Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Man Oh Man, rfall, and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw. The guest editors are Doctor RJ and annetteboardman.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
New York Times
In Manhattan, the upscale clothing retailer Barneys will replace the bankrupt discounter Loehmann’s, whose Chelsea store closes in a few weeks. Across the country, Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants are struggling, while fine-dining chains like Capital Grille are thriving. And at General Electric, the increase in demand for high-end dishwashers and refrigerators dwarfs sales growth of mass-market models.
As politicians and pundits in Washington continue to spar over whether economic inequality is in fact deepening, in corporate America there really is no debate at all. The post-recession reality is that the customer base for businesses that appeal to the middle class is shrinking as the top tier pulls even further away.
If there is any doubt, the speed at which companies are adapting to the new consumer landscape serves as very convincing evidence. Within top consulting firms and among Wall Street analysts, the shift is being described with a frankness more often associated with left-wing academics than business experts.
Reuters
The Obama administration on Monday defended its policy on Syria and disputed media reports that Secretary of State John Kerry had told a group of U.S. lawmakers the current U.S. policy on Syria is not working.
Kerry met with the bipartisan group on the sidelines of a security conference in Munich, Germany, during the weekend.
Included in the group were senior Republican lawmakers John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who favor a more muscular U.S. policy to stop the bloodshed in Syria, and Democrats Chris Murphy and Sheldon Whitehouse.
McCain and Graham told reporters that Kerry said Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was failing to uphold a promise to give up chemical weapons and peace talks in Geneva to put in place a Syrian transitional government were not succeeding, according to The Daily Beast.
Los Angeles Times
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal appeals court agreed Monday to put on hold a ruling in favor of a California law that bans licensed therapists from trying to change a minor’s sexual orientation.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9thCircuit Court of Appeals gave opponents of the ban 90 days to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The 9th Circuit upheld the law in August and refused last month to hear another challenge. Liberty Counsel, a religious rights group, then asked the court to block enforcement of the law pending an appeal to the high court.
In upholding the ban, the 9th Circuit said the law regulated conduct, not speech, and did not violate the 1st Amendment rights of patients or therapists or the fundamental rights of parents.
Psychological associations say that attempting to change a minor’s same-sex attractions is generally futile and potentially harmful.
Judges Diarmuid O’Scannlain, a Ronald Reagan appointee, joined by Judges Carlos T. Bea and Sandra S. Ikuta, both appointed by George W. Bush, dissented when the 9th Circuit refused to rehear the case before a larger, en banc panel.
Reuters
U.S. automakers Ford Motor Co and General Motors Co saw January auto sales plummet, missing analysts' estimates for the month.
But early sales results were mixed for other companies and brands, with Chrysler Group, a unit of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, and Nissan North America reporting increases and topping analysts' estimates, while Toyota Motor Sales USA missed on a year-to-year decline.
There was little consistency in the initial sales reports. GM estimated industry sales in January were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 15.3 million.
GM, Ford and Toyota, the top three U.S. sellers, all blamed bad weather for poor performances.
Ford said company sales fell 7.1 percent to 154,644. Analysts polled by Reuters had projected 157,441. Ford brand sales dropped 8.4 percent, with declines in such popular models as the Fusion mid-size sedan and the F-Series full-size pickup. But Lincoln brand sales jumped 42.5 percent, on the strength of the MKZ sedan and the MKX crossover.
Reuters
U.S. manufacturing activity slowed sharply in January on the back of the biggest drop in new orders in years, suggesting the economy had lost steam at the start of 2014.
The economic picture was also darkened by other data on Monday showing spending on construction projects barely rose in December.
The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said its index of national factory activity fell to 51.3 last month, its lowest level since May 2013, from a recently revised 56.5 in December.
"This offers a sobering glimpse on the weakening in growth in recent months, confirming the souring tone in other important economic indicators," said Millan Mulraine, deputy chief economist at TD Securities in New York.
U.S. stocks extended losses on the data, while prices for U.S. Treasury debt rose. The dollar fell against a basket of currencies.
