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 Besame. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Man Oh Man, wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community featureon 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.
US NEWS
Bloomberg
Donald Trump launched a full-throated attack on James Comey, hours before the FBI director he fired in May will appear in a network television interview tied to the release of a book that describes the president in unfavorable terms.
“I never asked Comey for Personal Loyalty. I hardly even knew this guy. Just another of his many lies. His ‘memos’ are self serving and FAKE!” Trump said on Twitter early Sunday, one of five Comey-related tweets of the morning.
“Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far!”
Trump also said in what so far has been the final tweet on the subject.
Comey’s response:
Al Jazeera
The US will not pull its troops out of Syria until Washington's goals are accomplished, Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, said.
According to Haley, the three aims for the US are ensuring chemical weapons are not used in any way that poses a risk to US interests; Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) is defeated; and there is a good vantage point to watch what Iran is doing.
"[It is our goal] to see American troops come home, but we are not going to leave until we know we have accomplished those things," Haley said on Fox News on Sunday.
The Guardian
Donald Trump’s press secretary issued a begrudging clarification on Sunday after being accused of posting a misleading photograph of the president online.
Sarah Sanders was criticised for a tweet on Saturday that appeared to show Trump busily directing missile strikes against Syria from the White House situation room, with vice president Mike Pence at his right hand.
“Last night the President put our adversaries on notice: when he draws a red line he enforces it,” Sanders wrote as a caption.
Keen observers promptly noted that the photograph could not have been taken on Friday as the attacks were mounted – because by then Pence had arrived in Peru to deliver remarks at the Summit of the Americas.
“Fascinating tweet in which Sarah Sanders reveals that Mike Pence was simultaneously in Peru and Washington,” said Walter Shaub, the former director of the office of government ethics. “If this new capability doesn’t scare our enemies, nothing will.”
The Guardian
The mayor of Philadelphia has ordered a city commission to review policies at Starbucks after the arrest of two black men prompted social media users to accuse the company of racial discrimination.
Videos posted online show officers handcuffing the men in the downtown Philadelphia establishment on Thursday.
Mayor Jim Kenney said Saturday he was “heartbroken” to see the city in the headlines for an incident that appears at this point “to exemplify what racial discrimination looks like in 2018.”
Kenney says he’s asked the Commission on Human Relations to examine the company’s policies and procedures “including the extent of, or need for, implicit bias training for its employees.”
NPR
A prominent lawyer who spent years fighting for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people set himself on fire Saturday.
David S. Buckel's charred remains were found in a New York park, The New York Times reported. In a letter Buckel emailed to the publication and other media outlets earlier that day, he wrote, "Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purpose in death."
A former marriage project director for Lambda Legal, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the rights of LGBT people, Buckel played a major role in a long, dark battle for recognition and equality.
In one of his most noted cases, he represented the mother of Brandon Teena, a transgender man who had notified a Nebraska sheriff that he had been raped. The sheriff informed Teena's assailants who killed him in the days that followed. "It should not be the case that reporting a crime makes matters worse for you," Buckel told The Daily Nebraskan in 2001. Eventually the sheriff was found liable for failing to protect Teena and his brutal murder was dramatized in a film called Boys Don't Cry starring Hillary Swank.
The Guardian
Unlike in the vast majority of fatal shootings by police officers, someone is going to prison for the 2015 death of 16-year-old A’Donte Washington in Alabama. It just isn’t the police officer who shot him.
Lakeith Smith was sentenced last week to 30 years for A’Donte’s murder, even though no one disputes it was an officer’s bullet that killed him. Smith is not even accused of having possessed a weapon. Under the state’s accomplice law, co-defendants can be guilty of murder if a death occurs when they are in the midst of committing a felony.
Smith was one of five teens who were allegedly committing a burglary when responding officers opened fire, killing A’Donte. Smith, now 18, was also sentenced to another 35 years for crimes related to the the burglary, for a total of 65 years.
“Because the sentences are consecutive, it will be a long time before he comes up for even the possibility for parole, at least 20 to 25 years,” prosecutor CJ Robinson said. “We are very pleased with this sentence.”
