Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Man Oh Man, rfall, and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw. The guest editor is annetteboardman.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
DW
Manger square, the area surrounding the Church of Nativity, where Christians believe Jesus Christ was born, is usually bustling and local businesses do their best trade of the year. But this week they are reflecting on how to turn around a stagnant economy. One that hasn't been helped by the recent snow storm - the largest in the region since 1953.
An oversized artificial Christmas tree, around 55 feet (16.7 meters), that was made in China stands beside the Church of Nativity, covered in shiny red baubles with a large metal star at its top. The decorated tree is just steps away from the Omar Mosque.
Nabil Giacaman, 30, a Christian, helps his father Issa in the family shop, Christmas House, which sells holiday-themed ornaments and nativity scenes carved from local olive wood.
He said local businesses are doing well, despite the setback posed when the municipality set up an outdoor Christmas market directly outside their shops, taking business away.
Reuters
U.S. consumers shopped less on the final weekend before Christmas despite deeper discounts, the latest sign of how difficult a season this is turning out to be for retailers.
Shoppers also showed signs they will do more of their spending after December 25 than they did in the same period last year in the hopes of snagging even more deals.
Analytics firm RetailNext estimated on Sunday that U.S. retail sales fell by a mid-single-digit percentage at brick-and-mortar stores on Friday and Saturday, two of the four most important shopping days of the season, compared with the same days last year.
That does not include online sales, which have been strong.
The number of visits to stores fell 7 percent on Friday and Saturday, RetailNext said.
"Retailers recognize that consumers will wait as long as they need to," said Charles O'Shea, senior analyst at Moody's Investors Service.
Only two-thirds of Americans are all or almost finished with their Christmas shopping, according to a survey by consumer research firm America's Research Group and Inmar.
NPR
You might not expect "Santa's Helper" to be a career-altering gig, but for David Sedaris, it changed everything. The writer and humorist spent a season working at Macy's as a department store elf. He described his short tenure as Crumpet the Elf in "The Santaland Diaries," an essay that he read on Morning Edition in 1992.
Instantly, a classic was born. Sedaris' reading has become an NPR holiday tradition. Click the "Listen" link above to hear Sedaris read his tale.
NPR
If you're like me, you'll be spending Christmas in the traditional manner of atheist Jews married to atheist Christians hosting their jet-lagged Australian in-laws while raising a 3-year-old who likes to bake: by making vegan mince pies and trying to squeeze in some work here and there.
OK, so none of you are like me.
But if I did celebrate Christmas, I would probably be tempted to geek it up a bit. So, with that in mind, here are three ideas for a scientifically-informed Christmas.
First, are you tired of the standard recital of "'Twas the night before Christmas?" Spice up your Christmas Eve with this creative version by Josh Rosenau and Glenn Branch of the National Center for Science Education, which commemorates the 8th anniversary of the Kitzmiller v. Dover ruling that established the unconstitutionality of teaching Intelligent Design in public schools:
New York Times
It might take a miracle from the North Pole for video game fans to get their wish this season.
New game consoles from Sony and Microsoft are sold out in many stores, with Sony’s less expensive PlayStation 4 proving to be especially difficult for shoppers to find. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One had stronger sales during their first two weeks on the market — more than two million each — than any previous game console, according to DFC Intelligence, a game research firm in San Diego.
Reuters
Consumer sentiment hit a five-month high heading into the end of the year and spending notched its strongest month since the summer, the latest signs of sustained vigor in the economy that are fostering hopes of a strong 2014.
Consumer spending rose in November at the fastest pace since June and an upbeat sentiment reading for December suggests consumers will keep shopping despite tepid income growth.
"Next year is shaping up to be the better tomorrow we have wanted to see ever since the recession ended almost five years ago," said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ in New York.
DW
The Fed has been watching over the dollar for a 100 years. The decisions of the most powerful reserve bank in the world can inspire or shake the global economy. Amid the celebrations, there's also a chorus of boos.
It radiates power, the white and heavily guarded palace, not far from the White House and the Treasury Department. The high and dark windows do not allow a view inside - if any tourists or locals actually cared to take a look.
The people working are chauffeured straight into the underground parking. They are the guardians of the dollar.
