Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, 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.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
Hopefully everyone had a merry day, whether celebrating Christmas or just enjoying the pretty lights that seem to be everywhere. Thanks to all Overnight News Digest posters and visitors who make this series a special part of the Daily Kos Community.
US NEWS
Trump's Wish for Peace Follows a Weekend of Twitter Needling
Bloomberg
President Donald Trump’s Christmas wishes include a peaceful America, he said while taking phone calls from children tracking the global travels of Santa’s sleigh -- although the president’s social-media activities suggested otherwise.
“I think we want peace. What do you think? Peace for the country,” Trump told a young boy. “We’ve got prosperity. Now we want peace,” the president said taking children’s calls from the gilded and tiled living room of Mar-a-Lago, his Palm Beach, Florida, club and home.
The boy had told the president that his Christmas wish was for his sick grandmother to return home from the hospital. “That’s better than asking for some toy or something, right?” Trump responded, before sharing his own ambitious wish.
Christmas after a hurricane: 'We still must celebrate the holidays'
The Guardian
For seven weeks in autumn, images of homes in ruins, trees stripped bare and people wading through floodwaters dominated the news as hurricanes devastated the American south and Caribbean.
The US had never been hit in one hurricane season by storms as strong as Harvey, Irma and Maria, according to modern records, and the areas hit hardest by those intense storms are still far from recovery.
In Houston and the Florida Keys, thousands of people still don’t have homes. In Puerto Rico, full electricity services have not been restored and those that have power know it can go out at any moment. At least 200 people were killed on the US mainland in the storms and the death toll in Puerto Rico is expected to be hundreds of people higher than the 64 reported by the island’s government.
Other islands in the Caribbean were also badly hit.
These catastrophic events unleashed death and destruction but also an outpouring of support from people with no connection to the regions affected. As the holiday season approaches, nonprofits leading the recovery continue to see significant donations that will help provide food, water and shelter to those still in need.
Three months since the trio of storms unleashed life-threatening rain and winds, the Guardian spoke with people on the frontlines of the recovery.
Obama's post-presidential life: what does his second act have in store?
The Guardian
There’s the library. There’s the memoir. There might be a foundation. Maybe some paid speeches. Perhaps a new hobby, like oil painting. Maybe, in the case of George HW Bush, accusations of groping by eight women.The life of a former president has a few set pieces, but still plenty of room for surprise. John Quincy Adams was elected to Congress. “There is nothing more pathetic in life than a former president,” he is said to have concluded.
But what about our most newly minted “former”? In his first year as an ex-president, is Barack Obama headed the way of Jimmy Carter and a career of distinguished service, or the way of the Bushes and firm retirement?
Obama’s executive afterlife so far is unique because his successor is unique, say close observers of the post-presidency.Mark Updegrove, a former director of the LBJ presidential library and the author of Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House, said that Obama had demonstrated admirable reserve.
Man says he delivered manure to Mnuchin to protest new U.S. tax law
Reuters
A man claiming to be the person who delivered a gift-wrapped package of horse manure at the Los Angeles home of U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Monday he did it to protest the federal tax overhaul signed into law last week by President Donald Trump.
Robert Strong, 45, a psychologist for the Los Angeles County Public Health Department, said by telephone he left the poop-filled parcel addressed to Mnuchin and Trump in the driveway outside Mnuchin’s home in the posh Bel Air community.
KNBC-TV, an NBC television affiliate in Los Angeles, reported Mnuchin was not home at the time. The package was found by Mnuchin’s neighbor.
“Protest really should be funny,” Strong told Reuters. “People’s eyes glaze over when they just see angry people in the streets.” He believes the new tax law will hurt poor people.
Activist Erica Garner Hospitalized After Heart Attack
NPR
Erica Garner, a 27-year-old activist whose father's dying words became a rallying cry for protest against police brutality, has been hospitalized in serious condition after a heart attack, according to multiple reports.
Eric Garner, a black man who died in 2014 after a white NYPD officer put him in a chokehold, was recorded repeatedly telling the officer, "I can't breathe." A grand jury did not indict any officers over his death, a decision that prompted protests across the country.
Eric Garner's oldest daughter, Erica, was a major force behind protests for justice for her father. In the years since she has continued to advocate more broadly, against police brutality and in support of racial equality.
