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 editors are Doctor RJ and annetteboardman.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the OND banner.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Al Jazeera America
Danish police said Monday they have arrested two people on suspicion of aiding a gunman in deadly attacks during the weekend on a synagogue and an event promoting free speech, violence that has shocked a nation proud of its reputation for safety and openness.
The gunman opened fire on a Copenhagen café hosting a free speech debate Saturday, killing one, and later attacked a synagogue, killing a guard. The 22-year-old suspect was later shot dead by police in his neighborhood of Norrebro, a poor and largely immigrant part of the city with a reputation for gang violence.
The café event was attended by Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has received death threats for his drawings of the Prophet Mohammad, and by French Ambassador Francois Zimeray, who likened the shootings to the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris. Vilks and Zimeray were both unharmed.
DW
Denmark's prime minister says there is no evidence to suggest the man who carried out two fatal attacks in Copenhagen over the weekend was part of a wider terrorist network. Two alleged accomplices have been jailed.
"We have no indication at this stage that he was part of a cell, but we will of course in the coming time evaluate our fight against radicalization," Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt said during a press conference on Monday.
She described the weekend attacks on a cultural center and synagogue, which left two people dead, as clear acts of terrorism.
"This is not a conflict between Islam and the West, this is not a conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims. This is a conflict between the core values of our society and violent extremists," Thorning-Schmidt said. "We are not alone in this struggle."
The Guardian
Omar El-Hussein, the 22-year-old Danish man shot dead by police after supposedly carrying out the worst attack on Danish soil for decades, was a petty criminal with a past seemingly full of contradictions. He was a smart student but reportedly had a short fuse and was prone to violence. He was a talented kick-boxer and yet appeared to have suffered from anxiety and used cannabis.
Believed to have been born in Copenhagen to Palestinian parents who left a refugee camp in Jordan to come to Denmark, he spoke fluent Danish and Arabic and, local media reported, was always quick to debate the Palestinian issue.
El-Hussein has been widely named by local media as the Copenhagen gunman. Danish intelligence services have suggested the fatal Copenhagen shooting of a film-maker at a freedom of speech debate and a Jewish security guard at a synagogue may have been a copycat of last month’s Paris attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. If that was the case, El-Hussein would have had to have followed those Paris attacks from a Danish prison, where he was serving a two-year sentence for stabbing a 19-year-old man on Copenhagen’s inner-city train system. He had been released from prison only two weeks before the attacks in Copenhagen this weekend.
BBC
Danish police say a suspected gunman who attacked a free-speech debate and a Copenhagen synagogue was 22, born in Denmark and with a record of violence.
The alleged attacker was shot and killed early on Sunday by police who were monitoring an address in the Norrebro district of the city.
Danish media have named the suspect as Omar El-Hussein.
A film director and a synagogue guard were killed in separate attacks. Five police officers were also injured.
Police believe the gunman was acting alone but they have not confirmed his identity.
The suspect was known to them in connection with criminal gangs and had convictions for violent offences and dealing in weapons.
Reuters
Tens of thousands of Danes gathered at torch-lit memorials around the country on Monday, commemorating victims of deadly attacks on a synagogue and an event promoting free speech that shocked a nation proud of its record of safety and openness.
Singing John Lennon's Imagine, defiant Danes promised to uphold their trademark open society and showed solidarity with the country's Muslim minority after reports the gunman was a Dane with Palestinian roots and a passion for Islamist issues.
The 22-year-old gunman opened fire on a cafe in hosting a free speech debate on Saturday, killing one, and attacked a synagogue, killing a guard. He was later killed in a shootout with police in his neighborhood of Norrebro, a largely immigrant part of the city with a reputation for gang violence.
The Guardian
US authorities are investigating whether some of those responsible for one of the American south’s most notorious mass lynchings are still alive, in an attempt to finally bring prosecutions over the brutal unsolved killings.
FBI agents questioned a man in Georgia who was among several in their 80s and 90s newly named in connection with the Moore’s Ford Bridge lynching of 1946 on a list given to the US Department of Justice by civil rights activists, he told the Guardian.
Speaking at his home in Monroe, 10 miles west of the lynching site, Charlie Peppers denied taking part in the killings of four African Americans who were tied up and shot 60 times by a white mob.
