(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest: Climate change and extreme floods in Germany [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-06-03 Deutsche Velle Communities across southern Germany have been forced to evacuate, and many have issued states of emergency as severe flooding hit the region this weekend. It follows days of unrelenting rainfall: Initial assessments suggest some places experienced more in 24 hours than the average for an entire month. Numerous streams and rivers have burst their banks, flooding entire towns and villages, with the states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg particularly impacted. It comes three years after a catastrophic flood around the Ahr Valley in the west of the country claimed over 180 lives and caused billions of euros of damage. We are not necessarily seeing more frequent floods in Germany, says Johannes Quaas, a meteorologist at Leipzig University in eastern Germany. "But when they occur, they are now more extreme." Germany has seen an 8% increase in mean annual precipitation since 1881 and can expect a further 6% increase in the future, according to the German Weather Service. Quaas says the intensity of heavy rainfall in Germany is about 15% higher compared to the 19th century and 10% higher than around four decades ago. Last year alone average rainfall in Germany was 20% higher than the average for 1991-2020. 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 President Joe Biden is expected to issue a sweeping new executive order aimed at curbing migrant arrivals at the US-Mexico border as early as Tuesday. Under the planned order, US officials could swiftly deport migrants who enter the US illegally without processing their asylum requests once a daily threshold is met, according to CBS. That, in turn, will allow border officials to limit the amount of migrant arrivals, three unnamed sources briefed on the expected order told CBS, the BBC's news partner. More than 6.4 million migrants have been stopped crossing into the US illegally during Joe Biden's administration - a record high that has left him politically vulnerable as he campaigns for re-election. Migrant arrivals have plummeted this year, however, although experts believe the trend is not likely to be sustainable. CBS - the BBC's US partner - and other US news outlets have reported that Mr Biden has been mulling use of a 1952 law that allows access to the American asylum system to be restricted. BBC Israel's military says it has established the deaths of four more people abducted by Hamas on 7 October. It says the four were killed while together during an Israeli operation in Khan Younis in southern Gaza, adding that their bodies were still being held by the militants. The men were named as British-Israeli Nadav Popplewell, 51, Chaim Peri, 79, Yoram Metzger, 80, and Amiram Cooper, 85. IDF spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari said intelligence gathered in recent weeks had led to the assessment. "We assess that the four of them were killed while together in the area of Khan Younis during our operation there against Hamas," he said, without giving further details. Last month Hamas claimed that Nadav Popplewell had died in an Israeli strike in April. The UK Foreign Office said it was investigating but there was no confirmation of his death until now. Deutsche Welle Toyota Motor Corporation on Monday admitted to cheating on various certification and safety tests for seven models of car sold in Japan, three of which are still in production. Chairman Akio Toyoda apologized at a press conference in Tokyo, offering a customary low bow as he did so. HIs comments were based on the findings of an internal Toyota review, launched as the Japanese government announced its own investigation at the beginning of the year. That probe is ongoing and affects multiple car manufacturers. "We are not a perfect company. But if we see anything wrong, we will take a step back and keep trying to correct it," Toyoda said. The issue does not affect the non-Japanese market for Toyota. However, it is providing a stern test for Japanese car companies in their lucrative and symbolically important home market. Al Jazeera Johannesburg, South Africa — After suffering a stunning blow in last week’s election, South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) has begun closed-door negotiations with its political opponents to begin talks about forming a coalition government. On Sunday, the Electoral Commission (IEC) announced that elections in South Africawere “free and fair” but with no single party gaining an outright majority. The final election results confirmed the ANC’s decline in support to just more than 40 percent of the vote – far less than the absolute majority it had for the past 30 years after bringing about an end to apartheid. Parties have a two-week deadline to elect a president, and analysts said the ANC would likely need to concede to an array of demands to bring others on board for a coalition government. Al Jazeera Nigeria’s main labour unions have shut down the national electrical grid and disrupted flights across the country as they began an indefinite strike over the government’s failure to agree a new minimum wage. The strike is the fourth embarked upon by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC), two of the country’s biggest union federations, since President Bola Tinubu took office last year. The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) said on Monday that union members drove operators away at power control rooms and shut down at least six substations, eventually shutting down the national grid at 2:19am (01:19 GMT). Nigerian airline Ibom Air said it was suspending flights until further notice due to the strike while another, United Nigeria, said airports across the country had been shut down and striking workers had permitted none of its flights to operate. Kyiv Independent U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will attend the upcoming global peace summit to be held on June 15-16 in Switzerland, the White House said on June 3. The announcement comes a few days after it was reported President Joe Biden would likely miss the event as it clashes with a campaign fundraiser he is set to attend alongside, among others, George Clooney, Julia Roberts, and Jimmy Kimmel. The White House's statement effectively confirmed that Biden would not be attending. "The Vice President will underscore the Biden-Harris Administration’s commitment to supporting Ukraine’s effort to secure a just and lasting peace, based on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and the principles of the U.N. Charter," the White House said in a statement. Le Monde May 29, 2014: Deborah de Robertis, half-naked, spread her legs beneath Gustave Courbet's L'Origine du Monde ("The Origin of the World," 1866) at the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, to denounce the place of women in the art world. The French-Luxembourgish artist got away with a warning after a few hours in police custody. On Wednesday, May 29, 10 years later to the day, de Robertis, 40, was indicted on charges of "damage to cultural property committed as part of a group" and "theft of cultural property as part of a group." This time, her actions