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.
McClatchy
SOCHI, RUSSIA — Russia concluded the 2014 Winter Olympic Sunday with a lavish, theatrical victory lap celebrating not only successfully hosting the games, but also showcasing a Russia transformed from the grainy black-and-white images of the old Soviet Union.
"Russia delivered on its promise," Dmitry Chernyshenko, president of the Sochi 2014 Organizing Committee said to thunderous applause inside Fisht Stadium. "This is the new face of Russia, our Russia."
Then, borrowing the line from the late International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch, Cheryshenko added: "And for us these are the best games ever."
NPR
The closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Sochi featured a particularly captivating image: an aerial view of the coastal Olympic village, with the stadiums set like jewels among sparkling avenues, set off by the flash of fireworks in the night sky.
It seemed as if Russia, and especially President Vladimir Putin, had achieved everything that could be hoped for from a world-class sporting event.
But like the spectacular closing ceremony itself, a lot of the best effects were achieved by lighting.
In the daytime, the Olympic village is a large, open expanse of pavement, enclosing giant venues that will need to be used somehow if Russia's $51 billion investment — the most in Olympics history — is to pay off. The idea sold by the Russian Olympic organizers and Putin himself was that Sochi would continue to benefit from the investments as a year-round resort city, but will it?
If previous games any are guide, the prospects aren't great.
Think Progress
After two weeks, hundreds of medals, and billions of dollars spent, the Winter Olympics came to a close this weekend in Sochi, with all delegations departing unscathed — though some disappointed in their performance — despite weeks of worries about the possibility of a terrorist attack being carried out against the games.
This year’s Winter Olympics took place close to one of the most restive areas in the Russian Federation, with the states of Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Chechnya just beyond the Caucasus mountain range from Krasnodar Krai, home to Sochi. From the coverage before the Games that declared it was a matter of “not if but when” an attack occurred, you would be forgiven if you expected any minute to see breaking news declaring a bomb exploding somewhere within the Olympic Village or elsewhere throughout Russia. There was no shortage of coverage on cable news about the potential for “black widows,” spouses of dead terrorists who had taken up the cause for their own, to strike or for jihadis from the Caucasus Emirates to launch an attack. The United States government itself warned about the potential for “toothpaste bombs” to be used against flights coming into Sochi and warned American athletes from wearing their gear beyond the confines of the Village.
Al Jazeera America
Facing a daunting re-election year, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett has been touting his all-out support for natural gas drilling as a job creator in his state.
But economists and environmentalists are questioning Corbett’s claim that the industry props up more than 200,000 Pennsylvania jobs. They say that the governor’s administration has greatly inflated the number, and that it may be getting lower every day.
A new analysis made by the Allentown Morning Call newspaper and published Monday indicates that the core number of jobs associated with drilling for gas in the Marcellus Shale – one of the country’s main areas for hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” – fell by 29 percent to just under 30,000 jobs between 2010 and 2013. Industry supporters say that the decline is a temporary fluctuation, and that ancillary jobs created and supported by shale gas development – including careers in trucking, engineering and construction – boost the number to more than 200,000.
But as Gov. Corbett continues to support natural gas development in his bid for reelection, those jobs numbers have come under more scrutiny. Activists and economists say that while there is no doubt natural gas has contributed to the state’s economy, it is likely the practice’s impact has been exaggerated, perhaps for political gain.
McClatchy
WASHINGTON — Governors are displaying split personalities as they launch their 2014 election campaigns: Bash the other party as divisive and wrong about the big issues, but also calmly vow to solve the day’s biggest problems as they work diligently with others.
That dual focus -- feisty partisans and thoughtful policy-makers -- was evident all weekend at the National Governors Association winter meeting.
After a dinner at the White House Sunday evening, the governors plan to meet Monday morning with President Barack Obama and members of his Cabinet. Problem-solving, rather than politics, is expected to dominate the agenda.
This less flashy aspect of this four-day conference, which ends Monday, has been apparent during a series of forums on everyday problems confronting governors. The discussions have been civil, the disagreements polite.
The Guardian
The US defense secretary, Chuck Hagel, has effectively declared that the US is out of the business of long, agonizing ground wars for the foreseeable future, a gamble detailed between the lines of the Pentagon’s budget plan for 2015.