For many people in Washington the building is a mystery. "I have no clue," said a passerby."I have no idea what that is." He's not the only one. Only a few people seem to notice the thin, elegant lettering on the marble of the building. "This is the Federal Reserve Bank," said one man. "Isn't Bernanke working here?" A woman agrees with him. "It is the Central Bank for the US. Ben Bernanke is its current boss," she said. "It regulates the monetary policy," says another.
It's been doing that for the past 100 years. But the birthday celebrations for the most powerful central bank in the world have lost some of their bluster.
DW
Andrea Prasow: Congress has spent the last few years trying to make it harder to close Guantanamo. But for the first time they have actually cut back on the restrictions they had imposed on the administration.
The administration has always had the ability to close Guantanamo. But these restrictions served as a serious hurdle. And it's a promising sign that they are being eased.
What is going to change now and what does this mean for the detainees? Can many of them hope to return home soon?
I hope it means that. There are 158 detainees in Guantanamo right now. Seventy-nine of them were identified almost four years ago as eligible for transfer - people who were supposed to be allowed to go home. A handful of them can't return to their home countries, so they need to be resettled in third countries.
But these restrictions have been used by the Obama administration as a way to delay transferring these men. I hope the change in the congressional language will allow many more to go home.
McClatchy DC
WASHINGTON — “To-night I have been wandering awhile in the Capitol, which is all lit up,” wrote poet Walt Whitman in 1865.
“The illuminated rotunda looks fine. I like to stand aside and look a long, long while, up at the dome; it comforts me somehow.”
It still comforts America.
But while you’d never know it to look at it, the Capitol Dome is slowly, gently crumbling.
As a result, Washington’s most iconic symbol is undergoing a 21st century-style facelift. Soon, it’ll look like a high-tech version of the planet Saturn, ringed by softly lighted scaffolding. Workers will be painstakingly patching hundreds of cracks, scraping off the rust and getting the lead out. The $59.5 million project aims to have the dome repaired and refreshed in time for the inauguration of the next president on Jan. 20, 2017.
In the meantime, no one is in danger of being struck by a falling ornamental iron flower from the dome. “The Capitol is in great structural condition,” said Stephen Ayers, the architect of the Capitol.
Al Jazeera America
WASHINGTON — The takeaway from 2013: Your government has gotten eerily good at watching you. Serving you, on the other hand, seems to be an impossibly tall order for lawmakers whose ability to govern has atrophied.
The powers in the nation’s capital can’t be blamed for everything, but close observers of the U.S. political system agree we’re at a low point and are likely to remain there for the foreseeable future, given the polarization, the historic unproductivity, the bickering (no canings, though, as an Al Jazeera reader pointed out recently), the bottom-scraping approval ratings.
Perhaps the biggest cause for alarm is elected officials’ inability to tackle urgent challenges: an unemployment rate that stands at 7 percent, an anemic recovery that has been particularly slow to extend to minorities and other vulnerable populations, the steady decline of workers’ wages, growing income inequality, a broken immigration system, low trust in public institutions, not to mention the unmet challenges of man-made climate change.
The year opened as the country reeled from a horror show: Adam Lanza, a teenager with a history of mental illness, walked into an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., in late December 2012 and opened fire, killing 20 schoolchildren and six teachers. Although the faces of the 26 slain and their grieving families lit up television screens for months, lawmakers ultimately decided not to act. Modest legislation to expand background checks failed in the Senate, as the gun-rights lobby outspent gun-control groups $12.2 million to $1.6 million in the first half of 2013, according to the nonpartisan Sunlight Foundation. A running tally by Slate estimates that more than 33,000 people have been killed by guns since the massacre.
Bloomberg News
The amount of loans to the riskiest U.S. companies ballooned to a record this year, propelled by unprecedented demand for floating-rate debt that offers protection from rising interest rates.
The market for junk-rated loans increased to $683 billion, exceeding the 2008 peak of $596 billion, according to Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ Leveraged Commentary and Data. The $130 billion surge this year was fueled by borrowings that don’t include typical lender protections such as limits on leverage.
