Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors jlms qkw, maggiejean, wader, Oke, rfall, and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7 and BentLiberal. The guest editor is annetteboardman.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Boy Scouts may soon welcome gay youths, leaders
USA Today
As early as next week, the Boy Scouts of America may announce it will allow gay Scouts and troop leaders, a spokesman for the group has told USA TODAY.
If this policy shift is approved by the national board meeting next week, it will be a sharp reversal of the Scouts' decades' old national policy banning homosexuals.
"The policy change under discussion would allow the religious, civic or educational organizations that oversee and deliver Scouting to determine how to address this issue," BSA spokesman Deron Smith said in a statement to USA TODAY.
Only seven months ago, the Boy Scouts affirmed its ban on gays after a nearly two-year examination of the issue by a committee of volunteers convened by national leaders of the Boy Scouts of America, known as the BSA. However, local chapters and some members of the national board -- corporate CEO Randall Stephenson of AT&T and James Turley of Ernst & Young -- called for a reconsideration.
Talking Points Memo
The post-inauguration push for President Obama’s ambitious second term agenda kicks into high gear this week, with major action on Capitol Hill for two of Obama’s signature legislative goals: immigration reform and gun violence prevention.
While most of the news Monday was dominated by a bipartisan call for comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate, the day also kicked off a big week for gun violence prevention. Recent days have included a push by Vice President Biden for the president’s gun control agenda — as well as signs that in the Senate at least, key parts of that agenda could be picking up steam.
Some things to watch over the next seven days:
• Senate Republicans
Last week brought stories of Republican Senators crossing the aisle to at least rhetorically endorse some of the president’s top goals on gun control. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) is reportedly working with Democratic Senators on legislation to ban the trafficking of illegal guns. He’s also working “to find an amenable background-check proposal,” according to staff.
US NEWS
Bloomberg
John Wilcockson, who has been to 44 consecutive Tours de France and wrote six books about Lance Armstrong’s victories, counts himself among those taken in by the confessed doping cheat.
His work culminated in the 2010 best seller, “Lance: The Making of the World’s Greatest Champion.” In it, Wilcockson recounted Armstrong’s life story, juxtaposing a tale of grit and perseverance with the doping allegations that had been swirling around the cyclist for a decade. The conclusion: Armstrong’s life was a triumph of training, strength and will.
Now Wilcockson, 69, and others in the far-flung world of Lance Inc. have to rebrand and retool, while reassessing a confessed serial cheater who helped them make a lot of money. From Armstrong-linked sportswear by Nike Inc. (NKE) to Armstrong- endorsed energy drinks and Armstrong-inspired private cycling trips to the Tour de France, purveyors of the shattered myth of Lance Armstrong are facing a reckoning of their own.
Reuters
A gauge of U.S. business investment plans improved in December, a sign companies were betting the economy will pick up despite fears over tighter fiscal policy.
The Commerce Department said on Monday that non-defense capital goods orders excluding aircraft, a closely watched proxy for investment plans, edged up 0.2 percent last month.
Many economists expected businesses to invest more timidly late last year because of uncertainty over government spending cuts and tax increases, which had been scheduled to kick in this month. Congress ultimately struck a last-minute deal to avoid or postpone most of the austerity measures.
Despite the uncertainty, Monday's data pointed to growing economic momentum as companies sensed improved consumer demand.
Al Jazeera English
Residents of Newtown, Connecticut, site of a mass school shooting that reignited the US gun violence debate, participated in a Washington march for gun control with activists, politicians and actors.
Thousands of protesters were expected for the rally on Saturday on the National Mall, part of about a dozen across the United States in favour of gun control, organisers said in a statement.
Demonstrators began gathering at the Capitol Reflecting Pool and marched to Constitution Avenue toward the Washington Monument at 11am.
A rally took place near the monument just before noon.