McClatchyDC
WASHINGTON — When the new attorney general in Virginia decided recently to oppose his state’s ban on gay marriage, it might have been dismissed as an isolated move by a Democrat seeking to reverse Republican policy. But it underscored the speed and breadth of a fundamental change in the country.
Public opinion on same-sex marriage is changing at breathtaking speed. Voters across the nation are dropping their opposition, and many state gay-marriage bans just recently adopted are already coming under assault.
“On no issue in American life have opinions changed as fast as they have on gay rights,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster and political consultant. “It is truly a stunning development.”
The change is especially vexing for Republicans, who used the issue to get conservative voters to the polls just a decade ago and now are torn between their traditional stance and political base on one hand and the quickly changing political landscape on the other.
Al Jazeera America
DETROIT — The homes sit side by side and worlds apart on Greenview Avenue. The one on the left has a hole in its roof, no windows or doors, with piles of charred debris strewn across the exposed living room under a film of recent snow. The one on the right has pretty, clean blue siding, a recently installed front awning and a working satellite dish, its walkway freshly shoveled and the driveway occupied by a boat and some recently dug-out cars.
The occupants, who have lived there only since last summer, don’t know how the place next door fell into such disrepair. By the time Jannelle Davis and her boyfriend rented this 900-square-foot one-bedroom in northwestern Detroit, it was already so decrepit that even the scavengers seeking to strip it of copper were long ago done and gone.
Al Jazeera America
WINDOW ROCK, Navajo Nation — Brown University alum Dana Eldridge could have sought employment in a big city on the East Coast. But she wanted to avoid becoming another statistic in what some call the Navajo Nation’s “brain drain” — the flight of the nation's brightest and most successful young people from their homeland.
So now Eldridge finds herself roughing it on the reservation. The 27-year-old can’t find her own place to live, because of the Navajo's complicated land-leasing system. So she’s couch-crashing with friends and relatives.
Eldridge is a private consultant on Native American policy issues, but she has no office space. Even so, she remains determined. “I want to be here, and I want to be involved in what’s going on,” she said.
Eldridge is not alone. Many of those who buck a trend of young, talented people leaving the reservation by returning home after university encounter a dearth of opportunities for professional development. Now many are agitating for changes in policy that they say will allow them to create the businesses and jobs they — and the rest of the reservation — so desperately need.
The Guardian
The treasury secretary, Jack Lew, said on Monday the US government’s borrowing limit should be extended as a matter of urgency, warning that the country will be unable to meet its debt obligations “at some point very soon”, possibly by the end of the month.
Conservative figures in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives are braying for a confrontation over the debt limit, as a way of prising unspecified concessions out of President Barack Obama’s administration. Obama is refusing to negotiate, saying he will not yield to heavy-handed tactics which could risk a calamitous US debt default.
On Monday, Lew said the Treasury’s borrowing capacity would expire “ in just a matter of days”, after which he would be required to use extraordinary measures to enable the government to meet its obligations.
However, Lew said, complex seasonal factors mean such measures will not last as long as they might do at other times of the year. “We now forecast that we are likely to exhaust these measures by the end of this month,” he said.
Reuters
A man convicted of four 1993 murders escaped from a central Michigan prison during the Super Bowl broadcast and is on the loose after kidnapping a woman and forcing her to drive to Indiana, prison authorities said on Monday.
Michael David Elliot, 40, escaped Sunday night from the prison in Ionia, where he was serving four life sentences, the state's Department of Corrections said.
"He made it through some fencing," prison spokesman Russ Marlan said in a telephone interview, "and it was obviously a vulnerable spot of our perimeter." That spot had since been secured, Marlan added.
After his escape at about 7 p.m. EST (0000 GMT Monday), Elliot used a box cutter, or knife, to kidnap a woman in Michigan and forced her to drive for about 100 miles to a gas station in Middlebury, Indiana, said Indiana broadcaster WNDU.
Elliot came upon the woman, who appears to have no relationship with him, at a gas station or party store, Marlan said. There appeared to be no planning of the escape with anyone from the outside, he said.
