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 (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.
Los Angeles Times: Ventura County wildfire rages over 50,000 acres, destroys more than 150 structures; 27,000 residents flee by Ruben Vives, Laura J. Nelson, Sarah Parvini, Matt Hamilton, and Sonali Kohli
A fast-moving, wind-fueled wildfire swept into the city of Ventura early Tuesday, burning 50,000 acres, destroying homes and forcing more than 27,000 people to evacuate.
About 3,000 homes were threatened by flames, a firefighter was injured and Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in Ventura County on Tuesday morning, as some 1,000 personnel continued to battle the Thomas fire.
At least 150 structures — including at least one large apartment complex and the Vista Del Mar Hospital, a psychiatric facility — were consumed by flames. But Cal Fire suspects the true number is hundreds more; firefighters just haven’t been able to get into areas to know for sure.
The fall weather sequence helped spark the Thomas fire, which as of 5 p.m. Tuesday was 0% contained and moving west, fire officials said. In the last couple of years, the rains came before the Santa Ana winds. But this year, with no rain in three months, the winds hit dry fuels.
“This fire is very dangerous and spreading rapidly, but we'll continue to attack it with all we've got,” Brown said. “It's critical residents stay ready and evacuate immediately if told to do so.”
Former President Barack Obama popped in to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s mayoral climate summit on Tuesday, saying it can be challenging to address climate change “in an unusual time” but never mentioning President Donald Trump by name.
The former president’s Chicago appearance also gave a boost to his former chief of staff as Emanuel ramps up to run for a third term as mayor.
Obama was in town for a private speech later in the day and talked to mayors in attendance at the downtown climate event for about 15 minutes. Though Trump’s pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement prompted mayors to take steps to limit greenhouse emissions themselves, Obama stepped around criticizing Trump directly.
Instead, the former president tried to show a path toward fighting climate change without Trump’s cooperation.
“Obviously we’re in an unusual time when the United States is now the only nation on earth that does not belong to the
Paris agreement,” Obama said. “And that’s a difficult position to defend. But the good news is that the Paris agreement was never going to solve the climate crisis on its own. It was going to be up to all of us.”
I respect and like President Obama a lot, of course, and I can understand the fact that he wants to support his former Chief of Staff but I really wish that he would butt out of Chicago mayoral politics on Rahm’s behalf.
Chicago Sun-Times: Judge slams city after it produces key cop discipline report by Jon Seidel
Seventeen years before his drunken crash on the Dan Ryan Expressway led to the fiery deaths of two young men, Chicago Police Officer Joseph Frugoli got in a bar fight that ended with this declaration: “Nobody messes with the Frugolis!”
Frugoli allegedly punched two people at the First Base Tavern in Bridgeport in 1992, grabbed one by the throat, threw them on a pool table and hit them with pool cues. He also allegedly threw glasses and broke two bar stools.
The off-duty cop later admitted he’d been drinking but “was not intoxicated.” A sergeant would testify that she’d reached the same conclusion. But Frugoli was never given a field sobriety test or breathalyzer, records show. Frugoli got away with a five-day suspension.
None of that came to light until this week, well into a civil trial at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse brought by two families who contend Frugoli thought he could drink and drive with impunity. Their lawsuit revolves around Frugoli’s April 2009 crash on the Dan Ryan Expressway that killed Fausto Manzera, 21, and Andrew Cazares, 23.
Mother Jones: In Texas, a Slow, Grinding, Frustrating Recovery 3 Months After Harvey by Nathalie Baptiste
Three months after Hurricane Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 storm in Rockport, Texas, bringing four feet of rain to Houston and the surrounding area, the recovery process for those who live there—especially minority communities— has been slow and grinding.
A new Kaiser Family Foundation and Episcopal Health Foundation survey of 1,635 residents in the 24 hardest-hit counties found that 66 percent of them suffered employment disruptions, lost income, and property damage from the hurricane.
“The conventional wisdom that Texans hit by Hurricane Harvey have recovered is wrong,” said Drew Altman, the president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation.
