Welcome to the Overnight News Digest
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.
Stories and Headlines
- Florida Republicans at Odds With Their Leader
(NYT) TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Rick Scott, the conservative Republican billionaire who plucked the governor’s job from the party establishment in November with $73 million of his own money and the backing of the Tea Party, vowed during his campaign to run the troubled state like a corporate chief executive (which he was) and not a politician (which he proudly says he is not).
And now it has become a problem, some of his fellow Republicans say.
“The governor doesn’t understand there is a State Constitution and that we have three branches of government,” said State Senator Mike Fasano, a Republican from New Port Richey who upset Mr. Scott with rough handling of his staff during a testy committee hearing. “They are talking about the attitude that he is still the C.E.O. of his former health care corporation, and that is not going to work in this state, in Tallahassee, in my district. The people believe in three branches of government.”
Republican lawmakers in Florida were hoping for a smoother transition. Instead, they say, they got top-down management from a political novice.
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- Libya War Traps Poor Immigrants at Tripoli’s Edge
NYT TRIPOLI, Libya — As wealthier nations send boats and planes to rescue their citizens from the violence in Libya, a new refugee crisis is taking shape on the outskirts of Tripoli, where thousands of migrant workers from sub-Saharan Africa have been trapped with scant food and water, no international aid and little hope of escape.
The migrants — many of them illegal immigrants from Ghana and Nigeria who have long constituted an impoverished underclass in Libya — live amid piles of garbage, sleep in makeshift tents of blankets strung from fences and trees, and breathe fumes from a trench of excrement dividing their camp from the parking lot of Tripoli’s airport.
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The airport refugees, along with tens of thousands of other African migrants lucky enough to make it across the border to Tunisia, are the most desperate contingent of a vast exodus that has already sent almost 200,000 foreigners fleeing the country since the outbreak of the popular revolt against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi nearly three weeks ago.
Dark-skinned Africans say the Libyan war has caught them in a vise. The heavily armed police and militia forces loyal to Colonel Qaddafi who guard checkpoints along the roads around the capital rob them of their money, possessions and cellphone chips, the migrants say. And the Libyans who oppose Colonel Qaddafi lash out at the African migrants because they look like the dark-skinned mercenaries many here say the Libyan leader has recruited to crush the uprising.
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- Wrongly convicted rarely compensated
Marie C. Baca, California Watch (sfgate.com)
Jeffrey Rodriguez was in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles when the victim of an auto parts store robbery the night before identified him as the crook.
He spent more than five years in a Santa Clara County jail before being released in 2007. Declared factually innocent of the crime, his arrest and conviction were expunged from the record.
But when Rodriguez, now 32, applied for compensation from a state fund for the wrongly convicted - $138,100 in his case - a three-person state panel denied his request in 2009. As he soon found out, there are degrees of innocence in California.
Rodriguez is one of 44 Californians released from prison since 2000 who have been denied money after a hearing before the state's victim compensation board, which can award $100 a day for each day spent behind bars after a wrongful conviction.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/...
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- High court rejects suit over 'In God We Trust'
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
The U.S. Supreme Court turned aside a challenge to "In God We Trust" on the nation's coins and currency Monday, refusing to consider a Sacramento man's claim that the national motto is a government endorsement of religion.
Michael Newdow, an atheist, has filed numerous lawsuits against government-sponsored religious invocations, including the words "under God" that were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/...
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- Diverse Character in City Qaddafi Calls Islamist
(NYT) DARNAH, Libya — This fiercely independent port city on the Mediterranean coast, once the center of a simmering Islamist insurgency in the 1990s, is now branded by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi as an Islamic emirate infiltrating his embattled country.
The charge, uttered again on Monday by Libya’s foreign minister, is familiar in the Arab world, where strongmen have long presented a stark choice to their subjects and their American backers: either dictatorship or Islamists, repression or chaos.