Reuters
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said on Monday he "unequivocally" had no knowledge of a plan by some of his top aides to snarl traffic near the busy George Washington Bridge, which has threatened the governor's political ambitions.
The Guardian
Janet Yellen was sworn in as the first woman to head the Federal Reserve on Monday, ascending to the top job at the central bank at a time when the US economy seems on a firmer footing but investors are worrying about China and other emerging markets.
The 67-year-old was sworn in by the Fed governor Daniel Tarullo, the senior member of the Fed's seven-member board, in a brief ceremony in front of a fireplace in the Fed's massive board room. Her husband, the Nobel-winning economist George Akerloff, was present. She made no remarks.
Her first day of the job started as treasury secretary Jack Lew warned "time is short" to solve the US’s latest budget battle, with a new deal supposed to be agreed before February 7. Lew’s comment’s followed disappointing manufacturing figures for January which combined to knock over 326 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average by the end of the day. The Dow has fallen more than 5% since its all time high at the end of last year, dropping in part on fears that China’s growth is slowing and amid signs of more economic woes in emerging markets.
Reuters
Italy's justice minister ordered an investigation on Monday into comments to the media by the judge who reinstated murder convictions for U.S. student Amanda Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.
Alessandro Nencini, who last Thursday sentenced Knox to 28 years and six months and Italian Sollecito to 25 years in jail for the 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher, spoke to several Italian newspapers the morning after the verdict.
Sollecito's lawyers said the comments showed the judge had been biased against their client and had violated the legal maxim that jury deliberations remain secret. They asked Italy's judicial governing body to consider disciplinary action and queried whether the court's decision was still valid.
Al Jazeera America
Al-Qaeda has publicly disavowed the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), whose members have been locked in deadly clashes with other Syrian rebel groups, according to an online statement apparently from Al-Qaeda's leadership.
The move is seen as an attempt by Al-Qaeda to reassert its authority over fragmented fighters involved in Syria's three-year-old war, which remains largely deadlocked, with the country split into areas controlled by the government of President Bashar al-Assad and the opposition.
The statement, which was attributed to the Al-Qaeda "General Command," said that ISIL "is not a branch of the Al-Qaeda group."
Al-Qaeda's leader Ayman al-Zawahri last May ordered ISIL to operate independently from the Nusra Front, another Al-Qaeda-linked group. However, ISIL leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi rejected al-Zawahri's orders and unsuccessfully sought to merge the two branches.
Spiegel Online
The Vatican last year sent out a survey to Catholics around the world focusing on attitudes to sex and sexuality. The responses are now in -- and they show that the Church is badly in need of reform. Can Pope Francis meet such expectations?
Adolescents find it embarrassing to talk about sex with adults. Even more so when the adult in question is their Catholic priest.
About 20 girls and boys are sitting on leather sofas in the basement of St. Josef Catholic Community Center on the outskirts of Berlin. The walls are brightly painted and bags of gummy bears and chocolate are on a table in the center of the room.
Hannah, Jonas and their friends giggle when Harald Tux, a friendly, balding man with glasses, reads a questionnaire from the Vatican out loud. It's about premarital sex, and the officials in Rome want to know how these young Catholics in Berlin's Weissensee neighborhood feel about it. "Is contraception an option for you?" the theologian asks. The youths are already whispering, and they can't help but smile when Tux finally gets to the point: "If you used contraception, would you confess to it?"
"Huh?" a girl asks with a grimace. "It's not a crime," exclaims a boy in a hooded sweatshirt. They all snort with laughter.
The Guardian
When Darwish looked out of his new living room window 40 years ago, he felt as if he'd left Afghanistan. Then, as now, it was one of the world's poorest countries, but in Shahrak paved roads curved between lawns and flowerbeds past an Olympic-standard swimming pool towards two cinemas, a clinic and low-rise apartment blocks.
