Headlines of some stories covered tonight:
- Covid summer: Fauci warns US not to ‘declare victory’ despite lowest rates in a year
- Republican resistance: dissenting Texas leads the anti-Biden charge
- Sharp rise in Florida manatee deaths as algal blooms hasten food depletion
- Google Photos ends unlimited free storage tomorrow. Here's everything you need to do
- History of digital cameras: From '70s prototypes to iPhone and Galaxy's everyday wonders
- China allows three children in major policy shift
- Bangladesh arrests tiger poaching suspect after 20-year hunt
- What we know about Israeli coalition that may oust Netanyahu
- Egypt’s intelligence chief holds talks with Hamas in Gaza Strip
- Merkel and Macron hold their last Franco-German Ministerial Council meeting
- Danish secret service helped US spy on Germany's Angela Merkel: report
- Why it took 100 years for America to learn about the Tulsa massacre
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
BBC
China has announced that it will allow couples to have up to three children, after census data showed a steep decline in birth rates.
China scrapped its decades-old one-child policy in 2016, replacing it with a two-child limit which has failed to lead to a sustained upsurge in births.
The cost of raising children in cities has deterred many Chinese couples.
The latest move was approved by President Xi Jinping at a meeting of top Communist Party officials.
It will come with "supportive measures, which will be conducive to improving our country's population structure, fulfilling the country's strategy of actively coping with an ageing population and maintaining the advantage, endowment of human resources", according to Xinhua news agency.
But human rights organisation Amnesty International said the policy, like its predecessors, was still a violation of sexual and reproductive rights.
"Governments have no business regulating how many children people have. Rather than 'optimising' its birth policy, China should instead respect people's life choices and end any invasive and punitive controls over people's family planning decisions," said the group's China team head, Joshua Rosenzweig.
The Guardian
Dr Anthony Fauci, the top infectious diseases expert in the US, has warned it is too early to declare victory against Covid-19 as cases fall in the country to the lowest rates since last June.
“We don’t want to declare victory prematurely because we still have a ways to go,” Fauci told the Guardian in an interview. “But the more and more people that can get vaccinated, as a community, the community will be safer and safer.”
The Memorial Holiday weekend marks the unofficial start of summer in the US, and for the at least 50% of the adult population that is fully vaccinated, it could usher in a season of maskless barbecues and trips to the beach.
Daily coronavirus cases have dropped 53% since 1 May, according to Johns Hopkins University data, but the rates are still high in the unvaccinated population and cases are growing globally. Already there have been more global cases in 2021 than in all of 2020, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
The Guardian
California emerged as the bastion of Democratic opposition to Trump. Now Texas is showing it’s ready to do the same to Biden
First it was tighter restrictions on voting. Then stringent limits on abortion. Then a relaxation of gun laws.
And that was just May.
Texas, a state famed for its independent streak and doing everything bigger, is staking an early claim as
the bulwark of Republican opposition to Joe Biden’s administration. It is a mirror image of the previous four years when California, the only state more populous than Texas, emerged as the
bastion of Democratic resistance to Donald Trump’s agenda.
The defiance of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and then attorney general, Xavier Becerra, in filing more than a hundred lawsuits against the Trump administration over gun control, immigration and other issues was seen as a ray of hope for liberals during some dark years.
The Guardian
Environmental groups in Florida are warning that unusually high numbers of manatee deaths in the first five months of the year, blamed in part on resurgent algal blooms contaminating and destroying food sources, could threaten the long-term future of the species.
The 749 fatalities recorded by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) to 21 May surpassed 637 from the whole of 2020, the agency said. The total is on course to exceed the high of 804, set in 2018.
The dying off of substantial areas of seagrass, the favoured food source for the slow-moving aquatic mammals, has caused starvation. The situation has been exacerbated by the recurrence of inland blue-green algal blooms and phytoplankton blooms in Florida waterways.
C/NET
Google Photos will end its unlimited free storage policy for photos and videos on Tuesday, June 1 (tomorrow!). After that, any new photos and videos you upload will count toward the free 15GB of storage that comes with every Google account. But don't worry: Any photos or videos you've uploaded before that day won't be part of the cap. And Google has added a new free tool to help you manage your storage quota.
The move, announced in November, is meant to encourage people to sign up for Google's storage subscription service, Google One. Google One plans start at $2 a month in the US for 100GB of storage and other features, like Google Store discounts.
