Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame and jck. 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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Chicago Sun-Times: Midway temps soar to 100 degrees, Wednesday will climb into high 90s and can be deadly: city leaders by Mitch Dudek and David Struett
Temperatures at Midway Airport reached 100 degrees for the first time in a decade Tuesday as a heat wave belted the Chicago area, according to the National Weather Service.
City leaders who gathered Tuesday morning to offer suggestions on how residents could stay safe during the heat wave recommended staying cool and drinking plenty of water.
The extreme heat prompted the National Weather Service to issue an “excessive heat warning” in northern Illinois that expires Wednesday evening.
By 3 p.m. Tuesday, temperatures at Midway had reached 100 degrees. It was the first time since July 2012 that the airport reached that mark, the weather service said. At O’Hare Airport, temperatures climbed to 96 degrees around 2 p.m., falling a few degrees shy of the record high for June 14 of 99 degrees set in 1987. Official temperature records for the city are measured at O’Hare.
New York Times: Deceptive Mailings, False Billboards: Voting Disinformation Is Not Just Online by Steven Lee Myers
When it comes to elections, disinformation is not just a problem online.
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin argue in a new report that disinformation targeting communities of color in three battleground states circulated as often through traditional sources of information, complicating efforts to fight it.
The misleading information was included in mailings and campaign advertisements in newspapers, radio, television and even billboards. Those efforts are more likely to reach voters in those communities than targeted disinformation campaigns on the internet.
“Online disinformation is just one small piece of the puzzle,” said Rachel Goodman of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan organization that commissioned the report. “There are many other failures in the information ecosystem that allow disinformation about elections to thrive.”
CNN: Dozens evacuated as unprecedented flooding forces Yellowstone National Park to close all entrances by Elizabeth Wolfe, Claudia Dominguez, and Ray Sanchez
Yellowstone National Park will remain closed to visitors through at least Wednesday due to dangerous flooding conditions, which have prompted park evacuations and left some in surrounding communities trapped without safe drinking water, officials say.
A Montana helicopter company transported about 40 people on Monday and Tuesday from a community airstrip in the town of Gardiner in Park County, Laura Jones of Rocky Mountain Rotors told CNN.
“We haven’t ‘rescued’ anyone that was in danger, we have mainly been transporting people out of there,” Jones said via email. “We have also taken some passengers in who had pets they needed to get to or live there and needed to get home.”
The park announced Monday afternoon that all park entrances were closed to visitors, citing “record flooding events” and a forecast of more rain to come.
The abundant rainfall and rapid snowmelt combined to produce up to three-quarters of a foot of water runoff, which is similar to the area receiving 2 to 3 months of June precipitation in only three days, according to CNN Weather calculations.
Washington Post: New details emerge of Oval Office confrontation three days before Jan. 6 by Michael Kranish
Three days before Congress was slated to certify the 2020 presidential election, a little-known Justice Department official named Jeffrey Clark rushed to meet President Donald Trump in the Oval Office to discuss a last-ditch attempt to reverse the results.
Clark, an environmental lawyer by trade, had outlined a plan in a letter he wanted to send to the leaders of key states Joe Biden won. It said that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns” about the vote and that the states should consider sending “a separate slate of electors supporting Donald J. Trump” for Congress to approve.
In fact, Clark’s bosses had warned there was not evidence to overturn the election and had rejected his letter days earlier. Now they learned Clark was about to meet with Trump. Acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen tracked down his deputy, Richard Donoghue, who had been walking on the Mall in muddy jeans and an Army T-shirt. There was no time to change. They raced to the Oval Office.
Guardian: Russia bans 29 UK journalists, including Guardian correspondents by Pjotr Sauer
Russia has banned 29 members of the British media, including five Guardian journalists, from entering the country, its foreign ministry has said.
Moscow said the sweeping action was a response to western sanctions and the “spreading of false information about Russia”, as well as “anti-Russian actions of the British government”.
“The British journalists included in the list are involved in the deliberate dissemination of false and one-sided information about Russia and events in
Ukraine and Donbas,” the ministry said in a statement.
