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
- International Pillow Fight Day sees feathers fly worldwide
metro.co.uk - Cities around the globe were filled with hundreds of thousands of pillow-brandishing types for the event, from New York's Union Square to Nelson's Column in London and the Dr Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Taipei.
Started by The Urban Playground Movement, International Pillow Fight Day sees participants smack each other around with their feather-filled weapons.
The organisation's mission is to make more use of public spaces and ultimately replace the world's couch-potato habits.
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- Minority Report-like adverts 'may hit the UK next year'
BBC - In 2002, Steven Spielberg's hugely successful film Minority Report set imaginations alight, showing a glimpse of what the world could be like in the not-too-distant future.
Its plot revolved around a special police unit named 'PreCrime' which would predict when a murder was about to take place, giving police a chance to capture the potential criminal before they could commit the act.
Yet for many, by far the most intriguing 'invention' in Minority Report intrusively made itself known as Tom Cruise's character strolled through a mall.
"John Anderton!" an advertisement yelled. "You could use a Guinness right about now!"
As Anderton walked on, his world was a blur of noise and distraction emanating from adverts all over the room.
The film was set in 2054, but while we are still many years away from the Minority Report world, a new report suggests that adverts like the ones in the film may be well on the way, and indeed, that some already exist.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/...
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- Gauguin painting in Washington DC attacked by woman
BBC - A woman who attacked a painting by Paul Gauguin hanging in the National Gallery in Washington DC said the French artist was "evil", court records show.
Susan Burns pounded Two Tahitian Women and tried to rip it from a gallery wall on Friday, officials said.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/...
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- More customers exposed as big data breach grows
(Reuters) - The names and e-mails of customers of Citigroup Inc and other large U.S. companies, as well as College Board students, were exposed in a massive and growing data breach after a computer hacker penetrated online marketer Epsilon.
In what could be one of the biggest such breaches in U.S. history, a diverse swath of companies that did business with Epsilon stepped forward over the weekend to warn customers some of their electronic information could have been exposed.
Drugstore Walgreen, Video recorder TiVo Inc, credit card lender Capital One Financial Corp and teleshopping company HSN Inc all added their names to a list of targets that also includes some of the nation's largest banks.
http://www.reuters.com/...
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- Tepco Dumping Toxic Water Angers Fishermen; Stock Plunges
Bloomberg - Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s decision to dump radioactive water from its crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear station into the sea angered fishermen and pushed the Japanese utility’s shares to a record low.
The company known as Tepco plunged as much as 15 percent to the lowest since its listing in August 1951. A fishing industry group in Fukushima prefecture asked the utility to stop releasing contaminated water, and radioactive iodine and cesium were found in fish caught in north of the Japanese capital.
Tepco began discharging 11,500 tons of water yesterday, enough to fill 4 1/2 Olympic-sized swimming pools, to make room to store more highly contaminated fluids. The United Nations nuclear watchdog said the partial meltdown at the station was a result of “errors” from the time a March 11 quake and tsunami knocked out pumps used to cool reactors and spent fuel.
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- Fed Help Kept Banks Afloat, Until It Didn’t
NYT WASHINGTON — During the frenetic months of the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve stretched the limits of its legal authority by lending money to more than 100 banks that subsequently failed.
The loans through the so-called discount window transformed a little-used program for banks that run low on cash into a source of long-term financing for troubled institutions, some of which borrowed regularly from the Fed for more than a year.
The central bank took little risk in making the loans, protecting itself by demanding large amounts of collateral. But propping up failing banks can increase the eventual cleanup costs for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation because it keeps struggling banks afloat, allowing them to get even deeper in debt. It also can clog the arteries of the financial system, tying up money in banks that are no longer making new loans.
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- Milk, berries still contaminated from Chernobyl: Greenpeace
(Reuters) - Milk and other staples like mushrooms and berries are still contaminated in parts of Ukraine by radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, 25 years after the world's worst nuclear disaster, Greenpeace said on Sunday.
The environmental group published findings of a field investigation ahead of a Ukraine-hosted international conference on Chernobyl on April 19.
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Ukraine is seeking 600 million euros ($840 million) in extra funding to build a massive new shell over a reactor at the Chernobyl plant which blew up in 1986, spewing radioactive debris across neighboring Belarus and other parts of Europe.
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- Libya says Gaddafi stays, wounded relate siege hell
(Reuters) - Forces loyal to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi are staging a "massacre" in the besieged city of Misrata, evacuees said on Monday, as Libya said it was ready to discuss political reform, led by Gaddafi.
Libyan TV showed footage of Gaddafi saluting supporters outside his fortified compound in Tripoli. But some residents of the capital, angered by fuel shortages and long queues for basic goods caused by a popular revolt and Western sanctions and air strikes, began openly predicting his imminent downfall.
Government spokesman Mussa Ibrahim said Libya was ready for a "political solution" with world powers.
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- U.N. and France Strike Leader’s Forces in Ivory Coast
nytime.com - The United Nations and France went on the offensive against Laurent Gbagbo, striking targets at his residence, his offices and two military bases. |
- Cowardice Blocks the 9/11 Trial
Editorial - New York Times - Last year, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. described a federal court trial for the self-professed mastermind of Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as “the defining event of my time as attorney general.” On Monday, Mr. Holder’s dream for demonstrating the power of the American court system crumbled when he announced that the trial would take place not in New York City or anywhere in the United States but before a military commission at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp.
That retreat was a victory for Congressional pandering and an embarrassment for the Obama administration, which failed to stand up to it.
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- The Truth, Still Inconvenient
Krugman, NY Times - So the joke begins like this: An economist, a lawyer and a professor of marketing walk into a room. What’s the punch line? They were three of the five “expert witnesses” Republicans called for last week’s Congressional hearing on climate science.
But the joke actually ended up being on the Republicans, when one of the two actual scientists they invited to testify went off script.
Prof. Richard Muller of Berkeley, a physicist who has gotten into the climate skeptic game, has been leading the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, an effort partially financed by none other than the Koch foundation. And climate deniers — who claim that researchers at NASA and other groups analyzing climate trends have massaged and distorted the data — had been hoping that the Berkeley project would conclude that global warming is a myth.
Instead, however, Professor Muller reported that his group’s preliminary results find a global warming trend “very similar to that reported by the prior groups.”
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- Iraq: 4 U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq
By TIM ARANGO, NYT
Four United States soldiers have been killed in Iraq in recent days, two from enemy attack and two from what the American military called a “non-hostile incident” in the north.
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- Transocean’s Safety Claim Is Criticized
(NYT/Reuters) MEXICO CITY — Ken Salazar, the interior secretary, on Monday sharply criticized Transocean, a company that operated the oil rig that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico last year, for awarding executive bonuses for what it called the “best year in safety performance in our company’s history.”
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The interior secretary was visiting Mexico with officials from the presidential commission that investigated the BP oil spill to discuss regulation of offshore drilling with Mexican officials. William K. Reilly, co-chairman of commission, called Transocean’s comments “embarrassing.” |
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