The Overnight News Digest is an ongoing evening series dedicated to chronicling the day's news that the editor de la nuit finds of import or interest. Everyone is welcome to add their own news items in the comments. Tonight, I am featuring news from around the world.
Top Story
- Texas Tribune - Keystone Pipeline Sparks Property Rights Backlash
Several landowners along the proposed pipeline route say TransCanada has bullied them into selling their property by asserting “eminent domain” authority, the same power that governments use to seize land for highways and other public infrastructure projects. A property rights coalition tracking the condemnation proceedings has uncovered at least 89 land condemnation lawsuits involving TransCanada in 17 counties from the Red River to the Gulf Coast — cases that could test the limits of a private company's power to condemn property…
The land seizure proceedings are continuing even though the White House rejected TransCanada’s application for an international pipeline permit, which included the proposed Gulf Coast segment that would run from Cushing, Okla., to Houston and Port Arthur. The company is exploring options to build the southern piece of the pipeline without a presidential permit, but either way it says it won't stop seeking land for the project.
“We don’t need a presidential permit in order for us to obtain the easements that we need for the right of way for this project,” said TransCanada spokesman Terry Cunha. He said the company already had 99 percent of the easements it needed for the Texas segment and was working on snapping up the remaining holdouts. |
USA
- NYT - Obama Offers to Cut Corporate Tax Rate to 28%
President Obama will ask Congress to scrub the corporate tax code of dozens of loopholes and subsidies to reduce the top rate to 28 percent, down from 35 percent, while giving preferences to manufacturers that would set their maximum effective rate at 25 percent, a senior administration official said on Tuesday.
Mr. Obama also would establish a minimum tax on multinational corporations’ foreign earnings, the official said, to discourage “accounting games to shift profits abroad” or actual relocation of production overseas.
With the framework for changes that the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, will outline on Wednesday, Mr. Obama will enter an election-year debate with Republicans in Congress and in the presidential race who seek even lower taxes for businesses. But an overhaul of the corporate code is unlikely this year, given that political backdrop and the complexity of an undertaking that would generate a lobbying frenzy as businesses vie to defend old tax breaks or win new ones. |
- WSJ - Fed Writes Sweeping Rules From Behind Closed Doors
The Federal Reserve has operated almost entirely behind closed doors as it rewrites the rule book governing the U.S. financial system, a stark contrast with its push for transparency in its interest-rate policies and emergency-lending programs…
The Fed is making these sweeping changes—the most dramatic since the Great Depression—almost completely without public meetings. Rather than discussing rules and voting in public, as is done at other agencies with which the Fed often collaborates, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and the Fed's four other governors have held just two public meetings since July 2010. On 45 of 47 of the draft or final regulatory measures during that period, they have emailed their votes to the central bank's secretary.
|
- LAT - Gulf oil spill spawns mega-suit, with likely mega-payouts
Spill 4.9 million barrels of oil into the ocean, and this is what you get: the lollapalooza, labyrinthine, mega-mother of all lawsuits.
It encompasses 72 million pages of documents, 20,000 exhibits and 303 depositions — the collective effort of hundreds of lawyers and legal workers.
It involves the Justice Department and about 120,000 plaintiffs: angry fishermen, restaurateurs, state governments and condo owners who say their beach-side property is not worth what it once was. The trial phase, set to begin Feb. 27 in a New Orleans federal courtroom, could go on for nine months.
That is, unless it is averted by the mega-mother of all legal settlements. |
- NYT - Bucket Brigade Gives a Lift So Salamanders Can Live to Mate
Salamander people are special people. Consider Tom and Debora Mann, biologists in their early 60s who live in a little town near Jackson, Miss. When it rains hard at night, they rush to a dark stretch of the Natchez Trace Parkway and start scooping salamanders into quart-size freezer containers.
Most rainy nights during the late winter and early spring, dozens — sometimes even hundreds — of salamanders, generally three to nine inches long, try to get from their burrows on one side of the road to seasonal ponds on the other to mate. The salamanders, some of which can live up to 30 years, procreate only once a year. The compulsion to get across that road is unyielding.
Unfortunately, so is the traffic. So the Manns, along with a handful of volunteers, have made it their scientific and personal mission to help. They are out there for hours in the rain at night, cajoling the slimy-skinned amphibians across the wet pavement. The nocturnal animals need moisture to travel and spend most of their days safely tucked in their forest habitat. |
Europe
- Reuters - Greece pores over bailout laws amid protests
Trade unionists, communists and pensioners angry at punishing spending cuts in Greece marched through central Athens on Wednesday as lawmakers set to work on legislation needed to secure payment of a second bailout for the debt-laden country.
