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, planter, JML9999, 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 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
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Guardian: Soldiers on UK streets as threat raised to critical after Manchester bombing by Robert Booth, Vikram Dodd, Sandra Laville and Ewwn MacAskill
Soldiers are being sent on to Britain’s streets to help the police and a second terror attack may be imminent following the Manchester concert bombing, Theresa May has said.
The prime minister raised the threat level from severe to critical for the first time since July 2007, meaning “not only that an attack remains highly likely but a further attack may be imminent”.
May said she did not want to “unduly alarm” people but military personnel would be present at public events and key sites under police command.
She said it could not be ruled out that the attacker, named as Salman Ramadan Abedi, was working as part of a terrorist group.
Speaking from Downing Street after an emergency Cobra meeting, May said the investigations of the security services and police have “revealed it is a possibility we cannot ignore that there is a wider group of individuals linked to this incident”.
Chicago Sun-Times: Senate Dems call budget a ‘compromise’— but GOP calls it ‘incomplete’ by Tina Sfondeles
Illinois Senate Democrats passed what they called a “compromise” budget on Tuesday, even though it attracted no Republican votes, was denounced by the GOP and failed to include the one piece Gov. Bruce Rauner said was most important.
With pressure mounting as the legislative session inched toward a close, Democrats approved a budget and tax package that includes a politically unpopular income tax hike that may never see the light of day in the Illinois House.
Before the measures cleared, sans any Republican support, Rauner warned legislators about the missing piece of the budget puzzle.
“Let me be clear, to get my signature, any agreement must include real property tax relief,” the governor said.
And underscoring the political nature of the budget impasse and the timing of the governor’s race, the Rauner-led Illinois Republican Party on Tuesday said the Senate passage “confirms that the entire Democratic Party’s position is to raise taxes while protecting the status quo.”
Orange County Register: How some Southern California drug rehab centers exploit addiction by Teri Sforza, Tony Saaverda, Scott Schwebke, Lori Basheda, Mindy Schauer and Jeff Grichen
As they push their grocery carts and clutch their coffees, the shoppers scurrying through the Ocean View Plaza parking lot pay little attention to Timmy Solomon.
For many, he’s easy to ignore.
His hair is dirty and matted. His voice is raspy. And on this sunny Tuesday, Solomon is dragging around a bag full of cans and bottles that he hopes to sell to the RePlanet Recycling station behind the Ralph’s in San Clemente.
He wants to raise $20 so he can get high one last time before he goes into rehab.
As a kid, Solomon was taught not to steal or use drugs. But today, at 28, he’s grown up to become a shoplifter and a junkie, addicted to heroin and meth and benzodiazepines, one of the hardest drugs to kick.
Those aren’t the only contradictions in Solomon’s life.
As broke as he is, Solomon is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Chronic drug users like Solomon are commodities, exploited by a growing world of drug and alcohol rehab operators who put profit ahead of patient care. Everything from the opioid epidemic and Obamacare to prison realignment and legal loopholes has created conditions in which unethical operators can flourish, using addicts to bilk insurance companies and the public out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Buzzfeed: A Top Republican Backs A Federal Legal Aid Agency The White House Is Trying To Defund by Zoe Tillman
As the Trump administration pushes ahead with a proposal to get rid of the Legal Services Corporation — a federal agency that provides millions of dollars in grants each year for legal aid for low-income Americans — the White House faces opposition not only from Democrats, but from Republicans and corporate America as well.
The president’s proposed budget released by the White House on Tuesday calls for a complete defunding of the Legal Services Corporation. The agency, which received $385 million this year from Congress, gives grants to 133 legal aid organizations across the country. Trump’s 2018 budget would provide $33 million to wind down its operations.
The fate of the agency’s budget ultimately lies with Congress, though, and several Republicans in the House and Senate have already joined Democrats in opposing the cut. In a May 18 letter obtained by BuzzFeed News, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn — the second ranking Republican in the Senate — and two other Senate Republicans joined Democrats in urging the Senate Committee on Appropriations to provide “robust funding” for the agency.
“Recent research shows that civil legal aid is a good investment of taxpayer dollars, as it reduces clients’ reliance on other types of governmental aid and enhances their ability to participate in the marketplaces,” the letter says.
Portland Press Herald: Maine’s highest court rules ranked-choice voting is unconstitutional by Scott Thistle
AUGUSTA — Maine’s highest court concluded Tuesday that the nation’s first statewide ranked-choice voting system violates the Maine Constitution even though it was approved by the state’s voters in a referendum in November.