But Darnah offers a more complex reality: a mélange where secular currents are intersecting with religious ones, drawn together by nationalist opposition to Colonel Qaddafi’s four decades of often bizarre rule. This old Barbary port, with a reputation as one of Libya’s most pious cities and, in the words of a WikiLeaks cable, a “wellspring for foreign fighters in Iraq,” suggests a more nuanced picture of what role militant Islam may play in a city and country fumbling to forge a body politic in a land without one.
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- Tunisia interim leaders dissolve secret police agency
BBC - Tunisia's interior ministry has announced it is dissolving the country's secret police service.
The agency had been widely accused of committing human rights abuses during the rule of President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who was ousted on 14 January.
Interim Prime Minister Caid Essebsi has also announced a new government, which includes no members of the old regime.
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- Obama to restart Guantanamo military commissions
BBC - US President Barack Obama is lifting the two-year freeze on new military trials for detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Mr Obama also announced a new process for continuing to hold those detainees not charged or convicted but deemed too dangerous to free.
He said the measures would "broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice".
Mr Obama had pledged in January 2009 to close the prison within a year.
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- Roger Ebert Tests His Vocal Cords, and Comedic Delivery
By JENNIFER 8. LEE (NYT)
First there was the Turing Test, a benchmark for computer intelligence via conversation.
Now perhaps, there is the Ebert Test, a way to see if a synthesized voice can deliver humor with the timing to make an audience laugh.
Last Friday Roger Ebert, the movie critic who lost his ability to speak several years ago after his lower jaw was removed, used a computer-created voice to tell a joke to an audience of over 1,000 people at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif.
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- Elephants know how to co-operate
BBC - Footage of an oversized experiment has revealed that elephants understand when they need help from a partner.
In the test, two animals had to work together - each pulling on a rope in order to tug a platform towards them.
Elephants' apparent grasp of the need to co-operate shows, scientists say, that they belong in an "elite group" of intelligent, socially complex animals.
Researchers from the University of Cambridge built the apparatus, which was originally designed for chimps.
The team published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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- Christchurch, New Zealand quake mapped from space
BBC - The upheaval wrought by the 22 February earthquake in Christchurch, NZ, is illustrated in new radar imagery.
The Magnitude 6.3 tremor killed more than 160 people and shattered a city already reeling from a previous seismic event in September.
Data from the Japanese Alos spacecraft has been used to map the way the ground deformed during the most recent quake.
It shows clearly that the focus of the tremor was right under the city's south-eastern suburbs.
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- A million Libyans need aid as UK, France seek no-fly zone
(Reuters) - Britain and France said they were seeking U.N. authorization for a no-fly zone over Libya, as Muammar Gaddafi's warplanes counter-attacked against rebels and aid officials said a million people were in need.
Al Jazeera television said rebels had rejected an offer by Gaddafi to hold a meeting of parliament to work out a deal under which he would step down.
With civilians surrounded by forces loyal to Gaddafi in two western towns, Misrata and Zawiyah, fears grew of a rising humanitarian crisis if the fighting continued.
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- Poll shows 30 percent of young drivers text at the wheel
(Reuters) - A new poll shows young drivers are more likely to use cell phones while driving, and that 30 percent of them have recently texted from behind the wheel, transportation officials said on Monday. |
- Arab media says Gaddafi looking for exit deal
(Reuters) - Two Arab newspapers and al Jazeera television said Monday Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was looking for an agreement allowing him to step down, but there was no official confirmation of the reports.
Al Jazeera said Gaddafi had proposed to Libyan rebels to hold a meeting of parliament to pave the way for him to step down with certain guarantees.
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- Waxman: House GOP More Anti-Science Than Ever
(Mother Jones) - "Protection of the environment is now a partisan battleground," Waxman said. "On climate change, we can't even agree whether there is a problem." That's not to say things were peachy in the past; there were of course major battles over measures to curb acid rain, toxic power plant emissions, and other environmental protections. But, Waxman said, "I've never been in a Congress where there was such an overwhelming disconnect between science and public policy." |
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