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.
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NPR
President Trump is doing his best to put a good face on defeat in his party's attempt to replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
His strategy is simple: declare that the law is failing. And he is selling that message in his own distinctly Trumpian way: concocting it out of simple, bold words and then hammering that message home, over and over: Obamacare, in his words, will "explode."
"The best thing we can do, politically speaking, is let Obamacare explode," he said in the Oval Office on Friday after the GOP health care bill went down. "It's exploding right now."
Again on Twitter on Saturday, he repeated his case: "ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE. Do not worry!"
The law has its problems — but it is far from "exploding," using any reasonable definition of the word. Here is a quick rundown of where the Affordable Care Act stands right now: what's going well and what's not-so-great.
US NEWS
Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday will announce that his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will oversee a broad effort to overhaul the federal government, a White House official confirmed.
Kushner, who is married to Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and serves as a senior adviser, will lead the newly formed White House Office of American Innovation to leverage business ideas and potentially privatize some government functions, the official said, confirming a Washington Post story.
"The government should be run like a great American company. Our hope is that we can achieve successes and efficiencies for our customers, who are the citizens," Kushner told the Post in an interview.
He will focus on veterans' care, opioid addiction, technology and data infrastructure, workforce training and infrastructure, according to the report.
In a statement to the Post, Trump said: "I promised the American people I would produce results, and apply my ‘ahead of schedule, under budget’ mentality to the government."
The move comes days after Trump suffered his first major political setback since taking office in January. Fellow Republicans pulled their healthcare plan after years of promising to undo former President Barack Obama's 2010 health law.
The Guardian
America’s biggest coal boss is hopeful that his industry will soon be freed of “fraudulent” green legislation that has hampered his industry, but warned Donald Trump to “temper” expectations about a boom in mining jobs.
Robert Murray, founder and chief executive of Murray Energy, the largest privately held coalminer in the US, is confident Trump will follow through with campaign plans to reinvigorate the coal industry and will start by scrapping Barack Obama’s clean power plan (CPP), Obama’s signature climate change plan.
The CPP was designed to cut the power sector’s carbon emissions by 32% by 2030, and Trump may move as soon as this week to overturn it. Murray blames it for shuttering coal-fired power plants and freezing new constructions during the Obama presidency. Repeal would be a major victory for Murray Energy, which filed a lawsuit against the CPP in 2015 that is now backed by more than two dozen states.
Murray, who met with Trump last month, also expects the president to end the classification of carbon dioxide as a pollutant in the US, a classification brought in under the Obama administration. “We do not have a climate change or global warming problem, we have an energy cost problem,” Murray told the Guardian.
A mystery rooted in President Donald Trump's claim that he was wiretapped by then President Barack Obama during the 2016 election campaign deepened on Monday with the disclosure that a top congressional Republican reviewed classified information about the charge on the White House grounds.
In a separate development, Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top White House adviser, has volunteered to testify before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation into whether Russia attempted to interfere in the Nov. 8 U.S. election, a White House spokesman said.
Rebecca Glover Watkins, a spokeswoman for Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, said that Kushner has been called to testify. The timing for his testimony was unclear.
U.S. Representative Devin Nunes, chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, visited the White House the night before announcing on Wednesday that he had information that indicated some Trump associates may have been subjected to some level of intelligence activity before Trump took office on Jan. 20.
Nunes spokesman Jack Langer said in a statement that Nunes "met with his source at the White House grounds in order to have proximity to a secure location where he could view the information provided by the source."
The Guardian
Just emerging from their blanket of winter snow, the lush and leafy lanes of Greenwich, Connecticut, are usually quiet on a Saturday morning. Behind high walls and long drives sit the manicured mansions of some of the world’s richest people. After a long week making more millions, the last thing the residents want is “the help” disturbing their beauty sleep. This weekend, though, was different.
On Saturday morning, a coachload of local workers, bullhorns in hand, took to Greenwich’s windy lanes for a protest organized by union-backed local community groups and billed as the “Lifestyles of the Rich & Shameless” bus tour.
