Welcome to the Overnight News Digest
(graphic by palantir)
The OND is published each night around midnight, Eastern Time.
The originator of OND was Magnifico.
Current Contributors are ScottyUrb, Bentliberal, wader, Oke, rfall, JML9999 and NeonVincent who also serves as chief cat herder.
A lot of the content in this article is no surprise to Daily Kos readers, but at least AP is writing about the Super Pacs:
GOP 'super PACs' buoyed by mega donors in Jan.: (AP) - A pair of "super" political action committees supporting top Republican presidential candidates spent nearly $24 million in January, drawing upon major gifts and repeat donations from wealthy business executives, according to financial reports the groups filed Monday with the government.
The super PACs — Mitt Romney-leaning Restore Our Future and Newt Gingrich-supportive Winning Our Future — raised a combined $17 million last month. That financial strength allowed the groups to hit the airwaves in key primary states with millions of dollars in expensive TV ads.
The groups' fundraising offers a periodic behind-the-scenes glimpse into the identities of the wealthy supporters who will help elect the next president, along with details on how the tens of millions of dollars they donated have been spent this election season. Restore Our Future, which spent $14 million last month, has been boosted by more than two dozen repeat donors. Winning Our Future, which spent $9.7 million, is largely supported by casino mogul Sheldon Adelson and his wife.
And another from the New York Times ...
G.O.P. Campaigns Grow More Dependent on ‘Super PAC’ Aid (NYT) - Weeks of intense campaigning in the early nominating states have left the leading Republican presidential candidates increasingly dependent on millions of dollars spent on their behalf by outside “super PACs,” reports filed with the Federal Election Commission on Monday showed.
Mitt Romney’s campaign spent close to $19 million during January, almost three times as much as the $6.5 million he raised. He ultimately won two states, New Hampshire and Florida, and ended the month with less than $8 million in cash on hand. Newt Gingrich raised nearly as much, $5.6 million, and spent close to $6 million.
Rick Santorum, who enjoyed a surge of grass-roots donations after being declared the victor in Iowa, raised $4.5 million, as did Representative Ron Paul of Texas. The amounts still leave Mr. Romney in the lead, but no longer in a class by himself.
700 gather outside San Quentin for Occupy protest (sfgate) - As many as 700 peaceful Occupy demonstrators gathered outside San Quentin State Prison this afternoon as part of a nationwide effort to call for prison reform ...
Among the reforms protest organizers are calling for are elimination of solitary confinement, a ban on the death penalty and an end to California's "three-strikes" law. The protest was one of about 15 taking place at prisons across the country today.
Lab-grown meat is first step to artificial hamburger (BBC) - Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year.
The aim of the research is to develop a more efficient way of producing meat than rearing animals.
At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%.
"We would gain a tremendous amount in terms of resources," he said.
Professor Post's group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.
Ants remember their enemy's scent (BBC) - Ant colonies - one of nature's most ancient and efficient societies - are able to form a "collective memory" of their enemies, say scientists.
When one ant fights with an intruder from another colony it retains that enemy's odour: passing it on to the rest of the colony.
This enables any of its nest-mates to identify an ant from the offending colony.
UC chancellor raised no objection to baton report (sfgate) - E-mails have surfaced that for the first time reveal UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau was informed on Nov. 9 while traveling that police used batons to forcibly remove an encampment involving hundreds of student Occupy protesters, yet did not call a halt to their use.
The use of force was criticized as excessive not only by students who were hit and are suing the university, but also by faculty and others.
The Nov. 9 protest is under investigation by a campus Police Review Board to determine who authorized use of batons by police, seen on video hitting nonviolent student protesters who had pitched tents in violation of campus policy. The five-member Review Board, convened by Birgeneau in November, is also holding hearings to determine a timeline of events that day and whether police conduct was appropriate.
Higher Crime, Fewer Charges on Indian Land (New York Times) - Indian reservations across the United States have grappled for years with chronic rates of crime higher than all but a handful of the nation’s most violent cities. But the Justice Department, which is responsible for prosecuting the most serious crimes on reservations, files charges in only about half of Indian Country murder investigations and turns down nearly two-thirds of sexual assault cases, according to new federal data.
The country’s 310 Indian reservations have violent crime rates that are more than two and a half times higher than the national average, according to data compiled by the Justice Department. American Indian women are 10 times as likely to be murdered than other Americans. They are raped or sexually assaulted at a rate four times the national average, with more than one in three having either been raped or experienced an attempted rape.
The low rate of prosecutions for these crimes by United States attorneys, who along with agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation generally have jurisdiction for the most serious crimes on reservations, has been a longstanding point of contention for tribes, who say it amounts to a second-class system of justice that encourages law breaking. Prosecutors, however, say they turn down most reservation cases because of a lack of admissible evidence.
...
But tribes say they are rarely told why reservation cases are not pursued by the government.
“One of the basic problems is that not only are they declining to prosecute cases, but we are not getting the reason or notification for the declination,” said Jerry Gardner of the Tribal Law and Policy Institute in West Hollywood, Calif., which works with tribes to develop justice programs. “The federal system takes a long time to make a decision, and when it comes to something like a child sexual assault, the community gets the message that nothing is being done.”
Dead for 32,000 Years, an Arctic Plant Is Revived (nytimes) - Living plants have been generated from the fruit of a little arctic flower, the narrow-leafed campion, that died 32,000 years ago, a team of Russian scientists reports. The fruit was stored by an arctic ground squirrel in its burrow on the tundra of northeastern Siberia and lay permanently frozen until excavated by scientists a few years ago ...
