Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), 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 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
Washington Post
President Trump revealed highly classified information to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in a White House meeting last week, according to current and former U.S. officials, who said that Trump’s disclosures jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State.
The information Trump relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.
The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said that Trump’s decision to do so risks cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and National Security Agency.
US NEWS
Al Jazeera
The mayor of Charlottesville, in the US state of Virginia, has been the target of anti-Semitic tweets after speaking out against far-right white nationalists who converged on a local park carrying blazing torches the night before.
Mayor Mike Signer said two protests led on Saturday by Richard Spencer, a leader of the "alt-right" movement, came on the same day the city held its annual Festival of Cultures event, which celebrates diversity in the home of the University of Virginia.
The protesters gathered on Charlottesville's Robert E Lee Park, where a statue of the Confederate general that the city council voted to remove is located.
The city also voted to remove a statue of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, located in another park. Both changes have been put on hold amid ongoing litigation.
'Reminiscent of the KKK'
The Charlottesville protests were the latest of several in the US South in recent months over the removal of statues celebrating leaders of the Confederacy, the slave-holding group of states that broke with the North in the early 1860s, prompting the 1861-1865 Civil War.
"You're seeing anti-Semitism in these crazy tweets I'm getting and you're seeing a display of torches at night, which is reminiscent of the KKK," Signer, who is Jewish, said in a phone interview with the Reuters news agency.
The Guardian
The White House is seeking to recast the US president as a world statesman, but critics say his confidence in his own persuasive powers is simply delusional.
Donald Trump is embarking on a week of diplomacy and preparation for his first foreign trip as president, aimed at demonstrating that his personal charisma can override longstanding global divisions and conflicts of interest with old allies.
Trump’s personality-driven approach seeks to reassert US pre-eminence in the world through consolidating bonds with foreign leaders, most notably autocrats, as long as they are aligned with the administration’s priorities of defeating Islamic State and al-Qaida while containing Iranian influence. Pressure to observe human rights has been explicitly relegated as a foreign policy mission.
The president’s critics argue, however, that abandoning such values damages long-term US aspirations to global leadership. They warn that Trump’s overweening confidence in his own persuasive powers is simply delusional and will not help resolve intractable global conflicts and the often contradictory aims of his own foreign policy objectives.
Starting on Friday, the president’s world tour is seeking to recast Trump as a world statesman at a time when the legitimacy of his election victory is under greater attack than ever following his dismissal of the FBI director, James Comey, who was overseeing an investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.
Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rebuffed a Republican bid to revive a strict North Carolina voter-identification law that a lower court found deliberately discriminated against black voters, handing a victory to Democrats and civil rights groups.
The justices' decision not to take up a Republican appeal in the important voting rights dispute set no legal precedent and did not rule out the possibility that the court, with a 5-4 conservative majority, would endorse such laws in future. North Carolina's law was one of a number of similar statutes passed by Republican-controlled states.
"Today's announcement is good news for North Carolina voters. We need to be making it easier to vote, not harder," said North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat who took office in January and asked the court not to take up the case.
The justices left in place a July 2016 ruling by the Richmond, Virginia-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that voided the law passed by a Republican-controlled legislature and signed by a Republican governor.
The appeals court found that the law's provisions "target African-Americans with almost surgical precision" and "impose cures for problems that did not exist," concluding that the Republican-led legislature enacted it "with discriminatory intent.”
The Guardian
The Trump administration will significantly expand a Reagan-era policy banning foreign aid to international healthcare providers who discuss abortion, a White House official has told the Christian Broadcasting Network.
The new terms of the ban will reportedly apply to $8.8bn in existing foreign aid provided by the state department, USAid, and the Department of Defense – dwarfing the $60m in programming that previously fell under the ban.
The change in policy will not cut the amount of foreign aid distributed through existing channels. But it will prevent those funds from going to any organization that promotes abortion rights.
“Votes in America have international consequences,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of the Susan B Anthony List, an anti-abortion political action committee. “The [policy] implemented today is one of the reasons pro-life voters worked to elect Donald Trump to the White House. We have officially ceased exporting abortion to foreign nations.”
State department officials are expected to formally announce the new rules as early as Monday.
Reuters
On an overcast spring morning, about 40 Mexican men turned out in the pre-dawn hours to board a bus for California's Salinas Valley where they would harvest 16 acres (6.47 hectares) of lettuce over the next three days.
Hector Manuel Morales, 20, came north from Mexico to work the fields with his three cousins. He said his family worried about his journey, spooked by President Donald Trump's talk of a crackdown on illegal immigrants. But he does not anticipate problems.
While about half of U.S. crop workers are in the country illegally, Morales and the other men have H-2A visas, which allow them to work temporarily as seasonal agricultural laborers on American farms.