Ringed by riot police, parliament debated a string of measures demanded by euro zone states in exchange for a 130 billion euro rescue, endorsed by finance ministers on Tuesday after hours of torturous negotiation in Brussels.
The bailout averts a chaotic default next month, but does little to allay doubts over Greece's long-term financial and social stability as the country faces spiraling unemployment and a recession in its fifth year. |
- BBC - France PM Francois Fillon orders adieu to mademoiselle
The term "mademoiselle" is about to disappear from French paperwork.
Under pressure from campaigners, the government has decided that women will not have to choose how to describe themselves on official documents. Unlike men, women have been forced to choose between a married "madame" or unmarried "mademoiselle".
Feminist groups welcomed the move from Prime Minister Francois Fillon, but noted that in an election year they want to ensure it is applied. |
- RIA Novosti - Some 120,000 to Join Thursday Rallies in Moscow
Some 120,000 people are expected to take to the streets in Moscow on Thursday in four separate demonstrations organized by supporters of Russian prime minister and presidential candidate Vladimir Putin and his opponents in the March 4 elections.
Some 10,000 police officers will be deployed to Moscow streets during the demonstrations, Moscow police said in a statement.
|
- Daily Beast - 8 More Bodies Found on Shipwrecked Italian Cruise Ship
For Susy Albertini, the wait for her five-year-old daughter Dayana is finally over. Sadly, it did not turn out the way she’d hoped. Wednesday morning, Italian emergency workers searching the wreckage of the Costa Concordia--the cruise liner that crashed off the Tuscan island of Giglio on January 13--found the remains of Albertini’s beloved daughter and seven other people trapped in the submerged section of the ship’s lifeboat deck. When inclement weather forced workers to suspend the sub-aquatic search for victims January 31, Albertini was still waiting on Giglio. She pleaded with workers to let her on the ship. “Let me onboard to find my daughter,” the distraught mother said. “She will answer when I call her.”
The discovery of the latest victims brings to 25 the total confirmed dead from the fatal shipwreck. Seven are still missing.
|
- Bloomberg - Tony Blair’s Wife Cherie Sues News Corp
Former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s wife Cherie sued News Corp. and a former private investigator for its now-defunct News of the World tabloid for hacking into her phone.
The lawsuit, filed Feb. 21 against the company’s U.K. unit and Glenn Mulcaire, comes as News Corp. prepares for the first civil trial over the scandal, scheduled to start next week in London. The company has already settled phone-hacking claims by Blair’s former press chief, Alastair Campbell, and former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott…
“If it is true that a former prime minister’s family have been targeted by Rupert Murdoch’s hackers, then it is clearly a significant moment in the scandal,” Tom Watson, a Labour Party lawmaker who is on a parliamentary committee investigating the scandal, said in an e-mail. |
Africa
- Guardian - UN votes to increase Somalia peacekeeping force
The UN security council has voted to increase an African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia to nearly 18,000 troops in a bid to defeat extremist rebels and help stabilise the country after more than two decades of chaos.
The vote to boost the Amisom force of east African troops came as a joint Ethiopian and Somali government offensive wrested control of the central city of Baidoa from the al-Shabaab rebels. It boosted hopes at a conference in London on Thursday aimed at consolidating the government in Mogadishu, bringing greater stability to the country, and combating piracy which has thrived on Somalia's lawless coastline.
|
- BBC - Chevron Nigeria gas well fire 'may burn for months'
A gas-fuelled fire, with flames as high as 5m, may burn for months in waters off the Niger Delta in south-east Nigeria, Chevron has told the BBC.
Two workers died after January's explosion at the KS Endeavour exploration rig, owned by the US firm. Friends of the Earth says this is the world's worst such accident in recent years.
Chevron spokesman Lloyd Avram says claims, despite the fire, the situation is now under control and no oil is leaking. |
- China Daily - Libyan leader acknowledges lack of control over militias
Libya's leader has acknowledged that his transitional government is powerless to control militias that are refusing to lay down their arms after ousting Muammar Gadhafi as it struggles to impose control over the oil-rich North African nation.
In a wide-ranging interview…, Mustafa Abdul-Jalil warned that remnants of the former government also still pose a threat and it will take years for Libya's new leaders to overcome a "heavy heritage" of corruption and distrust after more than four decades of Gadhafi's rule.
