Reuters
WASHINGTON, April 19 (Reuters) - The U.S. House of Representatives advanced a
$95 billion legislative package on Friday providing aid to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific in a broad bipartisan vote, overcoming hardline Republican opposition that had held it up for months.
Democratic President Joe Biden, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell and top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries had been pushing for a House vote since then.
Friday's procedural vote, which passed 316-94 with more support from Democrats than the Republicans who hold a narrow majority, advanced a package similar to a measure that passed the Democratic-majority Senate in February.
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BBC
That Taylor Swift would write a break-up album is no surprise.
Over her last 10 records, the star has taken a scalpel to her personal life, filleting the details of flings and trysts and heartbreaks to create some of pop's most memorable lyrics.
For the last half-decade, she's been in romantic mode. Songs like Delicate, Lover, Invisible String and Lavender Haze were all inspired by her boyfriend of six years, the British actor Joe Alwyn.
They were so close that Swift moved to London, and shared writing credits with Alwyn (under the pseudonym William Bowery) on her Grammy Award-winning albums Folklore and Midnights.
Then, in April 2023, a month after Swift kicked off her record-breaking Eras tour, it was announced that they had split.
BBC
A US teenager accused of planning a mass shooting at his former elementary school was arrested after sharing a story he wrote describing the attack, police say.
Alex Ye, 18, was arrested in Maryland after an investigation by the FBI and Montgomery County police.
Investigators said Friday that the high school student wrote a 129-page "memoir" in which he described attacking a school in the hopes of becoming famous.
Ye shared the document with another person, who reported it to police.
Ye, a resident of Rockville, is charged with threats of mass violence and faces up to 10 years in prison.
"In the document, [Mr] Ye writes about committing a school shooting, and strategizes how to carry out the act," police said in charging documents.
Al Jazeera
The United States and European Union have imposed sanctions targeting hardliner Israeli settlers engaged in violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
The EU said on Friday that the European Council slapped sanctions on four “extremist” Israeli settlers and two entities over “serious human rights abuses against Palestinians”.
The decision was the second part of an agreement among EU member states that saw sanctions against Palestinian group Hamas over its October 7 attack on southern Israel.
The move to target violent settlers in the West Bank comes two months after the US and Britain took similar steps.
Al Jazeera
Millions of Indians have voted in the first phase of the world’s largest elections as Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeks a third term on the back of issues such as growth, welfare and Hindu nationalism.
The vote pits Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) against an alliance of two dozen opposition parties that promise greater affirmative action and more handouts while stressing what they call the need to save democratic institutions.
Before polls closed on Friday, the Election Commission said voter turnout ranged from 40 percent in the sprawling northern state of Bihar to 68 percent in the small northeastern state of Tripura. In the multiphase 2019 polls, the average turnout was 67 percent.
“I urge all those voting … to exercise their franchise in record numbers,” Modi posted on the social media platform X before voting began.
The main opposition Indian National Congress party urged voters to end “hatred and injustice” in a statement on X.
Deutsche Welle
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday admonished NATO defense ministers, telling them, "the choice of whether we are indeed allies," will be determined by whether NATO countries are willing to provide his beleaguered country with more military aid as it struggles to defend itself against a Russian onslaught that is now in its third year.
Zelenskyy described the state of Western aid as "very limited," contrasting the current lack of support for Kyiv to the aid being extended to Israel.
Deutsche Welle
An Italian court on Friday dropped a case against crew members of migrant rescue ships, which has dragged on for nearly seven years.
They were accused of rescuing migrants and aiding traffickers in illegal migration.
"These unfounded accusations have attempted to tarnish the work of humanitarian search and rescue teams for years," Doctors Without Borders (MSF) International President Christos Christou said. MSF operated one of the rescue ships.
"They were intended to remove vessels from the sea and to counter their efforts of saving lives and bearing witness. Now these accusations have collapsed."
NPR
Treating gunshot wounds on children was not what Mikael Petrosyan expected when he entered pediatrics.
Petrosyan has been working as a pediatric surgeon at the Children's National Hospital for more than a decade, and he has treated many children injured by guns.
He hasn't been able to save them all and has had to tell parents that their children have died from gunshot wounds.
"It's a devastating thing to do, to lose a child for something that has been caused by guns," Petrosyan said. "It's not an accident. It was totally preventable in many ways."
NPR
Tesla is recalling the new Cybertruck to fix a defective pedal pad that could cause accelerator pedals to get stuck in the depressed position, raising the risk of a crash.
