Editor’s Note: The Nightshift will be published in abbreviated form for the next couple of weeks due to outside scheduling commitments. Weekend editions will be full-pack, but weekday commentary will be very streamlined.
Press Clippings:
Good Morning, It’s Monday, 24 April 2017, and this is the Morning Edition of The Nightshift: the world’s overnight news feed.
The first round of the French elections are over and two candidates, novice political aspirant Emmanuel Macron (sound familiar?) and right winger Marine Le Pen (another familiar position to Americans), took the top two spots. They will face a runoff to be held on May 7th, just two weeks away, to determine the next leader of France.
This is a big week for the White House. New bills on Trumpcare, Tax Reform, and that Wall are expected to arrive in Congress. There’s also the government funding issue which the White House has decided to tie to the fate of the wall. Hmmmm. Unless this new round of legislation is much better reasoned and detailed than the last round, expect these initiatives to be D.O.A. Trump’s first hundred days are winding down and there’s little chance of much of substance being accomplished but he’s going to “double down” to see if he can’t get something, anything, done. Approval ratings continue to drop to historic lows. As my old tennis coach used to say, “change a losing game”.
In business, Japanese electronics/entertainment giant SONY is reporting its’ best results since 1998. That’s a good thing: we need SONY. SONY is the dominant supplier of most commercial television equipment (SONY 4K HD cameras equipped with CANON lenses is a very, very good combo) and who doesn’t remember how the Walkman enabled us to enjoy music anywhere. American Airlines is dealing with its’ own passenger mis-handling incident and this one is almost as ugly as United’s. This is the week Bill O’Reilly was expected back at Fox News–but he’s not coming back. The other cable news outlets couldn’t be happier; they will take advantage of his absence to build their own audiences.
The Boston Celtics evened their series with the Chicago Bulls at 2-2 and are back in the game in the Eastern Conference NBA playoffs. Houston’s Rocket’s beat the Oklahoma City Thunder to take a 3-1 lead in that series; Oklahoma is lead by fearless, force-of-nature Russell Westbrook, but he can’t do it all by himself. Westbrook had a triple double by the end of the first half–he’s that good. But it wasn’t enough. Steve Kerr, the superb coach of the Golden State Warriors, will miss game 4 of the current Golden State/Portland series and may miss the rest of the playoffs due to complications from back surgery. Kerr is one of the good guys in the game; let’s hope he can recover enough to lead the Warriors–a team he built and coached to greatness–through the NBA playoffs. As Kerr says, do everything you can to avoid back surgery–it never seems to work out, especially for people who are/were very active. And finally, Lionel Messi, the very best player in soccer, scored the winning goal in overtime in the El Clasico soccer match between Barcelona and Real Madrid. Despite being roughed up during the game (Messi had dental surgery after the game), he scored two goals and dominated play.
And that’s it for Monday morning….
Now more than ever, catch up on the news in the rest of the world by reading the front pages of the World’s Greatest newspapers.
Don’t forget that both Politico.com and Bloomberg.com have been added to our go-to news resources.
The International Headlines are all at your fingertips. Have a great week.
The Times (London
Financial Times (UK)
The Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)
The Wall Street Journal (European edition)
Washington Post (Washington, D.C.)
New York Times (New York)
The Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles)
Daily News Egypt (Cairo)
South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)
The Moscow Times (Moscow)
Le Figaro (Paris)
Bloomberg.com (New York)
The Jerusalem Post (Jerusalem)
The Japanese Times (Tokyo)
Sputnik (Moscow)
The Buenas Aires Herald (Buenas Aires)
The Sidney Morning Herald (Sidney)
Deadline Hollywood (Hollywood)
FiveThirtyEight (New York City)
Politico (Washington, DC)
The Fine Print: Embed courtesy of our friends at Getty Images, who have the photographic history of the 20th and 21st century on file. They remain the internet’s go-to source for photos. This visual has not been altered in any way. We thank them for sharing. The Nightshift is a production of Perception Engineering and The Media Bunker. This post is number 1080 for this site. Thanks for reading. Now–catch up on the world.