During the storm and its aftermath, media coverage mostly focused on Harris County where Houston is located, but the storm disproportionately affected people living in the Beaumont, Orange, and Port Arthur—known as the “Golden Triangle”—and Rockport, Corpus Christi, and other vulnerable towns on the coast.
The Golden Triangle is poorer than Harris County and is home to several oil refineries, some of which were breached during the storm and leaked toxic chemicals into the water. In Beaumont, flooding was so severe the city’s water system failed.
The Kaiser report revealed great disparities in the recovery between higher-income and lower-income residents.
ProPublica: Local Lawmakers and Civil Rights Groups Call for Suspending Pedestrian Tickets in Jacksonville by Topher Sanders and Benjamin Conarack
This story was co-published with the Florida Times-Union.
Jacksonville, Fl. — Several local lawmakers and civil rights organizations have called for the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office to suspend all pedestrian ticket writing over concerns officers are targeting blacks and other residents of the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
Isaiah Rumlin, president of the local chapter of the NAACP, and Reverend Levy Wilcox of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s local branch, said in a news release made public Tuesday that while public safety was a great concern, so was the possibility that the sheriff’s office had been discriminating against African Americans by selectively enforcing sometimes obscure pedestrian statutes.
The calls from the civil rights organizations come two weeks after the Times-Union and ProPublica reported that a disproportionate number of the more than 2,200 pedestrian tickets issued from 2012 to 2017 had been given to blacks. Those tickets, issued for everything from jaywalking to walking on the wrong side of the road, can have an impact on people’s driver’s licenses and, if unpaid, their credit ratings.
Buzzfeed: Emails Show The Support Sally Yates Got From Within DOJ For Her Stand Against Trump's Travel Ban by Zoe Tillman
Internal Justice Department emails released on Tuesday by a conservative watchdog group shed new light on the support that former acting attorney general Sally Yates got from within the Justice Department after she announced that she wouldn't defend President Donald Trump's first travel ban in January.
Judicial Watch, the group that obtained the messages through a Freedom of Information Act request, is pointing to the cache as proof of anti-Trump bias at the Justice Department — as well as within the special counsel's office investigating Russian influence in the 2016 election.
One of those emails to Yates came from Andrew Weissmann, who at the time was the head of the Justice Department's criminal fraud section and is now a member of special counsel Robert Mueller's team.
Given that it was those right wing nutcases at Judicial Watch that wanted to access these e-mails, you see where this is going.
Bloomberg: How the Kremlin Tried to Pose as American News Sites on Twitter by Selina Wang
The Kremlin-backed Russian Internet Research Agency operated dozens of Twitter accounts masquerading as local American news sources that collectively garnered more than half-a-million followers. More than 100 news outlets also published stories containing those handles in the run-up to the election, and some of them were even tweeted by a top presidential aide. These news imposter accounts, which are part of the 2,752 now-suspended accounts that Twitter Inc. has publicly disclosed to be tied to the IRA, show how the Russian group sought to build local communities of followers to disseminate messages.
Many of the news imposter accounts amassed their following by tweeting headlines from real news sites, while others sought to represent certain communities. They targeted a diverse set of regions across the political spectrum, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and Boston. Several of the accounts were impersonating local news outlets in swing states, like @TodayPittsburgh, @TodayMiami and @TodayCincinnati.
There were about 40 news imposter accounts out of the 2,752 Twitter accounts that the company identified as being tied to the IRA. Twitter has deactivated all of those accounts and removed any data on the accounts from third-party sources. Information on the details of the accounts was gathered from Meltwater, a data intelligence firm that monitors social media. Details on the contents of the tweets are from Facebook posts that were synced with the users’ Twitter accounts. Some of the followers of the accounts could be bots, and the same bots or users could have followed multiple imposter accounts.
FiveThirtyEight: Mueller Is Moving Quickly Compared To Past Special Counsel Investigations by Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux
For months, there were rumors about a possible indictment against Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser and key campaign aide. He had been under investigation by special prosecutor Robert Mueller since soon after the probe into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia began in May. On Friday morning — more than six months after Mueller’s inquiry started and more than a month after the first charges were leveled in the investigation — Flynn pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI. That may seem like a long time for an investigation to begin yielding criminal charges, but based on the timing of the first indictments and guilty pleas, Mueller is moving fast.
