Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Doctor RJ, rfall, JML9999 and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke 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 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the OND banner.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Reuters
The European Union proposed doubling the size of its Mediterranean search and rescue operations on Monday, as the first bodies were brought ashore of some 900 people feared killed in the deadliest shipwreck while trying to reach Europe.
Three other rescue operations were underway on Monday to save hundreds more migrants in peril on overloaded vessels making the journey from the north coast of Africa to Europe.
The mass deaths have caused shock in Europe, where a decision to scale back naval operations last year seems to have increased the risks for migrants without reducing their numbers.
"The situation in the Mediterranean is dramatic. It cannot continue like this," said European Council President Donald Tusk, calling an extraordinary summit of EU leaders for Thursday to plan how to stop human traffickers and boost rescue efforts.
DW
Italian and Maltese ships are responding to two migrant emergencies near the Libyan coast, according to Italian Premier Matteo Renzi.
Renzi said on Monday that ships from Italy and Malta were responding to distress calls from an inflatable life-raft near the Libyan coast with 100 to 150 people aboard and to another boat with 300 people on board.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) received a call at its Rome office on Monday from an unidentified person claiming to be on a sinking boat with 300 people on board, including 20 who had already died. The same caller said there was a total of three boats in distress.
NPR
The European Union is holding an emergency meeting Monday about the deadly capsizing of a boat crowded with would-be migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. With 28 survivors reported and 24 bodies recovered, only a fraction of the hundreds of people who were reportedly on board are accounted for.
The boat was about 120 miles south of the Italian island of Lampedusa when it capsized this weekend; it was roughly 60 miles from Libya. Estimates of the number of people who were on the 65-foot craft range from 700 to 950. The boat reportedly capsized after many of its passengers rushed to the same side.
The Guardian
On a day that 27 survivors of the weekend’s Mediterranean boat disaster were flown to Sicily and salvage crews scoured the waters off Libya for the bodies of up to 900 more victims, reports came in of many more desperate migrants heading for Europe in unseaworthy craft, oblivious to the overwhelming odds against them.
Matteo Renzi, Italy’s prime minister, said rescues were under way to help save migrants trapped on two vessels carrying about 450 people off the Libyan coast. Earlier, the International Organisation for Migration said “at least” 20 fatalities had been reported from one of the vessels, carrying about 300 people, although that could not be immediately confirmed.
New York Times
ROME — European leaders were confronted on Monday with a full-blown humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean, as estimates that as many as 900 migrants may have died off the Libyan coast this weekend prompted calls for a new approach to the surging number of refugees crossing from Africa and the Middle East.
Even as efforts continued to collect the bodies from the sinking off Libya late Saturday and early Sunday — only 28 survivors have been found — Italian rescue ships responded to new distress calls from other vessels. A second migrant ship crashed near the Greek island of Rhodes, underscoring the relentless flow of people fleeing poverty, persecution and war.
The Guardian
Six Baltimore police officers have been suspended over the death of a man whose neck was broken after he was arrested and locked in a police van, as it emerged officers had delayed providing him with medical attention despite his requests.
Freddie Gray died from a “significant spinal injury”, police confirmed on Monday, while claiming it remained unknown how he was hurt. Chiefs said Gray appeared to have been injured while locked alone in a compartment of their transportation wagon.
“When Mr Gray was put in that van, he could talk, he was upset. And when he was taken out of that van, he could not talk and he could not breathe,” deputy police commissioner Jerry Rodriguez said at a press conference.
“It’s clear that what happened happened inside the van,” said mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. “We don’t have any procedure that would have an officer riding in the back of the van with the suspect.”
Vox
Today is the day tens of thousands of Americans will gather around the country to celebrate a drug that remains illegal in most of the US: marijuana.
April 20 (or 4/20) is cherished by pot smokers around the world as an excuse to toke up with friends and massive crowds each year. Major rallies are happening across the country, particularly in places like Colorado, Washington state, and Washington, DC, where marijuana possession is legal.