[T]he new claim is supported by a firm radiocarbon date. A similar avenue of inquiry into the deep past, the field of ancient DNA, was at first discredited after claims of retrieving dinosaur DNA proved erroneous, but with improved methods has produced spectacular results like the reconstitution of the Neanderthal genome.
The new report is by a team led by Svetlana Yashina and David Gilichinsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences research center at Pushchino, near Moscow, and appears in Tuesday’s issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
Photo Credit: Svetlana Yashina
In New Book, Ex-Senator Says Fear Clouded Judgment After 9/11 (nytimes) - Russ Feingold always went his own way in the Senate, frequently to the annoyance of his Democratic colleagues. But Mr. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat, was never more alone than on Oct. 11, 2001, when he was the sole opponent to the Patriot Act antiterror law pushed through on a 96-1 vote weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“This was indeed an intimidating time,” Mr. Feingold writes in his new book, “While America Sleeps” (Crown Publishers), his recounting of the historic Congressional period after the Sept. 11 shock through the rise of the Tea Party conservatism that led to the loss of his own Senate seat in November 2010.
Best known as the chief Democratic architect of the campaign finance law, Mr. Feingold assembles a narrative of how the terrorist attacks, the deadly anthrax assaults and, later, the sniper killings of 2002 in the Washington region created a climate of fear that ultimately led not only to the antiterrorism law, but also to the war in Iraq and ugly political attacks. The pleasant Capitol Hill neighborhood that he inhabited became an armed camp reminiscent of another anxious period in American history when civil liberties were at risk.
Settlement Talks Pick Up Ahead of BP Oil Spill Trial (nytimes) - Nearly two years after the oil rig explosion that killed 11 people and spilled millions of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the myriad plaintiffs suing BP and other companies over the disaster are about to get their day in court.
Or not.
With the start of the high-profile trial set for next Monday, and the specter of potential liability that some experts have estimated at $40 billion, BP and other defendants are stepping up negotiations to end the litigation before Judge Carl J. Barbier of Federal District Court picks up his gavel.
“We are ready to settle, if we can do so on fair and reasonable terms,” Robert Dudley, BP’s chief executive, said this month during a conference call about the company’s earnings. “But we are preparing vigorously for trial.”
Syrian forces fire on Damascus protest (Reuters) - Syrian forces opened fire with live ammunition on demonstrators in Damascus overnight, wounding at least four, activists said early Tuesday as unrest continued to spread in the capital.
Demonstrations and clashes with security forces have hit Damascus in the past week, undermining President Bashar al-Assad's argument that an 11-month uprising has been the work of saboteurs and limited mainly to the provinces.
International diplomacy showed no sign of finding a solution, as Western powers and the Arab League prepared a meeting of "Friends of Syria" Friday to pressure Assad to step down, while Russia and China backed Assad's reform plans, derided by Syria's opposition.
"There were hundreds of demonstrators at the main square of Hajar al-Aswad (neighborhood), and suddenly buses of security police and shabbiha (pro-Assad militia) turned up and started firing into the crowd," activist Abu Abdallah told Reuters by telephone.
From yesterday's First Nations News & Views (posted every Sunday afternoon):
'Fighting Sioux' Fight Continues, Rick Santorum Takes Sides
As we reported in the Feb. 12 edition of FNN&V, the NCAA's ban on what it calls "abusive and hostile" nicknames has not ended in North Dakota. There, the use of the "Fighting Sioux" nickname for University of North Dakota athletic teams is now in its sixth year. Last week, the State Board of Education (SBHE) dragged the courts into the dispute, and GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum joined in at a rally in Fargo.
Santorum was at a Feb. 15 campaign stop promoting his candidacy for the March 6 state caucus that will choose 28 delegates for the Republican National Convention. When a man handed him a “Fighting Sioux” hockey jersey, Santorum held it up and said to some cheers, “I sort of like that logo. What do you think?” Had the forum been larger, that question might have drawn a round of boos as well.
The real news came Feb. 13 when the SBHE decided to go to the state supreme court to block a statewide vote in support of a North Dakota law that requires the university to call all its teams the "Fighting Sioux." The board initiated the lawsuit in a 7-1 vote after consultation with Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem. He thinks the law violates the state constitution. While board members see themselves defending constitutional prerogatives, however, nickname supporters who gathered signatures to force the referendum see the board's move as an attempt to silence voters. To overturn the law, four of the five supreme court members must rule it is unconstitutional. Which would render the referendum moot.
Student Challenges NYT Stereotypes About Wind River Reservation
The original story made page one of The New York Times on Feb. 3. It documented what almost seemed to be a reign of terror: brutal homicides, sexual assaults, chaotic law enforcement, broken homes, gangs, drunkenness and drug abuse, shockingly high unemployment even by reservation standards and the poverty to go with it, child abuse, Indian-white tension, an expected life span more than 20 years below the national average, soaring teen pregnancies and a sky-high school drop-out rate.
Willow Pingree
The place? Wind River Indian Reservation in central-west Wyoming, home to some 7500 Northern Arapaho and Eastern Shoshone and 17,000 non-Indians located in some of the nation's most beautiful country. Sacajawea, the Shoshone woman who traveled with the Lewis and Clark expedition is buried there. A portion of the reservation was sold off to non-Indians under the 1906 Burke Act. That provided the land for the largest town within Wind River's boundaries, Riverton, with about 10,000 residents, 90 percent of them non-Indian.
A two-year federal effort begun in 2009 on five of the nation's most crime-plagued reservations reduced violent crimes on four of them. However, even though the effort temporarily increased the number of police officers from six to 37 at Wind River, the crime rate there increased.