Now she is hospitalized on life support, her mother, Esaw Snipes-Garner, told The New York Daily News.
It's A White Christmas For Some In Northeast, Midwest
NPR
A winter storm system delivered Christmas Eve snow to Detroit, Chicago and other parts of the Midwest, and is now passing over the Northeast. Snow and sleet also struck some parts of the Pacific Northwest.
That means families in parts of the country woke up to a white Christmas, with corresponding joy or a touch of dread (depending, in no small part, on who has snow-shoveling duties).
And there's more to come for the states north of Pennsylvania.
WORLD NEWS
Pope's Christmas message seeks peace in Jerusalem
Agence France Presse
Pope Francis in his traditional Christmas address on Monday called for peace in Jerusalem and highlighted the plight of children scarred by conflict, having earlier urged the world's Catholics not to ignore the conditions migrants face.
Tens of thousands of worshippers gathered at the Vatican to hear the pontiff's fifth "Urbi et Orbi" (To the City and The World) message. It was delivered hours after a Christmas Eve mass where he spoke on how migrants had been "driven from their land" because of leaders willing to shed "innocent blood".
On Monday, Francis's message sought "peace for Jerusalem and for all the Holy Land.
"We see Jesus in the children of the Middle East who continue to suffer because of growing tensions between Israelis and Palestinians," he said.
Russia bars Navalny presidential bid
Agence France Presse
Russia's Central Election Commission on Monday unanimously rejected top opposition figure Alexei Navalny's bid to run against President Vladimir Putin next year, leading him to urge a boycott of the polls.
The commission voted 12 to zero in barring Navalny from the presidential election, citing a controversial embezzlement conviction for which he received a five year suspended sentence.
Navalny's crime qualifies as "serious" and therefore rids the individual of the right to stand for president," said commission member Boris Ebzeyev ahead of the vote, urging the body to bar him from running.
The decision prompted the 41-year-old protest leader -- who maintains that the court case against him was fabricated for political reasons -- to call for a boycott of the election.
Canada expels Venezuelan ambassador in tit-for-tat move
Deutsche Welle
The diplomatic row between Canada and Venezuela intensified on Monday after Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that Venezuela's ambassador in Ottawa had been barred from returning to the country.
Freeland's announcement came two days after the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro expelled Canada's envoy for criticizing his regime's human right record.
Read more: Venezuela starts expelling envoys from Canada and Brazil
"In response to this move by the Maduro regime, I am announcing that the Venezuelan ambassador to Canada... is no longer welcome in Canada," Freeland said in a statement. "I am also declaring the Venezuelan charge d'affaires persona non grata.”
Mexico detains suspect in journalist Miroslava Breach killing
Deutsche Welle
Mexican authorities said on Monday they had detained the man suspected of ordering the killing of journalist Miroslava Breach, who was shot dead outside her home in March.
The governor for the northern state of Chihuahua described Juan Carlos Moreno Ochoa as the "intellectual author" of the 54-year-old Breach's killing.
The state's attorney general, Cesar Augusto Peniche, told the Reforma newspaper that the 43-year-old suspect is allegedly a member of the "Los Salazar" criminal organization, a faction of the country's notorious Sinaloa drug cartel.
He was detained along with two others on Monday morning in the town of Bacobampo, in Sonora state, the National Security Commission said in a statement.
Read more: Mexican journalists to Pena Nieto: Stop the killings
Another man, Ramon Zavala, accused of being the gunman who actually shot Breach, was killed on Friday by unidentified assailants.
Bangladesh disappearances 'a matter of grave concern'
Al Jazeera
Dhaka, Bangladesh - An academic who went missing for over a month has returned home, saying "unidentified abductors" scooped him up in the middle of a busy road in Dhaka last month.
Mubashar Hasan, an assistant professor of political science at North South University in Dhaka, was abducted on November 7.
"If you look back, we will kill you," Hasan cited his kidnappers as telling him when they released him last Friday, dropping him off from a microbus on a highway near Bangladesh's capital.
Hasan had been dragged onto the bus, blindfolded, after spending 44 days in a room without sunlight, he said.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
The Loopholes Drug Companies Use to Keep Prices High
Bloomberg
The retired firefighter, 53, needs Revlimid to stay healthy. Celgene Corp. has raised the price 88 percent over the past seven years. The drug doesn’t have substantial competition from a less expensive generic version, and probably won’t for another eight years. Celgene has worked hard to make sure of that.