Loans, which suffered the biggest losses in the fixed-income market during the financial crisis, staged a comeback as investors funneled a record $64.4 billion into funds that buy the debt in anticipation the Federal Reserve would start unwinding its bond buying that’s suppressed borrowing costs. The demand has enabled companies take on more debt for shareholder rewards, prompting regulators to warn that the excesses which contributed to the credit crisis may be creeping back.
NPR
Update at 1:22 p.m. ET. Gay Marriages Will Continue:
A federal judge on Monday refused to set aside a ruling that invalidated Utah's ban on gay marriage.
That means same-sex couples will be able to continue to receive marriage licenses across the state, even though the ruling will be appealed before a higher court.
Utah had asked U.S. District Court judge Robert Shelby for an emergency stay of the ruling he issued on Friday. The state argued that gay marriages should be put on hold, while the state appealed.
The Salt Lake Tribune reports:
"Assist. Utah Attorney General Philip Lott had argued Monday that court should impose a stay because the judge's order last week caught everyone by surprise and disrupted the status quo. And because the state will otherwise appeal, and all same-sex marriage licenses issued would be null and void, if the decision is overturned.
"Lott said there was 'a cloud of uncertainty over the same-sex marriages currently taking place.'
"'No one wins, if Utah's marriage laws are changed back and forth," he argued. "The status quo should remain in tact.'
"'There is a great irony in the fact that for Utah to be allowed to become a state, it was compelled by the federal government to define marriage as a union between one man and one woman.'"
Reuters
South Sudan's government said on Monday it will start a major offensive to retake two strategic towns controlled by rebels loyal to former Vice President Riek Machar, deepening fears that the conflict is provoking broader ethnic bloodletting.
Western powers and east African states, which want to prevent the fighting from destabilizing a fragile African region, have tried to mediate between Machar, who hails from the Nuer tribe, and President Salva Kiir, a Dinka.
But so far their efforts have been fruitless as clashes which started in Juba on December 15 enter their second week, reaching the country's vital oil fields and destabilizing a state which won independence from Sudan only in 2011.
Hundreds of people have been killed, with reports of summary executions and ethnically-targeted killings.
Information Minister Michael Makuei said Machar has not come to the negotiating table so the government plans to attack and retake Jonglei State capital Bor as well as Bentiu town, the capital of oil-producing Unity State.
McClatchy DC
BERLIN — Former Russian oligarch, then celebrity political prisoner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky addressed international media here Sunday from a cramped room at a museum dedicated to those who tried, and often died while failing, to escape the old authoritarian rule that many believe is evident once again today in Russia.
Khodorkovsky, the former owner of oil-giant Yukos (Russia’s second largest business), repeatedly said he had only had 36 hours to reacquaint with this family after a decade of jail and therefore had not had time to make any detailed plans. He did say however that his goals for the future do not necessarily contain a return to Russia, that he will stay out of politics and the world of power, and even that he didn’t expect to return to the business world.
Al Jazeera America
When William Lindsey was a theology professor at a Catholic college in the 1980s, he taught about a 1986 pastoral letter written by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, “Economic Justice for All.” In it, the bishops called on Catholics to address economic inequality, noting “recent Catholic social thought regards the task of overcoming these patterns of exclusion and powerlessness as a most basic demand of justice.”
Since then, though, “they’ve acted for almost two decades like none of that was said in 1986,” he recently told Al Jazeera. “It’s as though the document stopped existing.”
Economic justice, Lindsey said, was “taken off the table” by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI.
Pope Francis, though, “seems to be resurrecting a lot of this discourse.”
Francis’ apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium, or “The Joy of the Gospel,” published on Nov. 24, sparked worldwide attention largely because of its critique of trickle-down theories of economics. Francis contended that these ideologies amount to “a crude and naive trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting.”
Al Jazeera America
More than one in five people worldwide live in extreme poverty – defined by the World Bank as living on less than $1.25 per day – according to self-reported household income data released by Gallup on Monday.
Analyzing data from 131 countries compiled between 2006 and 2012, Gallup found that a third of respondents get by on less than $2 per day – sobering news for the World Bank, which has declared an ambitious goal of slashing the global extreme poverty rate to just 3 percent by 2030.