WORLD NEWS
Agence France Presse
President Emmanuel Macron said Sunday that France's air strikes in Syria in response to an alleged chemical attack were not a declaration of war against the Damascus regime.
"We have not declared war on the regime of Bashar al-Assad," Macron said in a television interview, a day after France joined the United States and Britain in launching strikes.
Insisting that the strikes were legitimate, Macron hailed the operation targeting Syrian chemical weapons facilities as a military success.
Deutsche Welle
More than 300,000 people have rallied in Barcelona, calling for the release of Catalan separatist politicians. A wide range of political and social groups came together to organize the protest.
Police in Barcelona said some 315,000 people gathered in Catalonia's capital on Sunday to demand the release and freedom to return for a number of Catalan politicians who had been involved in the failed attempt to break away from the rest of Spain last year.
Read more: Catalan independence — What you need to know
The rally comes six months after pro-independence activists Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sanchez, who has been put forward by lawmakers as the regional presidential candidate, were imprisoned. Both men face rebellion charges which could lead to jail terms of 30 years.
Deutsche Welle
Visiting Russian politicians shared Syrian President al-Assad's view that the recent airstrikes had been an act of aggression. Chemical weapons investigators are set to begin probing the alleged gas attacks in Douma.
Russian politicians met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on Sunday, one day after joint airstrikesby the US, UK and France targeted centers related to suspected chemical weapons use by the Syrian government. Russia, an ally of al-Assad, condemned the strikes.
Al-Assad praised the Soviet era-air defense system that Syria had reportedly used to shoot down around 70 of the 100 missiles fired during the strikes, Russian news agencies said. He also described the airstrikes as an act of Western aggression, a view which the visiting lawmakers shared.
"From the point of view of the president, this was aggression and we share this position," Russian lawmaker Sergei Zheleznyak said after his meeting with al-Assad, according to Russia's TASS news agency.
Al Jazeera
After a week of rhetorical escalation between the US and Russia - much of it conducted on Twitter - missile strikes on Syria were finally carried out on Saturday. US, UK and French forces launched attacks on three sites allegedly linked to the production of chemical weapons near Damascus, as well as in the province of Homs.
Despite the pathos with which US President Donald Trump announced the military operation, its result turned out to be less than modest. Putting aside the contradictory reports on how many missiles struck their intended targets, they did not cause any military casualties and failed to inflict any serious damage on Syrian military infrastructure. Compared to the recent Israeli air raid on the T-4 base, the result of the April 14 strikes seems rather insignificant.
NPR
Asifa Bano was 8 years old and wearing a purple salwar kameez when she disappeared on Jan. 10.
A week later, on Jan. 17, her mutilated and lifeless body was found in a forest near Kathua in the Indian-controlled region of Kashmir. It was a mile away from Rasana, the village where her family was currently living.
[...]
On Wednesday, graphic details of the crime and its perpetrators emerged in a charge sheet filed by the Jammu and Kashmir state police. Its contents sparked massive outrage across the country. People gathered for candlelight vigils in protest. And using the hashtag #JusticeForAsifa on social media, citizens are condemning the crime and encouraging each other to speak up to authorities.
Details from the report revealed that the crime was fueled by religious and political tensions between Asifa's tribe, a group of Indian Sunni Muslims called the Bakarwal, and local Hindus who saw them as a threat.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central (4/11/18)
With flooding in parts of the Mississippi Valley and a strong Pacific storm coming into the Northwest, we examined the trend in the number of days each year with heavy precipitation at 244 individual sites in the U.S. This expands our nationwide-averaged heavy precipitation analysis from earlier this year, complementing the 2017 Climate Science Special Report which indicated the heaviest precipitation events are increasing in all regions of the U.S.
As the world warms from the increase of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, there is more evaporation from oceans, lakes, rivers, and even transpiring plants. For every 1°F of warming, the saturation level of the atmosphere increases by about four percent. This means more water is available to condense into precipitation, and it can come down in heavier downpours.
