Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors jlms qkw, maggiejean, wader, rfall, and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal and Oke. The guest editor is annetteboardman.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments. Also, please visit Magnifico's diary Frustrated Obama "seriously considering" total U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan
BBC
Egypt's interim leader has expressed sorrow over the deaths of at least 51 people near a barracks in Cairo, urging restraint amid ongoing unrest.
Adly Mansour also said he had ordered an investigation into the deaths.
The Muslim Brotherhood says its members were fired on as they staged a sit-in for ousted President Mohammad Morsi, while the army said it had responded to an armed provocation.
The Brotherhood's political wing meanwhile called for an "uprising".
The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) - which took nearly half the seats in historic parliamentary elections held in late 2011 and early 2012 - urged Egyptians to revolt against "those trying to steal their revolution with tanks".
Spiegel Online
Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Egyptian politician Mohamed ElBaradei believes last week's military intervention in Egypt was necessary. In an interview with SPIEGEL he explains why and argues that deposed president Mohammed Morsi was bad for the country.
SPIEGEL: Mr. ElBaradei, you opposed the authoritarian rule of former President Hosni Mubarak. Now, it appears that you will play a significant role in the interim government put in place after military leaders overthrew the democratically elected president of Egypt. Should a Nobel Peace Prize laureate be part of such a coup?
ElBaradei: Let me make one thing clear: This was not a coup. More than 20 million people took to the streets because the situation was no longer acceptable. Without Morsi's removal from office, we would have been headed toward a fascist state, or there would have been a civil war. It was a painful decision. It was outside the legal framework, but we had no other choice.
The Guardian
Egyptians are braced for new violence after at least 51 supporters of the deposed president Mohamed Morsi were killed by security forces in what the Muslim Brotherhood condemned as a massacre but the military insisted was the result of an armed attack on a Cairo barracks.
The country's single bloodiest incident in over a year took place outside a Republican Guard officers' club where Morsi is rumoured to be in detention. The Brotherhood said its people were attacked during morning prayers but the army said an attempt had been made by "a terrorist group" to storm the heavily guarded building. Emergency services confirmed 435 people were injured.
Egypt's interim presidency announced a judicial investigation into the killings but that did not appease angry crowds who were still massing as night fell at the nearby Rabaa al-Adwiya mosque, a focal point for pro-Morsi protests. The US said it was "deeply concerned" and called on Egypt's military to "exercise maximum restraint".
Reuters
The pilot of the Asiana plane that crashed at San Francisco International Airport was still in training for the Boeing 777 when he attempted to land the aircraft under supervision on Saturday, the South Korean airline said.
Lee Kang-kuk was the second most junior pilot of four on board the Asiana Airlines plane. He had 43 hours of experience flying the long-range jet, the airline said on Monday.
The plane's crew tried to abort the descent less than two seconds before it hit a seawall on the landing approach to the airport, bounced along the tarmac and burst into flames.
SF Gate
(07-08) 17:48 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- It wasn't just luck that saved all but two of the 307 passengers aboard Asiana Airlines Flight 214, aviation safety experts said Monday.
It also took Federal Aviation Administration mandates from the late 1980s that forced manufacturers to bolster seat strength to withstand traumatic force and to line cabins with fire-resistant materials to stall fires.
"If this had happened before then," said Michael Barr, a senior instructor at the Aviation Safety School at the University of Southern California, "the inside of that plane would have looked like a jigsaw puzzle dropped from a second-floor window."
Instead, photos released by the National Transportation Safety Board show that rows of seats inside the Boeing 777 remained mostly intact, which allowed passengers to unbuckle and flee toward emergency exits.
The fire that followed may have been delayed just long enough to give crew members and rescue workers time to evacuate those who were stuck, Barr said.
"A few seconds here and there adds up," he said. "It's the difference between saving lives."