It was a dream conjured up in the offices of Soviet bureaucrats who had dispatched engineers to build the country's largest hydroelectric plant nearby. In a social engineering project as ambitious as the 100-metre (328ft) dam, they also created a model village for its Soviet and Afghan workers.
"When we came here it felt like a foreign country, with the grass and the beautiful flowers," said Darwish, 72, a mechanic who started at the plant even before its giant turbines began spinning out electricity in 1967.
Today Shahrak is on the fringes of Taliban territory. Women rarely go out without burqas, the cinema is makeshift housing and the wrecked remains of diving boards are the only suggestion that the pool was once anything more than a rubbish pit browsed by muddy goats.
The Guardian
An Iranian opposition leader who was being held against his will in a safe house belonging to the intelligence services has been transferred to his own home but remains under house arrest.
Mehdi Karroubi, a former presidential candidate in Iran's 2009 disputed election, returned home but a judicial official made clear on Monday that his house arrest has not been lifted.
"Two nights ago the authorities took my father back to his home in Tehran but security guards are still in control of his movements and communications," Karroubi's son, Mohammad Taghi, told the Guardian. "In his home, he is allowed to live with my mother who used to be under house arrest herself but is now free."
According to his son, Karroubi and his wife live on the second floor of their house while guards stay in the first floor. He is allowed to watch national television and has regular access to two state-run newspapers selected by the authorities, but not telephone or satellite channels. Immediate family members can visit him once a week with prior arrangements as in the past, his son said. Newspapers Karroubi is allowed to read include the conservative Ettelaat, Hamshahri and Jam-e-Jam, which do not have significant coverage of political news.
NPR
Twenty-seven bodies have been recovered from the ruins of a home for senior citizens in L'Isle-Verte, Quebec, and authorities believe that bone fragments found in the burned-out building will help them identify five more victims.
The search is over at the site, which was consumed by a fire on Jan. 23. It took 10 days to search the wreckage because water used to fight the flames had frozen. In some spots, ice was more than a foot thick.
According to The Toronto Star, "10 of the bodies that were recovered have been officially identified, and nine of those names have been made public."
NPR
The Winter Olympics in Sochi are just a few days away. Russia has spent $50 billion on everything from construction to security, making these the most expensive games in history.
Countries often justify the Olympic-sized price tag by saying the investment pays off in increased business and tourism.
It may look that way at first. In London these days, the Olympic complex looks like an anthill of activity, with a huge shopping mall, construction cranes updating the stadium used in the 2012 Summer Games, and buildings that housed athletes and are now high-end apartments, condos and even student housing.
It looks a lot different in Athens. The main Olympic complex, located in the northern suburb of Marousi, is mostly bare. The buildings are rusty and empty, and the landscape is bleak, with a lone souvlaki salesman peddling his wares outside the front entrance before a local basketball game on a recent day.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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DW
DW: There have been an estimated 14 million new cases of cancer per year. That figure is expected to rise to 22 million annually within the next two decades. Weren't we getting better at treatment und survival rates?
Christopher Wild: I think both aspects are correct, in fact we are getting better at treatment, particularly for some cancers. What we're seeing here is the result of population growth and aging, particularly in the low and middle income countries. As cancer is a disease of aging, and the populations are changing, the number of cancers is increasing globally, but particularly in those low and middle income countries.
You're citing African, Asian, Central and South American countries where up to 70 percent of the world's cancer deaths are accounted for.
Yes. Those regions also have very high numbers of people, they're the most populous regions, but it's a combination of changing demographics and the aging process. But those are also the same countries where survival, if you develop a cancer, is much poorer: The access to cancer services is not as good as in high income countries.
Al Jazeera America
Governments could slow or even reverse the growing obesity epidemic if they introduce more regulation into the global market for fast foods such as burgers, chips and fizzy drinks, researchers said in a report to be released Monday.
A study published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (WHO) suggested that if governments took firmer action, they could start to prevent people from becoming overweight and obese – conditions with serious long-term consequences such as diabetes, heart diseases and cancer.