Heavier rain means more flooding — both flash flooding and larger river flooding. This can lead to more property damage, and in the long term, historical flooding maps may need to be redrawn to address this risk, affecting property values and insurance rates. Excluding tropical cyclones, individual billion-dollar flooding events in the U.S. have added up to $39 billion in losses since 2010. Including tropical cyclone damage estimates (which also factor in storm surge and wind damage) makes the total balloon to over $400 billion since that time.
Agence France Presse
NASA is poised to launch a $337 million washing machine-sized spacecraft that aims to vastly expand mankind's search for planets beyond our solar system, particularly closer, Earth-sized ones that might harbor life.
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is scheduled to launch Monday at 6:32 pm (2232 GMT) atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Its main goal over the next two years is to scan more than 200,000 of the brightest stars for signs of planets circling them and causing a dip in brightness known as a transit.
The Guardian
Those who have contributed the most to climate change are the real debtors so it is unfair that small island states be indebted as a result, write Keith Mitchell, prime minister of Grenada, and Gaston Browne, prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda. Plus a coalition of organisations calls on Theresa May to apologise for the UK’s anti-gay legacy.
This week we will meet with fellow Commonwealth heads of government in Windsor. One of the most pressing challenges facing smaller Commonwealth governments is the impact of climate change, and the rising debt burden we face as a result.
The 2017 hurricane season was one of the most devastating in Caribbean history. In Barbuda and Dominica destruction totalled more than twice annual GDP. The growing severity of hurricanes in the Caribbean is related to climate change, a major global threat primarily caused by countries far richer and larger than our own.
Reuters
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Concern about Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) respect for data privacy is widening to include the information it collects about non-users, after Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said the world’s largest social network tracks people whether they have accounts or not.
Privacy concerns have swamped Facebook since it acknowledged last month that information about millions of users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, a firm that has counted U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign among its clients.
Zuckerberg said on Wednesday under questioning by U.S. Representative Ben Luján that, for security reasons, Facebook also collects “data of people who have not signed up for Facebook.”
Lawmakers and privacy advocates immediately protested the practice, with many saying Facebook needed to develop a way for non-users to find out what the company knows about them.
Reuters
Nearly 207 million eggs from a farm in North Carolina are being recalled from nine U.S. states after 22 people fell ill, the federal Food and Drug Administration has said.
[...]
The eggs may have been contaminated with salmonella braenderup, an organism which can cause serious and sometimes fatal infections in young children, frail or elderly people and others with weakened immune systems, the FDA said on Friday in a statement.
The eggs were recalled by producer Rose Acre Farms of Seymour, Indiana “through an abundance of caution,” the FDA’s statement said.
Reuters
ATLANTA (Reuters) - Deadly slow-moving storms generating record or near-record snowfall and low temperatures in the U.S. Midwest moved eastward on Sunday, leaving stranded airline travelers and thousands without power.
In Michigan, where snowfall was expected to reach 18 inches (46 cm) in some areas, about 310,000 homes and businesses were without power because of an ice storm, most of them in the southeast of the state.
Large areas of Detroit were without power and customers were not expected to have it back on Sunday night, utility DTE Energy (DTE.N) said. It was working to have 90 percent of outages restored by Tuesday, DTE spokeswoman Carly Getz said in a statement.
The weight of ice on power lines, coupled with high winds, caused more than 1,000 power lines to fall in Detroit and Wayne County, DTE said.
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS
The Guardian
‘Have you ever used a lie detector before?’ Mueller asks Michael Cohen, played by Ben Stiller. ‘I’ll start with some easy ones. How’d you like that pee-pee tape?’
“I’m Donald Trump’s lawyer! I have a whole hard drive in my office that’s just labelled ‘Yikes!’” Michael Cohen – played by Ben Stiller – is in a state of panic. Jeff Sessions (Kate McKinnon) tells him that she has someone important for him to meet: it’s Robert De Niro as Robert Mueller. The Saturday Night Live crowd goes wild.
“Have you ever used a lie detector before?” says Mueller. “I’ll start with some easy ones. How’d you like that pee-pee tape?”