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, planter, JML9999, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke 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.
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From the New York Times: Pelosi and Schumer Say They Have Deal With Trump to Replace DACA
Democratic leaders on Wednesday night declared that they had a deal with President Trump to quickly extend protections for young undocumented immigrants and to finalize a border security package that does not include the president’s proposed wall.
The Democrats, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York and Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, said in a joint statement that they had had a “very productive” dinner meeting with the president at the White House that focused on the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. “We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides,” they said.
In its own statement, the White House was far more muted, mentioning DACA as merely one of several issues that were discussed, including tax reform and infrastructure. It called the meeting, which came a week after the president struck a stunning spending-and-debt deal with the Democratic leaders, “a positive step toward the president’s strong commitment to bipartisan solutions.”
But the bipartisan comity appeared to have its limits. In a tweet, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, disputed the Democrats’ characterization of Mr. Trump’s stance on the border wall. “While DACA and border security were both discussed, excluding the wall was certainly not agreed to,” she wrote.
From Washington Post: Martin Shkreli jailed after Facebook post about Hillary Clinton
A federal judge on Wednesday revoked the $5 million bail of Martin Shkreli, the infamous former hedge fund manager convicted of defrauding investors, after prosecutors complained that his out-of-court antics posed a danger to the community.
While awaiting sentencing, Shkreli has harassed women online, prosecutors argued, and even offered his Facebook followers $5,000 to grab a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair during her book tour. Shkreli, who faces up to 20 years in prison for securities fraud, apologized in writing, saying that he did not expect anyone to take his online comments seriously, and his attorneys pleaded with the judge Wednesday to give him another chance.
“The fact that he continues to remain unaware of the inappropriateness of his actions or words demonstrates to me that he may be creating ongoing risk to the community,” said U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, in revoking his bond.
From BBC News: Irma: Eight dead at Florida nursing home left without power
Eight people at a Florida nursing home that was left without power for days after Hurricane Irma have died.
Police evacuated 115 residents on Wednesday from the facility, whose air conditioning was cut by the storm.
Broward County Mayor Barbara Sharief said three were found dead at the nursing home in the city of Hollywood. Five others died in hospital.
Ten million people are still without power in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas after Hurricane Irma.
The storm - which has claimed more than two dozen lives in the US - struck southwestern Florida on Sunday morning as a category four hurricane before weakening to a tropical depression on Monday.
Irma earlier left a trail of destruction in the Caribbean, where nearly 40 people were killed.
From Sports Illustrated: White House's Call for Jemele Hill's Firing Is Trip to Edges of Crazytown
I was going to give this a pass. Truly, I was. Jemele Hill, the gifted young woman who co-hosts ESPN’s The Six every night with my old Morrissey Boulevard running buddy Michael Smith, got on her electric Twitter machine and tweeted out her unremarkable—and damned near irrefutable—opinion that the current president of the United States is a racist and a white supremacist.
This drew the usual screams from the political flying monkeys of the American Right. ESPN responded with a craven corporate response that I’ll get to in a minute, but let me just say right now that you will not believe that the response was written by anyone who ever came within a light-year of any newsgathering operation. OK, so I thought that was pretty much it. I agreed with everything Hill tweeted. I thought what she said should be obvious to everyone in America at this point. She delivered her opinion. There was the customary cyber-bullying pushback, and we all move on.
That, of course, was until the whole business hit the podium of the White House press room. On Wednesday afternoon, administration spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked about the controversy and this is what she said.
“That is one of the more outrageous comments that anyone could make and certainly something that is a fireable offense by ESPN.”
From CNN: 3 Customs officers charged in 'rape table' incidents at Newark airport
Three Customs and Border Protection agents were arrested after allegedly assaulting two of their fellow colleagues in hazing-type incidents that involved what was referred to as a "rape table" at their office in Newark Liberty International Airport, according to a press release from the US Attorney's Office.
In both incidents, the two alleged victims were locked in a conference room and forced onto a table, which was referred to as a "rape table" by the men charged with assaulting the victims. The victims were held down by colleagues while one officer got on top of them and "moved his genitals up and down" in "simulation of a sex act," according to the press release.
CBP officers Tito Catota, 38, Parmenio I. Perez, 40, and Michael Papagni, 32, were charged with forcibly assaulting, impeding, intimidating and interfering with two men identified as victims in the criminal complaint. Both the victims were working as CBP officers when the incidents occurred, according to the press release.
From Entertainment Weekly: Sopranos, Goodfellas actor Frank Vincent dies at 80
Legendary film and television tough guy Frank Vincent, who battled James Gandolfini and Robert De Niro in his most famous roles, has died at 80.