Chanting “El pueblo unido / Jamás será vencido” (“The people united / Will never be defeated”) and “Hey hey, ho ho, tax loopholes have got to to”, a couple of dozen protesters, gently shepherded by local police, left giant “tax bills” totaling close to $3bn for some of the world’s richest hedge fund managers.
The protesters, and many others in Connecticut, are hoping they can force the state to reclaim such tax from its richest residents as it wrestles with massive debts and prepares to sack thousands of local workers.
The Guardian
Approximately half of adult Americans’ photographs are stored in facial recognition databases that can be accessed by the FBI, without their knowledge or consent, in the hunt for suspected criminals. About 80% of photos in the FBI’s network are non-criminal entries, including pictures from driver’s licenses and passports. The algorithms used to identify matches are inaccurate about 15% of the time, and are more likely to misidentify black people than white people.
These are just some of the damning facts presented at last week’s House oversight committee hearing, where politicians and privacy campaigners criticized the FBI and called for stricter regulation of facial recognition technology at a time when it is creeping into law enforcement and business.
“Facial recognition technology is a powerful tool law enforcement can use to protect people, their property, our borders, and our nation,” said the committee chair, Jason Chaffetz, adding that in the private sector it can be used to protect financial transactions and prevent fraud or identity theft.
“But it can also be used by bad actors to harass or stalk individuals. It can be used in a way that chills free speech and free association by targeting people attending certain political meetings, protests, churches, or other types of places in the public.”
Reuters
U.S. stocks slid on Monday amid concerns that Republican President Donald Trump may struggle to push a sweeping overhaul of the tax code through Congress in the wake of his party's failure last week to pass broad healthcare legislation.
Trump's pledge to cut taxes, including a lowering of the rates paid by corporations, was a pillar of his 2016 presidential campaign and provided much of the fuel for the heady stock market rally that followed his Nov. 8 victory.
The White House has sought to refocus attention on that part of Trump's agenda since the collapse on Friday of a Republican bill to reshape the U.S. healthcare system largely by gutting Democratic former President Barack Obama's 2010 healthcare law.
"The markets aren't really concerned about healthcare," said Randy Frederick, managing director of trading and derivatives for Charles Schwab in Austin, Texas. "What the markets are concerned about is tax policy. So now the more important issue has come to the forefront. The question is, will they be able to get that done? I don't know."
The major U.S. stock indexes were down, with the S&P 500 0.3 percent lower, while benchmark 10-year Treasury notes were up 11/32 in price for a yield of 2.36 percent after hitting a one-month low in yield earlier.
Reuters
Ohio police have yet to make any arrests in a fatal shooting in a Cincinnati nightclub over the weekend, in part because there was no security video footage of the mayhem available to investigators, authorities said on Monday.
The shooting at the packed Cameo Nightlife early on Sunday morning left a 27-year-old man dead and wounded 16 others, a number that authorities said on Monday was one more than previously thought.
The gunfire, which sent hundreds of patrons fleeing, grew out of a dispute inside the club, which has a history of gun violence, including two shootings in 2015, authorities said.
The shooting was a painful reminder of a Florida nightclub massacre last year that left 49 people dead in the worst mass shooting in the U.S. history.
Police said on Monday they were confident of finding those responsible even though they lack video footage of the chaos.
Cincinnati Mayor John Cranley told Police Chief Eliot Isaac at a City Council committee hearing that he fully backed the department in tracking down the culprits.
Reuters
Since President Donald Trump's election, monthly lectures on social justice at the 600-seat Gothic chapel of New York's Union Theological Seminary have been filled to capacity with crowds three times what they usually draw.
In January, the 181-year-old Upper Manhattan graduate school, whose architecture evokes London's Westminster Abbey, turned away about 1,000 people from a lecture on mass incarceration. In the nine years that Reverend Serene Jones has served as its president, she has never seen such crowds.
"The election of Trump has been a clarion call to progressives in the Protestant and Catholic churches in America to move out of a place of primarily professing progressive policies to really taking action," she said.