Read more: 6 of the best photo storage options for 2021
C/NET
The camera in your pocket is pretty amazing. Today's smartphone cameras feel like they're a million miles away from earlier photography tech, but digital cameras had to start somewhere.
Back in the 20th century when cameras needed film, digital camera technology began as a sat-nav for astronauts. Since then, Kodak, Apple and many others have played important roles in developing today's pocket-sized marvels. Let's dive into digital camera history to mark the milestone devices and the groundbreaking tech.
The beginnings...
The history of the digital camera started in 1961 with Eugene F. Lally of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When he wasn't working on artificial gravity, he was thinking about how astronauts could figure out their position in space by using a mosaic photosensor to take pictures of the planets and stars.
BBC
A man suspected of killing 70 endangered tigers has been arrested in Bangladesh after a 20-year search.
Habib Talukder - known as Tiger Habib - was finally caught following a tip off, after three previous arrest warrants had been issued for him, police said.
He has operated in the Sundarbans mangrove forest, on the border between India and Bangladesh.
The area is home to the world's largest population of Bengal tigers. Only a few thousand remain in the wild.
Black market traders buy their pelts, bones and even flesh for sale around the globe.
"He was on the run for a long time," police chief Saidur Rahman told the Dhaka Tribune.
Al Jazeera
Benjamin Netanyahu’s record 12-year run as Israeli Prime Minister could be coming to an end, with his political rivals joining forces to form a coalition after the country’s fourth elections in two years ended in a hung parliament.
Each of the past four elections was seen as a referendum on Netanyahu – who has become a polarising figure as he stands trial on corruption charges – with each ending in deadlock.
The new fragile coalition has come into being after Israeli far-right politician Naftali Bennett joined hands with centrist leader Yair Lapid.
Bennete, 49, who was Netanyahu’s defence minister, defended his decision to join hands with Lapid to prevent the country from sliding into a fifth consecutive election in just more than two years.
“It’s my intention to do my utmost in order to form a national unity government along with my friend Yair Lapid, so that, God willing, together we can save the country from a tailspin and return Israel to its course,” Bennett said on Sunday after meeting with his own party, Yamina.
Al Jazeera
A senior Hamas official has said Israel must halt its “aggression” in both the Gaza Strip and Jerusalem as Egypt’s intelligence chief met the Palestinian group’s leaders in the besieged coastal enclave to try to bolster a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.
Khalil al-Haya spoke after meeting Abbas Kamel, who visited Gaza after meeting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on a trip aimed at shoring up an informal ceasefire brokered by Cairo.
His visit – the first by an Egyptian intelligence chief to the enclave since the early 2000s – was also aimed at discussing reconstruction plans following the recent Israeli bombardment of Gaza, according to Egyptian and Palestinian officials.
Kamel, who has not given public statements, is the highest-ranking Arab official to visit Gaza since 2018. He met with Yahya Sinwar, the top Hamas leader in Gaza.
“We discussed several files, most importantly the necessity to oblige the occupation to stop its aggression on Gaza, Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah and all over Palestine,” al-Haya told reporters. He said Israel must also fully lift the blockade it imposed on Gaza when Hamas seized power from rival Palestinian forces in 2007 after winning 2006 elections.
“If this happens, then calm and stability could return,” he said.
DW News
Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday opened her last Franco-German Ministerial Council meeting. It was the 22nd installment of the twice-annual summit and covered a range of topics, such as increased bilateral industrial cooperation in the health care sector, the negative impact of the pandemic on both countries' economies, EU and foreign policy, and international crises such as Belarus and Israel.
Prior to the meeting, Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert spoke of the "incredibly close cooperation" Berlin has enjoyed with Paris during Emmanuel Macron's first four years as French president. Seibert pointed to Franco-German Treaty on Cooperation and Integration, signed by Merkel and Macron in Aachen, Germany, on January 22, 2019, as a "major achievement" that lent new impetus to work on defense and environmental projects.
Paris, for its part, pointed to the €750 billion ($915 billion) European coronavirus recovery plan known as NextGenerationEU as the "high point" of Franco-German cooperation.
DW News
Denmark's secret service helped the US National Security Agency (NSA) spy on EU leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, a European media investigation published on Sunday revealed.