Drugmakers typically have exclusive rights to sell brand-name medicines for 12 or 13 years. After that, cheaper copycats can hit the market. Celgene and a growing number of other pharmaceutical giants are taking advantage of an array of loopholes to extend the exclusivity period, keeping less expensive alternatives away from needy patients like Kelsey.
'If there's no water, what's the point?' Female farmers in Arizona – a photo essay
The Guardian
By 9am, it’s already 100F (38C). In the desert afternoons, rain gathers on the horizon, teasing – and then it disappears. There is so much heaviness, so much waiting.
I pulled on to the ranch of Anastasia Rabin with Audra Mulkern, a Washington-based photographer and founder of the Female Farmer Project. We were on assignment for a story and chasing a statistic: according to the most recent US census, Arizona is the state with the highest proportion of female farm operators.
Despite the fact that women have always farmed, they have been left out of our agricultural narrative. An incomplete story has real consequences: women have been left off land titles and bank documents; they have been denied federal loans and training opportunities; and until the 1982 census of agriculture, female farmers were not counted at all.
Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge now has a $1bn price tag on it
The Guardian
Years ago, camping in Alaska’s Arctic national wildlife refuge, I watched a herd of caribou – 100,000 bulls, cows and their three-week-old calves – braid over the tundra, moving to a rhythm as old as the wind.
“Not many places like this left today,” said my friend Jeff, sitting next to me above an ice-fringed river.
And so Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski believes this refuge – 80 miles east of Prudhoe Bay – could generate $1bn over 10 years once it’s opened to oil leasing. She and her Republican colleagues slipped this drilling provision into the Senate Republican tax bill.
Murkowski repeatedly says this development would cover just 2,000 acres, “about one ten-thousandth of ANWR”.
The acronym ANWR conveniently deletes the words “wildlife” and “refuge”, with no regard for the polar bears, Arctic fox, musk oxen and migratory ground-nesting birds that come there every summer, some species from as far away as Patagonia.
Vietnam braces for typhoon as Philippine toll rises to 230 dead
Reuters
HANOI/MANILA (Reuters) - Authorities in Vietnam prepared to move a million people from low-lying areas along the south coast on Monday as a typhoon approached after it battered the Philippines with floods and landslides that killed more than 230 people.
Typhoon Tembin is expected to slam into Vietnam late on Monday after bringing misery to the predominantly Christian Philippines just before Christmas.
Vietnam’s disaster prevention committee said 74,000 people had been moved to safety from vulnerable areas, while authorities in 15 provinces and cities were prepared to move more than 1 million.
The government ordered that oil rigs and vessels be protected and it warned that about 62,000 fishing boats should not venture out to sea.
Welcome To 'The Cleanest Village In India'
NPR
It bills itself as the "God's Own Garden," and this tribal village tucked in India's remote northeast is unlike any other in the country.
Mawlynnong is free from what plagues so much of rural and urban India: litter, burning garbage and open defecation, the latter punishable by fine.
Reaching this mini-Shangri-La is a commitment, as we climb evergreen-studded mountain roads, peer into emerald valleys, and plateau into lush vegetation that overlooks the border with Bangladesh to the south.
Its leafy lanes fan out across the village lined with bamboo and wooden houses, some crowned with thatch roofs. But Mawlynnong isn't just quaint. This village, population 500, is picture-perfect clean.
The inhabitants from the dominant Khasi tribe in the state of Meghalaya grow beetle nut and, appropriately enough, a plant called "broomstick." No village green or walkway is littered for long — by 7 a.m. a team of women, each paid $3 a day, are out sweeping and spiffing up the place.
ENTERTAINMENT AND SPORTS
Doctor Who Christmas special 2017: Twice Upon a Time
The Guardian
“Love hard, run fast, be kind…”
Merry Christmas! Despite the sense of occasion, we must offer a little critical analysis. This wasn’t really a Doctor Who adventure, since it was barely an adventure at all. This was something… perhaps less, but perhaps more. At the nub is the First Doctor (played here with unsettling skill by David Bradley, who portrayed William Hartnell’s portrayal in the 50th anniversary biopic) equally unsettled by his future as ‘the Doctor of war’, and our 12th’s horror at the unreconstructed 60s humanoid he used to be.