Twenty individuals it described as “associated with the defence complex”, including military figures, senior aerospace figures and MPs, were also banned.
Among the journalists banned are the Guardian correspondents Shaun Walker, Luke Harding, Emma Graham-Harrison and Peter Beaumont, as well as Katharine Viner, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian.
BBC News: EU set to take legal action against UK over post-Brexit deal changes
The EU is expected to launch legal action against the UK government on Wednesday over its decision to scrap some post-Brexit trade arrangements.
Ministers insist current checks on some goods travelling from Great Britain to Northern Ireland must end to avoid harm to the peace process.
They published a parliamentary bill on Monday aimed at overriding parts of the deal signed with the EU in 2020.
But Brussels says going back on the arrangement breaks international law.
The Northern Ireland Protocol is the part of the Brexit deal which keeps Northern Ireland in the EU's single market for goods.
This prevents a hard border with the Republic of Ireland - including checks there on the movement of people and goods - which both the UK and EU want to avoid in order to ensure peace is maintained.
Al Jazeera: US officials confirm Biden to visit Saudi Arabia, meet MBS
The White House has confirmed details of US President Joe Biden’s first trip to the Middle East, including a controversial stop in Saudi Arabia and an expected meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).
The Biden administration on Tuesday announced that the trip, which had previously been reported by US media, would take place between July 13 and 16. Biden will also visit Israel and the occupied West Bank.
The stop in Saudi Arabia – and particularly the meeting with MBS – represent an about-face for Biden, who as a candidate said the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which US intelligence later directly linked to the crown prince, made the kingdom a “pariah”.
Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered by a group of Saudi agents inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. Saudi officials initially claimed Khashoggi had left the building, but amid public pressure, later acknowledged that he was killed there.
New Yorker: “Running Up That Hill” with Kate Bush, Again by Carrie Battan
The Billboard Hot 100 chart is an imperfect bellwether of trends in American pop music, but it can often provide useful signals. Last week’s Top Ten was largely predictable. It included multiple entries from the British soft-pop sensation Harry Styles—a guy so popular that he recently sold out his forthcoming fifteen-night run at Madison Square Garden—a swaggering single from the ever-present white rapper du jour Jack Harlow, and Lizzo’s latest empowerment anthem. But, then, just below Bad Bunny’s “Me Porto Bonito” was something curious enough to look like a mistake at first glance: “Running Up That Hill,” the lead single off Kate Bush’s 1985 album, “Hounds of Love,” sitting at No. 8 [No. 4 now! ck]. Not a cover, not a remix, not an interpolation—the original version, holding fast, in all of its booming and extraterrestrial synth glory.
Plenty of diffuse, mysterious factors contribute to any given song’s popularity, but the reason for the newfound ubiquity of “Running Up That Hill” is clear-cut. The song recently appeared during a pivotal, intensely melodramatic scene in the fourth season of “Stranger Things.” Netflix’s vibey teen sci-fi show struck a nerve with its highly stylized form of nineteen-eighties nostalgia when it first aired, in 2016, and now it has become such a cultural force that its new season broke Netflix-viewership records. “Running Up That Hill” arrives late in Episode 4, at a crucial plot moment, when Max, one of the show’s plucky leads, has been abducted by Vecna, a humanoid monster who preys on people with emotional trauma. Max’s friends learn that they can release her by playing her favorite song, and proceed to power up “Running Up That Hill” on a Sony Walkman. Originally titled “Deal with God” but re-titled because of Bush’s record label’s concerns over putting “God” in a song name, “Running Up That Hill” is a work of intense yearning. It’s a song in which Bush longs to be able to swap perspectives with a man: “If only I could / I’d make a deal with God / and I’d get Him to swap our places,” she sings, in a register that would pique the curiosity of a birdsong expert.
I was never a big, BIG Kate Bush fan but I’ve looooooooooooooooooved “Running Up That Hill” since it’s initial release in the summer of 1985, when I was going off to college. I am just tickled to hearing it blaring on the radios over 37 years later.
Everyone have a good evening!