"We are not violating any law here in the U.S.," he said. "We come to work."
His co-worker Rafael Gonzalez Arredondo, 23, said listening to Trump's statements about Mexico was "difficult, but we are going to show him that Mexicans are hard working people, that we are not what he says."
The men came to the country through a labor brokerage company, Fresh Harvest, which brings in H-2A laborers to work on farms in need of temporary workers. This year, the company’s owner, Steve Scaroni, says he expects to bring in about 4,000 workers.
The men came to the country through a labor brokerage company, Fresh Harvest, which brings in H-2A laborers to work on farms in need of temporary workers. This year, the company’s owner, Steve Scaroni, says he expects to bring in about 4,000 workers.
NPR
The Senate is negotiating its own legislation to repeal and replace much of the Affordable Care Act in secret talks with senators hand-picked by party leaders and with no plans for committee hearings to publicly vet the bill.
"I am encouraged by what we are seeing in the Senate. We're seeing senators leading," said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, one of the 13 Republicans involved in the private talks. "We're seeing senators working together in good faith. We're not seeing senators throwing rocks at each other, either in private or in the press."
Senate Democrats have a different take. "Your morning reminder that under the cloud cover of the FBI story, 13 GOP Senators are still secretly writing a bill to destroy the ACA," Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., tweeted Monday morning.Senate Republicans have shrugged away criticism about their decision to avoid action in committees in favor of closely guarded meetings in the U.S. Capitol to craft legislation to repeal and replace key pillars of President Barack Obama's health care law and reshape Medicaid.
Reuters
A majority of Americans, including a growing number of Republicans, want to see an "independent investigation" sort out any connections between Russia and President Donald Trump during the 2016 election campaign, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Monday.
The May 10-14 poll, which was conducted after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, suggests the public is increasingly uneasy with allegations of meddling by the Russians in the U.S. election. Trump's dismissal of Comey, who was leading the Federal Bureau of Investigation's probe into ties between the White House and Russia, intensified calls by Democrats for an independent probe.
According to the poll, 59 percent of adults, including 41 percent of Republicans and 79 percent of Democrats, agreed that "Congress should launch an independent investigation into communications between the Russian government and the Trump campaign during the 2016 election."
That compares with 54 percent of all adults, including 30 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Democrats, who felt that way when the poll last asked the question in February.
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
New French President Emmanuel Macron named centre-right lawmaker Edouard Philippe as prime minister on Monday in a further effort to splinter the country's traditional parties and redraw the political map.
Philippe, a little known 46-year-old MP and mayor of the northern port of Le Havre, comes from the moderate wing of the rightwing Republicans party and is seen as a pragmatist.
His appointment was seen as a strategic move by 39-year-old Macron, who is trying to woo modernisers of all stripes to his new centrist party, the Republique en Marche (Republic on the Move, REM).
France's fervently pro-European new president -- who travelled to Berlin later to meet German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- has already won over dozens of moderate Socialist MPs.
Former investment banker Macron, who trounced far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the May 7 presidential run-off, aims to take votes from both the Republicans and Socialists in next month's crucial parliamentary election.
Philippe has been presented as his Trojan horse on the right of the spectrum.
Deutsche Welle
On his first full day in office and shortly after naming his new prime ministerEdouard Philippe, Macron made his first international trip as French president to Germany, meeting Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin.
He was received with military honors ahead of the talks, during which the two leaders were expected to discuss one of Macron's most controversial ideas - a shared budget for the 19 countries which use the euro currency.
Under his proposal, the move would also include creating a new finance minister for the eurozone. Macron has said such measures would allow for joint investments and help the eurozone better cope with financial crises. The idea has been met with skepticism by some in Germany, Europe's strongest economy, which has faced the biggest share of bailouts for weaker eurozone members.
Last week, Merkel's spokesman Steffen Seibert had said on the subject of euro bonds: "I can tell you that the federal government's dismissive attitude toward euro bonds remains valid," when asked if Germany would back Macron should he push for the creation of such financial instruments.
Deutsche Welle
Wolfgang Hellmich, the chairman of the Bundestag Defense Committee told the German news agency dpa "we're not going to be blackmailed" by the Ankara government after a second German parliamentary delegation was prevented from visiting Turkey’s Incirlik facility. The air base is being used in the international fightback against so-called "Islamic State" (IS) militants.
A decision on where to move the Tornado units is likely to be made in the next few weeks, with Jordan seen as a favorite, sources from the Bundestag committee said.
New tensions
Turkey's latest snub follows Germany's decision to grant asylum to a number of Turkish military officers, who faced persecution following Turkey's failed coup on July 15 last year, according to dpa.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Turkey's latest move "unfortunate" in remarks to reporters in Berlin earlier in the day.