Molly Smith, artistic director of Washington's Arena Stage, and her partner who organised the march were motivated by the December 14 massacre that killed 20 first-graders and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown.
Politicians from Maryland and the District of Columbia, including Washington Mayor Vincent Gray, were scheduled to speak.
The Guardian
Boeing's hopes of a quick solution to its problems with the grounded 787 Dreamliner jet have been dashed by regulators in the US and Japan who have conceded that they still have no clear idea what went wrong with the world's most technologically advanced passenger plane.
Regulators have been examining two incidents involving 787s earlier this month that led to a worldwide grounding of the new airliner. So far, investigators have concentrated on the plane's controversial use of lithium ion batteries, one of which burst into flames, triggering a smoke alarm.
On Monday, Japan's transport ministry official Shigeru Takano said his investigations had found no evidence that battery maker GS Yuasa was the source of the problems. His statement came after US regulators said on Sunday that they had made "no significant discoveries" three weeks into their investigation into the source of a fire that broke out early this month on a Japan Airlines 787 parked at Boston's Logan airport.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had been looking at the batteries' charger, made by Securaplane Technologies, a unit of Britain's Meggitt engineering firm. NTSB said they had found no evidence of flaws that could have caused the incident. NTSB also said parts of the charred battery were too damaged to yield useful information.
Bloomberg
The largest U.S. auto insurers weigh occupation and education levels more than driving records to set rates for minimum-liability coverage, the Consumer Federation of America said today, citing a review of a dozen cities.
The group compared quotes from State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., Allstate Corp. (ALL), Progressive Corp. (PGR), Geico and Farmers Insurance for two fictional 30-year-old female drivers. One was a married executive with a master’s degree and a home who’d caused $800 in damage in an accident in the past three years. The other was a single receptionist with a high-school education who was renting and had a clean driving record.
Controlling for variables like zip code and car model, the group found that the executive got a lower quote in most cases. The findings show that companies are using discriminatory metrics in setting rates for coverage that is mandated in most states, the CFA said.
“State insurance regulators should require auto insurers to explain why they believe factors such as education and income are better predictors of losses than are at-fault accidents,” J. Robert Hunter, CFA’s director of insurance and former Texas insurance commissioner, said in a statement posted on the group’s website.
WORLD NEWS
Reuters
Relatives of the 231 people who died in a Brazilian nightclub fire demanded answers on Monday as to how it could have killed so many people, while police questioned the club's owner and members of the band whose pyrotechnics show allegedly caused the tragedy.
Several coffins, many draped with flags of the victims' favorite soccer teams, lined a gymnasium that has become a makeshift morgue since the fire in the early hours on Sunday, one of the world's deadliest such incidents in a decade.
The death toll was revised down overnight from 233 to 231, as officials said some names had been counted twice.
Eighty-two people remained hospitalized in and around the southern city of Santa Maria. At least 30 of them were in serious condition.
Al Jazeera English
Ground forces backed by French paratroopers and helicopters have taken control of the airport and roads leading into the desert town of Timbuktu, according to a French military official.
Colonel Thierry Burkhard said on Monday that the airport was taken without firing a shot.
"There was an operation on Timbuktu last night that allowed us to control access to the town," he said.
"It's up to Malian forces to retake the town."
About 200 paratroopers landed north of Timbuktu and took control of the routes there.
The French military found more than 90kg of explosives in the airport's air traffic control tower, an official said.
Al Jazeera English
Torrential rain over the weekend has severely flooded several cities and towns in eastern Australia, leading to three deaths in the region.
Many businesses and homes in the Queensland state capital, Brisbane, were inundated on Monday, while about 1,200 properties were flooded by record-high waters in the city of Bundaberg 385km to the north.
Helicopters were used to rescue 18 people from the roofs of their homes in Bundaberg, Australian Associated Press reported.
Queensland police on Monday confirmed that three people had died in flood waters since the weekend.
There was also flooding in the Queensland towns of Gladstone, Gympie and Ipswich.