Our analysis of special counsel probes in the modern era, starting in 19791shows that the fact that Mueller’s investigation has produced criminal charges at all sets it apart — a majority of the investigations over the past four decades ended without charges being filed against anyone. Moreover, in the inquiries that produced criminal charges, the first occurred more than a year, on average, after the special prosecutor was appointed — while Mueller’s investigation produced its first charges after less than five months.
Historically, major special counsel investigations that have led to charges have lasted for years, with indictments trickling out as an inquiry gains momentum. Flynn has acknowledged that he is cooperating with Mueller, which suggests that more charges could be coming, as a result of the information he’s contributing to the investigation.
Daily Beast: Congress to Grill Trump’s Data Guru and His Longtime Assistant by Betsy Woodruff
Alexander Nix, the data guru who offered to help Julian Assange distribute Hillary Clinton’s emails, is scheduled to testify before the House intelligence committee on Dec. 14, according to a source familiar with the committee’s interview schedule.
The committee is also scheduled to interview Rhona Graff, Trump’s longtime personal assistant, on Dec. 22. Rob Goldstone—the music publicist who helped arrange the notorious June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., and Kremlin-linked Russian operatives—offered to send information on the meeting to Trump himself through Graff.
A spokesman for Cambridge Analytica, the firm that Nix heads, did not immediately return a request for comment. A spokesperson for the intelligence committee’s top Democrat, Adam Schiff, declined to comment.
The interviews are a part of the committee’s wide ranging probe into Russia’s interference with the 2016 elections. Congressional interviews are sometimes cancelled or rescheduled.
Guardian: Security officials 'thwart plot to assassinate Theresa May' by Vikram Dodd
Security officials believe they have thwarted an alleged plot to assassinate Theresa May by terrorists who would first bomb their way into Downing Street and then kill the prime minister, it has emerged.
Two men were arrested last week following a joint operation by MI5, the UK’s counter-terrorism security service, and police.
Security officials believe the alleged Islamist plot is the ninth to have been thwarted since March this year.
The attack on Westminster in March heralded the start of a spate of attacks, with five terrorist atrocities getting through Britain’s defences this year and claiming a total of 36 lives in London and Manchester.
The alleged details of the latest plot emerged as an official report into the terrorist attacks Britain suffered between March and June was released, showing that MI5 had intelligence that could have stopped the Manchester terror attack in May but, with the benefit of hindsight, did not correctly interpret it.
AlJazeera: What a US embassy in Jerusalem means to Palestinians by Farah Najjar
US President Donald Trump will call Jerusalem the capital of Israel on Wednesday and begin the process moving his country's embassy to the city, according to senior US officials.
Amid reports of the expected move, the Arab League urged the US president to reconsider, saying there will be "repercussions".
In a telephone call on Monday, Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas called for a mass protest on Wednesday, and discussed how to unify the Palestinian people's efforts to confront the threats facing Jerusalem.
The PA has also called on the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and the Gulf Cooperation Council to hold meetings on this subject.
"If US President Donald Trump carries out his decision, he will inflame the entire region and threaten the US' interests there," Nabil Shaath, an adviser to Abbas, said to Palestine TV.
New York Times: It’s Official: Lebanese Prime Minister Not Resigning After All by Anne Barnard
BEIRUT, Lebanon — A month after he declared under Saudi Arabian pressure that he was quitting his post, Lebanon’s prime minister officially rescinded his resignation on Tuesday, closing a chapter in a curious political saga that threatened to destabilize Lebanon and transfixed the region.
The reversal by the prime minister, Saad Hariri, was considered a setback for Saudi Arabia and its brash young crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, who had summoned Mr. Hariri to Riyadh last month.
Western diplomats and Lebanese officials have said the prince coerced Mr. Hariri into announcing his resignation and effectively kept him under house arrest for more than two weeks, until an international diplomatic scramble brought him home.
