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Overnight News Digest April 8, 2025 [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-08
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 JeremyBloom. 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. 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.
Chicago Sun-Times: Trump administration freezes $790 million for Northwestern University: report by Lisa Kurian Philip
The Trump administration has reportedly frozen $790 million in funding for Northwestern University amid civil rights investigations, two administration officials told the New York Times. The newspaper also reported that more than $1 billion earmarked for Cornell University in New York was frozen. In a statement, Northwestern spokesman Jon Yates said the school was “informed by members of the media that the federal government plans to freeze a significant portion of our federal funding. The university has not received any official notification from the federal government.” The funding freeze apparently involves grants and contracts with the departments of Agriculture; Defense; Education; and Health and Human Services, according to the officials, who spoke to the New York Times on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unannounced decision.
CNN: Acting IRS commissioner resigning after agency reaches data-sharing deal with immigration authorities by Rene Marsh and Marshall Cohen
Acting Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Melanie Krause informed her staff Tuesday she is leaving the agency amid internal chaos and the exodus of several senior IRS officials, according to two current IRS employees and one former IRS employee. Krause’s decision to accept the agency’s deferred resignation offer comes on the heels of the IRS and Department of Homeland Security finalizing an agreement Monday to provide sensitive taxpayer data to federal immigration authorities to help the Trump administration locate and deport undocumented immigrants. The controversial data sharing agreement between the agencies was one factor that played a role in Krause’s decision to leave, according to one source with knowledge of the situation. The source said that the last draft of the agreement that Krause had been involved with, and had reviewed, was different than the final agreement. Krause learned about the details of the final agreement from the news, the source said. There were other reasons Krause wanted to leave, the source said, including the direction the agency was going in and the exodus of multiple senior executive career employees within the last few days.
The New York Times: Supreme Court Pauses Ruling Requiring Rehiring of 16,000 Probationary Workers by Adam Liptak
The Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked a ruling from a federal judge in California that had ordered the Trump administration to rehire thousands of fired federal workers who had been on probationary status. The court’s brief order said the nonprofit groups that had sued to challenge the dismissals had not suffered the sort of injury that gave them standing to sue. The practical consequences of the ruling may be limited, as another trial judge’s ruling requiring the reinstatement of many of the same workers remains in place. Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, but she gave no reasons. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the court should not have ruled on such an important issue in the context of an emergency application.
Mother Jones: Donald Trump’s War on History by David Corn
Authoritarianism cannot exist with free thought. It must dominate the societal discourse and prevent debate. That means it must also dictate history. The Nazis knew this. In April 1933, two months after Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, Joseph Goebbels, his propaganda chief, proclaimed that “the year 1789” would be “expunged from history”—meaning that the animating ideas of the French Revolution, such as liberty, civic equality, and human rights, were to be crushed. Germany, under Hitler’s rule, was to be tied in narrative to a millennium that skipped recent European history and stretched back to the Viking era and the earlier Greek and Roman empires. The Soviets routinely photoshopped out-of-favor officials from official accounts, literally erasing inconvenient history. George Orwell, naturally, put it well in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” There’s much spewing out of Donald Trump’s firehose of chaos and destruction these days: his war on government, the rule of law, and decency; his reckless tariffs that threaten the economy here and abroad; his revenge-a-thon attacks on universities and law firms; his annihilation of the public health and biomedical research communities; his assault on American allies; and his effort to end the Russia-Ukraine war in Vladimir Putin’s favor. These all have dire and concrete consequences. Trump’s demolition of USAID certainly led to more deaths in Myanmar following the tragic earthquake, given that in previous years this agency would have been on the ground offering assistance within days of the disaster. Yet we also need to pay heed to Trump’s more abstract efforts, such as his war on culture and history.
BBC News: Dominican Republic nightclub collapse kills 79 by Vanessa Buschschlüter
At least 79 people have been killed and more than 150 injured after a roof collapsed at a nightclub in the Dominican Republic's capital Santo Domingo, officials have said. A provincial governor and former Major League Baseball pitcher Octavio Dotel were among the victims. Dotel, 51, died on the way to hospital after being pulled from the debris. The incident happened in the early hours of Tuesday at a concert by popular merengue singer Rubby Pérez at the Jet Set nightclub. He was reported among those trapped in the rubble. Hundreds of people were inside the venue and some 400 rescuers are still searching for survivors. There are fears the death toll will rise further.
DW: Brazil's democracy is 'inefficient' but solid by Astrid Prange de Oliveira
Who will prove to be the defender of democracy in these trials? In Brazil, supporters of ex-President Jair Bolsonaro, who is on trial before the Constitutional Court for an attempted coup, are facing off against the Brazilian judiciary. In France, supporters of the French right-wing populist Marine Le Pen, who was convicted of corruption, are protesting against what they consider a "political verdict". And in South Korea, many people see President Yoon Suk Yeol, who was recently dismissed by South Korea's Constitutional Court, as a "martyr for democracy." Yeol had surprisingly imposed martial law in December 2024 to "protect the country from pro-North Korean anti-state forces." For Brazilian political scientist Carlos Pereira from the University Fundacao Getulio Vargas, the criticism of Brazil's allegedly biased judiciary is actually a sign of its strength. "Those who lose always accuse the judiciary of being biased and unjust," he told DW.
El País in English: The American cultural boom a century on: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Louis Armstrong by Eduardo Lago
In George Steiner’s first book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, Steiner promotes the theory that the two great literary traditions of the 19th century – the golden age of the genre – had nowhere left to go: the European in general and the Russian in particular. With Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, Zola, Stendhal, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, a point of perfection had been reached, but also of saturation. How to continue with a universal vision? Steiner asks himself. He finds the answer on the other side of the Atlantic with the explosion of North American literature. Steiner does not indicate a specific starting point, but it could be said that the foundational moment coincides with the death of Edgar Allan Poe, in 1849. The following five years witnessed an outpouring of collective talent that would lay the foundations for the literary future of the then democratic and still young American nation. The big bang came at the midpoint of the century, between 1850 and 1855, when the formidable figures of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau and Walt Whitman published works whose influence lives on today. To these authors we must add Emily Dickinson, who secretly wrote poems of a caliber comparable to those of Whitman. Amazingly, during that prodigious five-year period, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, Walden: or Life in the Woods and Leaves of Grass were published, as well as Emerson’s Representative Men. Thus began a dizzying journey through the literary cosmos that would not be matched until exactly a century ago, in 1925, commonly considered the annus mirabilis of American literary history.
Leaving 1925 aside for a moment, for the 19th century, I’d begin not with the death of Poe but the 1845 publication of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written by Himself as starting the “foundations of the literary future” of America.
I say that with all due respect to Edgar Allan Poe, an author that I have been reading and enjoying since I was a child.However, I do think that there is not a sufficient appreciation of the first Douglass autobiography as a literary work.
Poe had more of an effect on world literature as a whole, to be sure, but Douglass’ influence on literatures written in English in the 19th century is not insignificant.
Everyone try to have the best possible evening!
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