NY Times
For three weeks, they would have seen America through the sunny lens of a Southern California summer camp: learning about American customs and English idioms in the mornings, visiting local theme parks in the afternoons and touring Stanford University and the Google campus on the weekends.
To see it all, the Chinese teenagers from Zhejiang Province had to fly through Seoul, South Korea, and into San Francisco International Airport, where their plane clipped the edge of the runway, skidded and burst into flames. Two of the students were left dead on the tarmac — the only fatalities — as their classmates fled the burning aircraft.
NPR
If the proliferation of summer reading lists is any indication, summer is prime time for recreational reading, whether it's fiction or non.
NPR Books is well into a special series on summer books for 2013. Philosophy Talk, a Bay Area philosophy show (think Car Talk, but where the problems tackled are more conceptual than mechanical), offers a list of "philosophically-rich summer reading," and it isn't all Kant and Hume (though they're recommended, too). You'll find additional offerings at Publisher's Weekly, Goodreads, Huffington Post, the LA Times and Slate.com, to name just a few.
How do you decide which books to read for leisure? And what, if anything, do your reading preferences reveal about the kind of person you are?
Curious about these questions, I decided to spend some time on Google Scholar, where I managed to dig up three studies investigating the relationship between adults' recreational reading preferences and their personalities. The studies varied in how they carved up literary genres and other kinds of reading material, but they all measured personality along five dimensions known as the "Big Five," usually referred to as openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
The Guardian
Islamic community leaders are calling on the Obama administration to rethink its policy of force-feeding hunger-striking detainees in Guantánamo during the month-long fast of Ramadan that begins on Monday.
The US government has said that barring "unforeseen emergency or operational issues" it will respect the daylight fast by trying only to force feed 45 detainees at night. Muslim groups say that by refusing to suspend the practice during Ramadan the US is adding insult to injury.
"We believe it's wrong to force feed at any time but it is particularly upsetting to do it through Ramadan," said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman of the largest US Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, the Council On American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He said the situation was Kafkaesque: "It's not just a religious issue, it's also a human rights issue in violation of international norms and medical ethics."
The Guardian
BP is being forced to pay inflated and fictitious claims to businesses because of the way a court-appointed administrator is making payments from a legal settlement, following the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the company's attorney said on Monday.
Ted Olson made the arguments in a packed courtroom before a three-judge panel of the 5th US circuit court of appeals. A lower court has already refused to block payments to businesses that claim the spill cost them money.
At stake are billions of dollars in settlement payments, stemming from the blowout of BP's Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, which killed 11 people and caused an environmental disaster.
Samuel Issacharoff, an attorney for Gulf Coast businesses and residents, argued the oil company was aware of the settlement terms and the administrator's methods. He questioned whether the appeals court has the authority to change that agreement.
"There is no order of the lower court that is capable of being reviewed by this court," Issacharoff said.
The Guardian
Defence lawyers acting for Bradley Manning, the US soldier who fed a trove of state secrets to WikiLeaks, have called for several of the 22 counts against him to be dismissed, including the most serious charge that he "aided the enemy".
Manning's lead lawyer, the civilian attorney David Coombs, has filed four motions with the military court in Fort Meade, Maryland, asking the judge to drop several charges because of lack of evidence. In addition to aiding the enemy, the relevant counts include the allegation that Manning stole or purloined US property in the form of unauthorised intelligence drawn from Afghan and Iraq warlogs, Guantánamo detainee files and hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables from embassies around the world.
Coombs has also filed a motion to dismiss the allegation that Manning violated section 1030 of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by "knowingly exceeding authorised access" on a secret military network and transmitting documents to WikiLeaks, "with reason to believe that such information so obtained could be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation".
LA Times
A former Amtrak clerk who fled after being convicted of disability and insurance fraud in January has been apprehended in Mexico, the San Diego County district attorney's office said Monday.
Wanda Lee Ann Podgurski, 60, had taunted authorities after she disappeared, including a tweet thought to be directed at D.A. Bonnie Dumanis: "Catch me if you can."