In a unanimous advisory opinion, the seven justices on the Maine Supreme Judicial Court acknowledged the validity of citizen-initiative ballot questions but noted that even citizen-enacted laws can be unconstitutional.
“The object must always be to “ascertain the will of the people,” the court wrote. “Nonetheless, when a statute – including one enacted by citizen initiative – conflicts with a constitutional provision, the constitution prevails.”
The court opinion itself doesn’t negate ranked-choice voting, which was supported by 52 percent of Mainers who cast ballots last fall. The justices instead spelled out the Legislature’s options, noting that lawmakers can now vote to repeal the measure or to initiate the process that leads to a constitutional amendment to allow for ranked-choice voting.
The Atlantic: The Poisoned Generation by Vann R. Newkirk II
Casey Billieson was fighting against the world.
Hers was a charge carried by many mothers: moving mountains to make the best future for her two sons. But the mountains she faced were taller than most. To start, she had to raise her boys in the Lafitte housing projects in Treme, near the epicenter of a crime wave in New Orleans. In the spring of 1994, like mothers in violent cities the world over, Billieson anticipated the bloom in murders the thaw would bring. Fueled by the drug trade and a rising scourge of police corruption and brutality, violence rose to unseen levels that year, and the city’s murder rate surged to the highest in the country.
Four hundred and twenty four people were slain in New Orleans in 1994, a murder rate that may have been the highest ever in any American city. Rival drug dealers killed each other while cops killed witnesses and whistleblowers in plain sight. Almost 1 percent of all young black men in the city were killed that year. Many of those murders were committed in the yards and units near where her sons, Ryan and Ronnie—then aged 5 and 3 years old—played or stayed with relatives and friends. Even as a Bill Clinton-led federal government used popular fears of “superpredators” to redouble the nation’s commitment to mass incarceration, Billieson attempted the superhuman task of trying to provide her children with a way out of Lafitte.
Bloomberg: Americans Are Taking More Paid Vacation Days by Rebecca Greenfield
Americans are notoriously bad at taking what little paid time off they get from their jobs. But there is one way to get people to take more paid vacation: Give them more of it.
As the economy recovers, companies are offering employees better benefits of all sorts, including more vacation days. Last year, full-time workers who get paid time off from their jobs earned, on average, 22.6 paid vacation days, up .7 days from the year before, according to an annual survey by Project: Time Off, a travel industry-funded initiative to get more people to take vacation.
They're using more days, too, the survey found. Last year, they took an average of 16.8 days off, up more than half a day from the year before and almost a full day from 2013. "Half a day is a big deal," said Katie Denis, the senior director at Project: Time Off.
The survey of 7,331 workers didn't include the quarter of non-government American workers, including part-time ones, who get no paid vacation at all. (The lowest-paid workers tend to get the least paid time off, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.)
New York Times: Trump Praises Duterte for Philippine Drug Crackdown in Call Transcript by David E. Sanger and Maggie Haberman
WASHINGTON — President Trump praised President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines in a phone call last month for doing an “unbelievable job on the drug problem” in the island nation where the government has sanctioned gunning down suspects in the streets. Mr. Trump also boasted that the United States has “two nuclear submarines” off the coast of North Korea but said he does not want to use them.
The comments were part of a Philippine transcript of the April 29 call that was circulated on Tuesday, under a “confidential” cover sheet, by the Americas division of the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs. In Washington, a senior administration official confirmed that the transcript was an accurate representation of the call between the two iconoclastic leaders. The official was not authorized to publicly discuss the call and confirmed it on the condition of anonymity.
The White House also keeps transcripts of such calls, but they are routinely kept secret. The Philippine rendering of the call offers a rare insight into how Mr. Trump talks to fellow leaders: He sounds much the way he sounds in public, casing issues in largely black-and-white terms, often praising authoritarian leaders, largely unconcerned about human rights violations and genuinely uncertain about the nature of his adversary in North Korea.
Undark: The Truth About Domestic Violence and the Impacts of ‘Trumpcare’ by Deborah Blum
ON THE DAY that he was arrested, Dan Heyman was chasing down a rumor. Literally.