But as support for marijuana legalization grows — with at least five states considering it in 2016 — the festivities are becoming more mainstream. As a result, marijuana businesses are looking to leverage the holiday to find more ways to sell and market their products. This puts 4/20's current iteration in sharp contrast to the holiday once embraced by a counterculture movement, largely made up of hippies and others who decried greed, corporate influences, and all things mainstream.
BY MICHELLE OBAMA AND JILL BIDEN
Special to McClatchyApril 20, 2015 Updated 6 hours ago
WASHINGTON — Right now, in communities across our nation, there are men and women who wore our country’s uniform who don’t have a place to call home. Some fought in wars as far back as Vietnam or Korea, and some served more recently in Iraq and Afghanistan. These brave Americans risked their lives for us and our freedom – yet, tonight, they won’t even have a roof over their heads.
To be clear, the vast majority of our veterans return home in good health and good spirits. They go on to build strong families and have successful careers. But we can all agree that even a single homeless veteran is one too many, and when we have tens of thousands of veterans who don’t even have somewhere to go when it rains – that’s a stain on our nation.
Al Jazeera America
When a black teenager was found hanging from a swing set by a belt that was not his own one morning late last summer, the first thought by his friends, family, and community was that it wasn’t a suicide. Lennon Lacy, they believe, was lynched.
Now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched a probe into the death, which the coroner in Bladen County, North Carolina, initially ruled a suicide based on evidence his family says is circumstantial: that he was distraught over the recent death of his uncle.
“It’s nonsense. Yes he was depressed, but he was grieving just like his other siblings,” said Rev. Gregory Taylor, a family friend who gave the uncle’s eulogy the day before Lacy’s body was discovered in his hometown of Bladenboro. “In the African-American community where we deal with grief openly and emotionally, doesn’t mean we are clinically depressed.”
The Guardian
Lelisa Desisa of Ethiopia won his second Boston Marathon on Monday, two years after he donated the medal from his first victory to the city in memory of the bombing victims.
Kenya’s Caroline Rotich was the women’s champion, outsprinting Mare Dibaba down Boylston Street to win by 4 seconds.
Desisa didn’t have much time to celebrate when he won in 2013.
Hours after he crossed the finish line, two bombs exploded on Boylston Street and turned his victory into an afterthought. As the city mourned the three killed and 260 wounded in the explosions, he returned to Boston to donate the medal.
Now Desisa has a Boston title he can enjoy.
“I’m happy for No 1,” he said. “I am happy to win and for a strong Boston 2013.”
The Guardian
The Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison has delivered a frank assessment of race relations in America, declaring that until racial disparities in the criminal justice system are resolved, the conversation about racism will never be over.
Morrison, who won the Pulitzer prize in 1988 for her novel Beloved, which told a story of racism and slavery in 19th-century Kentucky and Ohio, drew on a recent spate of high-profile killings of unarmed African Americans by law enforcement officials to illustrate the ongoing struggle.
“People keep saying, ‘We need to have a conversation about race’,” Morrison told the Daily Telegraph.
“This is the conversation. I want to see a cop shoot a white unarmed teenager in the back.”
She added: “And I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman. Then when you ask me, ‘Is it over?’, I will say yes.”
The Guardian
Jason Rezaian, the US reporter detained in Iran, has been charged with espionage and at least three other major crimes, it was reported on Monday – nearly nine months after he was arrested.
The Washington Post cited Rezaian’s lawyer, Leila Ahsan, saying that he is also facing the charge of “collaborating with hostile governments” and “propaganda against the establishment”.
Rezaian, who was detained in July 2014, was officially charged in December, but the exact nature of the charges had not been previously made public. A number of state-affiliated media outlets in Tehran had alluded to his charges in recent weeks, saying he was held for spying, an accusation which Rezaian’s family have vehemently denied.
According to the lawyer, Rezaian’s indictment alleges that he had been collecting classified information, especially “about internal and foreign policy”, providing them to “individuals with hostile intent”, including Barack Obama.
NPR
Martin O'Malley, former governor of Maryland, says he'll decide by late May whether he's running for president. Running would put him — even he seems to acknowledge — in an uphill battle against Hillary Clinton, currently the only Democrat who has declared.
O'Malley is positioning himself to Clinton's left, and even President Obama's left.