Almost 250,000 homes across Queensland were without power on Monday and the triple-zero emergency phone network was down in a number of areas, with mobile phones also out of service.
The heavy rain was caused by the remnants of a tropical cyclone that hit the country last week and also brought severe weather including tornadoes. Several high-water rescues have taken place.
BBC
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands has announced she is abdicating in favour of her son, Prince Willem-Alexander.
In a pre-recorded address broadcast on TV, she said she would formally stand down on 30 April.
The queen, who is approaching her 75th birthday, said she had been thinking about this moment for several years and that now was "the moment to lay down my crown".
Queen Beatrix has been head of state since 1980, when her mother abdicated.
In the short televised statement, the queen said it was time for the throne to be held by "a new generation", adding that her son was ready to be king.
Prince Willem-Alexander, 45, is married to Maxima Zorreguieta, a former investment banker from Argentina, and has three young children.
He is a trained pilot and an expert in water management.
He will become the Netherlands' first king since Willem III, who died in 1890.
The Independent
A teenager has survived spending nine weeks in the Australian outback with virtually no food and water, as temperatures soared during a record breaking heatwave.
Matthew Allen lost half his body weight surviving on small amounts of food and water from a near-dry creek and had no form of shelter after setting off on an apparent test of his survival skills in November.
The 18-year-old was discovered by chance on Saturday by two hikers who found him covered in leeches and mosquito bites and unable to stand after gangrene had started eating into his feet and lower legs.
He found “completely disorientated”, weighing just six stone and it has since been revealed the ordeal has left him partially blind.
A helicopter was sent in to winch him out of the dense bush land and fly him to hospital in nearby Hornsby.
It is believed the accountancy student had been suffering from mental health issues at the time of his disappearance.
Mr Allen’s parents had feared their son was dead after he disappeared from their home in Westleigh, north of Sydney, leaving behind his mobile phone and taking no additional clothing with him.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
The Guardian
Those who wonder why large parts of North America seem to be skipping winter have a new answer in addition to climate change: big city life.
A study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that the heat thrown off by major metropolitan areas on America's east coast caused winter warming across large areas of North America, thousands of miles away from those cities.
Winter warming was detected as far away as the Canadian prairies. In some remote areas, temperature rose by as much as 1 degree C (1.8F) under the influence of big cities, which produced changes in the jet stream and other atmospheric systems, the study found.
Researchers found a similar pattern in Asia, where major population centres resulted in strong warming in Russia, northern Asia, and eastern China.
On the flip side, however, changes in atmospheric conditions had an opposite effect in Europe – lowering autumn temperatures by as much as 1 degree C (1.8F).
The extra heat generated by big cities was just a fraction of the warming caused by climate change or urbanisation, the researchers said. But the study did help scientists account for additional warming that was not explained by existing climate models.
The Guardian
Google is facing a fresh privacy battle in the UK over its alleged secret tracking of the internet habits of millions of iPhone users.
An estimated 10 million Britons could have grounds to launch a privacy claim over the way Google circumvented Apple's security settings on the iPhone, iPad and desktop versions of its Safari web browser to monitor their behaviour.
At least 10 British iPhone users have started legal proceedings and dozens more are being lined up, according to Dan Tench, the lawyer behind the action at the London-based firm Olswang.
"This is the first time Google has been threatened with a group claim over privacy in the UK," he said. "It is particularly concerning how Google circumvented security settings to snoop on its users. One of the things about Google is that it is so ubiquitous in our lives and if that's its approach then it's quite concerning."
The Guardian
Every two minutes someone in the UK has a heart attack. Every six minutes, someone dies from heart failure. During an attack, the heart remodels itself and dilates around the site of the injury to try to compensate, but these repairs are rarely effective. If the attack does not kill you, heart failure later frequently will.
