Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck and Rise above the swamp. . 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.
Since 2007 the OND has been 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.
80 people stormed a California Nordstrom store and stole merchandise
About 80 people rushed into a Nordstrom store near San Francisco on Saturday and stole merchandise in what authorities called an "organized theft."
Police in Walnut Creek said Sunday that they arrested three people in connection with the incident at the luxury department store, including one person allegedly in possession of a gun.
"The remaining participants in this criminal mob fled from the area in cars at high speeds," officials added.
Video of the scene posted to Twitter by NBC Bay Area news reporter Jodi Hernandez showed cars blocking the street outside the store as people fled and the police making arrests at gunpoint.
NPR reached out to Nordstrom for comment but did not immediately hear back.
The mass theft was the latest in a spate of large-scale robberies to hit the Bay Area, from pharmacies to jewelry stores to cannabis dispensaries, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Republicans’ vilification of Trump critics is ‘ruining’ the US, says governor
The Republican party’s vilification of members of Congress who have criticized Donald Trump or supported bipartisan legislation is “ruining America”, New Hampshire’s governor, Chris Sununu, said on Sunday, adding another tacit voice to the small but growing internal opposition to the former president.
Sununu, seen as a rising star of the post-Trump right, attacked his colleagues in an interview on CNN, insisting that House Republicans “have their priorities screwed up” for seeking retaliation against 13 members who voted for Joe Biden’s $1.2tn infrastructure bill.
Sununu was scathing when asked about the call for those members to be stripped of their committee assignments in the same week that only two Republicans – vocal Trump critics Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger – voted to censure their colleague Paul Gosar for tweeting a video showing him murdering the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
The Guardian
Far-right populist, ex-protest leader set for runoff vote in Chile’s presidential election
The far-right populist José Antonio Kast is on course for a convincing victory over former protest leader Gabriel Boric in the first round of Chile’s presidential election.
With more than 90% of the votes counted, Kast led Boric by 28% to 25.6%. The two will meet in a runoff next month. Chileans also voted for a new congress in the general election.
Polling showed far-right Republican party candidate Kast had pushed into an unlikely lead over the last month, and he has ultimately been able to draw support from across the right to take victory in this first round.
Kast is a devout Catholic and father of nine who opposes marriage equality, abortion and political correctness. He has run a campaign focusing on migration, public security and conservative social values.
The Broad Front’s Boric, by contrast, is a 35-year-old former student leader who espouses social liberties and a green post-pandemic recovery.
Al Jazeera
Peng Shuai: Missing Chinese tennis star appears in Beijing
Chinese sports star Peng Shuai has attended a tennis tournament in Beijing, according to official photos, amid mounting international concern about her whereabouts after she accused a senior Chinese leader of sexual assault.
China Open, which organised the tournament, published pictures of Peng at the Fila Kids Junior Tennis Challenger Finals on Sunday.
The photos were posted on the event’s official WeChat page.
Hu Xijin, editor of the Communist Party-owned Global Times, also released a 37-second video on Twitter that showed Peng watching the match with five other people.
The former doubles world number one had not been seen or heard from publicly since she said on social media on November 2 that former vice-premier Zhang Gaoli had coerced her into sex, and they later had an on-off consensual relationship.
Reuters
Khashoggi's fiancee urges Justin Bieber to cancel Saudi performance
Nov 21 (Reuters) - The woman who was engaged to marry Jamal Khashoggi has asked singer Justin Bieber to cancel his scheduled Dec. 5 performance in Saudi Arabia's second-largest city Jeddah, urging him to not perform for the slain Saudi journalist's "murderers."
Hatice Cengiz wrote an open letter to the singer published on Saturday in the Washington Post in which she urged Bieber to cancel the performance to "send a powerful message to the world that your name and talent will not be used to restore the reputation of a regime that kills its critics."
President Joe Biden's administration released a U.S. intelligence report in February implicating Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Khashoggi's 2018 murder in Istanbul but spared him any direct punishment. The crown prince denies any involvement.
Deutsche Welle
Failure to send more jabs to Africa is a 'huge mistake’
Though Africa currently has fewer cases of COVID-19 than Europe, experts fear there will be more waves as only about 7% of the continent's 1.3 billion inhabitants are fully vaccinated.
Most African countries depend on vaccine doses from abroad, even if there are efforts to build up local production centers. But, as the number of cases rises in Europe, supplies to Africa will likely suffer. Germany, for example, has already made a decision to retain vaccine doses that were destined for poorer countries. "We have even postponed some of our COVAX donations, international BioNTech donations, from December to January and February so that there will be enough doses in Germany," Health Minister Jens Spahn said this week.
His words came just a few days after World Health Organization (WHO) head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus criticized certain countries for stockpiling vaccines. "Every day, there are six times more boosters administered globally than primary doses in low-income countries," he said. "This is a scandal that must stop now."
The nonprofit ONE Campaign has called for the German government to reverse its decision and to continue to give doses to COVAX as pledged. "If we don't move fast to ensure that people all over the world have access to vaccines, we will be prolonging the pandemic visibly,"
Washington Post
Cloud seeding gains steam as West faces worsening droughts
As the first winter storms rolled through this month, a King Air C90 turboprop aircraft contracted by the hydropower company Idaho Power took to the skies over southern Idaho to make it snow.
Flying across the cloud tops, the aircraft dropped flares that burned as they descended, releasing plumes of silver iodide that caused ice crystals to form and snow to fall over the mountains. In the spring, that snow will melt and run downstream, replenishing reservoirs, irrigating fields and potentially generating hundreds of thousands of additional megawatt hours of carbon-free hydropower for the state.
Idaho Power, a private utility serving more than half a million customers in southern Idaho and eastern Oregon, has used cloud seeding to pad its hydroelectric power production for nearly two decades. But over the past few years, the utility has ramped up its snow-making efforts at the behest of state officials concerned about dwindling water supplies.
Residents of the Gem State aren’t the only ones embracing cloud seeding, a 75-year-old technology that many scientists still view with skepticism. With a recent experiment providing the first unambiguous evidence that cloud seeding can increase snowpack levels, research into artificial rainmaking is undergoing a small renaissance.
As the West experiences a historic drought and climate models point to more dry spells in the future, states are doubling down on their cloud seeding programs.
ARGHANDAB, Afghanistan — Abdul Hamid’s pomegranate trees were scarred from bullets and shrapnel. The river was low and the land dry. There was no profit anymore from the fruit that made his district in southern Afghanistan so renowned for something other than war.
So this month, Mr. Hamid’s field hands began destroying his 800 or so pomegranate trees in Kandahar’s Arghandab district. He looked on as the century-old orchard, farmed for generations by his family, was turned into a graveyard of twisted trunks, discarded fruit and churned earth.
The decision to destroy his entire orchard is one Mr. Hamid and many other Afghan farmers in the district are making to earn an income after a series of devastating harvest seasons. A crippling drought, financial hardships and unpredictable border closures at the war’s end have sent them scrambling for the security of the region’s most reliable economic engine: growing opium poppy.