders of the state attorney general’s Consumer Law Section said they had “uncovered evidence suggestive of widespread misconduct” in a yearlong investigation. In a detailed 22-page request, they identified over a thousand legal violations in the small subsection of OneWest loans they were able to examine, and they recommended that Attorney General Kamala Harris file a civil enforcement action against the Pasadena-based bank. They even wrote up a sample legal complaint, seeking injunctive relief and millions of dollars in penalties.
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The House GOP reversed course on Tuesday, deciding in a closed door meeting to abandon a plan approved less than 24 hours earlier to gut the independent Office of Congressional Ethics (OCE).
In an emergency conference meeting Tuesday morning, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) offered and the party approved a motion to restore the current OCE rules. The reversal came as members of Congress said their offices were flooded with calls from constituents angered by the decision.
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Teresa Shook never considered herself much of an activist, or someone particularly versed in feminist theory. But when the results of the presidential election became clear, the retired attorney in Hawaii turned to Facebook and asked: What if women marched on Washington around Inauguration Day en masse?
She asked her online friends how to create an event page, and then started one for the march she was hoping would happen. By the time she went to bed, 40 women responded that they were in. When she woke up, that number had exploded to 10,000.
Now, more than 100,000 people have registered their plans to attend the Women’s March on Washington in what is expected to be the largest demonstration linked to Donald Trump’s inauguration and a focal point for activists on the left who have been energized in opposing his agenda.
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Last year, a network of health scientists from around the world set out to create the most comprehensive portrait of world obesity ever produced. The researchers compiled results from 1,698 studies on adult obesity, covering 186 countries, 19.2 million participants, and spanning 40 years. And they condensed it all into a single study, published earlier this year in the Lancet medical journal.
And here are the full results, presented in one eye-opening graphic.
The colour of each country represents its adult obesity rate in the year shown. Hover over a country to see what its obesity rate was in 1975 and what it is today.
Since 1975, obesity rates have risen in every country in the world, without exception. That includes countries like the United States and the UK, where food is cheap and abundant, and countries like Somalia and Angola, where malnutrition remains an epidemic.
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The gunman who killed 39 people in an Istanbul nightclub on New Year's Day in an attack claimed by Islamic State appears to have been well versed in guerrilla warfare and may have trained in Syria, a newspaper report and a security source said on Tuesday.
The attacker, who remains at large, shot dead a police officer and a civilian at the entrance to the exclusive Reina nightclub on Sunday. He then opened fire with an automatic rifle inside, reloading his weapon half a dozen times and shooting the wounded as they lay on the ground.
In a statement claiming the attack on Monday, Islamic State described the club as a gathering point for Christians celebrating their "apostate holiday" and said the shooting was revenge for Turkish military involvement in Syria.
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A trip is often defined by its surprises, so here are my biggest revelations from six days in Lagos, Nigeria.
Most of all, I found Lagos to be much safer than advertised. It is frequently described as one of the most dangerous cities on earth. Many people told me I was crazy to go there, and some Nigerian expats warned me I might not get out of the airport alive.
The reality is that I walked around freely and in many parts of town. I didn’t try to go everywhere or at all hours, and I may have been lucky. Yet not once did I feel threatened, and I strongly suspect that a trip to Lagos is safer than a trip to Rio de Janeiro, a major tourist destination. (In my first trip to Rio I was attacked by children with pointed sticks. In my second I found myself caught in a gunfight between drug lords). Many Lagos residents credit the advent of closed-circuit television cameras for their safety improvements.
So if you’re an experienced traveler, and tempted to visit Africa’s largest and arguably most dynamic city, don’t let safety concerns be a deal killer.
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Residents in Beijing kicked off the first day of the new year with smog that was off the charts.
The air quality index released by the municipal environmental protection bureau on Sunday hit 482, almost touching the 500 mark where the scale tops out, and far beyond the point deemed hazardous to health. The US embassy gives its own reading for air pollution in the capital, and said levels were well beyond 500.
More than a dozen other cities including Tianjin and others in neighbouring Hebei and Shandong provinces also saw smog return to dangerous levels.