He's for a much higher minimum wage, and against a major trade deal — the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In an interview with NPR's Steve Inskeep, O'Malley also said he wants to increase Social Security benefits, even though some people would pay more taxes.
Reuters
The U.S. State Department said on Monday it might talk with Iran about promoting regional stability, noting it had been open to including Iran in past efforts to achieve a Syrian peace deal if Tehran had altered its policy.
But it drew a distinction between talking to Iran about issues beyond its nuclear program and actually working with Tehran on such matters, something Washington has ruled out.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf made the comments when asked about a call by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif in a New York Times opinion piece for regional dialogue to address the crises in countries such as Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Washington was put in an awkward position since it blames Tehran for much of the instability and because it does not wish to upset Gulf Arab allies who fear a nuclear deal being negotiated with Iran may pave the way to a wider U.S.-Iranian entente.
Vox
The winners of the 99th Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday, April 20. The Pulitzer Prize is one of the highest awards given in journalism and the arts. At the presentation, Pulitzer administrator Mike Pride said that almost 3,000 entries had been reviewed to decide this year's winners.
Here are the 2015 Pulitzer Prize winners:
...
DW
Paratroopers from the United States have begun training Ukrainian National Guard soldiers. A fragile ceasefire between Kyiv's forces and pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine appears to be holding.
Joint training exercises began Monday for some 300 American paratroopers working with about 900 members of Ukraine's newly re-formed National Guard.
"This is not only a war for the independence of Ukraine, but also a war for freedom and democracy in Europe and the whole world," Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told the assembled troops of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade in a ceremony to launch the operation, dubbed "Fearless Guardian."
Al Jazeera America
A former intelligence officer for the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was the mastermind behind ISIL’s takeover of northern Syria, according to a report by Der Spiegel that is based on documents uncovered by the German magazine.
Der Spiegel, in a long story published over the weekend, "Secret files reveal the structure of Islamic State,” said it gained access to 31 pages of handwritten charts, lists and schedules that amount to a blueprint for the establishment of a caliphate in Syria, which the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has declared it has set up.
The documents were the work of a man identified by the magazine as Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, an Iraqi national and a former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam's air defense force. Khlifawi went by the pseudonym Haji Bakr.
Al Jazeera America
Karachi, Pakistan - Chinese President Xi Jinping has arrived in Islamabad for a landmark two-day visit that will see him and Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif unveil $28bn in new trade and investment deals.
The deals are part of the proposed $46bn China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) project, which envisions Chinese investment fuelling road, rail, electricity and other projects that would create a trade route from the western Chinese city of Kashgar to the southern Pakistani port of Gwadar.
Xi was received by a 21-gun salute and personally welcomed by Sharif at a military air base in Islamabad on Monday morning.
Reuters
An air strike on a Scud missile base in the Houthi rebel controlled Yemeni capital Sanaa triggered a big explosion that blew out windows in homes, killing at least fifteen people and wounding dozens on Monday, medical sources said.
Saudi Arabia has led an alliance of Sunni Arab countries in air strikes against the Iran-allied Shi'ite Houthi group and army units loyal to ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Yemen's state news agency Saba, run by the Houthi movement, said the bombing resulted in "dozens of martyrs and hundreds of wounded", citing a city official. The reference to "dozens martyred" might suggest that a larger number of soldiers at the base had been killed.
The Guardian
A tribal leader blamed for inciting deadly xenophobic violence in South Africa has claimed he was misquoted and demanded an official investigation into the media.
King Goodwill Zwelithini, chief of the Zulu ethnic group, told about 10,000 people in Durban, the epicentre of the crisis, that if he had given an order to kill foreigners “this country would be reduced to ashes”.
The influential monarch was accused of sparking the attacks that have left at least seven people dead and displaced more than 5,000 when he said in a speech last month that “foreigners must pack their bags and go home”. His defenders claim the remarks, made in the Zulu language, have been misconstrued and only referred to the deportation of illegal immigrants.
Under growing political pressure, Zwelithini addressed an anti-xenophobia imbizo (gathering) at Durban’s Moses Mabhida stadium on Monday, and accused journalists of unfairly manipulating comments he made in Pongola on 15 March.
