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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Chicago Sun-Times: Former mayoral candidate Paul Vallas urges leniency for Ed Burke, ‘whom I always felt met my standards for ethics’ by Jon Seidel
Former Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas told a federal judge that convicted ex-Ald. Edward M. Burke is “worthy of whatever leniency you see fit to provide” in an early batch of what will likely be several letters of support ahead of Burke’s sentencing this summer.
Four letters written by Vallas and others became public Tuesday at the urging of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Public Media, who asked U.S. District Judge Virginia Kendall to unseal letters she had recently placed on the docket.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Sarah Streicker agreed in court that such letters should “generally be made public with limited redactions for particularly sensitive information,” and Burke attorney Robin Waters did not object to unsealing the letters that had been filed so far.
LOL, that’s Chicago politics for you.
Time: How Far Trump Would Go by Eric Cortellessa
Donald Trump thinks he’s identified a crucial mistake of his first term: He was too nice.
We’ve been talking for more than an hour on April 12 at his fever-dream palace in Palm Beach. Aides lurk around the perimeter of a gilded dining room overlooking the manicured lawn. When one nudges me to wrap up the interview, I bring up the many former Cabinet officials who refuse to endorse Trump this time. Some have publicly warned that he poses a danger to the Republic. Why should voters trust you, I ask, when some of the people who observed you most closely do not?
As always, Trump punches back, denigrating his former top advisers. But beneath the typical torrent of invective, there is a larger lesson he has taken away. “I let them quit because I have a heart. I don’t want to embarrass anybody,” Trump says. “I don’t think I’ll do that again. From now on, I’ll fire.”
Six months from the 2024 presidential election, Trump is better positioned to win the White House than at any point in either of his previous campaigns. He leads Joe Biden by slim margins in most polls, including in several of the seven swing states likely to determine the outcome. But I had not come to ask about the election, the disgrace that followed the last one, or how he has become the first former—and perhaps future—American President to face a criminal trial. I wanted to know what Trump would do if he wins a second term, to hear his vision for the nation, in his own words.
Columbia Daily Spectator: NYPD begins sweep of occupied Hamilton Hall, arrests protesters by Esha Karam, Shea Vance, Sarah Huddleston, Amira McKee, and Manuela Silva
The New York Police Department began arresting protesters outside occupied Hamilton Hall at around 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday evening. One contingent of officers approached the admissions office entrance, while another approached the main entrance.
Students yelled “shame” as officers gathered around the front entrance of the building, and chants of “NYPD, KKK, IOF, they’re all the same” arose.
Officers asked members of the press and onlookers to clear the steps surrounding the entrance, urging them to return to their dorms. The NYPD pushed students to the entrance of John Jay Hall before escorting onlookers who do not live in on-campus residence halls outside campus through the gates outside John Jay Hall.
A group of protesters remained standing outside the Hamilton doors, standing in a human chain.
The NYPD began entering Hamilton through the windows, via a staircase constructed on Amsterdam Avenue.
At around 8:42 p.m. on Tuesday, the NYPD began taking down the barricades outside the Carman Hall gates. Officers in riot gear, some holding batons and with zip ties on their waists, stood outside the gates.
The Washington Post: Florida prepares for one of nation’s strictest abortion bans to take effect by Lori Rozsa and Kitchener
Clinics, patients and abortion rights activists in Florida are bracing for the impact of a new law that will transform the state overnight from one with the fewest restrictions for the procedure in the South to a place where it will be all but banned.
The
six-week abortion law signed by Gov.
Ron DeSantis last year and confirmed by the Florida Supreme Court earlier this month takes effect Wednesday. In the days leading up to the ban, clinics have seen a surge in demand. Meanwhile, advocates have started getting the word out on how to access abortion pills by mail.
“People are scrambling to get in before the deadline,” said Kelly Flynn,the president and chief executive of A Woman’s Choice, a network of abortion clinics. “We’re telling them, ‘Hey, it’s going to be busy.’ We don’t want them to walk in blindsided.”
The New York Times: In Charlotte, a City Mourns Its Officers, and Asks What Went Wrong by Eduardo Medina
As a corrections officer in North Carolina, Sam Poloche had long found being out in the field much more rewarding than working at a desk. So, in 2013, he eagerly joined a task force led by the U.S. Marshals Service, assisting in serving warrants across the western part of the state.
