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 (rating: "tear your hair out ...")
- London riots: Violence erupts for third day
Violence erupts for third day
BBC - Violence has broken out for a third consecutive day in London, with riot police deployed and firefighters tackling blazes across the capital.
Shops were looted and buildings, among them a furniture store in Croydon, set alight as police clashed with youths.
Trouble first flared on Saturday after a peaceful protest in Tottenham over the fatal shooting of a man by police.
The prime minister is returning early from holiday to chair a meeting of the government's emergency committee Cobra.
David Cameron, who is on holiday in Italy, was due to board a flight on Monday night ahead of a meeting with Home Secretary Theresa May and Acting Metropolitan Police Commissioner Tim Godwin on Tuesday.
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London violence extends into third night
Al Jazeera - Riots have spread to new areas of London while looting erupted in the cities of Birmingham and Leeds, as Britain's worst clashes in decades extended into the third night.
Looting by groups of hooded youths spread to Ealing in west London and Camden in the north of the British capital late on Monday.
Television pictures showed groups of men running through the streets and smashing shop windows. They also set fire to buildings in Croydon, a south London suburb, and Clapham, where they looted shops and cash machines and set fire to at least one shop.
The violence, which began in the northern Tottenham district on Saturday, also spread to Peckham and Lewisham. In Peckam, flames leapt into the air from a torched building, while rubble was strewn across the street. People walked in and out of shops looting.
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- Somali famine: First UNHCR airlift arrives in Mogadishu
BBC - The UN refugee agency has flown aid to famine victims in Somalia's capital - its first airlift to war-torn Mogadishu for five years.
Some 100,000 people have arrived in the city in the last two months in search of food.
Insecurity makes it difficult for aid agencies to distribute materials.
The Islamist al-Shabab group was reported to have pulled out of the city on Saturday but its fighters can still be seen patrolling some areas.
While the government has been celebrating what it called its "victory" over al-Shabab, BBC East Africa correspondent Will Ross says few people expect Mogadishu to be peaceful.
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- Gulf States recall envoys, rap Syria over crackdown
(Reuters) - Gulf Arab states broke their silence over a bloody crackdown on popular unrest in Syria, recalling their envoys in a pointed rebuke of President Bashar al-Assad's behavior and significantly deepening his international isolation.
In less than 24 hours, the island kingdom of Bahrain and oil-rich neighbor Kuwait followed Saudi Arabia's lead by summoning their ambassadors from Damascus "for consultations."
Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy normally loath to criticize other Arab autocrats but now wary of giving an opening to reform elements at home, pulled its envoy late on Sunday.
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- Remote Brazilian tribe threatened by 'drug dealers'
BBC - Guards in the Brazilian jungle protecting a tribe of Indians who have had no contact with the outside world say their guard post has been attacked by armed men.
Brazil's Indian Affairs Department said a guard post in Acre state had been surrounded by suspected drug dealers.
It said it feared the men wanted to traffic drugs from Peru into Brazil through the area where the tribe lives.
The tribe was first photographed from the air three years ago.
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- US unlikely to regain AAA rating soon, says S&P
BBC - The US is unlikely to see its long-term credit rating return to AAA any time soon, ratings agency S&P has said.
Its comments came as it downgraded the state-backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because of their "direct reliance on the US government".
It also lowered ratings for clearing houses and other institutions linked to long-term US debt from AAA to AA+.
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- Standard & Poor’s Lowers More Ratings
NYT - Even after Standard & Poor’s stripped the United States of its top credit rating on Friday evening, the downgrades were not over.
On Monday, S.& P. lowered its ratings of some of the nation’s most important financial institutions, from mortgage giants like the Federal National Mortgage Association to major trading clearinghouses that rely heavily on the government for support. The ratings dropped to AA+ from AAA, in lockstep with its long-term rating for the United States.
S.& P. also dropped the top credit rating of five large insurers, while several states and hundreds of municipalities with strong federal ties braced for similar actions.
Although the broader stock market fell nearly 7 percent on Monday, the bond market largely appeared to shrug off S.& P.’s later downgrades. Most of the companies affected, in fact, saw only modest increases to their borrowing costs or changes to their operations.
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- Nine El Salvador ex-soldiers held over Jesuit killings
BBC - Nine former Salvadoran soldiers have turned themselves in to face charges that they shot dead six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter during El Salvador's civil war.
They had been indicted in Spain under its universal jurisdiction law, which holds that some crimes are so grave that they can be tried anywhere.
The killing became one of the most infamous of El Salvador's civil war.
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- Japan Tsunami Breaks Off Antarctica Iceberg the Size of Manhattan
(From transcript of Video at Int'l Business Times)
Just 18 hours after the tsunami, a wave of 1-foot height struck the ice shelf in Antarctica.
The Sulzberger ice shelf is a sheet of ice 260 feet thick that extends towards New Zealand. It hasn't budged in nearly 50 years, but the pressure from the wave was strong enough to snap off massive pieces of ice.
One of them measured four by six miles in surface area, nearly the size of Manhattan.
Satellite imagery enabled scientists to see the "calving," or break off of the iceberg, proving that seismic events can certainly lead to other effects far from the site of the event, across the globe.The undersea megathrust earthquake had a staggering magnitude of 9.0 (Mw), and triggered waves of up to 133 feet high. Scientists were able to track the wave over 8,000 miles as it sprawled through the Pacific and Southern oceans.
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More News ( rating: "the lighter side ...")
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