On that morning in early May, Heyman, a 54-year-old journalist with the non-profit Public News Service, was running down a hallway in the West Virginia State Capitol building, waving his cell-phone recorder at Thomas E. Price, the newly installed Secretary of Health and Human Services. He was trying to get an answer on whether changes to health care law proposed by Congressional Republicans would allow health insurance companies to consider domestic violence a pre-existing condition. Such a designation could allow insurers to deny coverage to victims of abuse — principally women — or to charge them higher premiums.
Audio of Heyman’s encounter with Price went viral. “I heard that domestic violence is going to be a potential pre-existing condition,” Heyman called out upon encountering the secretary in a public corridor. “Do you think that’s right or not?” The recording is notable for many things: for the rapid thud of footsteps, for Price’s stony silence, and for Heyman’s increasingly out-of-breath and ultimately unfulfilled requests for an answer. It is also notable for concluding with the reporter’s arrest on a charge of “willful disruption of state government processes.”
CNN: Carrier plant that Trump helped save will cut 300 jobs right before Christmas by Chris Isidore
Donald Trump may have convinced Carrier not to move its Indianapolis furnace plant to Mexico. But the company is still shipping about 300 of its jobs to Mexico right before Christmas.
In a formal notice to the state of Indiana, the company detailed its plans to eliminate 338 jobs at the plant on July 20, four supervisor jobs in October and a final 290 jobs on Dec. 22.
The job cuts are not a surprise. Even back when the company announced it would
keep the furnace plant open, it disclosed plans to move some of the work there making fan coils to Mexico to take advantage of the lower labor costs.
Trump claimed during a Dec. 1 visit to the plant that Carrier had agreed to keep 1,100 jobs at the plant. But the real number was 800. To get to that 1,100 number, Trump and Carrier were counting 300 engineering and administrative positions that were never expected to be moved to Mexico.
And Greg Hayes, CEO of Carrier's corporate parent, United Technologies (UTX), has said that automation will ultimately replace some of those 800 jobs that were saved last year.
FiveThirtyEight: Trump’s Budget Is Built On A Fantasy by Ben Casselman
President Trump’s first budget, released Tuesday, is not going to become law. First, because presidents’ budgets never become law, not the way they’re initially proposed. And second, because the specifics of Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget — enormous cuts to nearly every significant government program other than defense, Social Security and Medicare in order to pay for huge tax cuts that would go disproportionately to the wealthy — seem designed to alienate not just Democrats (at least a few of whom Trump needs to get his budget through the Senate) but also moderate Republicans and the public at large. Trump likely knows this; the White House released the budget while he is thousands of miles away on his first foreign trip as president.
Leave aside, then, the details of what Trump is proposing and focus instead on how he is proposing it: via economic projections that have little basis in reality.
Washington Post: Trump advisers call for privatizing some public assets to build new infrastructure by Michael Laris
The Trump administration, determined to overhaul and modernize the nation’s infrastructure, is drafting plans to privatize some public assets such as airports, bridges, highway rest stops and other facilities, according to top officials and advisers.
In his proposed budget released Tuesday, President Trump called for spending $200 billion over 10 years to “incentivize” private, state and local spending on infrastructure.
Trump advisers said that to entice state and local governments to sell some of their assets, the administration is considering paying them a bonus. The proceeds of the sales would then go to other infrastructure projects. Australia has pursued a similar policy, which it calls “asset recycling,” prompting the 99-year lease of a state-owned electrical grid to pay for improvements to the Sydney Metro, among other projects.
In the United States, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) explored privatizing Midway International Airport several years ago but dropped the idea in 2013, after a key bidder backed away. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao says such projects should be encouraged.
VICE (Canada): An ‘Ultranationalistic’ Group Is Patrolling Canada’s Border With the US by Mack Lamoureaux
It hasn't been that long since the idea of Canadians guarding their border with the United States was literally satire.
In the recent months, however, real life has become much more surreal than satire so it's not that surprising that a group of Canadians turned up at a Quebec border to watch refugees attempting to make their way into the Great White North.
As first reported by the CBC, the patrol took place near Hemmingford, Quebec—on Roxham road—and was conducted by a group called Storm Alliance. Dave Tregget, the founder and national president of Storm Alliance, told VICE that the group was there to "send a message to Prime Minister Trudeau," and observe and learn from what they saw.
"We wanted to witness what was really going on there," Tregget said. "We're hearing things, media says some things, people at the border say some other things, the RCMP say other things. We wanted to see what was going on."
Tregget recently founded Storm Alliance after he and a number of other members broke off from the controversial anti-immigration group, Soldiers of Odin.