“Legendary actor and accomplished musician Frank Vincent has passed away peacefully at the age of 80 surrounded by his family on September 13, 2017. We ask that you respect our privacy during this difficult time,” his family said in a statement.
The New Jersey native began acting in the 1970s and his career took off after he starred in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull in 1980 alongside De Niro and Joe Pesci. Vincent had earlier partnered with Pesci in the 1970s to form a short-lived comedy duo. (“I would abuse the audience,” Vincent said in a 1996 interview with the New York Times, “and Joe would abuse me.”)
A fruitful collaboration with Scorsese, De Niro, and Pesci would soon follow. Vincent memorably played mobster Billy Batts in Scorsese’s 1990 classicGoodfellas, uttering the immortal line, “go get your f—ing shine box,” among other profane zingers. (Vincent’s graphic death scene, at the hands of Pesci’s character, both starts Goodfellas and acts as a narrative turning point later in the story.)
From The Atlantic: Can Cops Force You to Unlock Your Phone With Your Face?
Customers who shell out $999 for an iPhone X when it comes out in November will have a new party trick in their pockets: They’ll be able to unlock the phone with nothing more than a quick glance at the screen. When they look away, it will lock up again.
When new features like this one, which Apple is calling Face ID, make it easier to unlock a phone, they save time; Apple says iPhone users unlock their phones an average of 80 times a day. But make it too easy to get into a phone and people start to get nervous.
Apple executives emphasized the security of Face ID as they announced the latest generation of iPhones on Tuesday. Once a phone learns to recognize its owner, using a 3-D map made up of more than 30,000 infrared dots projected onto a person’s face, it’ll only unlock itself when it senses that the owner is looking straight at the device. The map can’t be fooled by photos or masks, said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for marketing, at Tuesday’s event, and it’s stored locally in a secure part of the device. Locking the phone just requires closing your eyes or glancing away, so waving a phone in front of its sleeping owner won’t unlock it.
From the A.V. Club: God is a gaslighting husband in Darren Aronofsky’s brilliantly deranged Mother!
Darren Aronofsky’s preoccupation with paranoid, physically grotesque searches for meaning—a curious mix of deep-think and makeup effects that goes back to his black-and-white debut feature, Pi—grimly paints humanity as a species defined by obsessions, addictions, delusions, and self-destruction, its only prophets being madmen. But now Aronofsky is something of a madman, too; he’d have to be to make Mother!, a delirious allegory that lets loose various subtexts and criticisms of the Bible (e.g., God as an inconsistently written character) to rewrite scripture as surreal psychological horror, with the human race as uninvited guests pissing and screwing where they don’t belong and their creator as a husband who might be gaslighting his wife. It’s almost unbelievable that something this narratively arty is being released as a mainstream horror movie, but the filmmaking ranks as some of Aronofsky’s most skillful.
Taking inspiration from classic Roman Polanski films like Repulsion andRosemary’s Baby—which is pretty damn subversive, considering the context—Mother! pictures creation as a creepy house in a clearing, with no mailbox or road. Inside live a young homemaker (Jennifer Lawrence) and her considerably older husband (Javier Bardem), a famous writer in a long creative slump; he broods in his upstairs study while she busies herself with housework and remodeling. (The characters’ names are never spoken out loud; anyway, they have many.) One night, a gruff stranger (Ed Harris) appears at the door and is inexplicably welcomed by the husband, even as he annoys the wife with his clumsiness, bad manners, and faux pas. The stranger’s own wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up the next morning, followed by more and more visitors; rapidly, the home devolves into a dark farce and then a violent nightmare of cannibalism, cultism, and genocide, gruesomely parodying the narrative of Christianity, from Genesis to the gospels and beyond.
As unlikely as it may sound, this elaborate meta-textual pastiche actually delivers the expected shocks and goosebumps, obsessing its way into something resembling a horror film. With the logic of a dream, it pieces together domestic fears and gothic elements: a locked room, a cold basement, notes of psychosexual unease, unwelcome guests, a missing child. In what turns out to be his boldest move, Aronofsky confines almost the entire thing to the Lawrence character’s claustrophobic, disoriented perspective, her face often framed in chin-to-forehead close-ups, while the other characters are seen over her shoulder. Think of her as everything left out of the traditional, turbulent image of God—but also as a point-of-view character in a horror movie, trying to orient herself in an increasingly senseless, distorted reality that eventually collapses into an overlong hallucination of the shittiness of humankind.