(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest: Proud Boys founder 'We want to make America hate again' [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-10-28 BBC In the North Philadelphia neighbourhood of Fairhill, signs of Puerto Rico are never far off. The US island territory's red, white and blue flag adorns homes and businesses, and the sounds of salsa and reggaetón boom from passing cars and restaurants selling fried plantains and spit-roasted pork. The area is the beating heart of Philadelphia's more than 90,000-strong Puerto Rican population and forms a key part of Pennsylvania's Latino community, which both the Democrats and Republicans have sought to woo ahead of the 5 November election. But on Monday morning, many locals were left seething at a joke made at Donald Trump's rally the night before in New York, in which comic Tony Hinchcliffe described Puerto Rico as an "island of garbage". The joke, some said, could come back to haunt the Republicans in a key swing state that Democrats won by a narrow margin of 1.17% - about 82,000 votes - in 2020. "The campaign just hurt itself, so much. It's crazy to me," said Ivonne Torres Miranda, a local resident who said she remains disillusioned by both candidates - Republican Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris - with just eight days to go in the campaign. "Even if he [Mr Hinchcliffe ] was joking - you don't joke like that. "We're Puerto Ricans. We have dignity, and we have pride," she told the BBC, speaking in rapid-fire Spanish with a strong Puerto Rican accent. x Take a moment today to celebrate Roberto Clemente (1934-1972), great Puerto Rican, great American and great Pennsylvanian: pic.twitter.com/fnqnsq3J29 — Michael Beschloss (@BeschlossDC) October 28, 2024 BBC The Vietnamese people smuggler emerged, briefly and hesitantly, from the shadows of a scraggly forest close to the northern French coastline. “Move away from the others. Come this way, fast,” he said, gesturing across a disused railway line to a member of our team, who had spent weeks posing undercover as a potential customer. Moments later, the smuggler - a tall figure with bright dyed blonde hair - turned away sharply, like a startled fox, and vanished down a narrow path into the woods. Earlier this year, Vietnam emerged - abruptly - as the biggest single source of new migrants seeking to cross the Channel to the UK illegally in small boats. Arrivals surged from 1,306 in the whole of 2023, to 2,248 in the first half of 2024. NPR TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel is awaiting the results of the U.S. presidential election next week before moving forward on a new Egyptian cease-fire proposal for Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza, according to an official briefed on the talks. Egypt’s cease-fire proposal comes amid an intense Israeli siege and bombardment of north Gaza this past month. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi laid out a proposal Sunday for an initial two-day cease-fire between Israel and Hamas — with the release of four hostages taken by Hamas in its Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in exchange for Israel releasing an unspecified number of Palestinian prisoners. NPR On Monday, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner asked a state judge to stop Elon Musk’s $1 million giveaway to registered voters, calling the scheme “indisputably an unlawful lottery.” Krasner brought the suit against Musk and his political action committee, America PAC. “America PAC and Elon Musk are running an illegal lottery in Philadelphia (as well as throughout Pennsylvania),” the suit said. “In other words, America PAC and Musk are lulling Philadelphia citizens – and others in the Commonwealth (and other swing states in the upcoming election) – to give up their personal identifying information and make a political pledge in exchange for the chance to win $1 million. That is a lottery.” Reuters JERUSALEM/CAIRO, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Israel's parliament passed a law on Monday to ban the UN relief agency UNRWA from operating inside the country, alarming some of Israel's Western allies who fear it will worsen the already dire humanitarian situation in Gaza. Israeli officials cited the involvement of a handful of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees' thousands of staffers in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel and a few staffers' membership in Hamas and other armed groups. "UNRWA workers involved in terrorist activities against Israel must be held accountable," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. The head of UNRWA, Philippe Lazzarini, said the vote opposes the U.N. charter and violates international law. "This is the latest in the ongoing campaign to discredit UNRWA and delegitimize its role towards providing human-development assistance and services to #Palestine Refugees," he wrote on social media platform X. Al Jazeera The Sudanese people are living through a “nightmare of violence, hunger and displacement”, and countless others are facing “unspeakable atrocities”, including widespread rapes, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told the UN Security Council on Monday. He singled out “shocking reports of mass killings and sexual violence” in villages in east-central Gezira province. The UN and a doctors’ group noted that paramilitary fighters wreaked havoc in the region in a multi-day attack that killed more than 120 people in one town. The UN chief said the country’s warring military and paramilitary forces are escalating attacks with outside powers “fuelling the fire” and intensifying the nightmare of hunger and disease for millions. Guterres warned that the 18-month war faces the serious possibility of “igniting regional instability from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa to the Red Sea.” Al Jazeera (10/27/2024) As the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to Nihon Hidankyo – the organisation of Japanese atomic bomb survivors – Michiko Kodama’s experiences are testimony to the horrors and long-term effects of nuclear weapons. She was only seven years old at the time, but Michiko Kodama has a crystal-clear memory of the morning of August 6, 1945 in Hiroshima, Japan. “It was a sunny day,” she says. “At 8:15, I was at school, sitting at my desk at the front of the class, when there was a tremendous white flash and the ceiling collapsed. A piece of glass was lodged in my shoulder, and all around me people were