Reuters: Exclusive: U.S. starts 'extreme vetting' at Australia's offshore detention centers by Colin Packham
U.S. Homeland Security officials have begun "extreme vetting" interviews at Australia's offshore detention centers, two sources at the camps told Reuters on Tuesday, as Washington honors a refugee swap that U.S. President Donald Trump had called "a dumb deal".
The Trump administration said last month the agreement to offer refuge to up to 1,250 asylum seekers in the centers would progress on condition that refugees satisfied strict checks.
In exchange, Australia has pledged to take Central American refugees from a center in Costa Rica, where the United States has expanded intake in recent years, under the deal struck with former President Barack Obama.
The first security interviews finished last week at Papua New Guinea's Manus Island detention center, two refugees who went through the process told Reuters.
The refugees told Reuters that interviews began with an oath to God to tell the truth and then proceeded for as long as six hours, with in-depth questions on associates, family, friends and any interactions with the Islamic State militant group.
"They asked about why I fled my home, why I sought asylum in Australia," said one refugee who declined to be named, fearing it could jeopardize his application for U.S. resettlement.
The security interviews are the last stage of U.S. consideration of applicants.
BBC: Indonesian men caned for gay sex in Aceh
Two men have been caned 83 times each in the Indonesian province of Aceh after being caught having sex.
The men stood on stage in white gowns praying while a team of hooded men lashed their backs with a cane.
The pair, aged 20 and 23, were found in bed together by vigilantes who entered their private accommodation in March. They have not been identified.
Gay sex is not illegal in most of Indonesia but it is in Aceh, the only province which exercises Islamic law.
It is the first time gay men have been caned under Sharia law in the province.
The punishment was delivered outside a mosque in the provincial capital of Banda Aceh.
Guardian: Brazil police arrest close aide of president in World Cup scheme by Jonathan Watts
A new thread in the web of corruption investigations around Brazil’s president, Michel Temer, was revealed on Tuesday when police arrested a close aide for an alleged kickback scheme involving the World Cup stadium in Brasilia.
Tadeu Filippelli, a former vice-governor of the capital and cabinet adviser, was among three senior politicians detained by police during morning raids. The suspects are accused of deliberately inflating the cost of the Mane Garrincha stadium in return for bribes from the construction company.
The venue – which was used in the quarter-final and third-placed play-off of the 2014 tournament – was initially budgeted at $180m, but ended up costing $454m. After Wembley, it is the second most expensive football stadium in the world, but the 72,800 seats are almost never filled because Brasilia has no top-tier football club. Last year, the spectacular edifice was used as a bus depot.
Temer’s office said Filippelli was dismissed from his post as soon as the charges were made public. But the arrest adds to the pressure on the embattled president, who was formally accused by the attorney general last week of obstructing justice and corruption related to the sprawling graft schemes at major companies uncovered by the Lava Jato (Car Wash) investigation.
AlJazeera: Outrage over India award for 'human shield' soldier
The Indian army has commended an officer accused of tying a man to a jeep and using him as a human shield in Kashmir, sparking outrage from the victim and rights activists.
Major Leetul Gogoi, who is still under investigation for strapping 26-year-old Farooq Ahmad Dar to the front of an army vehicle as it led a convoy in Indian-administered Kashmir , was last week awarded the Chief of Army Staff's Commendation Card "for his for sustained efforts in counter-insurgency operations".
"This has been given to Major Leetul Gogoi, who has been deployed in counter-insurgency operations for more than one year," army spokesman Aman Anand told the AFP news agency on Tuesday.
"It has been given for his sustained efforts over a period of time."
Reuters: Philippines' Duterte warns terrorists: 'I'll be harsh'
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte said on Wednesday he will deal harshly with terrorism and that martial law on the island of Mindanao would remain in place for a year if necessary.
Duterte cut short a visit to Russia and placed the southern island of Mindanao under martial rule on Tuesday after a fierce bout of fighting erupted during a raid by security forces at a hideout of Islamic State-linked militants.
"To my countrymen who have experienced martial law. It would not be any different from what President Marcos did. I’d be harsh,” Duterte said in an interview with his assistant communications secretary while onboard a flight back to Manila.
"If it would take a year to do it then we'll do it. If it's over with a month, then I'd be happy. To my countrymen, do not be too scared. I'm going home. I will deal with the problem once I arrive," said Duterte, a native of Mindanao.
Two soldiers and a policeman were killed and 12 people wounded amid chaos in Marawi, a predominantly Muslim city of about 200,000 people, where members of the Maute militant group took control of buildings and set fire to a school, a church and a detention facility.