The Guardian
Kayla Mueller was in a detention cell in Syria, face to face with her boyfriend who was posing as her husband. Had she told her captors she was married to Omar Alkhani, she might have been freed from the hands of Islamic State militants, he said. Instead, she denied being his wife.
Alkhani had persuaded a string of people to let him plead for her release, but he left empty-handed. He said he saw Mueller’s face for just a few seconds when guards uncovered it to show it was the American hostage from Prescott, Arizona.
Reuters
Record-breaking cold gripped the Eastern United States on Monday as an icy winter storm crippled the nation's central states before it was expected to barrel toward the mid-Atlantic in time to snarl Tuesday's morning commute.
Heavy snowfall and ice moving from the Southern Plains eastward pounded Missouri, Arkansas, southern Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, the National Weather Service said.
Freezing rain encased Nashville in ice, cancelling flights and closing Interstate 24, according to the Tennessee Department of Transportation.
Even the home of the king of rock 'n' roll - Elvis Presley's Graceland mansion in Memphis - declared a snow day.
NPR
While they're often called political animals, many of America's presidents had a bit of the party animal in them, too.
So says author Brian Abrams. In his new book, Party Like a President: True Tales of Inebriation, Lechery and Mischief from the Oval Office, Abrams chronicles the drinking habits and debauchery of former presidents.
Known as the president who repealed Prohibition, Franklin D. Roosevelt fancied himself the mixologist-in-chief, Abrams says, but many of his colleagues disagreed.
"A lot of his friends and colleagues said that he was an awful bartender," Abrams told NPR's David Greene on Morning Edition. "I think that he really had a fondness for the mixology culture that was born in the Prohibition years."
BBC
The US north-east is reeling from the latest in a series of blizzards, with low temperatures - up to 17C below normal - exacerbated by strong winds.
A fourth major snowstorm in Boston, Massachusetts, made February the snowiest month in the city's history.
Almost 2,000 flights have been cancelled so far, mostly from airports in Boston and New York.
Heavy snow and freezing rain is also forecast further south, in the inland states of Indiana and Kentucky.
The separate weather system developing in that area is expected to travel eastwards this week, bringing further snow and sub-zero temperatures to the north-east.
USA Today
Maybe Saturday Night Live should hold a 40th-anniversary special every year.
Sunday's star-studded spectacular averaged 23.1 million viewers for the three-hour portion that ran in prime time, according to preliminary Nielsen ratings.
The three prime time hours, which featured such renowned SNL stars as Chevy Chase, Tina Fey and Mike Myers, marked the top Sunday entertainment broadcast for NBC in viewers and young adults since the 2004 Golden Globes (23.4 million).
CNN
A Texas arbitration panel gave a $10 million judgment for SCA Promotions in its suit against disgraced American cyclist Lance Armstrong for bonuses it paid for his Tour de France championships.
"We are very pleased with this result," SCA president and founder Bob Hamman said in a statement, per Brent Schrotenboer of USA Today. "It is hard to describe how much harm Lance Armstrong's web of lies caused SCA but this is a good first start towards repairing that damage."
The arbitration panel, which voted 2-1 in SCA's favor, will now turn its ruling over to a judge, who must give a final approval. SCA asked the panel to do so out of fear Armstrong would refuse to pay it the $10 million.
New York Times
The safety net helped keep Camille Saunders from falling, but not Charles Constance.
The difference? Ms. Saunders has a job, and Mr. Constance does not. And therein lies a tale of a profound shift in government support for low-income Americans at a time when stagnating wages and unstable schedules have kept many workers living near or below the poverty line.
Assistance to needy Americans has grown at a gallop since the mid-1980s, giving a hand up to the disabled, the working poor and married couples with children. At the same time, though, government aid directed at the nation’s poorest individuals has shrunk.
“Most observers would think that the government should support those who have the lowest incomes the most, and provide less help to those with higher incomes,” Robert A. Moffitt, an economist at Johns Hopkins University, writes in a forthcoming article in the journal Demography. “But that is not the case.”
Los Angeles Times
Ships are steadily backing up off the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, as the nation’s busiest complex remains largely shut down amid a labor dispute.
On Monday, there were 33 vessels anchored off the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports, unable to dock, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California. That was three more than Sunday.
With the backlog worsening, businesses that depend on the trade gateways are hurting. They’re paying extra to divert supplies by air, or simply waiting as their goods languish at sea or on congested docks.