The Guardian
Five witnesses have reportedly been attacked by supporters of Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn outside the courthouse in Athens where leaders of the far-right party went on trial on charges of operating a criminal organisation.
According to local officials at least one of the witnesses was hospitalised as the trial of 69 defendants – among them the party leader, Nikos Michaloliakos, and senior Golden Dawn officials – got under way.
While more than 40 defendants were present, however, neither Michaloliakos nor the majority of the party’s MPs were, in what has been interpreted as an effort to undermine the significance of the proceedings – the first time an entire party and its leadership have faced trial in Greece.
NPR
Saudi airstrikes in Yemen began almost a month ago, targeting rebels who have taken over much of the country.
Internationally, there are concerns about increasing casualties and questions about the strategy in the Saudi operation, which is receiving help from the U.S., among others.
But at home in the kingdom, the war has sparked a patriotic fervor that's noticeable just about everywhere you turn.
Saudi state television and radio play patriotic war songs and run TV spots heralding the military operations in Yemen.
In one TV montage, King Salman, who became the country's ruler in January, waves and meets government officials. It also shows the Saudi army and air force in action.
And it doesn't stop there.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
|
A Canadian and U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker rendezvous in the Arctic Ocean.
Climate Central
Just 30 years ago, the Arctic was viewed as a frozen expanse of limited opportunity. But climate change is rapidly reshaping the region — it’s warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet — creating new opportunities and risks that are coming into global focus.
“Without climate change, we wouldn’t really be talking about the Arctic in the first place,” Malte Humpert, executive director of the Arctic Institute, said.
It’s against that backdrop that the U.S. takes over the chair of the Arctic Council next week at a meeting in Iqaluit, Canada. That group is comprised of eight Arctic nations — the U.S., Canada, Russia, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark — along with indigenous tribes and other official observers like China and other countries that are looking to get an economic foothold or influence policy in the region.
Climate Central
It seems simple enough: Take the salt out of water so it’s drinkable.
But it’s far more complex than it appears at first glance. It’s also increasingly crucial in a world where freshwater resources are progressively strained by population growth, development, droughts, climate change and more. That’s why researchers and companies from the U.S. to Australia are fine-tuning a centuries-old concept that might be the future of quenching the world’s thirst.
“When it comes to increasing water supplies, you have four options: Increase your amount of reuse, increase storage, conserve it or turn to a new source,” says Tom Pankratz, a desalination consultant and current editor of the weekly trade publication Water Desalination Report. “And for many places around the world, the only new source is desalination.”
Al Jazeera America
BURLINGTON, Vt. — When it purchased a small hydropower plant on the nearby Winooski River last fall, the municipally-owned electric utility here quietly nudged Vermont's largest city into the sustainability spotlight. With a little creative accounting and the addition of the Winooski facility, Burlington's 42,000 residents were now lighting their homes and running their businesses with a 100-percent renewable mix of wind, water and biomass.
That last resource raised some eyebrows, however, and not everyone was celebrating. Mary S. Booth, a New England ecologist, fired off a letter to the editors of the “PBS Newshour,” which was among many news outlets to herald Burlington's achievement. She pointed to the city's McNeil Electric Generating Facility, which burns wood to produce about one-third of the city's power, noting that the plant emits a variety of pollutants, including greenhouse gases.
The Guardian
Water has its own language in this town. Residents talk about nervous neighbors “pulling the hose”, or speculate about which houses on a street are “on the line”. People gripe about how neighbors use “tank water” to hydrate plants.
That water lingo developed in this rural city of 6,700 – mostly poor Latino farm workers – should not be surprising. There has been a preoccupation with the stuff that comes from the tap since residents started running out of it.
East Porterville is the epicenter of individual suffering in drought-stricken California. Nearly 1,000 private wells that once delivered water to homes and small businesses inside Tulare County have dried up, leaving desperate residents with just a few costly options, and no water. In all of California, there are 800 more such wells.
Now, as the well failures expand and without much water infrastructure to speak of, the people of East Porterville are expecting a long, hot summer without precipitation. Waterless residents are struggling to shower, cook and clean. And more permanent solutions, such as drilling a new well, come with no small amount of expense, frustration and worry.