The Hollywood Reporter: Critic's Notebook: Roger Moore Was More Than Just a Starchy Old Smoothie by Stephen Dalton
Roger Moore was always fond of a wry joke, usually at his own expense. The veteran British screen star, whose death at 89 was announced Tuesday, liked to claim that his acting skills boiled down to three expressions: eyebrow up, eyebrow down and both eyebrows at the same time. This perpetual air of self-deprecating wit came to define his mature screen persona, and arguably damaged his career following his record-breaking 12-year run as James Bond. But it made Moore a better actor than his harshest critics might claim, and was an essential part of his charm.
Moore wafted onto a movie set like he had just walked off a yacht. For much of his career, he exuded an air of unflappable, patrician, old-school-tie Englishness, which belied his modest upbringing as the only child of a policeman and a homemaker raised in one of South London's poorer districts. He learned youthful lessons in poise from an older generation of well-groomed smoothies, notably his early screen idol Stewart Granger, and from the legendary Noel Coward, who smartly advised the ambitious young actor to accept any and every role that came along.
A sometime model before his acting career took off, Moore was a strikingly beautiful young man, which did not always work in his favor. He once claimed, "I was so pretty, actresses didn't want to work with me." More seriously, after moving to Hollywood and signing his first studio contract in 1954, his polished English manner appeared dated and lightweight just as new kind of rugged, raw, Method-era masculinity was revolutionizing American cinema.
Smithsonian: The Librarian of Congress Weighs In on Why Card Catalogs Matter by Erin Blakemore
O
rderly boxes of cards once filled libraries large and small, and even the most humble of books boasted a catalog card of its own. But when the company that made the cards stopped printing them in 2015, the sun finally set on the card catalog, a book-finding system more than a century old.
Meanwhile, something new was on the horizon for the nation’s most important library. Last year, Carla Hayden
became the nation’s new Librarian of Congress—the first professional librarian to serve in the role in decades, and the first African-American and woman to boot.
In her inaugural speech, Hayden promised to harness the power of technology to bring the library into the 21st century, calling for digitization, classroom connectivity and private-sector partnerships. She’s since made good on her promise, making metadata from 25 million MARC records (the very documents once enshrined on catalog cards) available to the public.
Hayden may be looking toward a future without card catalogs, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a soft spot in her heart for the old-fashioned tech that once made finding a book a hands-on experience. She wrote the foreword for The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures, a new tribute book featuring more than 200 full-color catalog cards, photos and first-edition books—and she spoke to Smithsonian.com via email about her continued love of the not-so-long-gone system:
The smell of coffee may urge you out of bed in the morning, and the perfume of blooming lilacs in the spring is divine. But you do not see police officers with their noses to the ground, following the trail of an escaped criminal into the woods. Humans do not use smell the way other mammals do, and that contributes to our reputation for being lousy sniffers compared with dogs and other animals. But it turns out the human sense of smell is better than we think.
In a review paper published in Science last week neuroscientist John McGann of Rutgers University analyzed the state of human olfaction research, comparing recent and older studies to make the argument our smelling abilities are comparable with those of our fellow mammals.
McGann traces the origins of the idea that humans have a poor sense of smell to a single 19th-century scientist, comparative anatomist Paul Broca. Broca, known for discovering Broca’s area—the part of the brain responsible for speech production—noted that humans had larger frontal lobes than those of other animals, and that we possessed language and complex cognitive skills our fellow creatures lacked. Because our brains’ olfactory bulbs were smaller than those of other mammals and we did not display behavior motivated by smell, Broca extrapolated these brain areas shrank over evolutionary time as humans relied more on complex thought than on primal senses for survival. He never conducted sensory studies to confirm his theory, however, but the reputation stuck.
AFP: No Federer, Serena, Sharapova, no problem for Roland Garros
Roland Garros organisers are confident that the absence from the 2017 French Open of Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova will just be a footnote when the story of the second major of the season is told.
"The absence of these three stars does not weaken the tournament because Roland Garros remains an institution and the Holy Grail for a player," French tennis historian Jean-Christophe Piffau told AFP.
"The Grand Slam tournaments are anchored in the history of tennis, which is what makes them both special and prized."
With that in mind, AFP Sports looks at the storylines likely to dominate the French Open which starts on Sunday:
Don’t forget that Mr. Meteor Blades is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a great evening!