Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Interceptor7, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck, 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.
Reuters
(Reuters) - Rescue workers and homeowners across the U.S. South on Monday sifted through what remained of hundreds of structures destroyed by a series of tornadoes that killed at least 26 people, as the deadly weather system churned up the East Coast.
Nearly 51 million people from Florida to New England were in the path of the system, with National Weather Service forecasters warning of strong winds, torrential rain and possibly more tornadoes on Monday afternoon.
The system had already spawned about 60 reported tornadoes that left a path of destruction from Texas to the Carolinas on Sunday and Monday, the weather service reported.
Powerful winds in the upper atmosphere combined with a strong cold front to make the system particularly dangerous, said weather service meteorologist Aaron Tyburski.
Washington Post
A U.S. sailor assigned to an aircraft carrier crippled by the coronavirus died on Monday, the Navy said, marking the first death of an active-duty service member caused by the virus as confirmed cases among the crew climbed to at least 585.
The sailor, who was not immediately identified, had been moved to an intensive care unit last week after being found unresponsive Thursday at Naval Base Guam. The sailor had tested positive for the virus on March 30 and was placed in isolation, Navy officials said in a statement.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said in a statement that the Defense Department is saddened by the loss of its first active-duty member to covid-19.
ESPN
Rich Rodriguez was visiting an Alabama college football spring practice a couple of years ago and chatting on the sideline with one of the Crimson Tide's big supporters.
Gazing around at Alabama's grandiose football digs, Rodriguez couldn't help himself and quipped, "Where's my statue?"
The Alabama booster looked at him curiously and said, "What do you mean?"
With a sheepish smile, Rodriguez deadpanned, "I'm partly responsible for those five national championships because if I had said yes, you wouldn't have had the greatest coach of all time, Nick Saban, winning all those championships."
All these years later, one of the most fascinating coaching what-ifs in college football history still reverberates from the hills of West Virginia, to Denny Chimes Tower at Alabama, to The Big House at Michigan.
"At least I can still get a laugh out of it," said Rodriguez, who had three Power 5 head-coaching stops at West Virginia, Michigan and Arizona before spending last season as Ole Miss' offensive coordinator. Rodriguez was not retained when Lane Kiffin was hired as the Rebels' head coach and brought in his own staff.
BBC
Forest fires that have been burning for several days in northern Ukraine are now no more than a few kilometres from the abandoned Chernobyl nuclear plant, reports say.
Tour operator Yaroslav Emelianenko said one had reached the abandoned town of Pripyat, which used to serve the plant.
He said it was now just 2km (1.24 miles) from where the most dangerous waste from the plant was stored.
Greenpeace said the fires were much bigger than the authorities realised.
The NGO's Russia branch, quoted by Reuters, said the largest fire covered 34,000 hectares, while a second fire just a kilometre from the former plant was 12,000 hectares in area.
Mr Emelianenko also said that if the fire engulfed Pripyat it would be an economic disaster, as supervised tourist visits provided valuable revenue.
BBC
A piece of 50,000-year-old string - the oldest yet discovered - found in a cave in France has cast further doubt on the idea that Neanderthals were cognitively inferior to modern humans.
A study published in Scientific Reports said a tiny, three-ply cord fragment made from bark was spotted on a stone tool recovered from the Abri du Maras.
It implies that Neanderthals understood concepts like pairs, sets and numbers.
Twisted fibres provide the basis for clothes, bags, nets and even boats.
Neanderthals - whose species died out about 40,000 years ago - are already known to have made birch bark tar, art and shell beads.
They also controlled fire, lived in shelters, were skilled hunters of large animals and deliberately buried their dead in graves.
NPR
In the last decade, bans and taxes on single-use plastic bags have been enacted in a number of states including California, Hawaii and Massachusetts and cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., as shoppers switched to reusable bags.
Now, some major grocery chains are not allowing shoppers to bring reused bags and lawmakers in a number of jurisdictions are rescinding the bans temporarily, citing health concerns prompted by the the coronavirus pandemic.
While scientists say the coronavirus mainly spreads through close person to person interactions, very little is known about the whether bags of any type transmit disease, says UC Davis microbiologist Jonathan Eisen.
"If someone comes in with a contaminated reusable grocery bag and puts it on to the counter and then someone is bagging with that, it certainly seems like there is a chance, it's probably very low, but a chance that there might be some transmission there."
But Eisen says store-provided plastic and paper bags could also harbor germs.
NPR
Amazon is putting new grocery-delivery customers on a waitlist — among several new measures the retailer is trying to keep up with a crush of demand for food deliveries during the coronavirus pandemic.
The company also announced plans to expand its hiring by 75,000 full- and part-time jobs. That's in addition to the 100,000 workers Amazon added in recent weeks.
"We are temporarily asking new Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market delivery and pickup customers to sign up for an invitation to use online grocery delivery and pickup," the company said in a blog post on Sunday. "We're increasing capacity each week and will invite new customers to shop every week."