Al Jazeera America
Five years have passed since an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, owned by British Petroleum (BP), led to the largest marine oil spill in U.S. history. Eleven people died in the accident, and about 200 million gallons of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico over a period of 87 days.
The spill devastated livelihoods, with $5 billion having to be paid out to settle tens of thousands of claims. That number doesn’t include the $40 billion in fines and clean-up costs, and the additional $16 billion to settle claims stemming from the Clean Water Act.
Following the spill, BP downplayed damage to the ecosystem, but independent investigations and the courts found negligence on the part of BP and its contractors, Transocean and Halliburton.
NPR
The editor of BuzzFeed, the website that carries headlines ranging from "12 Reasons Rain Is Better Than Anything Else" to "EU Ministers To Hold Emergency Talks On Migrant Crisis," has acknowledged the deletion of more than 1,000 posts — three of them following complaints from advertisers — since he was hired in January 2012.
Editor in chief Ben Smith's memo to the staff Saturday, obtained by the website Gawker, comes after his site was criticized for the recent deletion of two posts — one critical of the board game Monopoly and the other critical of the ad campaign launched by soap brand Dove. Their parent companies, Hasbro and Unilever, respectively, are BuzzFeed advertisers. Gawker first reported both those deletions.
NPR
Veterinarians have long warned that pain medications like ibuprofen are toxic to pets. And it now looks like merely using a pain relief cream can put cats at risk.
That's what happened in two households, according to a report issued Friday by the Food and Drug Administration. Two cats in one household developed kidney failure and recovered with attention from a veterinarian. But in a second household, three cats died.
When the veterinarians performed necropsies on the three dead cats, they found toxic levels of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs. NSAIDs include ibuprofen, like Advil and Motrin, and naproxen, which is in Aleve.
NPR
Last week, as a big storm bore down on Rockford, Ill., students in a Purdue University classroom prepared to track its effects using Twitter.
Using software jointly developed by Purdue, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Weather Service, they huddled around laptops to analyze a tiny sample of the tweets from the storm's immediate vicinity. They were looking for keywords like "damage" or "tornado" and for pictures of funnel clouds.
Their professor, Tim Filley, says social media can track a storm's path of destruction just as radar does.
"You can overlay storm tracks and the people who have been responding to the storm. It actually maps out very nicely when people are talking about damage," he says.
NPR
In 2010, just after the BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico exploded, seafood restaurants were bombarded with questions from concerned diners: "How bad is the spill?" "Is this from the Gulf?" "Is it safe?" Demand for Gulf seafood tanked.
"You have to remember, that was literally weeks and months on end when you could turn on the TV at any time of day and see an oil well leaking unabatedly into the Gulf of Mexico," says Brett Anderson, feature food writer for Nola.com.
Looking around a packed dining room at the local Cajun Seafood House in New Orleans on a recent day, it's clear that epidemic of worry is over. Ironically, now there's a supply issue: Seafood dishes have to be pulled from menus when orders fall through, and fishermen are losing longstanding customers.
C/NET
Google wants to make smartwatches less dependent on smartphones.
For now, to use most smartwatches, you need to connect the device to your smartphone and keep your phone nearby. That's no longer going to be necessary for wrist-worn devices powered by Google's Android Wear software, the company said Monday. Instead, the devices will let you connect your watch to a Wi-Fi network and receive updates about emails and upcoming calendar appointments directly over the Internet.
You'll still need to allow your watch to pull information from your phone -- and have your phone connected to a cellular or Wi-Fi network -- but then you'll be able to receive notifications, send messages and use apps on your watch. That's no matter where your phone is -- and your phone and watch don't have to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network.
The Guardian
Most of the world’s humpback whales could soon be taken off the endangered species list.
On Monday, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) proposed that humpbacks be split into 14 population segments, allowing for 10 populations to be removed from the endangered list.
Two of the other four populations would be listed as threatened, and only the humpbacks of the Arabian Sea and north-west Africa would remain listed as endangered.
The other 10 populations would still be protected under the US Marine Mammal Protection Act. Currently, all humpback whales are listed as endangered.