These are some of the stories from today’s news:
- Germany elections: Centre-left claim narrow win over Merkel's party
- In rural Afghanistan, a family welcomes Taliban rule
- Fuel supply: Why are there long queues for petrol in UK?
- Trucking in America: 5 fascinating truths about how your stuff gets to you
- CIA officials under Trump discussed assassinating Julian Assange – report
- South Australian eagle fossil identified as one of the oldest raptor species in the world
- End to freedom of movement behind UK fuel crisis, says Merkel’s likely successor
- Taliban takes on ISKP, its most serious foe in AfghanistanIn
- In search of ‘Lithium Valley’: why energy companies see riches in the California desert
- Dozens dead after deadly attacks in northeast Nigeria
- Olaf Scholz: The unlikely savior of Germany’s SPD
- Germany's Green Party and the FDP: Two kingmakers poles apart
- R. Kelly Found Guilty Of Racketeering And Sex Trafficking
- It's Lit! Latina Novelists On Living With (And Writing In) Two Languages
- FBI: Record surge in 2020 murders; nearly 30% increase drives spike in violent crime
- ‘The View’ Hosts Say They Had False Positive COVID Tests
- Israel's new plan is to 'shrink,' not solve, the Palestinian conflict. Here's what that looks like
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
Germany's centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) have claimed victory in the federal election, telling the party of outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel it should no longer be in power.
SPD leader Olaf Scholz said he had a clear mandate to form a government, while his conservative rival Armin Laschet remains determined to fight on.
The two parties have governed together for years.
But Mr Scholz says it is time for a new coalition with the Greens and liberals.
Preliminary results gave his party a narrow election win over the conservatives who suffered their worst-ever performance.
Despite this, Mr Laschet said his party had given him its backing to enter talks with coalition partners, pushing Germany towards a potentially protracted power struggle.
The Greens and pro-business Free Democratic Party (FDP) attracted the most support from the under-30s, in an election dominated by climate change and by differing proposals on how to tackle it. The Greens made history with almost 15% of the vote, even though it was well short of their ambitions.
BBC
The interior of the house made of mud bricks was cool, clean and calm. A man called Shamsullah, who had a small son clinging to his leg, ushered his visitors into the room where they received guests.
A rug covered the floor and cushions ran along the walls that were at least two-feet thick. A few treasures were on display. A small cabinet with half a dozen tiny coloured glass bottles. But the family are poor, and any possessions they had were destroyed or looted during the last 20 years of war.
The house was a refuge from the hot sun and dusty air outside. It was surrounded by high mud walls, like all the family compounds in the fields that became battlefields in Marjah, Helmand province. Inside the walls they were ready to harvest a few more puffballs of cotton to be added to the bale Shamsullah had already taken from the fields outside.
The interior of the house made of mud bricks was cool, clean and calm. A man called Shamsullah, who had a small son clinging to his leg, ushered his visitors into the room where they received guests.
A rug covered the floor and cushions ran along the walls that were at least two-feet thick. A few treasures were on display. A small cabinet with half a dozen tiny coloured glass bottles. But the family are poor, and any possessions they had were destroyed or looted during the last 20 years of war.
The house was a refuge from the hot sun and dusty air outside. It was surrounded by high mud walls, like all the family compounds in the fields that became battlefields in Marjah, Helmand province. Inside the walls they were ready to harvest a few more puffballs of cotton to be added to the bale Shamsullah had already taken from the fields outside.
BBC
The scenes have been described by one petrol station owner as "carnage".
Queues have stretched for miles outside some petrol stations as people wait for hours to fill up their tanks. Some drivers have slept in their cars as they waited, while others have tried to jump the queue by following fuel tankers into station forecourts.
Many petrol stations have not been able to keep up with demand and have had to close.
There have been ugly scenes in some places.
Professor Danny Altmann of Imperial College London tweeted about a fight he saw erupt as the petrol ran out.
"Man behind me was furious and started punching the guard. Became a melee of 8-10 men on the ground, punching and kicking."
C/NET
In May 2020, with the coronavirus pandemic in its infancy, a chain of colorful big rigs parked along Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC, for nearly three weeks. Horns blared as idling truck drivers protested sinking pay, rising insurance costs and lack of transparency from the brokers who set their rates to transport goods. In a Roll Call video, an organizer described what it was about: "All the things that were brought to the stores ... [truckers] brought it, and they're the ones who got screwed in the end."