The $496bn budget, previewed by the Pentagon on Monday before its submission to Congress next week, presents an army smaller than at any time since before the second world war, a shrinkage defense strategists argued represented contemporary and not legacy threats.
Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, called the new budget the first to “fully reflect the transition DoD [the Defense Department] is making after 13 years of war.”
One of the “realities” Hagel described as shaping his budget thinking was that “after Iraq and Afghanistan, we are no longer sizing the military to conduct long and large stability operations”.
NPR
The leader of an influential Justice Department office that offers legal advice on surveillance, drones and other issues at the center of security and executive power quietly left government before Christmas.
Virginia Seitz, who won Senate confirmation after an earlier candidate under president Obama foundered, resigned from federal service after 2 1/2 years on the job. The timing is unusual because her unit plays a critical role in drawing the legal boundaries of executive branch action — at a time when President Obama says he will do more to bypass a divided Congress and do more governing by way of executive order.
Seitz is a onetime Rhodes scholar and clerk to the late Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. She declined to be interviewed about her decision. But friends and former colleagues who spoke with NPR cited the grueling pace of the job and the untimely death last year of a close friend. They add she was well-liked and left of her own accord even after department leaders tried to persuade her to remain.
NPR
For baby boomers, divorce has almost become, like marriage, another rite of passage. The post-World War II generation is setting new records for divorce: Americans over 50 are twice as likely to get divorced as people of that age were 20 years ago.
But just because it's more common, doesn't mean it's not still painful.
Jim Campbell, 55, of Boulder, Colo., says he and his wife grew apart after 34 years together. "The No. 1 best thing in common that my ex-wife and I had was raising kids," Campbell says. When their two sons grew up, he says, "we just didn't have enough activities, passions, interests that were in common. And when the boys were gone, that just became more and more — to me — obvious."
He felt lonely. In 2012, he decided he had to leave. He told his wife while they were out for a walk. "And she was incredibly upset. And I left," he says. "And we haven't talked about emotions much since then."
Reuters
Unusually cold weather will take a bite out of U.S. economic growth this quarter, but a rebound seems likely on the horizon and expectations for stronger growth this year have not changed.
Economists estimate that freezing temperatures and the ice and snow storms that have blanketed much of the nation will shave as much as half a percentage point from gross domestic product in the first quarter.
That comes on top of the drag from efforts by businesses to sell off bloated inventories and a one-time hit from the expiration of benefits for the long-term unemployed.
"The slowdown is testing everyone's optimism about the economy, but so far it's just a soft patch. The economy will regain strength," said Ryan Sweet, a senior economist at Moody's Analytics in West Chester Pennsylvania. "Outside housing, we don't believe the recent data signal a change in fundamentals."
NY Times
Harold Ramis, a writer, director and actor whose sly but boisterous silliness helped catapult comedies like “Groundhog Day,” “Ghostbusters,” “Animal House” and “Caddyshack” to commercial and critical success, died on Monday in his Chicago-area home. He was 69.
The cause was complications of autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, a disease of the blood vessels, said Chris Day, a spokesman for United Talent Agency, which represented Mr. Ramis.
Mr. Ramis was a master at creating hilarious scenes and plotlines peopled by indelible characters, among them a groundskeeper obsessed with a gopher, fraternity brothers at war with a college dean and a jaded weatherman condemned to repeating Groundhog Day over and over.
Reuters
Ukraine's new authorities issued an arrest warrant on Monday for mass murder against ousted president Viktor Yanukovich, who is on the run after being toppled by bloody street protests in which police snipers killed demonstrators.
Russia, Yanukovich's main backer, said it would not deal with Ukrainians who seized power from their elected leader in an "armed mutiny". It declared that Russian citizens' lives were under threat there, and contacted NATO to express concern.
With Ukraine's neighbors raising the alarm about a break-up of Ukraine, Moscow said the concerns of local leaders in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, Russian-speaking bastions of electoral support for Yanukovich, must be taken into account.
European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton arrived in Kiev to discuss measures to shore up the ailing economy, which the finance ministry said needs urgent financial assistance to avoid default.
Reuters
Egypt's government resigned on Monday, paving the way for army chief Field Marshal Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to declare his candidacy for president of a strategic U.S. ally gripped by political strife.