"The Bundeswehr is a parliamentary army and this makes it absolutely necessary for our lawmakers to have access to our soldiers," Merkel said.
Turkey refused last year to grant German MPs access to the air base, only relenting in October after months of waiting.
Spiegel Online
Social Democratic Party headquarters in Berlin was more packed than it has been in a long time on Sunday. And the disappointment was more pronounced than usual as well. Indeed, the number of long faces among SPD members gathered there to watch the returns from the state election in North Rhine-Westphalia made it look as though the party had just lost several elections at once.
The frustration was understandable. The center-left party had been hoping that Hannelore Kraft, the SPD governor of the state, would get re-elected and provide essential momentum ahead of this fall's national election. Instead, despite having led in the polls for most of the spring, the SPD limped in with just 31.2 percent of the vote, its worst showing ever in the state, against 33 percent for Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats. It was, following defeats in Saarland in late March and last Sunday in Schleswig-Holstein, the third failure in a row for the party.
It wasn't supposed to be this way. When the SPD announced in January that Sigmar Gabriel was stepping down as party chair and former European Parliament President Martin Schulz was taking over -- and would be the SPD's chancellor candidate in the Sept. 24 general election -- nationwide support for the SPD immediately jumped by over 10 percent.
NPR
The U.S. State Department laid out a new case against Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime on Monday: Not only has the Syrian government committed mass atrocities at its military prison complex outside Damascus, but for years, it has also added to the structure in order to burn and secretly dispose of thousands of its victims' remains.
"Beginning in 2013, the Syrian regime modified a building within the Saydnaya complex to support what we believe is a crematorium," Stuart Jones, acting assistant secretary for Near East affairs, told reporters at a special media briefing, circulating satellite photographs that he says depict that crematorium.
"Although the regime's many atrocities are well-documented," Jones continued, "we believe that the building of a crematorium is an effort to cover up the extent of mass murders taking place in Saydnaya prison."
NPR
One of Mexico's most respected journalists has been shot to death in his home state of Sinaloa, in northwestern Mexico, and a large group of gunmen has attacked seven other journalists traveling in the southwest.
A wave of attacks, several of them fatal, targeted reporters in Mexico over the last few months, NPR's Carrie Kahn reports from Mexico.
Javier Valdez, who was shot to death in Culiacan, Sinaloa, on Monday, was a veteran reporter admired for his dogged coverage of drug trafficking, organized crime and life in Mexico's underworld, Carrie reports. He was a correspondent for a national newspaper, La Jornada, and also "founded the respected Riodoce publication and authored several books delving into narcotrafficking and organized crime."
A gunman pulled Valdez from his car and shot him multiple times, according to La Jornada."
Valdez was a nationally and internationally recognized journalist who authored several books on the drug trade, including Narcoperiodismo and Los Morros del Narco," The Associated Press reports. "The latter chronicled the lives of young people swept up in Mexico's underworld."
Reuters
Israel wants the White House to explain why a U.S. diplomat preparing President Donald Trump's visit to Jerusalem said Judaism's Holy Western Wall in its Old City is part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, an Israeli official said on Monday.
Israel considers all of Jerusalem as its indivisible capital, a claim that is not recognized internationally, and the Western Wall - the holiest prayer site for Jews - is part of territory it captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
Israel's Channel 2 reported that during a planning meeting between U.S. and Israeli officials, the Israelis were told that Trump's visit to the Western Wall was private, Israel did not have jurisdiction in the area and that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not welcome to accompany Trump there.
Trump's administration has been sending mixed messages in its dealings with a right-wing Israeli government that had hoped for a more sympathetic attitude from the Republican president after a rocky relationship with his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.
"The statement that the Western Wall is in an area in the West Bank was received with shock," said the official in Netanyahu's office.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central (5/14/17)
Alaska’s soils are taking far longer to freeze over as winter approaches than in previous decades, resulting in a surge in carbon dioxide emissions that could portend a much faster rate of global warming than scientists had previously estimated, according to new research.
Measurements of carbon dioxide levels taken from aircraft, satellites and on the ground show that the amount of CO2 emitted from Alaska’s frigid northern tundra increased by 70% between 1975 and 2015, in the period between October and December each year.
Researchers said warming temperatures and thawing soils were the likely cause of the increase in CO2 at a time of year when the upper layers of soil usually start freezing over as winter sets in.
In the Arctic summer, the upper level of soil, which sits above a vast sheet of permafrost that covers much of Alaska, thaws out and decomposing organic matter starts to produce CO2. From October, colder temperatures help freeze the soil again, locking up the CO2.
Alaska’s warming autumns and winters are altering this process. Whereas soils 40 years ago took about a month to completely freeze over, the process can now take three months or longer. In some places in the state, the soil is not freezing until January, particularly if there is a layer of insulating snow.