"Unless governments take steps to regulate their economies, the invisible hand of the market will continue to promote obesity worldwide with disastrous consequences for future public health and economic productivity," said Roberto De Vogli of the University of California, Davis, who led the study.
The WHO is urging governments to do more to prevent obesity from happening in the first place, rather than risking the high human and economic costs when it does.
The Guardian
The California drought, now reaching into its 13th month, grows more devastating with each passing day and there is no sign of significant relief in sight.
More than halfway through the state's wet season and the Sierra Nevada snowcap all but non-existent, California's prospects for making up its precipitation deficit are slim. The snowcap will yield precious little water and the state would need to get an average of about a foot or more of rain in the next two months to make up the difference.
Forecasts are not offering much hope of that.The California drought reached another grim milestone on Friday when the state announced that for the first time in the 54-year history of the State Water Project it may not be able to allocate water to the nearly 25 million Californians who depend on the vast system of dams and reservoirs for supplemental water supplies. The Department of Water Resources also said it planned to reduce allocations to farmland by 50%, the maximum extent allowable by law.
NPR
If you are buying health coverage in the Colorado ski resort towns, the Connecticut suburbs of New York City or a bunch of otherwise low-cost rural regions of Georgia, Mississippi and Nevada, you have the misfortune of living in the most expensive insurance marketplaces under the new health law.
The 10 most expensive regions also include all of Alaska and Vermont and large parts of Wisconsin and Wyoming. The ranking is based on the lowest-price "silver" plan, which is the midlevel plan that the majority of consumers are choosing.
These regions, created as part of the health law, range in size from a state to a single county. While many people in these places will receive government subsidies to help pay for premiums, the portion that they pay will still be higher than what they would have to foot in many other places.
The cause of the stratospheric premiums varies from region to region, although a recurring theme is that in some areas the limited number of hospitals and specialists allows them to demand high prices from insurers.
Bloomberg
Each year, 3,000 Americans die and one in six gets sick from the food they eat. The Food Safety Modernization Act signed by President Barack Obama in January 2011 was designed to fix the problem through the most comprehensive food-safety reform in more than 70 years. More than three years later, none of the act’s major provisions are in force, and the $1.2 trillion food industry still operates under decades-old measures such as the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Consumer advocates point to the political clout of food companies as one reason for the delay. The industry itself has split over some provisions, with grocers and giant food sellers like Wal-Mart, who deal directly with consumers, pushing against farmers and food processors for tougher rules and enforcement.
In January 2013 — after activists filed a suit to force progress — the Obama administration proposed the first major sets of rules under the new food safety act. One would give companies a year to develop a formal plan for preventing the causes of foodborne illnesses. The second would oblige farms that grow produce considered to have a high risk’ of contamination to develop new controls.
The Guardian
Tens of thousands of accounts associated with customers of Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Yahoo have their data turned over to US government authorities every six months as the result of secret court orders, the tech giants disclosed for the first time on Monday.
As part of a transparency deal reached last week with the Justice Department, four of the tech firms that participate in the National Security Agency’s Prism effort, which collects largely overseas internet communications, released more information about the volume of data the US demands they provide than they have ever previously been permitted to disclose.
But the terms of the deal prevent the companies from itemising the collection, beyond bands of thousands of data requests served on them by a secret surveillance court. The companies must also delay by six months disclosing information on the most recent requests – terms the Justice Department negotiated to end a transparency lawsuit before the so-called Fisa court that was brought by the companies.
In announcing the updated data figures, the companies appeared concerned by the lack of precision over the depth of their compelled participation in government surveillance.
NPR
More than a few parents have worried that the HPV vaccine might encourage girls to be more sexually active.
But girls say that's not so, even if they think, wrongly, that the HPV vaccine protects them against other sexually transmitted diseases.
Earlier studies have found that the vaccine for human papillomavirus, which is sexually transmitted and can cause cervical cancer, doesn't encourage increased sexual activity in teenagers and young women.
The HPV vaccine is recommended for girls and boys when they are 11 or 12. The idea is to get preteens vaccinated so that if they do become sexually active as teens, they will be protected against HPV.