The episode was widely seen as an attempt by Saudi Arabia to counter its regional rival, Iran, by collapsing Mr. Hariri’s government, which includes Hezbollah, the Shiite militia and political party that is Iran’s Lebanese ally.
BBC: Malta blogger murder: Three charged with Caruana Galizia killing
Three men have been charged with the murder of Maltese investigative journalist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia.
Brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio, aged 55 and 53, and Vincent Muscat, 55, all pleaded not guilty.
They were also accused of possession of bomb-making material and weapons.
Caruana Galizia died in an explosion shortly after she left her home in Bidnija, near Mosta, on 16 October.
The 53-year-old was known for her blog accusing top politicians of corruption.
On Monday, police arrested 10 Maltese nationals in connection with the murder. Police operations took place in the town of Marsa, and the Bugibba and Zebbug areas.
Undark: In the World of Online Health Quizzes, Who’s Looking Out for Consumers? by Michael Schulson
THESE DAYS, MEDICAL professionals often function like actuaries. They calculate and manage risk — identifying the genes, experiences, and habits that shape your odds of illness, and then trying to rein in those mortal probabilities.
All this risk assessment, approached with proper medical caution, can save lives. But that caution can disappear when patients start assessing their own risk, introducing some tricky ethical territory. And not much represents that buyer-beware dilemma better than the humble health quiz — those online questionnaires that range from built-for-social-media gimmicks (such as the Dr. Oz-endorsed RealAge test) to serious public health initiatives (DoIHavePreDiabetes.org, a collaboration of the American Diabetes Association, the AdCouncil, the American Medical Association, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
Quizzes may seem rather ordinary but, in fact, they are one of the many loosely regulated ways that Americans get information (or misinformation) about their health. And as hospitals and other service providers turn to digital outreach as a way to connect with patients, they’re giving quizzes too — and giving them a new medical luster that may or may not be real.
The Atlantic: The Desirability of Storytellers by Ed Yong
Once upon a time, the sun and moon argued about who would light up the sky. They fought, as anthropomorphic celestial bodies are meant to do, but after the moon proves to be as strong as the sun, they decide to take shifts. The sun would brighten the day, while the moon would illuminate the night.
This is one of several stories told by the Agta, a group of hunter-gatherers from the Philippines. They spend a lot of time spinning yarns to each other, and like their account of the sun and moon, many of these tales are infused with themes of cooperation and equality. That’s no coincidence, says Andrea Migliano, an anthropologist at University College London.
Storytelling is a universal human trait. It emerges spontaneously in childhood, and exists in all cultures thus far studied. It’s also ancient: Some specific stories have roots that stretch back for around 6,000 years. As I’ve written before, these tales aren’t quite as old as time, but perhaps as old as wheels and writing. Because of its antiquity and ubiquity, some scholars have portrayed storytelling as an important human adaptation—and that’s certainly how Migliano sees it. Among the Agta, her team found evidence that stories—and the very act of storytelling—arose partly as a way of cementing social bonds, and instilling an ethic of cooperation.
Wired: Page Not Found: A Brief History of the 404 Error by Anna Wiener
THE NOTORIOUS 404 error, “Not Found,” is often, not totally erroneously, referred to as “the last page of the internet.” It’s an obligatory heads-up with an outsize reputation; it is a meme and a punch line. Bad puns abound. The error has been printed in comics and on T-shirts, an accessible and relatable facet of what was once relegated to nerd humor and is now a fact of digital life.
That the 404 should have crossover appeal seems fitting. It is near-universal and inherently emotional: pure disappointment, the announcement of an unanticipated problem. It’s also a reminder that technology, and the web in particular, is made by humans, and therefore fallible. The internet, after all, is hardly a well-oiled machine; it’s more like a version of The Garden of Earthly Delights built by unidirectional hypertext and populated by broken links, corrupted image files, and incomplete information.
Not long after it appeared, the error code began to enjoy, or endure, its share of lore. In the early 2000s, the idea bubbled up that the 404 came from, well, room 404; that this room housed the web’s first servers, at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland); that World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee had his office there; that he frequently could not be found.