The last few weeks have been a trying time for Amazon as it's been pushing to hire tens of thousands of new employees, acquire face masks and gloves for its current workforce, all the while facing protests and criticism from some workers who say they don't feel safe working at its warehouses.
NPR
Ammon Bundy, who led an armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon in 2016, hadn't been drawing much attention from news cameras or social media lately, until COVID-19.
In defiance of Idaho's stay-at-home order, which he claims is an affront to personal liberties, the militia leader — who was acquitted by an Oregon jury in 2016 — has been regularly holding in-person meetings in the Idaho farming town of Emmett where he now lives.
Bundy, in a cowboy hat and jeans, usually addresses a couple dozen people while glancing at notes on his MacBook.
"If it gets bad enough and our rights are infringed upon enough, we'll physically stand in defense in whatever way we need to," he said recently.
Bundy often strikes a similar tone as his father Cliven Bundy did in the days leading up to an earlier standoff near the family's Nevada ranch in 2014. The meetings are usually streamed on Facebook and garner several hundred followers and scores of passionate comments.
AFP
The British government warned Monday it would not be lifting a nationwide lockdown anytime soon as the country remains in the grip of a coronavirus outbreak that has claimed more than 11,000 lives.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who is deputising for Prime Minister Boris Johnson as he recovers from his own bout of COVID-19, said there were some "positive" signs of progress.
But he warned at a daily media briefing: "We're still not past the peak of this virus."
The government must decide by Thursday whether to maintain three-week-old rules to keep schools and shops shut and order people to stay in their homes to try to stop coronavirus spreading.
"We don't expect to make any changes to the measures currently in place at that point, and we won't until we're confident as we realistically can be that any such changes can be safely made," Raab said.
AFP
France extended its nationwide lockdown on Monday for another month in a bid to halt the coronavirus pandemic, as other hard-hit countries considered easing their measures with hopes rising that death rates may soon plateau.
More than half of humanity is now under confinement to contain the virus, which has killed more than 117,000 people and infected nearly 1.9 million since emerging in China late last year.
Most of the dead are in Europe, but the United States has also been hard hit -- particularly New York state where more than 10,000 have died, close to half of all fatalities in the country.
Governments around the world are under pressure to save their economies from total collapse as a result of the mass shutdown of businesses and confinement of people, but officials are also trying to avoid a deadly second wave of the disease.
AFP
Former White House candidate Bernie Sanders on Monday endorsed onetime rival Joe Biden for president, saying it was time to unite in the effort to defeat Donald Trump in November.
The two veteran politicians, who each spent the past year battling for the Democratic nomination, appeared together by split-screen on Biden's livecast.
"Today I am asking all Americans -- I'm asking every Democrat, I'm asking every independent, I'm asking a lot of Republicans -- to come together in this campaign to support your candidacy which I endorse," Sanders said.
The swift endorsement marked a notable change from 2016, when Sanders lost the presidential nomination race to Hillary Clinton but delayed endorsing her candidacy, in a move seen as deeply damaging in that it exposed a divide within the party.
DW News
The top German scientific academy recommended Monday that the country could begin to reduce restrictions on public life in place to slow the spread of coronavirus.
Leopoldina, the German National Academy of Sciences, said the government could begin to safely reopen some schools while still observing hygiene rules. Stores and restaurants could also be reopened, if social distancing regulations are strictly enforced.
The academy also said the government should introduce requirements for citizens to wear face masks in public.
"Every citizen should in the future have this type of protection for their mouth and nose and wear it each time social distancing measures can't be respected," said the academy's head Gerald Haug to German newspaper Der Spiegel.
The academy also said that government offices should gradually reopen, but stressed that private and public travel and the vast majority of public events should only slowly and incrementally be re-introduced.
DW News
Coronavirus lockdowns have been touted on social media as helping to fight climate change. But in the Arctic Circle the virus is disrupting climate science. It could leave important gaps in our understanding.
Every year 150 climate scientists fly far into the wilderness and bore deep into Greenland's largest glacier. Their work is complicated and important. The EastGRIP project is trying to understand how ice streams underneath the glacier are pushing vast amounts of ice into the ocean, and how this contributes to rising sea levels. But this year the drills will be silent. The ice streams will go unmeasured.
The reason is the coronavirus. The fallout from measures to contain the outbreak have made the research impossible. Greenland is closed to foreigners. Its government is worried any outbreak could be particularly dangerous to its indigenous population and rapidly overwhelm its health services.
Al Jazeera
The White House said on Monday that President Donald Trump was not firing US infectious disease expert Dr Anthony Fauci, despite his retweet of a supporter's #FireFauci message.
"This media chatter is ridiculous - President Trump is not firing Dr Fauci," said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley. "Dr Fauci has been and remains a trusted adviser to President Trump."
The Republican president in the past has repeated critical tweets of officials or enemies rather than make the criticism himself. The retweet fueled speculation Trump was running out of patience with the popular scientist and could conceivably fire him.