"No matter what other clinical interventions are available, heart transplantation is the only genuine cure for this," says Paul Riley, professor of regenerative medicine at Oxford University. "The problem is there is a dearth of heart donors."
Transplants have their own problems – successful operations require patients to remain on toxic, immune-suppressing drugs for life and their subsequent life expectancies are not usually longer than 20 years.
The solution, emerging from the laboratories of several groups of scientists around the world, is to work out how to rebuild damaged hearts. Their weapons of choice are reprogrammed stem cells.
BBC
An American attempt to bore down into Lake Whillans, a body of water buried almost 1km under the Antarctic ice, has achieved its aim.
Scientists reported on Sunday that sensors on their drill system had noted a change in pressure, indicating contact had been made with the lake.
A camera was then sent down to verify the breakthrough.
The Whillans project is one of a number of such ventures trying to investigate Antarctica's buried lakes.
In December, a British team abandoned its efforts to get into Lake Ellsworth after encountering technical difficulties.
The Russians have taken water samples from Lake Vostok, although they have yet to report any big discoveries.
Lake Whillans is sited in the west of Antarctica, on the southeastern edge of the Ross Sea.
It is less of a lake and more of a dense system of streams, almost like a delta, that covers some 60 square km. The liquid body is quite shallow - just a few metres in depth.
BBC
The Pentagon will dramatically increase its cyber-security staff to counter threats against US government computer networks, according to media reports.
US Cyber Command, established three years ago, could grow as much as fivefold over the next few years.
The planned expansion comes amid a series of successful attacks, including a virus that wiped data from 30,000 computers at a Saudi oil firm.
Cyber Command currently has 900 staff members, both military and civilian.
Defence officials told the Washington Post, which first reported the staff increase, that the Pentagon had approved an expansion to 4,900 troops and civilians.
BOOKS
NPR
My favorite item from the growing mountain of Pride and Prejudice bicentennial trivia comes courtesy of an article in something called Regency World Magazine, which is going gaga over the anniversary. The article, "Albert Goes Ape for Austen," describes how a 200-pound orangutan named Albert, living in the Gdansk Zoo in Poland, insists on having 50 pages a night of Pride and Prejudice read to him at bedtime by his keeper or else he refuses to go to sleep.
What does Albert the orangutan hear in Pride and Prejudice, I wonder? Maybe the same thing my students hear when I teach survey courses on the evolution of the novel. We start our voyage out with Robinson Crusoe and often go on to Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy — fine, weird novels that seem to hail from a civilization a million light years from our own. Then we arrive home, on Planet Austen.
NPR
Reading always seemed to be the most private of acts: just you and your imagination immersed in another world. But now, if you happen to be curled up with an e-reader, you're not alone.
Data is being collected about your reading habits. That information belongs to the companies that sell e-readers, like Amazon or Barnes & Noble. And they can share — or sell — that information if they like. One official at Barnes & Noble has said sharing that data with publishers might "help authors create even better books."
The data is also, of course, a brilliant marketing tool. Best-selling author Scott Turow says e-readers can collect a lot of information about their owners.
"You can tell everything about how somebody reads a book," says Turow, "whether they are the kind that skips to the end, how fast they read, what they skip ... So [data from e-readers] can give the author specific feedback. You know, '35 percent of the people who bought this book quit after the first two chapters.' "
By Dialika Neufeld
Spiegel
A few weeks ago I experienced a feeling I had almost forgotten about, but one which was familiar to me from my childhood. It's a feeling that had to do with the fact that people liked to call me a "nigger".
I was called this often as a child. That's how it was in the northern German city of Kiel in the early 1990s, when I was in elementary school. A boy at the playground might tug at his mother's sleeve, point at me and say, "Look, Mom, a nigger!" When a child had a birthday party, the parents served marshmallow-filled chocolates known as "Negerküsse," or "Nigger kisses." When I dove into the swimming pool and the water beaded off my curls, someone was bound to say, "Niggers don't even get their hair wet, do they?"