NPR
No one in eastern Kentucky could remember rain as intense as what fell in July 2022. In just five days, more than 14 inches of rain inundated the region's rural counties. On the final day of the deluge, there was too much water for the ground to soak up any more. Flash floods tore through towns, washing away roads, homes and entire neighborhoods.
The floods were deadly. But how deadly, exactly? There are still multiple government death counts for an event that upended the lives of thousands of people. The state of Kentucky determined that 45 people died from the flooding. But the National Weather Service counted 40 deaths. And preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows only 36 people died.
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BBC
If diplomats have groundhog days, when they are condemned to reliving the same 24 hours, perhaps Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, felt a certain weariness as his jet approached the Middle East on his latest trip.
It is his eighth diplomatic tour of the region in the eight months since the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October last year.
The politics of trying to negotiate an end to the war in Gaza and an exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners were already complicated.
They are more tangled than ever now that the Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz has resigned from the war cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with his political ally Gadi Eisenkot. Both men are retired generals who led the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as chiefs of staff.
Al Jazeera
The UN Security Council has approved a resolution endorsing a ceasefire plan aimed at ending the eight-month Israeli assault on Gaza.
The vote on the US-sponsored resolution on Monday was 14-0, with Russia abstaining.
The resolution welcomes a ceasefire proposal announced by President Joe Biden that the US says Israel has accepted, although some Israeli officials have promised to continue the war until the elimination of Hamas, the Palestinian group that governs Gaza.
It calls on Hamas, which initially said it viewed the proposal “positively,” to accept the three-phase plan.
It urges Israel and Hamas “to fully implement its terms without delay and without condition”.
BBC
An aircraft carrying Malawi's Vice-President Saulos Chilima and nine others has gone missing, a statement from the president's office has said.
The Malawi Defence Force aircraft "went off the radar" after it left the capital, Lilongwe, on Monday morning, it added.
The president ordered a search and rescue operation after aviation officials were unable to contact the aircraft.
It was supposed to land at Mzuzu International Airport, in the country’s north, just after 10:00 local time (09:00 BST).
After being told of the incident by the Defence Force's commander, Malawian President Lazarus Chakwera cancelled his flight to the Bahamas, which was scheduled for Monday evening.
“The public will be updated of any developments on the situation as facts are established,” the president's office said.
Deutsche Welle
French President Emmanuel Macron is taking the bull by the horns. On Sunday evening, after being roundly defeated in the European elections, Macron announced a new election for the French parliament, the National Assembly.
Following the European elections, Chancellor Olaf Scholz, of the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), has also had to face up to the clear drubbing of his coalition government, known as the "traffic light coalition" because of the parties' colors, with the environmentalist Greens and neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP).
The SPD is calling it a "bitter defeat" after the party's worst outcome ever in a national election, with 13.9 %. There were also long faces among the Greens, who dropped to 11.9 %. The FDP came in at 5.2 %.
Surveys have long shown that about three-quarters of Germans are dissatisfied with the work of the federal government and the poll ratings of the coalition parties have long been in a slump.
But the European elections turned out even worse than expected. Even the far right AfD (Alternative for Germany) came out ahead of the governing parties with 15.9%.
Al Jazeera
London, England – As the United Kingdom gears up for a critical general election, some Britons are deciding between party loyalty and independent candidates.
The opposition Labour Party is predicted to win the election by a staggering margin. But many of its longtime supporters are disillusioned with the party’s stance on Israel’s war on Gaza.
According to a recent poll commissioned by Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP) and the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU), 86 percent of Labour voters support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
Labour leader Keir Starmer has only called for a “sustainable ceasefire” and repeatedly backed what he sees as Israel’s right to self-defence, even as tens of thousands of Palestinians are killed.
Andrew Feinstein, a former member of parliament for the South African African National Congress (ANC), is an ex- Labour Party member taking matters into his own hands; he is running as an independent candidate in Starmer’s London constituency of Holborn and St. Pancras.
Kyiv Independent
Nearly 20,000 Russian mercenaries died fighting for Wagner Group during the Battle of Bakhmut, an investigation by BBC Russia and Mediazona published on June 10 has found.
The outlets obtained documents shortly after the death of the group's founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin in August 2023, detailing the posthumous payments to relatives of those killed fighting in Ukraine between January 2022 and August 2023.
"This document contains more than 20,000 names of those killed," Mediazona writes, adding: "Most of the Wagnerites died in the 'Bakhmut meat grinder' – more than 19,500 people."
The numbers roughly confirm the number claimed by Prigozhin himself in May 2023 when he said he had lost more than 20,000 men in the fight for the town.