The rate is dramatically higher than the world average in sub-Saharan Africa, where 54% of respondents from 27 countries live in extreme poverty. In Burundi and Liberia, the proportion is almost 90 percent.
Analysts note that Gallup employed a unique methodology using self-reported income rather than the laborious calculations of daily consumption – calories consumed, utility costs – used by the World Bank.
“It’s a much cruder attempt to obtain these numbers, and yet the results seem broadly in the same range,” said Laurence Chandy, a Fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institute. “So it seems that we can assume rough and ready estimates through a much less laborious process.”
Spiegel Online
Hildebrand Gurlitt, the man who assembled the astounding art collection recently discovered in a Munich apartment, was more deeply involved in the trade of looted artworks than had been previously assumed. He also profited from Nazi injustices after the war.
The Americans moved in from the west around noon. There were two tanks, followed by infantry soldiers, their weapons at the ready.
There are people in Aschbach, a village in the Upper Franconia region of Bavaria, who remember April 14, 1945 very clearly. They were children then, helping out in the fields as the soldiers marched past. They remember that some of the men had dark skin and gave them chewing gum.
The Guardian
After nearly two years in prison for singing a song about Vladimir Putin in Moscow's main cathedral, the women of Pussy Riot are no less defiant. Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova have walked free from prison , and pledged to devote their energies to changing the political system in Russia and improving conditions inside its prisons.
Bareheaded despite the -25C cold, Tolokonnikova walked out of prison in the eastern city of Krasnoyarsk, flashing a victory sign to reporters waiting outside. "How do you like our Siberian weather here?" she asked, before shouting "Russia without Putin!"
Speaking to the Guardian by telephone shortly after her release from prison in the city of Nizhny Novgorod, Alyokhina said that the pair – who were released as part of a wide-ranging amnesty announced last week – now plan to launch a project which will fight for the rights of inmates in the Russian prison system.
"We will be creating very special, colourful and powerful programmes to defend other innocent women in Russian prisons, who are being turned into slaves right now," Alyokhina said, adding that she planned to fly to Siberia in order to meet up with her band mate.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Al Jazeera America
LAWRENCE, Kan. — It's no longer as corny as Kansas in August. Now it's cotton, okra and sorghum.
The hotter summers and ongoing drought conditions in the Midwest are forcing farmers here to forgo the plants of their ancestors and look down south for inspiration.
"We kept trying to grow sustainable tomatoes, but it was so hot that the plants got stressed and they wouldn’t produce fruit," said Courtney Skeeba, who started Homestead Ranch in the small town of Lecompton, Kan., about a decade ago. "By the end of the season, when it did get wetter and cooler, it was too late. So that’s when we started planting okra."
She's not the only one. It's that time of year when farmers are looking back at the summer past and planning for planting ahead. And what they see is a lot of hot and a lot of dry. That's why okra, once a plant squarely rooted in Southern cooking, is headed north — way north. Farmers in Wisconsin are planting okra as well.
Cary Rivard, a fruit and vegetable specialist at the Kansas State Horticulture Research and Extension Center in Olathe, said some growers are producing 1,200 pounds of okra a week to sell at local stores in Kansas City.
Spiegel Online
Has the climate change "brand" been ruined? Scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson says that the problem with trying to raise awareness about global warming is that it's the most boring subject on earth.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Dr. Olson, you say you've figured out the most boring subject humanity has ever confronted: global warming. So I have to ask, I have studied the subject and ...
Randy Olson: OK, this is probably going to be the most boring interview I've ever done. And I probably shouldn't even do it because it's kind of a losing proposition, but I will because I think this issue of climate change is truly important, and that it is a major tragedy how poorly it's been handled.
The Guardian
has announced a lucrative deal that ensures iPhones will be available in China on the the world's largest mobile network.
The multi-year agreement with China Mobile had been expected but was finally announced on Sunday.
It means the phone will be available to more than 760 million subscribers to China Mobile, a huge boost to the already successful brand. Even before the deal, Apple's iPhone 5S was a dramatic hit in China, comprising 12% of smartphone sales in the country during October, according to market research company Counterpoint.
Some analysts predict up to 20m iPhones could be sold in the first year of the deal.