The disclosure that the US had been spying on its allies first came to light in 2013, but it is only now that journalists have gained access to reports detailing the support given to the NSA by the Danish Defense Intelligence Service (FE).
The report showed that Germany's close ally and neighbor cooperated with US spying operations that targeted the chancellor and president.
The then chancellor candidate for the German center-left socialist party (SPD), Peer Steinbrück, was also a target, the new report disclosed.
Vox (5/30/2021)
The sky above Tulsa, Oklahoma, swelled with a thick, dark smoke on the evening of May 31, 1921.
That night and over the next 14 hours, white Tulsans, aided by local law enforcement officials and National Guard troops, destroyed 35 square blocks of segregated Black Tulsa and its affluent Greenwood community, which stretched for more than a mile and was home to an estimated 10,000 Black residents. When groups of hostile white invaders entered the area — incensed by a rumored assault of a white girl by a young Black man, which was later proven false — they looted and set more than 1,250 homes ablaze, according to an official government report commissioned almost 80 years later.
They razed what had been considered a promised land for Black Americans who traveled from afar to reach it. The elite enclave included doctor’s offices, butcher shops, drugstores, tailor shops, shoeshine parlors, cafes, restaurants, beauty parlors, barbershops, newspaper headquarters, a confectionery, a theater, hotels, billiards halls, dry cleaners, and grocery stores that were all burned down. Essential community spaces — a library, Dunbar Grade School, Frissell Memorial Hospital, and churches — were charred to bits, and even the trees that lined the once-bustling streets became sooty figures drooping over a wasteland.
Many of the people who had toiled for years to build Greenwood Avenue into what Booker T. Washington reportedly called the “Negro’s Wall Street” were shot and burned beyond recognition. Some reasonable estimates put the number of people killed between 70 and 300, historians told Vox. According to the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 report, bodies were dropped into unmarked graves in a city cemetery, while others, according to some oral histories, were thrown into the Arkansas River, and still others were hauled off to unknown locations. More than 800 people were treated for wounds and 8,000 were left homeless.
FROM BEHIND A PAYWALL:
NY Times
GUERNSEY, Wyo. — It was a few days before New Year’s Eve 2019, and Terri VanDam, the chief of Guernsey, Wyo.’s three-person Police Department, had run out of options.
For more than a year, Ms. VanDam and her sergeant, Misty Clevenger, had tried and failed to get to the bottom of the drug and alcohol problem in Guernsey, population 1,124. Methamphetamine use was rampant, and much of it was bought and sold right at the bars, they were told, but when anyone tried to investigate, they ran into a wall of silence that went right up to City Hall.
Not long after she had first started asking questions, she said, she had found a dead bird on her front porch, with a nail driven through it. Now, as chief, she had opened a full-scale investigation, and two townspeople warned that they had overheard the mayor talk about crippling the Police Department.
Not knowing where else to turn, Ms. VanDam reached out to the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, asking for a team of state investigators to come into Guernsey and help turn her suspicions into a case.
Washington Post
When Phil Gutis was diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease at 54, he immediately enrolled in a clinical trial for an experimental drug but had little hope of being helped. Over time, though, he started feeling better, his brain less cloudy.
“There was just a fogginess I remember having a couple of years ago that I don’t really feel I have now,” said Gutis, who has received monthly infusions of a medication called aducanumab for five years, except for a short interruption.
Now, he is hoping others with the disease will have a chance to try the drug. But he is worried that the Food and Drug Administration, which is weighing whether to approve the drug, will reject it, derailing the medication and jeopardizing his ability to get the treatment.“
Would my world become fuzzy again?” said Gutis, who lives in New Hope, Pa., with his husband and is a former reporter. “I don’t want to go backward.”
By June 7, the FDA is expected to make one of its most important decisions in years: whether to approve the drug for mild cognitive impairment or early-stage dementia caused by Alzheimer’s. It would be the first treatment ever sold to slow the deterioration in brain function caused by the disease, not just to ease symptoms. And it would be the first new Alzheimer’s treatment since 2003.
The medication is a monoclonal antibody, a protein made in the laboratory that can bind to substances — in this case, clumps of amyloid beta, a sticky plaque compound that many scientists believe damages communication between brain cells and eventually kills them. The treatment is designed to trigger an immune response that removes the plaques.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, 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.