Washington Post: Christine Keeler, key figure in 1960s British sex-and-spy scandal, dies at 75 by Matt Schudel
Christine Keeler, a London showgirl whose simultaneous relationships with British war secretary John Profumo and a Soviet military attache produced the country’s most notorious political scandal of the 1960s, died Dec. 4 at a hospital in Farnborough, England. She was 75.
Her son, Seymour Platt, announced the death on his Facebook page, noting that the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
The Profumo Affair, as it became known, has echoed through the years as one of the era’s most lurid tabloid scandals, with hints of espionage, Cold War politics, class prejudice and sexual hypocrisy.
The case has stayed in the popular imagination in the form of theatrical plays, including a musical by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, a feature film and dozens of books — three of which were written by Ms. Keeler.
New York Magazine (The Cut): Charles Manson’s Enduring Influence on Fashion by Rhonda Garelick
He may have preached anti-materialism, but Charles Manson practiced a kind of Satanic commercialism. Like fashion’s best marketers, he knew how to turn his vision — and himself — into a distinctive product, how to incite desire for that product, and how to use people’s desires — to be special, to belong, to be superior — to fuel his own agenda.
That Manson succeeded in becoming a replicable and attractive commodity is proven by pop culture’s unbroken devotion to retelling his story. Over the past few years — as if alerted by some secret signal to his impending demise — Manson fever went into overdrive, producing Manson’s Lost Girls (on Lifetime), Aquarius (NBC), Manson Family Vacation (Netflix), Charles Manson’s Hollywood (Karina Longworth’s 12-part podcast), and Emma Kline’s debut novel, The Girls. Just two days before Manson’s death, Quentin Tarantino — king of cinema’s glam-violent genre — signed a multi-million-dollar deal to produce a biopic about him.
The fashion world in particular remains fascinated with 1960s-era upheaval and the attendant theme of defiled innocence. Manson and his world hover over contemporary fashion. Creature of Comfort’s shapeless smocks and ankle-length tunics, for example, would feel a lot less chic if they didn’t evoke the edgy ghosts of the Manson girls in similar garb. And Raf Simons, in his spring 2018 RTW show for Calvin Klein 205W39NYC, conjured retro horror and ’60s counter-culture motifs. Clothes and accessories were silk-screened with Andy Warhol photos of an electric chair, tainted tuna cans, or car crashes; a satin baby-doll dress was polka-dotted with red splotches resembling bloodstains. Simons succinctly described the collection as “American horror, American dreams.” by Max Cea
Mic: Tonya Harding is an antihero in ‘I, Tonya.’ But the American public is the villain. by Max Cea
Before I saw I, Tonya — director Craig Gillespie’s tragicomic retelling of Tonya Harding’s tumultuous stint as a prominent American figure skater — Harding was one of those names I knew but couldn’t place. I wasn’t yet born when she triple-axel jumped into the national consciousness 1991. And I was a toddler when she was banned from the U.S. Figure Skating Association in 1994 for her role in the attempted cover-up of an attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan.
I’d venture that most other Americans under 30 wouldn’t know who she is, either. Margot Robbie plays Harding in I, Tonya, and she, an Australian born in 1990, initially thought Harding was a fictional character upon reading writer Steven Rogers’ screenplay. “When I first read the script, I thought how creative the writer was, coming up with this crazy character who was somehow involved with this outrageous incident in the figure skating world,” Robbie is quoted as saying in the press kit for the film, which opens in theaters Friday.
In the early ’90s, though, the idea Harding’s name would be forgotten by the the following generation probably would’ve been hard to fathom. Harding, for those unfamiliar, was not just an Olympian — she was a polarizing celebrity, involved in one of the most salacious scandals in modern American sports.
Personally, I was more of a Tonya Harding fan than a Nancy Kerrigan fan back in the day and I enjoyed the look on Harding’s face when she landed that triple axel but...let’s face it, as far as women’s figure skating goes, Japan’s Midori Ito will always own the triple axel.
Don’t forget that Mr. Meteor Blades is hosting an open thread for night owls tonight.
Everyone have a great evening!