Abdul-Jalil said the governing National Transitional Council has made mistakes, but he also criticized former rebels who have formed powerful militias and local governments that have emerged as rivals to the Tripoli-based central government that assumed power after Gadhafi was ousted.
"Both are to blame," he said. "The governmental program to integrate the militias is slow and the revolutionaries don't trust it." |
Middle East
- BBC - Journalists Marie Colvin and Remi Ochlik die in Homs
Two prominent Western journalists have been killed in the Syrian city of Homs in the latest violence which left 60 people dead across Syria on Wednesday. Sunday Times reporter Marie Colvin, an American, and award-winning French photographer Remi Ochlik died when a shell hit a makeshift media centre in the Baba Amr district.
Troops are shelling opposition-held areas of Homs, besieged for weeks. Thousands have died in unrest against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad.
On Tuesday Rami al-Sayed, a man who broadcast a live video stream from Homs used by world media, was killed in Baba Amr. |
- AP - UN nuclear agency reports failed Iran talks
The U.N. nuclear agency acknowledged renewed failure Wednesday after a trip to probe suspicions of covert Iranian nuclear weapons work, in a statement issued just hours after an Iranian general warned of a pre-emptive strike against any foe threatening the country.
The double signs of defiance reflected Tehran's continued resistance to demands that it defuse suspicions about its nuclear activities despite a growing list of international sanctions.
The International Atomic Energy Agency made little progress in talks that ended just three weeks ago, and hopes had been low that a visit by IAEA experts to Iran that ended late Tuesday would be any more successful even before the agency issued its statement. |
South Asia
- NYT - Koran Burning in NATO Error Incites Afghans
Word that NATO personnel had burned an undisclosed number of Korans and were preparing to dispose of many more by incineration set off an angry protest here on Tuesday. NATO officials rushed to apologize publicly and profusely, trying to head off what they feared could be a nationwide outburst of violence as news of the burning was gradually broadcast across the country.
About 2,000 Afghans descended on the largest American air base in their country in the bitter cold to protest what is generally regarded as one of the most offensive acts in the Muslim world.
“I offer my sincere apologies for any offense this may have caused, to the president of Afghanistan, the government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and, most importantly, to the noble people of Afghanistan,” the NATO commanding general, John R. Allen, said in a statement that was recorded and sent to local television and radio networks here, explaining that the burnings had been unintentional. |
- CNN - Pakistan vows to arrest Musharraf for Bhutto assassination
Pakistani authorities vowed Tuesday to use the international police agency Interpol to arrest former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in connection with the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.
"The government is moving for his (Musharraf's) red notice," Interior Minister Rehman Malik said, referring to the Interpol's international arrest warrant.
"We will get him through Interpol to Pakistan." |
Asia
- Business Week - Fishing as Slaves on the High Seas
On March 25, 2011, an Indonesian fisherman named Yusril became a slave. Yusril (which is not his real name, to protect his identity) is 28, with brooding looks and a swagger that compensates for his slight frame. That afternoon he went to the East Jakarta offices of PT Indah Megah Sari (IMS), an agency that hires crews to work on foreign fishing vessels. He was offered a job on the Melilla 203, a South Korea-flagged ship that trawled in the waters off New Zealand. “Hurry up,” said the agent, holding a pen over a thick stack of contracts in the windowless conference room with water-stained walls. Waving at a pile of green Indonesian passports of other prospective fisherman, he added: “You really can’t waste time reading this. There are a lot of others waiting and the plane leaves tomorrow.”
Yusril was desperate for the promised monthly salary of $260, plus bonuses, for unloading the fish… The terms of the first contract, the “real” one, would later haunt him…
The last line of the contract, in bold, warned that Yusril’s family would owe nearly $3,500 if he were to run away from the ship. The amount was greater than his net worth, and he had earlier submitted title to his land as collateral for that bond. Additionally, he had provided IMS with names and addresses of his family members. He was locked in. |
- China Daily - City suspends ties over massacre denial
Nagoya Mayor Takashi Kawamura's refusal to take back his denial of the Nanjing Massacre has increased tension between the two cities, with the Chinese city declaring on Tuesday that it would suspend official contacts with its sister city in Japan.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei expressed support for Nanjing's decision at a regular news conference on Wednesday.