Le MondeFor several months, a small
group of confidants worked discreetly at the Elysée Palace on a high-risk scenario: the dissolving of the Assemblée Nationale. Among those in the know were former advisers to President Emmanuel Macron – aides from his first presidential campaign who later left to work in the private sector, before returning to Macron's side, such as his special adviser Jonathan Guémas. Also involved were Macron's chief of staff Alexis Kohler and Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.
Fewer than 10 people were "at work" on the idea, confirmed Macron's adviser on historical issues, Bruno Roger-Petit, who was delighted Sunday by this coup de théâtre. The secret was well kept, until Macron's address at 8:58 pm, when he announced on television, in the wake of his coalition's disastrous results in the European elections, his decision to dissolve the Assemblée and call snap elections.
Pro Publica
Last week, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to curb immigration, effectively blocking most asylum claims when border crossings spike to a certain level. The move comes amid mounting concerns from across the political spectrum over immigration, which has emerged as a major voter issue this election year.
Some Democrats and human rights advocates have warned the Biden administration that the executive order could exacerbate the humanitarian crisis at the border, putting immigrants at greater risk as they wait on the Mexican side of the border. A recent analysis by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found lawmakers, advocates and government officials previously issued similar warnings that went unheeded before a fire in a Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, detention centerkilled 40 men in March 2023.
The Guardian, US
Rebecca Grossman, the California socialite who was found guilty of murderearlier this year for fatally striking two children with her car, was sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.
A Los Angeles county judge on Monday ruled that Grossman should serve two 15-years-to-life sentences concurrently. She will also serve three years for fleeing the scene concurrently with her other sentences.
She had faced 34 years in prison for her role in the 2020 deaths of Mark Iskander, 11, and Jacob Iskander, eight.
In February, a jury found Grossman guilty of second-degree murder, gross vehicular manslaughter, and one felony count of hit-and-run driving resulting in death. The 60-year-old had recently sought a new trial, but her request was denied last week.
The Guardian, International
A group of the world’s last wild horses have returned to their native Kazakhstan after an absence of about 200 years. The seven horses, four mares from Berlin and a stallion and two other mares from Prague, were flown to the central Asian country on a Czech air force transport plane.
The wild horses, known as Przewalski’s horses, once roamed the vast steppe grasslands of central Asia, where horses are believed to have been first domesticated about 5,500 years ago.
People are known to have been riding and milking horses in northern Kazakhstan nearly 2,000 years before the first records of domestication in
Europe.
Human activity, including hunting the animals for their meat, as well as road building, which fragmented their population, drove the horses close to extinction in the 1960s.
Filip Mašek, Prague zoo’s spokesperson, said: “These are the only remaining wild horses in the world.
The Guardian, Australia
The Queensland government will pour $56m into establishing a forensic examination service for victims of sexual violence in public hospitals across the state.
It comes after the Guardian reported last October that an alleged teenage rape victim was made to wait three hours for care, because her treating doctor had no training in the field.
The Guardian, US
California law enforcement officials have worked for seven years to keep secret a death in police custody, labeling the case an “accident” and refusing to disclose basic information to journalists and the family of the victim, an investigation published on Monday reveals.
Darryl Mefferd, 49, died on 8 December 2016 while he was detained by police in Vallejo, a city of 125,000 in the San Francisco Bay Area. The case was uncovered by Open Vallejo, a local non-profit news organization, which shared its records with the Guardian.
The afternoon before he died, Mefferd had seemed disoriented and dehydrated and was making paranoid remarks, so his niece, Courtney Mefferd, took him to a local hospital. He was treated with vitamins and a sedative and declared “stable”, medical records show. By around 11pm, he was anxious to be discharged and left the hospital against doctors’ recommendations.
NPR
Wild elephants seem to address each other using distinctive, rumbling sounds that could be akin to individual names.
That’s according to a provocative new study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, which was inspired by earlier work showing that bottlenose dolphins have signature whistles.
“Sometimes another bottlenose dolphin will imitate somebody else's signature whistle in order to get their attention, so effectively calling them by name,” says Mickey Pardo, a biologist at Cornell University.
He wondered if elephants, which are known to be vocal mimics, might do something similar.
CNN
A US Coast Guard Academy official says top leaders directed her to lie to sexual assault victims and Congress, making her an unwitting accomplice in a cover-up of decades of abuse.
As a result, Shannon Norenberg says she’s resigning from her role as the academy’s head of sexual assault prevention and issuing a public apology to survivors, saying she is no longer willing to stay silent.
“The Coast Guard lied to me,” she wrote in a public statement posted online Sunday. “I can no longer in good conscience be part of an organization that would betray me, betray victims of sexual assault, and betray the system I helped set up to hold perpetrators at the academy accountable.”
Norenberg’s explosive allegations were made in advance of a congressional hearing this week at which the Coast Guard’s first female commandant, Adm. Linda Fagan, is slated to testify about the agency’s sexual misconduct scandal.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, 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.