Podgurski was arrested Thursday in Rosarito by the Fugitive Task Force. The case, and taunting tweet, had been turned over to the U.S. Marshal and the Computer and Technology Crime High-Tech Response Team, authorities said.
She was arraigned Monday in San Diego Superior Court on a charge of failing to appear while on bail.
“The defendant in this case was brazen in both the large-scale fraud she committed and the way she mocked the criminal justice system,” said Dumanis.
BBC
Dangerous conditions are hampering the search for 40 people missing after a runaway crude oil train blew up in a Quebec town, killing five.
Fire crews were unable to search Lac-Megantic overnight because dozens of tanker wagons are strewn across the site after the blast early on Saturday.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said the place looked like "a warzone" as he toured the area on Sunday.
At least 30 buildings were incinerated by the fireball.
"It's an area that is still extremely risky," police spokesman Benoit Richard said on Monday. "The fire service decided they could not allow us to go there for security reasons. We'll see what we can do today."
'Nightmare'
Many of those missing were believed to have been drinking at a popular downtown bar when the explosions occurred, he added.
Anne-Julie Huot, 27, said at least 25 people she knows are still missing
Reuters
Bolivia has demanded that the ambassadors from France, Spain, Portugal and Italy inform the government on Monday why they thought former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden was on President Evo Morales' flight from Moscow last week.
Bolivia says the four countries banned Morales' plane from their airspace on suspicions he was transporting Snowden to Bolivia in defiance of Washington, which wants the fugitive returned home to face espionage charges.
Outraged, Bolivia is now calling the incident an act of "state terrorism" by the United States and its allies against Morales, an outspoken critic of U.S. policies.
Reuters
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy made his first political appearance since losing power, staging an appeal to hundreds of conservative lawmakers on Monday to help save the UMP party from financial ruin.
Greeted by a mass of fans as he arrived at UMP headquarters, Sarkozy called for donations to prop up the party after France's top legal body ruled last week that it overshot spending limits on his failed 2012 re-election campaign and must repay 11 million euros ($14.15 million) in state subsidies.
Spiegel Online
In an interview conducted using encrypted e-mails, whistleblower Edward Snowden discusses the power of the NSA, how it is "in bed together with the Germans" and the vast scope of Internet spying conducted by the United States and Britain.
Shortly before he became a household name around the world as a whistleblower, Edward Snowden answered a comprehensive list of questions. They originated from Jacob Appelbaum, 30, a developer of encryption and security software. Appelbaum provides training to international human rights groups and journalists on how to use the Internet anonymously.
BBC
Five men have been rescued in an Indonesian national park after spending five days trapped in trees surrounded by Sumatran tigers, officials say.
Dozens of rescuers, including police, arrived at the Mount Leuser National Park on Sumatra Island to help the men.
They moved in after tamers managed to drive the tigers away, reports say.
Several tigers attacked the group on Thursday after they accidentally killed a tiger cub. A sixth man died in the initial incident.
Andi Basrul, head of the national park, said the survivors were being transported to the nearest village, which normally takes six hours on foot.
BBC
Pope Francis has said Mass for migrants on Italy's tiny island of Lampedusa, condemning the "global indifference" to their plight.
On arrival, he threw a wreath in the sea in memory of the many people who have drowned trying to reach Europe.
A small boat carrying 166 Africans - reportedly Eritreans - arrived at Lampedusa's port just hours before the Pope's plane touched down.
The island is struggling to cope with thousands of illegal migrants.
Lampedusa, about 80 miles (120km) from Tunisia, is one of the nearest gateways to Europe for Africans fleeing poverty and conflict.
ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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NPR
If you're having chest pain, your doctor can test you for a heart attack. If you're having hip pain, your doctor could test for osteoarthritis.
But what if you're depressed? Or anxious? Currently there are no physical tests for most disorders that affect the mind. Lab tests like these could transform the field of mental illness. So far efforts to come up with biomarkers for common mental health disorders have proved largely fruitless.