Fauci has assumed national prominence as a leader in the fight against the coronavirus. He has contradicted or corrected Trump on scientific matters during the crisis, including whether the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine is effective against it.
Al Jazeera
The alleged burning and abuse of a young Iraqi woman at the hands of her husband and his family has caused outrage on social media, with activists and commentators calling for laws to protect women from domestic violence.
Videos circulated of Malak Haider al-Zubaidi, 20, bedridden in a hospital in the holy city of Najaf and screaming in pain, her face swollen from burns and her entire body bandaged.
…
Activists reacted with scorn to his words, and some shared an unverified statement from his family, saying that as sons of an important colonel in the army, the law cannot touch them.
While Iraq's constitution prohibits "all forms of violence and abuse in the family", the country's penal code allows husbands to "discipline" their wives, and there is no law criminalising domestic violence.
There are also no updated national figures for domestic violence in Iraq, where the most recent data available is from 2012, but there are estimates that one in five women are victims.
The Guardian
Americans with lower incomes and less education were more like to say the spread of infectious disease was a major threat to the US, according to a Pew Research Center survey released Monday.
Nearly all US adults said the spread of infectious disease is a threat to the country, but people who made less than $50,000 per year were 10 percentage points more concerned about the threat posed by infectious disease than those with higher incomes in a survey conducted in March.
Americans with less than a college degree were nine percentage points more likely to be concerned than those who have a college degree or more education.
The Covid-19 outbreak has laid bare inequality in the US, where there is no requirement for employers to provide paid sick leave and health insurance is not guaranteed to every citizen.
The Guardian
A major pork manufacturing plant in South Dakota has indefinitely shut down after more than 200 of its employees contracted Covid-19.
According to Smithfield, who runs the plant, the facility’s output represents up to 5% of US pork production, supplying 130m servings of food a week and employing 3,700 people. Over 550 independent farmers supplied the plant.
The company that runs the plant, Smithfield Foods, announced the closure of its plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on Sunday, a day after the state’s governor, Kristi Noem, asked the company to suspend the plant’s operation for at least 14 days.
The number of employees who worked at the plant and contracted the virus makes up over half of the state’s positive cases. About 240 employees from the plant have contracted the virus.
Bloomberg
Some of the nation’s most powerful governors said they would form regional alliances to coordinate reopening schools and businesses after the coronavirus outbreak subsides, setting up a potential clash with the president, who says that he alone has that authority.
“We will be driven by facts, we will be driven by evidence, we will be driven by science, we will be driven by our public health advisers, we will be driven by the collaborative spirit that defines the best of us at this important moment,” California Governor Gavin Newsom said as he announced a partnership with Washington state and Oregon.
With health data suggesting that the spread of the coronavirus may be nearing a plateau in the U.S., public officials are under growing pressure to chart a path back to normality. The longer the state-by-state lockdowns last, the more economic hardship there will be. But dropping stay-at-home restrictions too soon might risk a second wave of infections.
Reuters
(Reuters) - Liberal challenger Jill Karofsky won a hotly contested race for the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Monday, beating a conservative incumbent in state elections marred by court challenges and worries about coronavirus health risks.
Karofsky was projected by the Associated Press to have upset conservative incumbent Dan Kelly, who was endorsed by Republican President Donald Trump, for a court seat that could help decide future voting rights and redistricting issues in Wisconsin, a vital general election battleground.
The Supreme Court race highlighted a slate of thousands of elections held last week for state and local offices, as well as a presidential primary.
The release of the results was delayed by a court order that extended the deadline for receiving mailed absentee ballots until Monday.
Reuters
BRASILIA/RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Brazil likely has 12 times more cases of the new coronavirus than are being officially reported by the government, with too little testing and long waits to confirm the results, according to a study released on Monday.
Researchers at a consortium of Brazilian universities and institutes examined the ratio of cases resulting in deaths through April 10 and compared it with data on the expected death rate from the World Health Organization.
The much higher-than-expected death rate in Brazil indicates there are many more cases of the virus than are being counted, with the study estimating only 8% of cases are being officially reported.
The government has focused on testing serious cases rather than all suspected cases, according to the consortium, known as the Center for Health Operations and Intelligence. The center and medical professionals have also complained of long wait times to get test results.
NPR
One month ago today, President Trump declared a national emergency.
In a Rose Garden address, flanked by leaders from giant retailers and medical testing companies, he promised a mobilization of public and private resources to attack the coronavirus.
"We've been working very hard on this. We've made tremendous progress," Trump said. "When you compare what we've done to other areas of the world, it's pretty incredible."
But few of the promises made that day have come to pass.
NPR's Investigations Team dug into each of the claims made from the podium that day. And rather than a sweeping national campaign of screening, drive-through sample collection and lab testing, it found a smattering of small pilot projects and aborted efforts.
In some cases, no action was taken at all.