Xi Guohua, the chairman of China Mobile, said: "Apple's iPhone is very much loved by millions of customers around the world. We know there are many China Mobile customers and potential new customers who are anxiously awaiting the incredible combination of iPhone on China Mobile's leading network. We are delighted that iPhone on China Mobile will support our 4G and 3G networks."
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple said: "Apple has enormous respect for China Mobile and we are excited to begin working together.
NPR
For Matthew and Brianne Wojtesta, it all started about a week after the birth of their daughter Vera. Matthew was picking up his son from kindergarten when he got a phone call.
It was their pediatrician, with some shocking news. Vera had been flagged by New York's newborn screening program as possibly having a potentially deadly disease, and would need to go see a neurologist the next day.
Like every state, New York requires that newborns get a small heel prick so that a few drops of blood can be sent to a lab for testing. The idea is to catch health problems that could cause death or disability without early intervention.
But in recent years, patient advocacy groups have been pushing states to adopt mandatory newborn screening for more and more diseases, including ones that have no easy diagnosis or treatment.
One of those is Krabbe disease, a rare and devastating neurological disorder.
In 2006, New York became the first state to screen for Krabbe, and until recently it was the only state to do so. Screening for this disease is expanding, even though some experts say the treatment available doesn't seem to help affected children as much as was initially hoped — and testing can put some families in a kind of fearful limbo.
C/NET
The problem with any Top 10 list is that it's subjective and you're afterwards bound to think up more candidates who deserve consideration in the ranking. We plead guilty on both counts. But as we head into 2014, the following compilation features folks who, each in their own way, are trying to shake up their particular corners of the tech universe. Some will succeed, others will not. This much is clear: Watching how their stories unfold will make for fascinating reading as part of the larger tale of technology, circa 2014.
Anthony Levandowski
The New Yorker beat us to print, but Anthony Levandowski is no longer a secret. He was part of a graduate student team that created the world's first autonomous motorcycle, called the Ghost Rider. Now in the Smithsonian, the Ghost Rider is spearheading Google's driverless-car project. As CNET noted earlier this year, the century-old auto culture is on the verge of radical change, and you can thank Google for where it's headed. Yes, if things work out the way Google intends, these so-called robo-cars will usher in a new era that means the end of driving as we know it. Levandowski figures to be a big part of that revolution.
Glenn Greenwald
Journalist? Activist? Combination of the two? Actually, the moniker doesn't matter anymore. What does matter is the huge impact that Glenn Greenwald has had on our understanding of the extraordinary -- and intrusive -- high-tech intelligence-gathering capability the National Security Agency has built since 2011.
Science Blog
Climate change has not been strongly influenced by variations in heat from the sun, a new scientific study shows.
The findings overturn a widely held scientific view that lengthy periods of warm and cold weather in the past might have been caused by periodic fluctuations in solar activity.
Research examining the causes of climate change in the northern hemisphere over the past 1000 years has shown that until the year 1800, the key driver of periodic changes in climate was volcanic eruptions. These tend to prevent sunlight reaching the Earth, causing cool, drier weather. Since 1900, greenhouse gases have been the primary cause of climate change.
The findings show that periods of low sun activity should not be expected to have a large impact on temperatures on Earth, and are expected to improve scientists’ understanding and help climate forecasting.
MSNBC
By Steve Benen
Stories about credit-card hacks tend to have a dog-bites-man quality – they’re alarmingly common – but the news last week was more striking than most. A data breach at Target exposed as many as 40 million customers between Nov. 27 to Dec. 15, leading to investigations from at least four state Attorneys General and three class-action lawsuits from consumers.
What I wasn’t aware of, however, is that there’s a problem that’s largely unique to the United States that makes these incidents more common here than elsewhere.
That’s in part because U.S. credit and debit cards rely on an easy-to-copy magnetic strip on the back of the card, which stores account information using the same technology as cassette tapes.
“We are using 20th century cards against 21st century hackers,” says Mallory Duncan, general counsel at the National Retail Federation. “The thieves have moved on but the cards have not.”
In most countries outside the U.S., people carry cards that use digital chips to hold account information. The chip generates a unique code every time it’s used. That makes the cards more difficult for criminals to replicate. So difficult that they generally don’t bother.