trapped by pieces of debris, but somehow everybody was still alive.” The next thing she remembers is being in the school clinic where one of the teachers removed the glass. “They tore up curtains to clean our wounds as best they could. Then my father arrived. He put me on his back and we walked home together.” Michiko is a “hibakusha” or “bomb-affected person” – a survivor of the nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The hibakusha, including the descendants of those who experienced the bombings, today number about 540,000. Nearly nine decades since those horrific events, Nihon Hidankyo, the organisation representing hibakusha, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on October 11, 2024 “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again”, in the words of the Nobel Foundation. Deutsche Welle Croatia to send tanks to Ukraine with German help Croatia plans to supply Ukraine with 30 battle tanks and 30 infantry fighting vehicles from the Cold War era, its Defense Ministry said on Monday. The deal will also include ammunition and spare parts. Croatia will purchase up to 50 newer Leopard 2 A8 tanks from Germany to enable it to pass on the older equipment. The move was announced in a letter signed by the countries' defense ministers, Ivan Anusic and Boris Pistorius. The Croatian Defense Minsitry said that the value of the older material being sent to Ukraine would be deducted from the purchasing price for the new tanks. "The added value of this purchase model is the help for Ukraine in their fight against Russian aggression," the ministry said in a statement. Deutsche Welle Iranian state media reported that Jamshid Sharmahd was executed on Monday after being convicted last year. Sharmahd was sentenced to death in February 2023 following a conviction by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Court on charges linked to his involvement in a deadly 2008 attack on a mosque in Shiraz that killed 14 people. However, the formal conviction in Iran was for the much more vague Iranian criminal offense of spreading "corruption on Earth," a catch-all phrase the Islamic regime uses for an array of purported crimes, often related to religious values. Iranian media including the legal news site Mizan reported that the execution took place on Monday morning. Iran had also accused him of being in contact with "FBI and CIA officers" and of having "attempted to contact Israeli Mossad agents." The Guardian EU Thousands of Georgians have taken to the streets in the capital, Tbilisi, to rally against the results of a contested weekend parliamentary election in which the increasingly anti-western governing party was declared victorious amid reports of irregularities and voter intimidation. The demonstration outside the parliament in the city centre was organised by the country’s pro-western opposition, which has refused to concede defeat and has accused the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party of election rigging. The pro-western Georgian president, Salome Zourabichvili, whose role is largely ceremonial, said on Sunday she did not recognise the official results and claimed the country had fallen victim to a “Russian special operation” aimed at pulling it back into Moscow’s orbit and derailing its plan to join the European Union “They stole your vote and tried to steal your future. But no one has the right to do that, and you will not allow it,” Zourabichvili told the crowd on Monday, who waved EU and Georgian flags. The Guardian UK The budget will revive a “broken but not beaten” NHS, Labour ministers have said, with billions of pounds of funding to be announced in an effort to cut record waiting lists. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said measures to be announced on Wednesday would “end the neglect” of the health service, delivering more surgical hubs and radiotherapy machines in a drive to lay on an extra 40,000 appointments a week. The government is expected to deliver a boost of at least 4% to NHS annual funding, sources have previously told the Guardian, which could translate to a cash injection of about £7bn for the health budget in England. In a speech on Monday to underline how steep tax rises would fund public spending, Keir Starmer said this would be the biggest budget of the next five years, with the toughest decisions, to set the course for the whole parliament. The Guardian International The number of kindergartens in China fell by more than 5% last year, the second year in a row that preschool institutions were in decline, reflecting the country’s falling birthrate. In 2023, there were 274,400 kindergartens across China, down from 289,200 in 2022, according to a Ministry of Education statistical bulletin published last week. China is grappling with a falling birthrate and an ageing population , related trends that are causing a headache for policymakers who have tried various measures to encourage people to have more children, with limited success. The number of children enrolled in kindergartens also fell. In 2023 there were 40.9 million children in preschool education, according to the government’s figures, a decrease of more than 11% from the previous year. Uncharted Blue Billionaires are fighting to throw away democracy to protect their biggest, most expensive, and most beloved toys. On Friday, it was revealed that billionaire owner Jeff Bezos had blocked The Washington Post editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. On Sunday, Elon Musk appeared at Donald Trump's Madison Square Garden festival of hate and racism to declare himself "dark gothic MAGA" while wearing a hat emblazoned with the MAGA logo using a font closely connected to the Nazis. The reason the #1 and #3 people on the list of the world's wealthiest are making a show of obeisance to Trump in the campaign's closing days is almost certainly the same for both men: It's about rockets. Everything that happens in space has an impact on Earth. Sometimes that means you get GPS to help you navigate to an obscure address. Or you get all the computer chips, new materials, and medical improvements that spilled into the economy following the Apollo program. x Seen in PA. Love it. pic.twitter.com/HXxKw04row — Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) October 27, 2024 [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/28/2280462/-Overnight-News-Digest-Proud-Boys-founder-We-want-to-make-America-to-hate-again?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&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/