That doesn't stop people from trying. Doctors are looking to create them, and patients are taking them, too, even though they know that existing biomarkers — for Alzheimer's disease, for instance — have serious limitations.
Six years ago, Robin Jones of Menlo Park, Calif., found himself in a parking lot. He had no idea where his car was. That was unlike him. A 67-year-old scientist who worked on nuclear energy plants, he was good with details. "It was, you know, I can't believe this," Jones says now. "I can always remember where the car is."
At work, he had a hard time finding the right words. He'd come home and tell his wife, Anne, "Something's different."
NPR
The U.S. and EU officials begin talks Monday on an ambitious free-trade agreement aimed at generating billions of dollars of new trade. But negotiators must overcome barriers created by cultural and philosophical differences over sectors like agriculture. In Europe the cultivation of genetically modified crops is banned, while in the U.S., they are a central part of food production. NPR's Jackie Northam visited a farm in Delaware and NPR's Eleanor Beardsley one in Burgundy, France, to look at those deep-seated differences. We hear from Jackie first.
A ferocious noon sun beats down on Richard Wilkins as he traverses long rows of corn at his farm in Greenwood, Del. The tall, healthy stalks bow slightly to a gentle breeze that does little to ease the heat. He's expecting a relatively good corn yield this year. He first started farming more than 40 years ago. He began planting genetically modified crops - corn, soybeans, alfalfa - in the mid-1990s. Since then, Wilkins has become a true believer, he calls them genetically enhanced crops.
"This is an advancement in science that's good for mankind, it's good for the planet," he says. "It's something that myself as a farmer, ecologist, environmentalist, I've embraced it as being a better way for us to grow our food."
NPR
We've been following the case of Justin Carter, the Texas teen who's been jailed near San Antonio since February. It started when he posted a Facebook message saying he would go "shoot up a kindergarten." Austin Police arrested him and seized his computer and a grand jury indicted him in April on a charge of making a terroristic threat. Because a judge set bail at $500,000, the 19-year-old can't get out to await trial.
"He's really sorry," said Jack Carter, Justin's father. "He just got caught up in the moment ... and didn't think about the implications."
CNET
When Jimmy Iovine, the co-founder and CEO of Beats Electronics, launches his much-anticipated subscription music service in the coming months, he wants to do so with some big marketing muscle help from AT&T.
In recent weeks, Iovine has been in talks with top execs from the major music labels and AT&T, according to people familiar with the talks. The goal, sources say, is to bundle Beats' upcoming service, called Daisy, with AT&T data plans as a way to gain a big audience quickly.
The potential partners are in the early stages of working out the details, sources say.
The talks could fall apart or end up involving a different carrier. Such a bundling would likely offer consumers a free period of music access with the goal of converting them to paying subscribers. On the table now, sources say, is how much free music to offer and who would eat the costs.
Spokespeople for AT&T and Beats declined to comment.
Striking a deal with AT&T could give Beats a big boost as it tries to take on a range of competitors and defy the odds of creating an economically viable digital music business.
Daisy will be competing not just against Spotify and smaller players, such as Deezer and Rdio, but also against bigger entrants now getting into the subscription music business. In May, Google launched Google Music "All Access." The company also is working on a service tied to YouTube that it plans to release later this summer, sources say.
CNET
Apple's App Store turns five this week, which might be why some of the marketplace's popular applications are now available for free.
Apple's App Store has started offering several popular applications, including Infinity Blade II and Tiny Wings, for free. Traktor DJ, a platform for pro DJs, typically costs $19.99. As of this writing, it's available for free. Many of the other suddenly-free apps sold previously for a few bucks.
So, what's happening? The Verge, which was first to report on the free apps, argues that it might be an early promotion in anticipation of the App Store's five-year anniversary. The marketplace opened on July 10, 2008.