Although not as powerful as the religious right, which has been credited with helping elect Republican presidents and boasts well-known leaders such as Christian Broadcasting Network founder Pat Robertson, the "religious left" is now slowly coming together as a force in U.S. politics.
This disparate group, traditionally seen as lacking clout, has been propelled into political activism by Trump's policies on immigration, healthcare and social welfare, according to clergy members, activists and academics. A key test will be how well it will be able to translate its mobilization into votes in the 2018 midterm congressional elections.
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was sentenced to 15 days behind bars and fined Monday after staging the biggest anti-corruption protests in years, an act branded a "provocation" by the Kremlin.
The United States and the European Union have voiced deep concern after Navalny and more than 1,000 others were detained in the Moscow protest on Sunday, with the State Department calling the arrests an "affront to democracy".
A Moscow district court ordered Navalny to serve 15 days in jail after finding him guilty of disobeying police orders. He was also fined 20,000 rubles ($350) for organising an unsanctioned protest.
The lawyer turned activist, 40, who has announced plans to run for president next year, called Sunday's protests after publishing a report accusing Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev of controlling a property empire through a shadowy network of nonprofit organisations.
"The authorities are being accused of multi-million theft, but they remain silent," a haggard-looking Navalny said in court, insisting the protests were legal.
"More than 1,000 people were arrested yesterday but it is impossible to arrest millions," he said.
Agence France Presse
US-backed forces battled the Islamic State group around a key Syrian town Monday, after the capture of an airbase brought them closer to besieging the jihadists in their stronghold Raqa.
Backed by air power from the US-led coalition that has been bombing IS since 2014, the Syrian Democratic Forces are laying the groundwork for an assault on the heart of the jihadists' so-called "caliphate".
Operations are currently focused on the strategically important town of Tabqa on the Euphrates River, and the adjacent dam and military airport.
Late Sunday, Arab and Kurdish fighters from the SDF seized Tabqa airbase and pressed north towards the town itself.
Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, said the alliance was fighting north of the airport to reinforce its positions.
Agence France Presse
British police said Monday they had found no link between the man behind last week's terror attack outside the British parliament and the Islamic State group, which had claimed him as one of its "soldiers".
The statement came as 52-year-old Muslim convert Khalid Masood's mother spoke out for the first time, saying she was "deeply shocked, saddened and numbed, and relatives of the US victim voiced their grief.
"Whilst I have found no evidence of an association with IS or AQ (Al-Qaeda), there is clearly an interest in Jihad," Neil Basu, deputy assistant police commissioner, said in a statement.
Masood was shot dead after ploughing through a crowd of pedestrians and fatally stabbing a policeman just inside the gates of the British parliament in a frenzied attack lasting just 82 seconds on Wednesday.
Four people were killed and dozens more injured.
Deutsch Welle
Germany's populist, nationalist Alternative for Germany (AfD) had to make do with a relatively low election result in the state of Saarland. But leader Frauke Petry cried for a very different reason on Sunday.
Frauke Petry had more than one reason to cry on Sunday. The leader of Germany's most successful nationalist party since the Third Reich was pictured in tears at a party conference in Weinböhla, Saxony, because (according to the "Bild" newspaper) of a verbal attack on her delivered by Roland Ulbrich, a far-right candidate who ran against her to be Alternative for Germany's (AfD) election candidate.
A few hours later, it emerged that the AfD had scored its lowest election result in over a year in the Saarland state election. After an impressive run of five results in 2016 that all cracked double figures (including a peak of 24.3 percent in Saxony-Anhalt), the AfD had to make do with 6.2 percent in the western German state.
Al Jazeera (3/26/2017)
When human remains were discovered in a septic tank in Tuam, in western Ireland, last month it didn't come as a complete surprise to everyone.
The unearthing at the site - a former home for unmarried mothers - was the result of a government commission charged with investigating claims of abuse by religious orders. Excavations uncovered an underground structure where human remains were found.
Local historian Catherine Corless had initially uncovered details of a mass grave at the home run by the Catholic Church affiliated Bons Secours, where fewer than 200 infants born to unmarried mothers had been unofficially buried in a disused sewage tank.