The modest-size demonstration went largely unnoticed by the American public. But it represented something much larger that affects us all.What would happen if all the 3.5 million truck drivers in the US stopped working for just three days? It wouldn't take long for America to resemble a sci-fi dystopia: Grocery store shelves would go bare, hospitals would run out of medical equipment, computer and vehicle parts would dry up, fuel tanks would go empty. Consider some of the shortages we witnessed through early COVID-19 times, like meat and cleaning supplies, but in an exponential ripple.
What would happen if all the 3.5 million truck drivers in the US stopped working for just three days? It wouldn't take long for America to resemble a sci-fi dystopia: Grocery store shelves would go bare, hospitals would run out of medical equipment, computer and vehicle parts would dry up, fuel tanks would go empty. Consider some of the shortages we witnessed through early COVID-19 times, like meat and cleaning supplies, but in an exponential ripple.
The Guardian
Senior CIA officials during the Trump administration discussed abducting and even assassinating WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, according to a US report citing former officials.
The discussions on kidnapping or killing Assange took place in 2017, Yahoo News reported, when the fugitive Australian activist was entering his fifth year sheltering in the Ecuadorian embassy. The then CIA director, Mike Pompeo, and his top officials were furious about WikiLeaks’ publication of “Vault 7”, a set of CIA hacking tools, a breach which the agency deemed to be the biggest data loss in its history.
Pompeo and the CIA leadership “were completely detached from reality because they were so embarrassed about Vault 7”, Yahoo cites a former Trump national security official as saying. “They were seeing blood.”
The Guardian
A 25m-year-old eagle fossil discovered on a remote outback cattle station in South Australia has been identified as one of the oldest raptor species in the world.
Palaeontologists discovered the eagle fossil on the shore of a dry lake known as Lake Pinpa in 2016, and have since identified it as a new species, Archaehierax sylvestris, in a study published in the journal Historical Biology.
Ellen Mather, a PhD candidate at Flinders University and the study’s first author, said the ancient bird was slightly smaller than a wedge-tailed eagle, with a footspan of 15cm.
It would have been probably one of the larger eagles around at the time, based on what we know,” she said. Though Lake Pinpa is now sandy desert habitat, 25m years ago it was likely a temperate rainforest with permanent bodies of water.
“We believe that it would probably have been preying on most of the small-to-medium birds and mammals that were also alive at that time, so things like the ancestors of modern possums and koalas living in the forest,” in addition to other birds such as ducks and possibly flamingos, Mather said.
Deutsche Welle
After the pack was dealt, Germany's fraught election night had apparently left two options on the table:Either center-left Social Democrat (SPD) Olaf Scholz will preside over a coalition with the Green Party and the pro-free market Free Democrats (FDP), or center-right Christian Democrat (CDU) Armin Laschet will get the chance to do so.
A "grand coalition" of the SPD and CDU is also mathematically possible, but that appeared to be the least favored option among the key players on Monday morning.
Still, it's likely to be an arduous path to either a "traffic light" coalition (named after the parties' colors: SPD/red, Green, FDP/yellow) or a Jamaica coalition (the Caribbean country's national flag handily corresponds to the CDU/black, Green, FDP/yellow).
NPR
After more than 25 years of accusations and a federal court trial in New York that lasted seven weeks, R&B singer R. Kelly has been found guilty of charges including sexual exploitation of a child, bribery, racketeering and sex trafficking involving five victims. Kelly faces a possible sentence of 10 years to life in prison.
Kelly sat absolutely still as the foreperson gave the jury's verdict to Judge Ann Donnelly.
Fourteen alleged underlying acts were associated with the racketeering charge. The jury found that the government had proved 12 of those acts, which involved five victims: the singer Aaliyah as well as women named Stephanie, Jerhonda Pace, Jane and Faith. Two acts associated with an alleged victim named Sonja were not proved. (Most alleged victims went by their first names or pseudonyms.) The government needed proof of only two of the racketeering acts for a guilty charge.