“It was just something he loved,” his wife, Cielo Poloche, said. “He did his job, came home to us, and that was it.”
On Monday afternoon, a deputy greeted Ms. Poloche at her home, bearing the news that her husband, a slightly reserved man who loved his two sons, had been shot while serving a warrant in Charlotte. By the time she arrived at the hospital, her husband had died.
Officer Poloche and three other members of the task force had been fatally shot while serving a warrant on a man who used a powerful AR-15-style rifle to fire waves of rounds at them from the second floor of a house.
AlJazeera: France deploys riot police, cuts funding to quell campus protests over Gaza by Sania Mahyou
Names marked with an asterisk have been changed to protect identities.
Paris, France – Tensions are rising between the French state and students at top universities who are staging pro-Palestine protests amid Israel’s war on Gaza, inspired by their American counterparts.
Students of the Sciences Po university in Paris occupied parts of the institution and blocked entry to a building last week before riot police descended on campus.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, who like President Emmanuel Macron is among the university’s notable alumni, said his government “would not tolerate the actions of a dangerously acting minority trying to impose its rules and an ideology coming from North America”, following the three-day blockade at the prestigious school.
On Monday, undeterred by the threat of police action, antiwar protesters at the renowned Sorbonne University demonstrated on campus, setting up tents, chanting and waving the Palestinian flag.
Guardian: Great Barrier Reef’s worst bleaching leaves giant coral graveyard: ‘It looks as if it has been carpet bombed’ by Joe HInchliffe and Mike Bowers
Beneath the turquoise waters off Heron Island lies a huge, brain-shaped Porites coral that, in health, would be a rude shade of purplish-brown. Today that coral outcrop, or bommie, shines snow white.
Prof Terry Hughes, a coral bleaching expert at James Cook University, estimates this living boulder is at least 300 years old.
“If that thing had eyes it could have looked up and watched Captain Cook sail past,” he says, back on the pristine beach of this speck of an island 80km offshore at the southern end of the
Great Barrier Reef.
It is not just Heron’s grand old bommie that is freshly bleached. The surrounding tangle of staghorn corals, or Acropora, are splashed in swathes of white, or painted a dappled mosaic of greens and browns that betray the algae and seaweeds growing over the freshly killed coral. Hughes estimates 90% of those branching corals are dead or dying.
In just three days, the authorities in Moscow have detained at least three Russian journalists from Western media and news agencies considered “unfriendly” by the Kremlin. Sergey Mingazov, a reporter for the Russian edition of the U.S. magazine Forbes, has been arrested on charges of discrediting the actions of the Russian army in Ukraine for sharing third-party information about the massacre in Bucha on social media. Sergey Karelin and Konstantin Gabov — from the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters, respectively — are accused by the Kremlin of collaboration with the team of dissident Alexei Navalny, who died in a Russian prison in February. The latest arrests of journalists follow the expulsions and imprisonment of other Western and Russian correspondents over the past year.
Russian security forces detained Mingazov at his home at 6 a.m. last Friday in the Siberian city of Khabarovsk, located about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) from the Chinese border. Authorities seized his computer and cell phone as well as those of his wife and children, Forbes reported. A court ruled on Saturday that he must remain under house arrest until the conclusion of his trial. Upon leaving the hearing, Mingazov told local media outlet 7x7 he hoped to settle the matter by pleading guilty and paying a fine.
The indictment against the Forbes reporter also calls for a prison term of between five to 10 years. “The formal complaint is based on Article 207.3 of the Russian criminal code: dissemination under a reliable appearance of deliberately false information about the armed forces for hatred, political, ideological, racial, national or religious enmity,” the reporter’s lawyer, Konstantin Bubon, said via his Facebook profile.
King Charles spoke to patients about the "shock" of hearing a cancer diagnosis - as he returned to public engagements with a hospital visit.
The King was asked by a patient how he was feeling while he had his own cancer treatment: "I'm all right, thanks. Not too bad," the King replied.
Looking relaxed and smiling, the King visited a specialist cancer centre in central London with Queen Camilla.
It was his first big public appearance since his cancer diagnosis.
The King, who has become Cancer Research UK's new patron, was shown some of the innovative medical technology at the Macmillan Cancer Centre at University College London Hospital.
But there was a sense of shared human experience as he sat down to chat to patients about the treatment they were receiving - sympathising that he had his own "treatment this afternoon as well".