were on a different scale, carried out on Monday, May 6, during the "Lacan" exhibition, mounted by Bernard Marcadé and his wife, Marie-Laure Bernadac, at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. While two accomplices tagged five works with the slogan "#MeToo," including L'Origine du Monde – protected by a pane of glass – the artist stole a piece of embroidery by Annette Messager, bearing the inscription "Je pense donc je suce" ("I think therefore I suck"). In an Instagram post published in the aftermath, de Robertis announced that she would not be returning the work, which was owned by the exhibition's curator, Marcadé. The Guardian, UK The Conservative party’s faltering general election campaign suffered a potentially damaging blow when Nigel Farage announced he intended to stand as an MP and lead the Reform party for the next five years. The former Ukip and Brexit party leader said he would stand in Clacton, Essex, after changing his mind while spending time on the campaign trail. He claimed that he did not want to let his supporters down. Farage will also take over as leader of Reform UK from Richard Tice, pledging to stay in post for a full parliamentary term. While his announcement poses an immediate threat to the Tory candidate in Clacton, it may also energise his party’s national campaign, splitting the rightwing vote in other constituencies.It also raises the spectre of Farage antagonising the Tories as they descend into a post-election battle for the soul of their party.Farage’s bid to win in Clacton, which was the first to elect a Ukip MP in 2014 and has a Tory majority of 24,702, will be his eighth attempt to enter parliament. He has failed on each of the previous seven occasions. The Guardian, EU Thousands of homeless people have been removed from Paris and the surrounding area as part of a “clean-up” operation ahead of the Olympic Games, campaigners say. Those moved on include asylum seekers, as well as families and children already in a precarious and vulnerable situation, the collective Le Revers de la Médaille, which represents 90 associations, said in a report released on Monday. Police were also cracking down on sex workers and drug addicts, removing them from their usual networks in which they could receive vital healthcare and support, it added. “The Île-de-France region has been emptied of some of the people that the powers that be consider undesirable,” it concluded. The collective said expulsions and the dismantling of tent camps in and around the city had intensified since April last year, and 12,545 people had been moved in the last 13 months. The Guardian, International Claudia Sheinbaum seems poised to cement her historic victory as Mexico’s first female president with a supermajority in congress that would let her party pass legislation and budgets unopposed – and perhaps even change the constitution without need for compromise. Sheinbaum, a 61-year-old climate scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, won the presidency with 59.5% of the vote, according to a rapid sample count by Mexico’s electoral authority. During the campaign, Sheinbaum portrayed herself as a continuity candidate, vowing to keep the policies of her populist predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador , known popularly as Amlo, who founded the Morena party in 2014 and forged a bond with voters disenchanted with democracy. The Guardian, International Russia is targeting the Paris Olympics with a disinformation campaign that includes deploying a deepfake Tom Cruise to narrate a documentary criticising the organisation behind the games, according to a new report from Microsoft. Microsoft said a network of Russia-affiliated groups are running “malign influence campaigns” against France, Emmanuel Macron, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Paris Games with the event less than 80 days away. Russia has been banned from the 2024 Olympics, although a small number of Russian athletes may compete as neutrals. The fake Cruise video, which appeared on the Telegram messaging platform last year, is called Olympics Has Fallen and uses artificial intelligence-generated audio of the film star’s voice to present a “strange, meandering script” disparaging the IOC. The documentary, whose title riffs on the Gerard Butler action film Olympus Has Fallen , also claims falsely to have been produced by Netflix and is promoted with bogus five-star reviews from the New York Times and the BBC. The Guardian, US Relatives of the Sandy Hook elementary school victims who won more than $1.5bn against the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones over his false claim that the 2012 mass shooting was a hoax to force Americans to accept gun control are demanding his businesses be liquidated. In a letter to a bankruptcy court judge on Sunday, relatives of those killed in the shooting, which left 20 children and six educators dead, requested the rejection of Jones’s petition to financially reorganize his company, which includes Infowars. The request is the subject of a hearing scheduled in Houston on Monday. Lawyers for the families said Jones’s Free Speech Systems company has “no prospect” of getting a reorganization plan approved and has “failed to demonstrate any hope of beginning to satisfy” the judgment against it. If granted, the families may be less likely to have the ability to collect on the judgment – but Jones would be forced to sell most of what he owns, including his company and its assets, though he could keep his home and other personal belongings, according to the Associated Press. Reuters WASHINGTON, June 3 (Reuters) - Former top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci strongly denied suppressing the theory that COVID-19 originated from a lab leak in China, telling lawmakers he never influenced research on the origins of the virus. In his first time addressing the allegations publicly since a 14-hour hearing held behind closed doors in January, Fauci also reiterated that he believes the most likely origin of the pandemic was animal-to-human transmission. "I've also been very, very clear, and said multiple times, that I don’t think the concept of there being a lab (leak) is inherently a conspiracy theory," he said. "What is conspiracy is the kind of distortions of that particular subject, like it was a lab leak, and I was parachuted into the CIA like Jason Bourne and told the CIA that they should really not be talking about a lab leak," he told a U.S. House of Representatives panel. NPR The artist Scott Kildall is waving his hand over the contours of a Joshua tree, just inches from its spiky green, bayonet-like leaves. “If I get too close to it, it will prick me and draw blood,” he says. “And it's done that before.” In his palm, he has a microcontroller — just about the size of a credit card. It’s got a few wires sticking out, and an infrared sensor, which picks up wavelengths of light just beyond what the human eye can perceive. “It's kind of like magic,” Kildall says. “And the magic is just revealing something that's right beyond our levels of perception.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/3/2244531/-Overnight-News-Digest-Climate-change-and-extreme-floods-in-Germany?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/