The result is a huge and continuing expulsion of CO2, a planet-warming gas, into the atmosphere. In 2013, a particularly warm year racked by wildfires in Alaska, around 40m more tons of CO2 was given out by soils than absorbed by vegetation – an amount four times larger than that emitted by the state’s use of fossil fuels.
Agence France Presse
The world's biggest ransomware attack levelled off on Monday after wreaking havoc in 150 countries, as Russian President Vladimir Putin called it payback for the US intelligence services.
Microsoft's president and chief legal officer Brad Smith has said the US National Security Agency developed the original code used in the attack, which was later leaked in a document dump.
"Microsoft's leadership stated this directly, they said the source of the virus was the special services of the United States," Putin said on the sidelines of a summit in Beijing.
"A genie let out of a bottle of this kind, especially created by secret services, can then cause damage to its authors and creators," Putin said.
Russia has been accused of cyber meddling in several countries around the world in recent years.
But Putin said they had anything to do with the attack, which hit hundreds of thousands of computers.
The Guardian
Edward Snowden and Noam Chomsky are among those calling on Donald Trump to drop the US government’s investigation into Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
The pair – along with more than 100 other activists, journalists and government workers – have signed an open letter to the president that calls prosecuting WikiLeaks “a threat to all free journalism”. The letter asks the Department of Justice to drop plans to charge Assange and other WikiLeaks staff members.
“If the DoJ is able to convict a publisher for its journalistic work, all free journalism can be criminalised,” says the open letter, released on Monday by the Courage Foundation, a trust that raises funds for the legal defenses of whistleblowers, including Snowden. The group launched a campaign in support of WikiLeaks last month.
Trump praised WikiLeaks on the campaign trail, telling a Pennsylvania rally in October 2016: “I love WikiLeaks.” The organization had leaked Hillary Clinton’s emails.
Others in his administration, however, have not expressed the same enthusiasm.
Reuters
A county in New York state has sued Purdue Pharma LP, Johnson & Johnson (JNJ.N) and other drugmakers, accusing them of fraudulent marketing to play down the risks of prescription opioid painkillers, leading to a drug epidemic.
The lawsuit, which also named units of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd (TEVA.TA) and Endo International Plc (ENDP.O) as defendants, was announced on Monday by Orange County, New York, which is located in the southeastern part of the state.
The case, filed in a New York state court on Thursday, is the latest lawsuit by local and state governments seeking to hold drugmakers accountable for a national epidemic tied to painkillers.
The Orange County suit claims the drugmakers engaged in a deceptive marketing campaign that misrepresented the dangers of long-term opioid use to doctors, pharmacists and patients in order to encourage their use.
Those misrepresentations about drugs like Purdue's OxyContin and Endo's Opana ER led Orange County to incur health care, criminal justice and other costs related to addiction, the lawsuit said.
NPR
More than 37 million pieces of plastic debris have accumulated on a remote island in the South Pacific, thousands of miles from the nearest city, according to estimates from researchers who documented the accumulating trash.
Turtles get tangled in fishing line, and hermit crabs make their homes in plastic containers. The high-tide line is demarcated by litter. Small scraps of plastic are buried inches deep into the sandy beaches.
It's the highest density of debris reported anywhere in the world, scientists say. Their research on trash accumulated at Henderson Island, largest of the the Pitcairn Islands, was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The island is uninhabited and visited by scientists only once or twice a decade, according to the University of Tasmania. But ocean currents bring a steady stream of plastic trash from around the world, from litter swept into storm drains to debris dropped off fishing boats.
ENTERTAINMENT
Bloomberg
In the weeks before the Fyre Festival, organizers borrowed as much as $7 million in a last-minute bid to fund the doomed Bahamas music showcase, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.
While recriminations and lawsuits multiply over the event’s now-infamous collapse, almost $1 million is still unaccounted for, and it’s unclear exactly how the rest was spent. Meanwhile, there’s the open question of whether thousands of ticket-holders will get refunds, or if employees of the startup behind the festival, Fyre Media Inc., will be fully paid.
The first wave of litigation, including a $100 million class action, came from vendors and attendees of the event that was to begin late last month. Now come demands from backers looking to recoup their investment—funding that in one case was directly connected to how much attendees spent on such extras as tours, booze, and “upgrades.”
BBC
One of Pablo Picasso's best-known portraits has been sold at auction in New York for $45m (£35m).
Femme Assise, Robe Bleu (Seated Woman in Blue Dress) features one of his many lovers, Dora Maar.
During World War Two, the Nazis seized the painting but were intercepted on their way from Paris to Moravia by French Resistance fighters.
In 2015, Picasso's Women of Algiers sold for $179m at Christie's - a record for a picture sold at auction.