Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Doctor RJ, rfall, JML9999 and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, 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 12:00AM Eastern Time.
BBC (I couldn't resist)
Migrant crisis: Can Kos cope with migrants fleeing war?
Authorities in Greece are struggling to deal with a rapidly growing number of migrants arriving on the island of Kos.
In just a few days, 1200 people have arrived and are sleeping rough or squatting in an abandoned hotel. They have fled the civil war in Syria.
Locals who rely on tourism are concerned that the negative reports will turn away holiday makers.
Al Jazeera
More than 5,000 migrants rescued in Mediterranean as crisis grows
More than 5,000 migrants trying to reach Europe have been rescued from boats in the Mediterranean in last 24 hours, the Italian coastguard said on Saturday.
In some of the most intense Mediterranean migrant traffic of the year, over 5,000 people have been saved from fishing boats and rubber dinghies in dozens of operations involving ships from Italy, Ireland, Germany, Belgium and Britain.
On Friday the Italian navy said 17 dead bodies had been found on one of the boats off Libya. Details of the nationalities of the victims and how they died have not yet been released.
The bodies and more than 200 survivors will be brought to the port of Augusta in eastern Sicily aboard the Italian navy corvette Fenice later on Saturday, the coastguard said.
Migrants escaping war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East this year have been pouring into Italy, which has been bearing the brunt of Mediterranean rescue operations. Most depart from the coast of Libya, which has descended into anarchy since Western powers backed a 2011 revolt that ousted Muammar Gaddafi.
BBC
IS conflict: Petraeus urges Iraq to use politics to win
Ex-CIA Director David Petraeus has told the BBC that Islamic State militants can only be defeated through a dual military and political approach.
"Industrial-strength" extremists cannot be dealt with "just with force of arms", he said in a rare interview.
During the Iraq war, Mr Petraeus devised the strategy that saw a "surge" in US troop numbers and secured support from Sunni tribesmen against al-Qaeda.
Iraq's US-backed army is now battling to retake territory seized by IS.
Gen Petraeus described the group as "a formidable enemy".
"It is really a conventional army that also has elements of an insurgency, and indeed significant terrorist elements as well," he said.
But when asked to compare IS with its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq - which Gen Petraeus was instrumental in defeating - he said the latter "had much greater roots in Iraq and much greater numbers than IS".
BBC
Beijing public smoking ban begins
Public smoking in China's capital, Beijing, is now banned after the introduction of a new law.
China has over 300 million smokers and over a million Chinese people die from smoking-related illnesses every year.
Smoking bans already existed in China, but have largely failed to crack down on the habit.
These tougher regulations ban lighting up in restaurants, offices and on public transport in Beijing. Thousands of inspectors will enforce the rules.
Over a million Chinese die from smoking related illnesses each year
Ministry of Health guidelines published in 2011 banned smoking in all public spaces nationwide such as hotels and restaurants.
The rules were vague, however, and often flouted by Chinese smokers who are accustomed to lighting up at will.
The new rules were agreed by lawmakers in November 2014 but only came into effect on 1 June.
Al Jazeera
Veiled Muslim woman claims discrimination on US flight
A US airline has been accused of discrimination after a Muslim woman was allegedly told that she could not have an unopened can of cola because she could use it as a weapon.
Tahera Ahmad, who wears a headscarf, was travelling on a United Airlines flight from Chicago to the capital Washington DC on Saturday when she said a flight attendant refused to give her an unopened can while other passengers were given so.
When Ahmad asked the attendant for explanation, she was told that she could not be given one for security reasons.
The student, who also works as a Muslim chaplain, posted her account on social media, where it went viral and was reported on by media outlets globally.
"I can't help but cry on this plane because I thought people would defend me and say something," Ahmad wrote in a Facebook post.
N Y Times
Grim History Traced in Sunken Slave Ship Found Off South Africa
WASHINGTON — On Dec. 3, 1794, a Portuguese slave ship left Mozambique, on the east coast of Africa, for what was to be a 7,000-mile voyage to Maranhão, Brazil, and the sugar plantations that awaited its cargo of black men and women.
Shackled in the ship’s hold were between 400 and 500 slaves, pressed flesh to flesh with their backs on the floor. With the exception of daily breaks to exercise, the slaves were to spend the bulk of the estimated four-month journey from the Indian Ocean across the vast South Atlantic in the dark of the hold.
In the end, their journey lasted only 24 days. Buffeted by strong winds, the ship, the São José Paquete Africa, rounded the treacherous Cape of Good Hope and came apart violently on two reefs not far from Cape Town and only 100 yards from shore, but in deep, turbulent water. The Portuguese captain, crew and half of the slaves survived. An estimated 212 slaves did not, and perished in the sea.
On Tuesday, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History and Culture, along with the Iziko Museums of South Africa, the Slave Wrecks Project, and other partners, will announce in Cape Town that the remnants of the São José have been found, right where the ship went down, in full view of Lion’s Head Mountain. It is the first time, researchers involved in the project say, that the wreckage of a slaving ship that went down with slaves aboard has been recovered.
N Y Times
With Surveillance Program Set to Expire, Senate Turns Toward Limits
WASHINGTON — The government’s authority to sweep up vast quantities of phone records in the hunt for terrorists was set to expire at 12:01 a.m. Monday after Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, blocked an extension of the program during an extraordinary and at times caustic Sunday session of the Senate.