But a 2014 email sent by Bons Secours' PR representative Terry Prone to filmmaker Saskia Weber dismissed the need for an investigation into the site, saying: "If you come here, you'll find no mass grave, no evidence that children were ever so buried, and a local police force casting their eyes to heaven and saying 'Yeah, a few bones were found' - but this was an area where famine victims were buried. So?”
NPR
An avalanche struck a Japanese ski resort midmorning on Monday, overwhelming a student mountaineering exercise and leaving at least eight people with no vital signs, according to local authorities. Some 40 other students and teachers were injured in the avalanche, which hit the area in Tochigi Prefecture, nearly 100 miles north of Tokyo.
As the BBC notes, Japanese rescue officials typically will not pronounce victims dead until they receive confirmation from doctors at a hospital.
CNN, citing local police, reports that 62 people — mostly students — had descended on the small Nasu Onsen Family Ski Area for a three-day training program that attracted participants from seven high schools. Though the resort had recently closed for the skiing season, it had made some areas and facilities available specifically for the exercise.
Reuters
North Korea has carried out another test of a rocket engine that U.S. officials believe could be part of its program to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile, officials told Reuters on Monday.
The latest test follows one earlier this month, and is another sign of Pyongyang's advancing weapons program. It comes amid mounting U.S. concerns about additional missile and nuclear tests, potentially in the near future.
Several U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the test took place on Friday night and the engine could possibly be used in an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
Earlier this month North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country had conducted a test of a new high-thrust engine at its Tongchang-ri rocket launch station, saying it was "a new birth" of its rocket industry.
At the time, North Korea's official media said the engine would help it achieve world-class satellite launch capability, indicating the test was of a new type of rocket engine for long-range missiles.
Kim also has said North Korea is close to an ICBM test-launch.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central (3/26/2017)
The record-breaking heat that made 2016 the hottest year ever recorded has continued into 2017, pushing the world into “truly uncharted territory", according to the World Meteorological Organization.
The WMO’s assessment of the climate in 2016 reports unprecedented heat across the globe, exceptionally low ice at both poles and surging sea-level rise.
Global warming is largely being driven by emissions from human activities, but a strong El Niño — a natural climate cycle — added to the heat in 2016. The El Niño is now waning, but the extremes continue to be seen, with temperature records tumbling in the U.S. in February and polar heatwaves pushing ice cover to new lows.
“Even without a strong El Niño in 2017, we are seeing other remarkable changes across the planet that are challenging the limits of our understanding of the climate system. We are now in truly uncharted territory,” said David Carlson, director of the WMO’s world climate research program.
“Earth is a planet in upheaval due to human-caused changes in the atmosphere,” said Jeffrey Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona in the U.S. “In general, drastically changing conditions do not help civilisation, which thrives on stability.”
The WMO report was “startling”, said Prof David Reay, an emissions expert at the University of Edinburgh: “The need for concerted action on climate change has never been so stark nor the stakes so high.”
The Guardian
Scientists have raised hope for the prevention of early-onset diabetes in children after a fibre-rich diet was found to protect animals from the disease.
More than 20 million people worldwide are affected by juvenile, or type 1, diabetes, which takes hold when the immune system turns on the body and destroys pancreatic cells that make the hormone insulin.
It is unclear what causes the immune system to malfunction, but patients are usually diagnosed with type 1 diabetes before the age of 14 and must have daily shots of insulin to control their blood sugar levels.
Working with Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, researchers at Monash University in Melbourne created a diet rich in fibre that is broken down in the lower intestine into molecules known as short-chain fatty acids.
The team, led by immunologist Charles Mackay, believe that short-chain fatty acids called butyrate and acetate dampen down the immune system, and have the potential to treat a range of disorders from asthma to irritable bowel syndrome.
For the latest study, the scientists monitored the health of mice that were bred to develop the rodent equivalent of juvenile diabetes. On a normal diet, more than 70% of the animals had developed the condition after 30 weeks. But another group that received the high fibre diet was nearly entirely protected from the condition.