Specifically, when someone stomps on the accelerator, the pad can come off and get trapped in a bit of trim.
That would leave the accelerator stuck in the "on" position — something that has happened at least twice. When a driver hits the brake pedal, the truck will stop even if the accelerator is depressed. No injuries or crashes have been reported.
The problem, as Tesla reported to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, originated on production lines with soap.
USA Today
WASHINGTON – A third House Republican is supporting an effort to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson from his post in a sign of growing momentum against the speaker for advancing a foreign aid spending plan.
Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., a hard-right lawmaker, announced on Friday that he would be co-sponsoring conservative rabble-rouser Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s, R-Ga., motion to vacate against the speaker, a procedural tool that if passed would force Johnson out of the speakership.
Gosar’s announcement came shortly after the House voted on a bipartisan basis to advance the process for a set of foreign aid bills providing funds for Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific region. A number of ultraconservative lawmakers have railed against Johnson for not tying strict GOP-backed border and immigration policy changes to foreign aid.
Reuters
KYIV/DNIPRO, Ukraine, April 19 (Reuters) - Ukraine shot down a Russian strategic bomber on Friday after the warplane took part in a long-range airstrike that
killed eight people including two children in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Kyiv said.
Missiles rained down on the city of Dnipro and the surrounding region in the early hours, damaging residential buildings and the main train station.
Regional Governor Serhiy Lysak said three people died in Dnipro, including a man whose body was pulled from the rubble of a five-storey building, while five others were killed in nearby areas of Dnipropetrovsk region.
The Guardian
Rishi Sunak has rejected an EU offer to strike a post-Brexit deal to allow young Britons to live, study or work in the bloc for up to four years.
The prime minister declined the European Commission’s surprise proposal of a youth mobility scheme for people aged between 18 and 30 on Friday, after Labour knocked back the suggestion on Thursday night, while noting that it would “seek to improve the UK’s working relationship with the EU within our red lines”.
The European Commission president,
Ursula von der Leyen, suggested the scheme, which would also have allowed young people from within the EU to stay in the UK to work or study for the same period of time, would have been an area in which there could be “closer collaboration”.
The Guardian
Foreign ministers from the G7 countries have said they remain opposed to a full-scale military operation in Rafah by Israel on the grounds that it would have catastrophic consequences on the civilian population there.
Ministers from Italy, the UK, US, France, Germany, Japan and Canada also criticised the “unacceptable” number of civilians killed in Gaza during Israel’s military offensive.
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told western diplomats this week that he intended to push ahead with a ground assault on Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, where more than 1 million people are sheltering.
The G7 ministers said: “We reiterate our opposition to a full-scale military operation in Rafah that would have catastrophic consequences on the civilian population.”
The Guardian
Oxford University this week shut down an academic institute run by one of Elon Musk’s favorite philosophers. The Future of Humanity Institute, dedicated to the long-termism movement and other Silicon Valley-endorsed ideas such as effective altruism, closed this week after 19 years of operation. Musk had donated £1m to the FIH in 2015 through a sister organization to research the threat of artificial intelligence. He had also boosted the ideas of its leader for nearly a decade on X, formerly Twitter.
New York Times
The final jurors for Donald J. Trump’s criminal trial were selected on Friday, with lawyers preparing to offer opening statements on Monday in a landmark proceeding that was suddenly overshadowed at midday by the spectacle of a man setting himself aflame outside the courthouse.
Five Manhattan residents were chosen Friday, filling out a group of 12 seated jurors and six alternates who will hear accusations from the Manhattan district attorney’s office that Mr. Trump sought to cover up a sex scandal that could have imperiled his 2016 run for president.
The day was marked by an intensity of emotion from the start. Several prospective jurors asked to be excused, and some became upset, with one saying she had become too nervous to continue the process.
Then word quietly began to spread about the man who had set himself on fire in a park across the street from the courthouse. The courtroom proceedings continued, but the stir was noticeable, and reporters ran from the room.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) eeff, 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.
This is publishing 2 hours early since Daily Kos is shutting down at 11:00PM EDT for maintenance (or something). I understand it is expected to be up again around 4AM EDT.
From the front page:
On Friday, April 19, starting at approximately 11 PM ET, Daily Kos will start a back-end system migration that may have user-facing site impacts. Users should expect up to four hours of downtime. This post will be updated when maintenance is finished.