The White House is sending Labor Secretary Tom Perez to jump-start stalled contract talks between the employer group, Pacific Maritime Assn., and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. Perez is scheduled to meet with both sides Tuesday, according to a Department of Labor spokeswoman.
Reuters
A CSX Corp train hauling crude derailed in West Virginia on Monday, setting at least two cars ablaze and forcing the evacuation of two nearby towns in the second significant oil-train incident in three days.
One or two train cars plunged into the Kanawha River, and “a couple are burning," said Robert Jelacic, night shift manager of the West Virginia Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. There were no injuries or deaths, he said.
A 1-mile-wide area around the incident was being evacuated after a house caught fire because of the accident, Lawrence Messina, spokesman for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, told Reuters.
Messina said CSX had confirmed the train's only cargo was crude oil. Heavy snow and frigid temperatures were hindering efforts to deal with the incident, Jelacic said. A CSX spokesman did not immediately reply to messages seeking comment.
Washington Post
TEL AVIV — Mistrust between the Obama administration and Benjamin Netanyahu has widened even further in recent days because of U.S. suspicion that the Israeli prime minister has authorized leaks of details about the U.S. nuclear talks with Iran.
The decision to reduce the exchange of sensitive information about the Iran talks was prompted by concerns that Netanyahu’s office had given Israeli journalists sensitive details of the U.S. position, including a U.S. offer to allow Iran to enrich uranium with 6,500 or more centrifuges as part of a final deal.
Obama administration officials believed these reports were misleading because the centrifuge numbers are part of a package that includes the size of the Iranian nuclear stockpile and the type of centrifuges that are allowed to operate. A deal that allowed 500 advanced centrifuges and a large stockpile of enriched uranium might put Iran closer to making a bomb than one that permitted 10,000 older machines and a small stockpile, the administration argues.
DW
With crucial bailout talks with Greece underway in Brussels, many have already deemed the negotiations all but a failure. The German Finance Minister said he was "very sceptical" ahead of the meeting.
Greece and its international creditors looked set for an epic showdown as eurozone finance ministers began crucial talks in Brussels on Monday meant to stave off a much-feared "Grexit."
Monday's negotiations in Brussels are seen as one of the last off-ramps for Greece as the debt-ridden nation races towards an end-of-February deadline to extend its controversial bailout program - or risk shooting off the precipice of bankruptcy.
Al Jazeera America
Egyptian jets bombed Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) targets in Libya on Monday, a day after the release of a video showing the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians, drawing Cairo directly into the conflict across its border.
Libya's air force also participated in Monday's attack on Derna — an eastern coastal city seen as a base for ISIL fighters in the oil-rich nation.
While Cairo is believed to have provided clandestine support to a Libyan general fighting a rogue government in Tripoli, the mass killings pushed Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi into open action, expanding his battle against radical groups.
Cairo is also calling for international intervention in Libya against ISIL. Loyalists of the Syria- and Iraq-based group have risen to dominate several cities in the chaos-riven North African nation, just across the Mediterranean Sea from Italy.
Spiegel Online
In an interview, Israeli prime minister candidate Isaac Herzog says the country's people are "fed up" with Benjamin Netanyahu's "politics of fear." If elected, he says he wants to "reignite" the peace process and is prepared to negotiate with the Palestinians.
The death of the social democratic Israeli Labor Party has often been predicted, but Netanyahu's popularity has been declining since Herzog became its leader, giving the party good chances of a revival. The main reason for its recent success is that Herzog and Tzipi Livni have joined forces and have said they will alternate in the role of prime minister if elected.
Public opinion polls for the election on March 17 show the pair performing almost as well as Netanyahu. There's a real possibility Herzog, a man considered to lack charisma and who can often come across awkwardly in front of crowds, could win.Isaac Herzog, 54, comes from one of Israel's best known political dynasties. His grandfather was the first chief rabbi of Israel, his father served as president and his uncle foreign minister. Herzog works as a lawyer, has been a member of parliament since 2003 and has also held diverse ministry posts. Most recently, he served as social minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before resigning in 2011.
The Guardian
European leaders have rejected calls by the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, for Jews to migrate en masse to Israel, pledging to ensure their safety at home.
