Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, 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.
See also this very important diary from Tweedledee5: That “laddered CR”? A surprise switcheroo—Mike Johnson’s GOP got played, lost EVERYTHING they wanted
President Biden on Wednesday announced that he had reached three key areas of cooperation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, even as the president said he pushed hard on some of the most fraught issues between Washington and Beijing.
The president described Xi as a “dictator,” following what appeared to look like a friendly bilateral summit in San Francisco. Biden was earlier seen joking while sitting across from Xi at the start of the meeting, and showed a photo on his cellphone of Xi as a young man in San Francisco in 1985.
...But Biden also clashed with Xi on the fate of Americans detained in China. Biden didn’t name the Americans detained but they some have earlier been identified as Mark Swidan, Kai Li and David Lin. The president also raised with the Chinese leader U.S. opposition to the practice of placing exit-bans on American citizens, a practice Beijing uses to prevent what it views as suspicious persons from leaving the country.
Jonathan Miller, an attorney for Misty Hampton, said he shared the witness proffer videos with one of the two media outlets that reported on them.
An attorney for one of former President Donald Trump's co-defendants in the Fulton County district attorney's 2020 election interference case admitted at a hearing Wednesday that he had shared witness proffer videos of key figures in the case with a media outlet, saying he thought it was in his client's interest to do so.
Jonathan Miller, an attorney for Misty Hampton, made the confession during an emergency hearing for a protective order that was prompted by the publication of parts of the video statements of Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro and Scott Hall by ABC News and The Washington Post. The judge said he would issue a protective order barring the disclosure of certain discovery information by Thursday morning.
Powell, Ellis, Chesebro and Hall were among the original 18 defendants charged alongside former President Donald Trump in the racketeering case in August. All four have pleaded guilty to related charges. The proffer videos were made pursuant to their plea agreements, which required that they provide true and accurate information to prosecutors. The videos showed Ellis recounting a conversation with Trump adviser Dan Scavino in which he told her that Trump would not leave the White House regardless of the election results, and Powell testifying that Trump was repeatedly told by others that he’d lost the election.
Are EV sales actually slowing?
Data through the end of September 2023 shows that the EV fraction of US car sales is continuing to rise. EV sales in the US for the third quarter of 2023 exceeded 300,000 for the first time and EV sales in 2023 have increased nearly 50 percent compared to the same time last year. Overall, EV sales are now about 8% of new cars nationwide (a new high) and over 25% in California.
So why are automakers saying that EV sales are slowing? Part of the reason is likely due to the fluctuations in supply. Just a year ago, many EVs were in short supply and dealerships had waiting lists of buyers. Now, both production and the number of EV models available has spiked up, resulting in an oversupply for some models. That doesn’t mean there is waning interest, just that some automakers have overcompensated for supply constraints in past years. Put another way, overall EV demand (measured by sales) is still growing, but the supply of some EVs has caught up to consumer demand. In addition, not all EVs are equal. Just like there are gasoline models that underwhelm and sit on lots, some EVs are going to sell slower because they don’t stand out against tougher competition.
...Ordinarily, car companies might not be vocal about potential softening demand or oversupply of their products. So why are we hearing so much about it right now?
The answer might lie in the emissions standards proposed by the EPA for cars and trucks earlier this year. These standards are critical to reduce air pollution and to help curb climate change, and they are in part based on the demonstrated increasing availability of EVs. The automakers (through their trade group) are pushing hard to weaken these important standards, and now some of the companies seem to be using short-term market conditions to justify increased climate pollution for years to come.
The Vatican has confirmed a ban on Catholics becoming Freemasons, a centuries-old secretive society that the Catholic Church has long viewed with hostility and has an estimated global membership of up to six million.
"Active membership in Freemasonry by a member of the faithful is prohibited, because of the irreconcilability between Catholic doctrine and Freemasonry," the Vatican's doctrinal office said in a letter published by Vatican media on Wednesday.
...Masonic lodges are normally male-only societies, associated with arcane symbols and rituals. They have also sometimes been linked to conspiracy theories alleging undue influence on world affairs.
Archaeological research in the Middle East is revealing how a long-forgotten ancient civilisation used previously undiscovered linguistics to promote multiculturalism and political stability.
The ground-breaking discoveries are also shedding new light on how early empires functioned.
Ongoing excavations in Turkey – in the ruins of the ancient capital of the Hittite empire – are yielding remarkable evidence that the imperial civil service included entire departments fully or partly dedicated to researching the religions of subject peoples.
The evidence suggests that, back in the second millennium BC, Hittite leaders told their civil servants to record subject peoples’ religious liturgies and other traditions by writing them down in their respective local languages (but in Hittite script) – so that those traditions could be preserved and incorporated into the empire’s highly inclusive multicultural religious system.
Inspired by global warming and the refugees who lost their lives trying to reach Europe, Shezad Dawood’s work asks difficult questions. How will it go down in church?
It was harrowing,” says artist Shezad Dawood. He’s recalling the time he cast eyes on the personal effects of refugees and migrants who lost their lives in the sea between North Africa and Sicily. Dredged up from the seabed, these possessions included passports, mobile phones, medicine, cigarette packets – and often, small quantities of earth from their homelands, carefully wrapped in plastic or cellophane. “All were heart-rending, but none more so than the last category,” he says.
The items have been incorporated by Dawood, who is based in Hackney Wick, east London, into the Labanof Cycle, a suite of voluminous, elegiac textile tapestries. First he would paint the various possessions, then they would be screen-printed on to luxurious handmade Fortuny fabrics from Venice. The finished works are archives of loss. Objects that were once banal have become precious fragments of a life to be held on to.
...The Revd Dr Kenneth Padley, the cathedral’s canon treasurer and chair of its arts advisory panel, said Dawood’s installation was “provocative”, but hoped visitors and congregation would understand that “beneath the wrapping paper and joy of the birth of the baby, the Christian message of the incarnation is that God in Jesus comes into the brokenness of this world to transform and redeem it. Jesus himself becomes a refugee, like countless others before and since, as he flees to Egypt from the vengeful King Herod.”
Let’s go fly a kite? Or maybe an octopus?
What are YOU flying tonight? Tell us in the comments!