After the July overthrow of elected Islamist President Mohamed Mursi and subsequent crackdown on Islamists and liberals with hundreds killed and thousands jailed, critics say Cairo's military-backed authorities are turning the clock back to the era of autocrat Hosni Mubarak era, when the political elite ruled with an iron fist in alliance with top businessmen.
"(The outgoing government) made every effort to get Egypt out of the narrow tunnel in terms of security, economic pressures and political confusion," Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi said in a live nationwide speech.
DW
Ukraine's new opposition-dominated leadership has won recognition from the EU but Russian leaders continue to challenge its legitimacy. Elusive president Viktor Yanukovych is wanted by Kyiv for "mass murder."
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev on Monday told Western nations that they were mistaken in recognizing new leaders in Kyiv. From Brussels, the European Commission described Oleksandr Turchinov as Ukraine's "interim president."
Commission spokesman Olivier Bailly said a draft EU association with Ukraine "remains on the table" but could not be signed until after Ukrainian elections scheduled for May 25. Aid would be linked to economic reforms, he added.
Medvedev raised the rhetoric, saying Moscow would not communicate with a government comprising people who "carry Kalashnikovs."
DW
German public opinion of Israel is slumping ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel's visit there. There is growing public and political disillusionment over Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian neighbors.
Merkel and her 15 cabinet ministers will participate in the largest-ever bilateral consultations on Monday and will kick off official preparations for next year's celebrations commemorating 50 years since diplomatic relations between the two countries were established.
However, the visit has been overshadowed by reports of the worst crisis in diplomatic ties since Merkel took office almost 10 years ago. A recent BBC poll showed that only 14 percent of Germans today had a positive view of Israel.
"I think German public opinion is actually worse than what's shown in the polls because Germans don't publicly state their opinion, they play it down," said Israel's former ambassador to Germany and the European Union, Avi Primor.
Al Jazeera America
Pope Francis on Monday revolutionized the Vatican's scandal-plagued finances, inviting outside experts into a world often seen as murky and secretive and saying the church must use its wealth to help the poor.
Francis, elected nearly a year ago with a mandate for reform, used a document known as a Motu Proprio - Latin for "by his own initiative" - to implement immediate changes including appointing an auditor-general.
The document says the Church must see its possessions and financial assets in the "light of its mission to evangelize, with particular concern for the most needy."
A new Secretariat for the Economy will report directly to the pope and will be headed by Australian Cardinal George Pell, 72, currently the Archbishop of Sydney and a key proponent of financial transparency in a committee that advised the pope. A Church source said Pell would move to Rome.
The auditor-general will have wide oversight powers "to conduct audits of any agency of the Holy See and Vatican City State at any time," a statement said.
Al Jazeera America
Philippine police arrested a Wahid Tundok, a key commander of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the main Muslim rebel group, which recently concluded a peace deal with the government, National Police Director General Alan Purisima said Monday.
Purisima said police and marine forces arrested Tundok, wanted for murder and other charges, on Sunday at a checkpoint in southern city of Cotabato. Tundok and several of his armed followers were taken to a local military headquarters for questioning.
Police authorities said Tundok had outstanding warrants of arrest for various criminal offenses, including arson. Members of the group, including its deputy leader, Ghadzali Jaafar, said Tundok had been helping out in the peace process and was supposed to be covered by an immunity guarantee from the government. The cease-fire, Jaafar said, should remain in place, and Tundok's arrest should not affect the gains made in the peace talks.
The Guardian
Moscow delivered a damning indictment of post-revolutionary Ukraine on Monday, denouncing alleged discrimination of the ethnic Russian minority, accusing the west of sponsoring a takeover of the country by "terrorists" and "extremists", and clashing with Washington over plans for early elections in May.
"Russia is extremely concerned about the situation in Ukraine," said a foreign ministry statement, which followed the highest-level reaction from Moscow so far to the collapse of Viktor Yanukovych's presidency. Dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister and former president, accused the post-Yanukovych authorities and parliament of lacking legitimacy.
"If you consider Kalashnikov-toting people in black masks who are roaming Kiev to be the government, then it will be hard for us to work with that government," Medvedev said. "Some of our foreign, western partners think otherwise, considering them to be legitimate authorities. I do not know which constitution, which laws they were reading, but it seems to me it is an aberration … Something that is essentially the result of a mutiny is called legitimate."