Still, the Senate signaled that it was ready to curtail the National Security Agency’s bulk data collection program with likely passage this week of legislation that would shift the storage of telephone records from the government to the phone companies. The House overwhelmingly passed that bill last month. Senators voted, 77-17, on Sunday to take up the House bill.
Mr. Paul’s stand may have forced the temporary expiration of parts of the post-9/11 Patriot Act used by the National Security Agency to collect phone records, but he was helped by the miscalculation of Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, who sent the Senate on a weeklong vacation after blocking the House bill before Memorial Day.
I suspect the front page will have the latest on this story.
The Guardian
Woman who left rare Apple 1 for recycling has $100,000 check waiting
A $100,000 check is waiting for a mystery woman who donated a rare Apple 1 computer to a Silicon Valley recycling firm.
CleanBayArea in Milpitas, California, said on its website that a woman in her 60s dropped off some electronic goods in April, when she was cleaning out the garage after her husband died.
The boxes of computer parts contained a 1976 Apple 1, which the recycling firm sold for $200,000 in a private auction. The recycler’s policy is to split the proceeds 50-50 with the person who donated the equipment.
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak built the computers in 1976 and sold them for $666.66 each. Only a few dozen of the groundbreaking home computers are known to still exist.
“We thought it was fake. It was real,” CleanBayArea Vice president Victor Gichun told NBC news. He said he remembers what the donor looked like and all she had to do is show up.
“Tell this lady to please come over to our warehouse in Milpitas again,” Gichun said. “And we’ll give her a check for $100,000.”
The Guardian
Rain brings little relief to southern India as heatwave death toll nears 2,200
Despite hopes that weekend thundershowers would help end a raging heatwave in southern India, the rain brought only limited relief as the death toll since mid-April approached 2,200.
Officials said on Sunday the intense heat was likely to continue for another day in the worst hit states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana.
Daytime temperatures hovered between 45C and 47C (113-116 F) in parts of the two states over the weekend, 3-7C (5-12F) above normal, said YK Reddy, a director of the Meteorological Centre in the Telangana state capital of Hyderabad.
Andhra Pradesh has been hit the hardest, with 1,636 people dying from the heat over the past month and a half, a government statement said. A further 561 people have died in neighbouring Telangana, said Sada Bhargavi, a state disaster management commissioner.
Meanwhile, 22 heat-related deaths have been reported in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh over the past two weeks, said Raj Shekhar, a state government official. The Press Trust of India news agency said 21 people have died from the heat in the eastern state of Orissa, seven in Gujarat to the west, and two in New Delhi, India’s capital.
The Guardian
‘Paradigm shift’ hailed in treatment of lung cancer
A drug that frees the immune system to attack a devastating form of lung cancer has been shown to double the life expectancy of a targeted group of patients.
Nivolumab is one of new generation of immunotherapy drugs that release cancer-applied brakes on the immune system called “checkpoints”. The results, from an international trial involving patients who had already been treated for the most common form of lung cancer, were described by one expert as a “paradigm shift”.
In the Phase III trial, the last step before a drug is licensed for use in clinics, researchers compared the effectiveness of nivolumab and the standard chemotherapy drug docetaxel in 582 patients with advanced non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
The disease accounts for about 85% of all cases of lung cancer, which is diagnosed in 43,463 new patients and causes 35,371 deaths each year in the UK. Overall, nivolumab reduced the risk of dying by 27% compared with docetaxel and increased typical survival time from 9.4 to 12.2 months.
The drug was found to be most effective in patients whose cancers produced higher levels of a tumour protein called PD-L1, potentially paving the way to personalised treatments.
Kim Kardashian is pregnant. Ooops, sorry.
L A Times
120,000 endangered saiga antelopes die mysteriously in Kazakhstan
More than 120,000 critically endangered saiga antelopes — more than one-third of the worldwide population — have died in Kazakhstan since mid-May, and the cause of the “catastrophic collapse” is unclear, officials said.
“Not a single animal survived in the affected herds,” the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, a United Nations-backed effort also known as CMS, said in a statement Thursday.
Pasteurella and Clostridia bacteria exacerbated the die-off, but they are not lethal unless the animal already has a weakened immune system, so experts are still trying to identify the underlying cause, CMS said.
Die-offs are not unusual among saigas, which largely live in Kazakhstan and are recognized for their bulbous, flexible noses that warm up freezing air and filter out dust, CMS said. A 2010 event killed 12,000, and a 1984 event killed about 100,000, it said, although the causes of those mass deaths “could not be conclusively identified
.”
LOL Report
Raw Story
Jeb Bush: I learned about ‘protecting the homeland’ from the way George W. Bush ‘kept us safe’
Likely Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush said over the weekend that he had learned how to protect the United States by observing his brother’s presidency, and how George W. Bush handled the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that occurred on his watch.
During an interview that aired on Sunday, CBS News host Bob Schieffer asked Bush if he felt like overcoming George W. Bush’s legacy was his “main challenge” in running for president.
“No, I don’t,” the potential candidate insisted. “This is hard for me, to be honest with you. I have to do the Heisman on my brother that I love, you know? This is not something I’m comfortable doing. But I’m my own person. I have my own life experience, and I will be successful if I’m a candidate when I share my heart and I talk about what I’ve done as governor of the state.