Following shootings in Copenhagen at the weekend, Netanyahu echoed remarks he made after the Paris attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January, saying on Sunday: “This wave of terror attacks can be expected to continue, including antisemitic and murderous attacks. We say to the Jews, to our brothers and sisters, Israel is your home and that of every Jew. Israel is waiting for you with open arms.”
But the French prime minister, Manuel Valls – who was speaking after several hundred Jewish headstones were vandalised at a cemetery in eastern France – said that he regretted Netanyahu’s call, noting that the Israeli prime minister was “in the midst of a general election campaign”.
The Guardian
In the dead of winter, the last thing on most Canadians’ minds is the prospect of another federal election. The official deadline for this year’s vote – 19 October – is still a long way off, and there are more immediate worries in this G7 nation of 35 million people: the struggling economy, the drop in value of Alberta oil, the fast-sinking Canadian dollar, security scares over home-grown Islamist radicals, the war in Iraq and Canada’s military role there.
But it’s precisely those and other everyday worries – and the fact that the country’s Conservative government could use them to distract from its own stumbles and scandals as it seeks a fifth mandate into a new decade in power – that suggest an election could happen sooner than later. There could be a snap vote as early as April, after the budget. And when the writ is dropped, expect a hard-fought, three-way race.
Prime minister Stephen Harper and his Tories have governed Canada since 2006. For their first two terms, they held on to power precariously as a minority government, but were boosted to a solid majority (166 of 308 seats) after the last nationwide vote in 2011. That run could be coming to an end, however, for a number of reasons, one of which is the unexpected resurgence of the third-running (but for most of its history, governing) Liberal party.
Reuters
The head of Israel's election commission acted on Monday to limit any pre-election boost Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may get from a March 3 speech to the U.S. Congress, in which he will warn of the threat from Iran's nuclear programme.
The speech has caused controversy in Israel and the United States, where Democrats and the White House are angry that the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, invited Netanyahu to speak at a sensitive time in the nuclear negotiations between Iran and six big powers including Washington, and only two weeks before Israel's closely fought March 17 election.
Following complaints from opposition parties, election chief Salim Joubran decided that Netanyahu's address should be broadcast with a five-minute delay in Israel, giving news editors time to cut any statements deemed partisan.
Reuters
Japan's economy rebounded from recession in the final quarter of last year but growth was weaker than expected as household and corporate spending disappointed, underlining the challenge premier Shinzo Abe faces in shaking off decades of stagnation.
The annualized 2.2 percent expansion in October-December was smaller than a 3.7 percent increase forecast in a Reuters poll, suggesting a fragile recovery as the hangover from last year's sales tax hike lingered.
The preliminary reading for gross domestic product (GDP), which translates into a quarter-on-quarter increase of 0.6 percent, follows two straight quarters of contraction, data by the Cabinet Office showed on Monday.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Al Jazeera America
LOS ANGELES — California is home to some of the most wide-sweeping legislative and grassroots efforts to reduce the use of rat poisons deemed unacceptably toxic to wildlife, including a state ban on the sale of certain pesticides and far-reaching efforts by nonprofits to encourage home owners to install barn owl nesting boxes to naturally reduce the rodent populations.
California’s moves reflect a national shift away from rodenticides that revved up in 2005, when the Environmental Protection Agency was ordered by a federal judge to determine possibilities for reducing incidents of poisonings in children and wildlife. By 2008, the agency had developed a Risk Mitigation Decision, which pinpointed 10 chemicals found in a certain type of rodenticide called second-generation anticoagulants as being most harmful to wildlife and children.
Al Jazeera America
TOWN CREEK, Ala. — When Summer McCreless and her husband married 13 years ago, they decided to move back to the rural northern Alabama to raise their family in the country. They bought 77 acres of land — a pasture for the cows, a small valley for the pigs, space for an organic farm. Then five years ago, she got a call from a realty agency in Georgia asking if they would be interested in selling some of their land.
“They never divulged the company’s name. They never said specifically what they wanted. And they wouldn’t name a price,” McCreless remembered. “I thought that was odd, and I started to do some research.”
When the real estate agent called again, McCreless asked for $1 million dollars an acre. The agency never called back.
The Guardian
Sierra Leone has failed to properly account for almost a third of the money allocated to fight Ebola, national auditors have found.