Reuters
Anti-government demonstrators put up barricades and set fire to trash in Caracas on Monday despite calls from within the opposition to rein in protests that have led to 13 deaths in Venezuela's worst unrest for a decade.
Traffic in the capital slowed to a crawl and many people stayed home as protesters burned trash and piled debris along main avenues a day after opposition leader Henrique Capriles called on them to keep demonstrations peaceful.
"We know we're bothering people but we have to wake up Venezuela!" student Pablo Herrera, 23, said next to a barricade in the affluent Los Palos Grandes district of Caracas.
Reuters
Prime Minister Matteo Renzi won his first confidence vote in parliament, pledging to cut labour taxes, free up funds for investment in schools and pass wide institutional reforms to tackle Italy's economic malaise.
Facing parliament for the first time, the 39-year-old Renzi who is Italy's youngest premier, sketched out an ambitious program of change in an hour-long speech delivered in his trademark quickfire style interspersed with occasional jeers from the opposition benches.
"If we lose this challenge, the fault will be mine alone," he told the Senate. The euro zone's third-largest economy is in urgent need of potentially painful reforms and is weighed down by a 2-trillion-euro public debt.
Backed by his own center-left Democratic Party (PD), the small center-right NCD party, centrists and other minor groups, Renzi won the backing of the upper house by 169 votes to 139 in a vote taken in the early hours of Tuesday morning.
Spiegel Online
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier wants the country to take a more active approach to foreign policy. He spoke to SPIEGEL about the situation in Ukraine, the Merkel Doctrine and Germany's changing global role.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Steinmeier, you played a part in negotiating the political agreement between Ukraine's government and its opposition. What was at stake?
Steinmeier: We sat and negotiated for over 20 hours. When we arrived, black smoke was already rising above Independence Square, and you could hear gunshots. We were constantly hearing about the rising death toll. Everybody knew that our negotiations were the last chance for a political solution. I think it made people more prepared to make the necessary compromises.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Al Jazeera America
Before dying, Marina McClay’s mother asked her to promise one thing: “That you’ll take care of dad.”
“That was my mother’s only dying request of me,” McClay said. “And I said I would, of course.”
Her father, Robert, was more than a good provider; he was a renaissance man– a successful artist, jazz enthusiast and world traveler, who spent his 20s in Europe. Then, about five years ago, he started forgetting things.
“I discovered at some point that he hadn’t been opening his bank statements for more than a year,” she told America Tonight.
McClay is one of almost 40 million Americans who are considered informal caregivers – the silent army of family members who provide care to a skyrocketing number of aging adults.
People like McClay are at the forefront of a coming “care gap.” In America, a person turns 65 every six seconds. Today, there are roughly seven adults capable of providing care for every person age 80 or older, according to a 2013 study by AARP, an advocacy group for older Americans. By 2030, that ratio will drop to 4-to-1.
The Guardian
Consumer groups and media watchdogs on Monday expressed “grave concerns” about Netflix’s landmark pact with cable giant Comcast for improved internet service.
Netflix, the world’s largest video on demand service, announced at the weekend that it had made an undisclosed payment to Comcast for direct access to the cable company’s broadband network, in order to ensure smooth delivery of its content.
The deal came just 10 days after Comcast, the biggest US cable firm, announced a takeover of Time Warner Cable, the second biggest, in a $45bn deal that would hand it the accounts of 30 million cable customers. Netflix had previously accused Comcast of slowing its service in order to favour its own video-on-demand service.
The companies said Netflix would receive “no preferential network treatment” but would benefit from “a more direct connection”. Terms were not disclosed.
Craig Aaron, president of internet rights lobby group Free Press, said he had “grave concerns” about the deal.
NPR
Investigative reporter Julia Angwin was curious what Google knew about her, so she asked the company for her search data. "It turns out I had been doing about 26,000 Google searches a month ... and I was amazed at how revealing they were," she tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies.
From NSA sweeps to commercial services scraping our Web browsing habits, to all kinds of people tracking us through our smartphones, Angwin says we've become a society where indiscriminate data-gathering has become the norm. Angwin has covered online privacy issues for years, and in her new book she describes what she did to try to escape the clutches of data scrapers, even to the point of creating a fake identity.
"I want all the benefits of the information society; all I was trying to do is mitigate some of the risk," she says.