"We have made our position clear on the Nagoya mayor's denial of the Nanjing Massacre and already lodged a solemn representation to the Japanese side," Hong said, adding that China is closely watching the issue. |
- NYT - China Should Not Repatriate North Korean Refugees, Seoul Says
Oceana
- SMH - Gillard hits back after Rudd quits as Foreign Minister
Julia Gillard has responded to Kevin Rudd's resignation as Foreign Minister, saying she is 'disappointed' in his actions.
Ms Gillard - who is in Adelaide - issued a short statement tonight saying she had not been given prior warning by Mr Rudd that he would resign.
"I am disappointed that the concerns Mr Rudd has publicly expressed this evening were never personally raised with me, nor did he contact me to discuss his resignation prior to his decision," she said…
Earlier, Mr Rudd drew first blood in the Labor leadership crisis by resigning from Washington, saying he no longer has the support of the Prime Minister. |
Americas
- Bloomberg - Buenos Aires Commuter Train Crash Kills 49, Injures 460
Forty-nine people were killed and more than 460 injured when a packed commuter train slammed into the buffers and safety barriers at one of Buenos Aires’ busiest railway stations.
The crash, the second-worst in Argentina’s history, may have been caused by brake failure, Transport Secretary Juan Pablo Schiavi told local media shortly after the crash. The train entered the station at 26 kilometers per hour (16 miles per hour) and probably hit the barriers at 20 kilometers per hour, he said.
|
- CNN - Chavez says he will go to Cuba for surgery
Speculation and messages of support surged in Venezuela Wednesday, a day after President Hugo Chavez announced he would travel to Cuba for surgery.
Doctors there will remove a lesion in the coming days from the same area of his body where doctors removed a cancerous tumor last year, Chavez said.
The 57-year-old Venezuelan leader told state media in a phone interview late Tuesday that there was a high likelihood that the lesion was cancerous, due to its location, which he did not disclose. |
- Guardian - Honduran president pardons murderer who saved hundreds from jail inferno
The Honduran government has pardoned a convicted murderer who helped save hundreds of inmates during a fire that killed 360 people last week.
President Porfirio Lobo announced he would pardon Marco Antonio Bonilla, also known as Shorty, for releasing trapped prisoners from the horrific blaze that destroyed Comayagua jail.
While guards panicked and left screaming men to die, Bonilla – who had been outside his cell when the fire began – used a set of keys to unlock several barracks, each housing about 100 men. He also used a bench to smash open other locks. |
- MercoPress - Brazil and Uruguay with the most expensive per capita Legislative branch
Uruguay has the second most expensive per capita Legislative branch and also as a percentage of the government’s overall expenditure, although Uruguayan lawmakers earn half their best paid neighbours in Brazil, according to reports in the Montevideo press.
At the other extreme figure Venezuela and Costa Rica whose lawmakers figure with the lowest earnings: between 4.000 and 5.000 dollars per month. However Costa Rica next to Uruguay have the largest Legislative budget of the continent as a percentage of overall government expenditure.
|
- RTT - Mexico Arrests Prison Officials Over Deadly Riot
Authorities in Mexico have arrested 29 officials of a prison where a deadly riot resulted in the death of dozens of inmates and a jail-break early this week, media reports citing officials said late on Wednesday.
Those arrested in connection with the riot and the escape of 30 prisoners included director of the high-security Apodaca state prison, Geronimo Martinez, as well as his deputy Juan Hernandez and 27 security guards at the facility located outside the northern city of Monterrey.
All of them were suspected of colluding in the inter-gang fighting that resulted in the jail-break by unlocking the doors separating the blocks that housed the rival gangs. They were accused of plotting with the Zetas gang to massacre members of the rival Gulf Cartel and using the riot as a cover for some gang members to escape. |
- Guardian - Canada threatens trade war with EU over tar sands
Canada has threatened a trade war with European Union over the bloc's plan to label oil from Alberta's vast tar sands as highly polluting, the Guardian can reveal, before a key vote in Brussels on 23 February.
"Canada will not hesitate to defend its interests, including at the World Trade Organisation," state letters sent to European commissioners by Canada's ambassador to the EU and its oil minister, released under freedom of information laws.
The move is a significant escalation of the row over the EU's plans, which Canada fears would set a global precedent and derail its ability to exploit its tar sands, which are the biggest fossil fuel reserve in the world after Saudi Arabia. Environmental groups argue that exploitation of the tar sands, also called oil sands, is catastrophic for the global climate, as well as causing serious air and water pollution in Alberta. |