These undocumented losses may have slowed the country’s emergency response to the Ebola outbreak and may have led to unnecessary loss of life, the authors of a detailed report on the crisis said.
The report, released late last week, found “inadequate controls” over the disbursement of funds, hazard payments being made to hospitals with no proof the money was actually going to the health workers on the frontline and in some cases a “complete disregard for the law” in procurement.
The government promised a full investigation into the damning report promising anyone who misused the Ebola funds would be prosecuted.
NPR
In an abandoned building near Spain's Mediterranean coast, someone softly strums a guitar. Chord progressions echo through empty halls.
It's an impromptu music lesson, offered among unemployed neighbors in Alfafar, a suburb south of Valencia. The town was built in the 1960s for timber factory workers. It's high-density housing: tidy, identical two- and three-bedroom apartments, in huge blocks — some 7,000 housing units in total.
But the local timber industry has since collapsed. More than 40 percent of local residents are now unemployed. A quarter of homes are vacant. Apartments that sold for $150,000 decades ago are going for 20,000 now.
That guitar lesson is just one way residents are using their free time and empty space creatively. It's here that two young Spanish architects saw potential.
NPR
BPA-free isn't good enough anymore if you're trying to sell plastic sippy cups, water bottles and food containers.
The new standard may be "EA-free," which means free of not only BPA, short for bisphenol A, but also free of other chemicals that mimic the hormone estrogen.
At least that's the suggestion of a recent legal battle between a chemical company and an academic scientist with business interests in the plastics industry. The proceedings offer a glimpse of the struggle for the hearts and minds of consumers concerned about the safety of plastics.
NPR
In Medical Park Hospital in Winston-Salem, N.C., Angela Koons is still a little loopy and uncomfortable after wrist surgery. Nurse Suzanne Cammer gently jokes with her. When Koons says she's itchy under her cast, Cammer warns, "Do not stick anything down there to scratch it!" Koons smiles and says, "I know."
Koons tells me Cammer's kind attention and enthusiasm for nursing has helped make the hospital stay more comfortable.
"They've been really nice, very efficient, gave me plenty of blankets because it's really cold in this place," Koons says. Koons and her stepfather, Raymond Zwack, agree they'd give Medical Park a perfect 10 on the satisfaction scale.
My poll of the family is informal, but Medicare has been taking actual surveys of patient satisfaction, and hospitals are paying strict attention. The Affordable Care Act ties a portion of the payments Medicare makes to hospitals to how patients rate the facilities.
BBC
A mysterious haze high above Mars has left scientists scratching their heads.
The vast plume was initially spotted by amateur astronomers in 2012, and appeared twice before vanishing.
Scientists have now analysed the images and say that say the formation, stretching for more than 1,000km, is larger than any seen before.
Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers believe the plume could be a large cloud or an exceptionally bright aurora.
However, they are unsure how these could have formed in the thin upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere.
"It raises more questions than answers," said Antonio Garcia Munoz, a planetary scientist from the European Space Agency.
Around the world, a network of amateur astronomers keep their telescopes trained on the Red Planet.
Vox
Virtually every country on earth aside from the United States measures temperature in Celsius. This makes sense; Celsius is a reasonable scale that assigns freezing and boiling points of water with round numbers, zero and 100. In Fahrenheit, those are, incomprehensibly, 32 and 212.
This isn't just an aesthetic issue. America's stubborn unwillingness to get rid of Fahrenheit temperatures is part of its generally dumb refusal to change over to the metric system, which has real-world consequences. One conversion error between US and metric measurements sent a $125 million NASA probe to its fiery death in Mars' atmosphere.
Why does the United States have such an antiquated system of measurement? You can blame two of history's all-time greatest villains: British colonialism and Congress.
Reuters
The U.S. National Security Agency has figured out how to hide spying software deep within hard drives made by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on the majority of the world's computers, according to cyber researchers and former operatives.
That long-sought and closely guarded ability was part of a cluster of spying programs discovered by Kaspersky Lab, the Moscow-based security software maker that has exposed a series of Western cyberespionage operations.
Kaspersky said it found personal computers in 30 countries infected with one or more of the spying programs, with the most infections seen in Iran, followed by Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Mali, Syria, Yemen and Algeria. The targets included government and military institutions, telecommunication companies, banks, energy companies, nuclear researchers, media, and Islamic activists, Kaspersky said.