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China launched its first freight train to London on Sunday, according to the China Railway Corporation. The train will travel from Yiwu West Railway Station in Zhejiang Province, Eastern China to Barking, London, taking 18 days to travel over 7,400 miles.
The route runs through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, Poland, Germany, Belgium, and France, before arriving in London. The UK is the eighth country to be added to the China-Europe service, and London is the 15th city.
The railway is a major strategic development to assist Xi Jinping's multi-billion dollar 'One Belt, One Road' strategy, according to the China-Europe Freight Rail Development Plan released in October.
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At least 6,878 civilians were killed in Iraq last year as the Iraqi government struggled to maintain security and dislodge fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group from areas under its control.
The UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, known as UNAMI, said on Tuesday that its numbers "have to be considered as the absolute minimum" as it was not able to verify casualties among civilians in conflict areas.
It added that last year figures did not include casualties among civilians in Iraq's western Anbar province for the months of May, July, August and December.
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The Syrian government and rebel forces are trading blame for the water shortages.
Rebels claim the government destroyed the water pumping station in the Wadi Barada valley, one of the last remaining rebel-held pockets of Damascus.
The Syrian army and its allies are pushing to recapture Wadi Barada in spite of a nationwide ceasefire. The regime claims it is going after rebel groups who were excluded from the truce, like former al Qaeda affiliate Fateh al-Sham, which it says is operating in the area (although local groups deny this).
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Lately, Russia has increased its involvement in Afghanistan. For many experts, this is surprising, because Moscow had maintained an apparent distance from the Afghan conflict for many years. In fact, Russia even supported the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the subsequent toppling of the Taliban regime. At the time, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai rightly said that Afghanistan was probably the only place where the interests of Moscow and Washington didn't clash.
But a new geopolitical situation is emerging in the region, and it seems that Russia has decided not to remain "neutral" in the protracted conflict wracking the Asian country. The recent tripartite meeting in Moscow involving China, Pakistan and Russia to discuss Afghanistan's security is just one example of Russia's growing interest. […]
"Russia may have been chased out of Afghanistan several decades ago, but now it appears keen to re-enter the scene in a big way," Michael Kugelman, an expert at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told DW.
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After a half-century of war, peace has come to this long-troubled region of Colombia, and the change has been terrifying.
On Christmas Day, gunmen assassinated a rural activist from the leftist Marcha Patriótica party as he rode home on his motorbike. A member of the group was ambushed along the highway here in early November. The mutilated body of another activist turned up two weeks later in the same area.
The killings appear to fit a pattern of attacks on left-wing activists, indigenous leaders, human rights advocates and members of Marcha Patriótica, with the pace picking up in recent months as the government finalized a controversial peace accord with Marxist FARC rebels to end Latin America’s longest-running conflict.
By stalking grass-roots activists who are promoting the accord and pushing for its full implementation, the killers have sent a chill across the Colombian countryside and sown new doubts about the pact’s chances for success.
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US Navy-trained dolphins and their handlers will participate in a last-ditch effort to catch the last few dozen of Mexico’s vaquita porpoises to save them from extinction.
The trained animals will use their sonar to locate the extremely elusive vaquitas, then surface and advise their handlers.
The number of vaquitas, the world’s smallest and most endangered porpoise species, has been devastated by illegal fishing for the swim bladder of the totoaba, a fish which is a prized delicacy in China.
According to rough estimates, with the vaquita population falling by 40% a year, and only 60 alive a year ago, there could be as few as three dozen left.
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Colleges from Quebec to British Columbia say applications and website traffic from the United States have been surging since Trump’s victory Nov. 8. Although many Canadian schools had also ramped up recruiting in the U.S. recently, some say dismay over the presidential election has fueled a spike in interest beyond their expectations. […]
In the U.S., officials at some colleges say it’s clear Trump’s election is tilting enrollment patterns. Some recruiters say foreign students are avoiding the U.S. amid worries about safety and deportation, opting for Canada or Australia instead. And Canadian schools have noticed growing interest from China, India and Pakistan.
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