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.
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Chicago Sun-Times: 5 additional measles cases bring Chicago’s outbreak total to 31 by Kade Heather
Five more measles cases were reported by Chicago health officials Tuesday.
The city has reported 31 measles cases since an outbreak in early March. Those were the first cases of the disease detected in Chicago since 2019.
Children ages 4 and younger account for 21 of the city’s total cases, according to the Chicago Department of Public Health.
Many of the measles cases have been reported at a migrant shelter in Pilsen, where residents were urged to receive a second dose of the measles vaccine 28 days after the first shot, health officials said Monday.
The 31 measles cases in Chicago make up almost all of the cases this year in Illinois. Lake and Will counties each have reported one case, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health.
Illinois hasn’t had this many measles cases in a year in at least 15 years, according to the IDPH. The most recent year with double-digit cases was 2015, when 17 measles cases were reported in the state.
As questions surround the collapse of a Baltimore bridge after a containership crashed into it Tuesday, engineering experts say that while bridges have some built-in defenses against collisions, this one was most likely too extreme to withstand.
“Bridges are and should be designed to withstand ship impacts. That’s typical of the design process,” said Sanjay R. Arwade, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
“But for all structures and all engineered systems, there is a possibility that an event will occur that is beyond what the structure was designed for. And this may be one of those situations,” he added.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge, a roughly 1.5-mile-long steel arch truss bridge, collapsed into the Patapsco River early Tuesday after a containership struck it. Several vehicles crashed into the water, and one of the country’s busiest ports shut down.
New York Times: NBC News Cuts Ties With Ronna McDaniel After Network Firestorm by Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin
The Ronna McDaniel era at NBC News has come to an abrupt and chaotic end.
Facing an extraordinary on-air revolt by its leading stars, NBC’s top news executive said on Tuesday that he had decided to cut ties with Ms. McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, who was hired last week as an on-air political commentator.
Her tenure at NBC lasted four days.
Ms. McDaniel’s appointment, announced with fanfare on Friday, was immediately criticized by reporters at the network and viewers on social media. Fans of MSNBC, NBC’s left-leaning cable arm, were particularly outraged, citing Ms. McDaniel’s leadership of the Republican Party under former President Donald J. Trump and her handling of his false claims that the 2020 election was rigged.
“After listening to the legitimate concerns of many of you, I have decided that Ronna McDaniel will not be an NBC News contributor,” Cesar Conde, the chairman of the NBCUniversal News Group, wrote in a staff memo on Tuesday.
Washington Post: Supreme Court skeptical of efforts to restrict access to abortion pill by Ann E. Marimow and Caroline Kitchener
The Supreme Court on Tuesday seemed unlikely to limit access to mifepristone, a key medication that is used in more than 60 percent of U.S. abortions and has emerged as the next front in the battle over how and whether women can terminate their pregnancies.
During nearly two hours of oral argument, a majority of justices from across the ideological spectrum expressed skepticism that the antiabortion doctors challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s loosening of regulations for the long-approved medication have suffered the type of direct harm that would give them sufficient legal grounds to bring the lawsuit.
The Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer urged the justices to reverse a lower-court ruling that would make it more difficult to access mifepristone, in a case that centers on the role of government agencies in regulating medicine and returns the issue of abortion to the high court less than
two years after the conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade.
DW: After Moscow attack, could Putin's image suffer in Russia? By Aparna Ramamurthy
"Putin resign!"
This chant rang out in 2018 after a fire broke out at a crowded mall in Siberia, just a week after the last Russian presidential election, which gave Vladimir Putin a second consecutive term as president — and his fourth overall.
But after the deadly attack at the Crocus City Hall concert venue in Moscow on Friday, it's instead the slogan "We mourn" that has blanketed the city as Russia grieves the loss of at least 139 lives.
Just five days after the 2024 presidential election, in which Putin extended his term by another six years, gunmen dressed in camouflage gear stormed the hall, shooting people at close range and hurling incendiary bombs.
The so-called Islamic State-Khorasan Province (ISIS-K) has claimed responsibility for the attack, with Washington saying there is no reason to doubt the claim by the extremist group, an Afghanistan branch of the transnational "Islamic State" (IS) militant group.
But will any blame be assigned to Putin for what is being widely seen as a serious blunder by Russian intelligence?
Guardian: Brazil and Colombia voice concern as Venezuela bans opposition candidate by Tom Phillips
A chorus of Latin American nations, including Brazil and Colombia, have voiced concern over the deteriorating political situation in Venezuela after the opposition politician best-positioned to challenge its strongman leader, Nicolás Maduro, in July’s presidential election was prevented from registering for the vote.
Corina Yoris, an 80-year-old philosopher, was little-known outside academic circles until last Friday, when she was catapulted on to the frontline of Venezuela’s long-running political crisis by being named as the substitute for María Corina Machado, a prominent opposition figure who had been banned from running in the election.
Members of the opposition had hoped the octogenarian grandmother of seven might prove an unconventional yet effective adversary capable of discombobulating the 61-year-old Maduro, who has held power since becoming president after Hugo Chávez’s 2013 death. Maduro’s re-election, in 2018, was widely denounced as an illegitimate farce by western governments.
Everyone have the best possible evening!