NPR
Novelists Isabel Allende and Sandra Cisneros do not have much in common — their personal histories, writing styles and subject matter all differ — but what they do share is a towering presence as icons in the world of arts and letters.
But they also received outsized recognition for their first works, published just a few years apart: Allende's breakthrough magic realism novel La Casa de Los Espiritus was published in Argentina in 1982 (later translated and published in English as TheHouse of the Spirits in 1985); Cisneros published The House on Mango Street, her Chicana realism novel, in 1984.
This week, we celebrate those differences in two wide-ranging conversations centered around their recently published books: Allende's newest memoir, The Soul of a Woman, and Cisneros' bilingual tale of ex-pat Latinas in Paris, Martita, I Remember You/Martita, te recuerdo.
But, as often happens during conversations with highly creative minds, the conversations touch on deeper philosophical matters: the role of women in Latino cultures, living and writing with two languages, and why you kill off the handsome male character by page 112.
USA Today
The FBI reported a nearly 30% increase in murders in 2020, the largest single-year jump since the bureau began recording crime statistics six decades ago.
The surge in killings drove an overall 5% increase in violent crime last year, according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report.
Violence stalked most major cities, the report found, even as the coronavirus pandemic exacted its own deadly toll across the country.
The numbers appeared to closely track preliminary data released early this year by the FBI, which showed that murders had spiked by more than 20% in 2020.
Although the reported annual increase was dramatic, the total number of homicides last year – 21,570 – did not surpass some stunning totals in the early 1990s, including the nearly 25,000 murders recorded in 1991.
HuffPost
None of the hosts who were on Friday came into contact with Harris. Hostin and Navarro, along with Joy Behar and Sara Haines, were tested multiple times over the weekend and all results were negative, the show said.
“It really was uncomfortable for my results to be released publicly before I even knew what was going on,” Hostin said on Monday.
She said her husband, a doctor, had to be pulled out of surgery as a precautionary measure when the news became known, and her children were taken out of school. All are safe, she said.
“I was flabbergasted,” Navarro said.
After the two were taken off the air, the show had to kill time, with Behar and Haines engaging in a question-and-answer session with audience members until the remote interview with Harris was set up.
CNN
Tel Aviv (CNN)The new Israeli government that toppled long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this summer is full of contradictions. There's pro-peace leftists, pro-settlement right-wingers, pragmatic centrists and even for the first time an Arab Islamist party, all sitting together in one governing coalition. On the most divisive issue -- the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- there is almost no consensus, which is just how Micah Goodman likes it.
Goodman, a political philosopher, has rocketed to public prominence in Israel and beyond for his contrarian thesis on how not to solve the long-running conflict.
Many have taken to calling him the court philosopher of Prime Minister
Naftali Bennett, an ultra-nationalist former settlement leader, who has publicly embraced Goodman's paradigm of "shrinking the conflict." But other centrist and leftist ministers have also come calling. Even the Biden administration has seemingly taken on what Goodman calls his pragmatic and less ideological approach. While the White House remains committed to a two-state solution, Secretary of State
Antony Blinken said in May that the immediate priority was to "rebuild some trust" between Israelis and Palestinians.
From Behind a Pay Wall
New York Times
WASHINGTON — Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the inscrutable Democrat who may hold the key to passing her party’s ambitious social policy and climate bill, is scheduled to have a fund-raiser on Tuesday afternoon with five business lobbying groups, many of which fiercely oppose the bill.
Under Ms. Sinema’s political logo, the influential National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and the grocers’ PAC, along with lobbyists for roofers and electrical contractors and a small business group called the S-Corp political action committee, have invited association members to an undisclosed location on Tuesday afternoon for 45 minutes to write checks for between $1,000 and $5,800, payable to Sinema for Arizona.
Washington Post
Senate Republicans on Monday blocked a bill that would fund the government, provide billions of dollars in hurricane relief and stave off a default in U.S. debts, part of the party’s renewed campaign to undermine President Biden’s broader economic agenda.
The GOP’s opposition dealt a death blow to the measure, which had passed the House last week, and now adds to the pressure on Democrats to devise their own path forward ahead of urgent fiscal deadlines. A failure to address the issues could cause severe financial calamity, the White House has warned, potentially plunging the United States into another recession.
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.