NPR
I am 51 years old and have had a yearly mammogram, more or less, since the age of 40.
I got them despite the fact that there is no history of breast cancer in my family. I did it because that was what my doctor and others, including the American Cancer Society, recommended.
Three years ago, I was diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma in situ breast cancer after a screening mammogram. I underwent a mastectomy and chemotherapy. The doctors say my prognosis is good.
I don't know if the mammogram saved my life, because I'm not qualified to make that judgment. No medical professional I've been treated by has ever declared that the mammogram saved my life either.
What I do know is that the challenge of assessing and treating breast cancer, or any cancer for that matter, is all about weighing odds. Since my diagnosis, my doctors have been working to tilt the odds in my favor. First, they sought to keep the cancer from becoming so widespread that it might kill me, and then they focused on keeping it from coming back.
BBC
Scientists say they have observed a record-breaking impact on the Moon.
Spanish astronomers spotted a meteorite with a mass of about half a tonne crashing into the lunar surface last September.
They say the collision would have generated a flash of light so bright that it would have been visible from Earth.
The event is reported in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
"This is the largest, brightest impact we have ever observed on the Moon," said Prof Jose Madiedo, of the University of Huelva in south-western Spain.
The explosive strike was spotted by the Moon Impacts Detection and Analysis System (Midas) of telescopes in southern Spain on 11 September at 20:07 GMT.
CNET
BARCELONA, Spain -- If you're afraid your smartphone is sharing too much of your private information, it's too late to worry because it probably is. However, paranoid smartphone users now have an option that should give them much more peace of mind. The Blackphone from Geeksphone goes beyond any phone that came before it in terms of security. It's available for pre-order now and will ship this summer for $629.
So, the first thing I think about when I hear the words "security phone" is really complicated gobbledygook that I'll never fully understand. However, Geeksphone's intent with the Blackphone is to make your privacy options as transparent as possible, while at the same time allowing for easy modification.
Facebook wall in new digs.
CNET
Monday marks another big move for Facebook, though this time the change in course is of a more literal variety as the social network's ever-expanding New York branch is setting up shop at the company's new offices at 770 Broadway.
The New York office, designed by Facebook favorite Frank Gehry, is in the Astor Place neighborhood in Lower Manhattan. The space, which is still under construction, will officially open its doors in the spring.
"Something exciting is happening at Facebook New York where we're beginning the move into our new home at 770 Broadway at Astor Place, a building that holds a special place in the history of advertising and media, from its origin as John Wanamaker's department store to now being not just Facebook's new home, but also the headquarters for AOL, Adweek, Backstage, and Billboard," Carolyn Everson, Facebook's vice president of global marketing solutions, wrote in a status update.
USA Today
A mysterious polio-like syndrome has affected as many as 25 California children, leaving them with paralyzed limbs and little hope of recovery.
"What's we're seeing now is bad. The best-case scenario is complete loss of one limb, the worst is all four limbs, with respiratory insufficiency, as well. It's like the old polio," said Keith Van Haren, a pediatric neurologist at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif.
The first known case appeared in 2012. Sofia Jarvis in Berkeley began to experience wheezing and difficulty breathing. The 2-year-old spent days in the intensive care unit at Children's Hospital Oakland. Doctors thought she had asthma.
On a follow-up visit, her mother Jessica Tomei, 37, realized something else was wrong.
CNET
The earlier doctors find diseases, the better (typically) one's prognosis. Looking for biomarkers -- the biochemical signatures of certain diseases that are found in tissue, blood, and urine -- is one way to diagnose diseases earlier, even before a patient is symptomatic.
The good news is that scientists are identifying new biomarkers in labs on a regular basis; the bad news is that it can take years and even decades to study them in clinical trials, and it can be expensive to conduct those trials. So scientists are working more and more closely with engineers to build computational models that evaluate those biomarkers far more efficiently.
Now, a multidisciplinary team of urologists, pathologists, and engineers at the University of Michigan is closing in on a faster and more affordable computational model they say will improve prostate cancer diagnosis. Using large data sets with information on biomarkers, biopsy test results, and treatment history, they are looking for the most promising biomarkers (as well as biomarker combinations, frequency of patient testing, etc.) to get a prostate cancer diagnosis as early as possible.