NPR
When Kathleen Muldoon had her second child everything was going smoothly. The delivery was short, the baby's APGAR score was good and he was a healthy weight.
"Everyone said he was amazing," says Muldoon.
But when a doctor noticed that Gideon was jaundiced, everything changed. Nurses put him under a fluorescent light to treat the problem. But it didn't work. Instead, he developed a red rash all over his body. Blood work indicated newborn Gideon was infected with a virus Muldoon had never heard of: Cytomegalovirus or CMV – a virus that can cause severe birth defects.
Muldoon, 40 of Peoria, Ariz., remembers the pediatrician coming in to deliver the bad news.
"He couldn't even make eye contact," she says.
Gideon's case is unusually severe. Every year about 40,000 babies are born in the U.S. infected with CMV. Most won't have any symptoms. But one in five will have CMV-related problems, like hearing loss, cognitive delay or neurological problems like Gideon.
Like cold and flu viruses, CMV is transmitted from person to person. It travels in bodily fluids like blood, urine and saliva. It is extremely common, according to
Dr. Joseph Bocchini, a pediatric infectious disease specialist with Louisiana State University.
"Cytomegalovirus is everywhere," he says. It is hard to avoid.
NPR
Breast-feeding has many known health benefits, but there's still debate about how it may influence kids' behavior and intelligence.
Now, a new study published in Pediatrics finds that children who are breast-fed for at least six months as babies have less hyperactive behavior by age 3 compared with kids who weren't breast-fed.
But the study also finds that breast-feeding doesn't necessarily lead to a cognitive boost.
Researchers studied 8,000 children in Ireland. At ages 3 and 5, the kids took standardized tests to measure cognitive abilities. Overall, the breast-fed kids scored a tad higher.
"But [the difference] wasn't big enough to show statistical significance," says study author Lisa-Christine Girard, a child-development researcher at University College Dublin.
New York Times
LOS ANGELES – By every wet indication, California is about to lift the drought state of emergency order imposed in January 2014. So we thought this would be a good time to talk to Felicia Marcus, the chairwoman of California’s Water Resources Control Board (you can call her the Water Czar.) This interview has been edited and condensed.
Do you think these past three years have produced permanent changes in how Californians use water?
With respect to urban water use, 50 percent of which on average is used on outdoor ornamental landscapes, folks have learned how much they can save outdoors, and how hard it actually can be to kill a lawn. But, we’ve got to value and learn to water our trees separately. With climate change coming, we’ll need more trees and less nonfunctional lawn. We’ve had quite a few conversions to drought-tolerant landscaping.
Just as encouraging are the stepped-up efforts to capture urban storm water. In agriculture, we’ve seen even greater implementation of efficiency in water, pesticide, and fertilizer targeting.
Reuters
U.S. President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Tuesday to undo a slew of Obama-era climate change regulations, a move meant to bolster domestic energy production but which environmentalists have vowed to challenge in court.
The decree, dubbed the "Energy Independence" order, will seek to undo former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan requiring states to slash carbon emissions from power plants - a critical element in helping the United States meet its commitments to a global climate change accord agreed by nearly 200 countries in Paris in December 2015.
It will also rescind a ban on coal leasing on federal lands, reverse rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas production, and reduce the weight of climate change in federal agencies' assessments of new regulations.
"We're going to go in a different direction," a senior White House official told reporters ahead of Tuesday's order. "The previous administration devalued workers with their policies. We can protect the environment while providing people with work."
Trump will sign the order at the EPA with the agency's Administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Tuesday afternoon.
SPORTS
NPR
Stare hard at your March Madness brackets because the weekend is over and we are down to the Final Four:
When South Carolina faces Gonzaga in the NCAA final four playoffs in Arizona on Saturday, it will be the first time both the seventh-seeded Gamecocks and the No. 1 seeded Bulldogs have played their way into the semifinals.
The Oregon Ducks, which haven't been in the final four since they won the very first tournament back in 1939, will have to outplay the UNC Tarheels who were last in the Final Four, well, last year, and has, according to the Los Angeles Times, made more Final Four appearances than any other team.