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.
Al Jazeera America
Malaysian Prime Minister Naib Razak confirmed at a press conference on Monday that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which vanished on March 8 with 239 people aboard, crashed in the southern Indian Ocean.
"MH370 flew along the southern corridor, and its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean west of Perth. This is a remote location, far from any possible landing site," he said. "It is therefore with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that, according to this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean. We will be holding a press conference tomorrow with further details."
To confirm the plane’s final location, Inmarsat, the U.K. company whose satellite first suggested the two possible paths that the plane took, worked with the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) to perform a detailed analysis of the data, using a method that had never been used in an investigation of this scale.
The Guardian
The last desperate hopes of finding survivors in the hunt for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane ended on Monday with the announcement that flight MH370 had almost certainly crashed into the southern Indian Ocean with all lives lost.
A statement by the Malaysian prime minister, Najib Razak, concluded an anguished 16-day wait for families of the passengers and crew but brought them no closer to understanding why MH370 had vanished en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March. The location of the Boeing 777 also remains unknown despite a massive international hunt.
Ten aircraft are combing a huge patch of the southern Indian Ocean, about 2,500km (1,500 miles) south-west of the Australian city of Perth. More ships are on their way and the US is dispatching a specialised device to help locate aircraft flight data and cockpit voice recorders.
NPR
Malaysia's Prime Minister Najib Razak said Monday that new analysis of the flight path of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 showed that it "ended in the southern Indian Ocean."
Speaking at a news conference in Kuala Lumpur, Razak said the U.K. Air Accidents Investigation Branch and the U.K.-based satellite company Inmarsat had used a first-of-its-kind analysis to determine the course of the Boeing 777 and the 239 passengers and crew aboard. Most of the people aboard the Beijing-bound flight from Kuala Lumpur were Chinese nationals.
"Based on their new analysis, Inmarsat and the AAIB have concluded that MH370 flew along the southern corridor and that its last position was in the middle of the Indian Ocean, west of Perth," the prime minister said.
"This is a remote location, far from any possible landing sites," Razak added. "It is therefore that with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that with this new data, Flight MH370 ended in the southern Indian Ocean."
NY Times
PEARCE AIR FORCE BASE, Australia — A British satellite company has solved one crucial aspect of the mystery surrounding the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared on March 8, using a complex mathematical process to determine that it ended its journey in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean.
Guided by a principle of physics called the Doppler effect, the company, Inmarsat, analyzed tiny shifts in the frequency of the plane’s signals to infer the plane’s flight path and likely final location. The method had never before been used to investigate an air disaster, officials said.
The first definitive news of the fate of the Boeing 777 jet brought heartbreak to the families of those on board as Malaysia’s prime minister, Najib Razak, announced on Monday that no one is believed to have survived the flight.
Reuters
U.S. President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping pledged cooperation between their countries and chatted about first lady Michelle Obama's recent trip to Beijing when they met prior to a nuclear summit on Monday.
In remarks to reporters ahead of their meeting, Obama said he and Xi would discuss the situation in Ukraine, denuclearization of North Korea, and fighting climate change.
Obama said the bilateral relationship between the two countries was as important as any in the world.
Through various meetings and forums, Obama said, "We're also able to work through frictions that exist in our relations around issues like human rights, dealing with maritime issues in the South China Sea and the Pacific region in a way that is constructive and hopefully will lead to resolutions and … solutions for all parties."
Al Jazeera America
After three combat tours, Sgt. Dennis Tackett was kicked out of the Army for punching a man in the face while drunk. It didn’t matter that he had been diagnosed with PTSD (by the Army) and had tried to get help (from the Army) for the drinking it led to. It didn’t matter that he was in the late stages of a medical discharge that would get him out soon anyway — with benefits. What mattered to the commanding general at Fort Carson, Colo., who spoke to him that day in November 2012 was that he had tried to fight the discharge with the help of a pair of civilian watchdogs, Georg-Andreas Pogany and Robert Alvarez.
“If you had not gotten involved with those advocates, it would have gone differently,” Tackett remembers the commander, Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson, telling him. Anderson is now commander of Fort Bragg, N.C.
A recording obtained by Al Jazeera America suggests Tackett and soldiers like him were retaliated against because of an increasingly rancorous relationship between commanders at Fort Carson and the civilian advocates.
Al Jazeera America
A politically charged issue pitting claims of religious freedom against women’s rights heads for a legal test at the Supreme Court on Tuesday, as the justices hear oral arguments in two cases brought by business owners claiming that the contraception coverage requirement under the Affordable Care Act infringes on religious liberty.
The cases brought by for-profit companies and their owners are just two of nearly four dozen similar cases, all involving Christian proprietors who claim their opposition to contraception and abortion bars them from complying with that rule in the ACA, President Barack Obama’s signature health care reform legislation.
The rule, finalized in 2012, requires that employers that provide a group health insurance plan for their employees cover, without co-pays, 20 specified contraceptive drugs and devices.
In both cases before the court, Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Inc. v. Sebelius, the business owners, who are evangelical Christians and Mennonites, respectively, do not object to all contraceptive methods. Rather, they object to the emergency contraceptives Plan B and ella and to intrauterine devices (IUDs), which they claim can cause abortions. The medical establishment refutes that claim.
Spiegel Online
Michael Hayden, 69, served as the director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005. After leaving the NSA, he served as director of the CIA from 2006 to 2009. Today he is a partner at the consulting firm Chertoff Group in Washington, DC.
SPIEGEL recently sat down with the former US Air Force general in Washington for a wide-ranging interview on revelations from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, including allegations that the intelligence agency spied on the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, that have been the source of significant trans-Atlantic tensions.
SPIEGEL: General Hayden, let's speak about the future of the Internet. Are you concerned?
Hayden: I am very concerned. This may be the single greatest, most destructive effect from the last 10 months of what Mr. Snowden has revealed. The Internet was begun in the United States and it is based on American technology, but it's a global activity. We in the United States feel it reflects free people, free ideas and free trade. There are countries that do not want the Internet as we know it. Russia, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia. The Snowden revelations will now allow them to argue that we Americans want to keep a single, unitary Internet, because it just helps us spy. My fear is that the disclosures may have set a motion in progress that ends up really threatening the Internet as we know it.
NPR
Already sad news from a tiny community north of Seattle turned even more grim on Monday. Officials said that they had found six more bodies, bringing the death toll to 14.
What's most stunning, perhaps, is that officials expect that number to climb, because they have received reports of about 108 people still missing.
NPR's Martin Kaste reports that officials weren't saying the death toll will exceed 100. "Some of the names [on the list] are uncertain ... some of the reports are vague," he told our Newscast Desk. It's likely that some of those on the list weren't in the area at the time of the slide.
At the same time, he says, emergency officials repeated that the millions of yards of mud couldn't have come crashing down on the 49 residential lots in the community of Oso at a worse time. It happened on Saturday morning, when many people were likely to be at home, rather than at work or school.
The Guardian
The Obama administration is sending about 150 special forces troops along with military aircraft to Uganda to help in the search for warlord Joseph Kony, the Washington Post reported on Sunday.
The deployments began on Sunday night, the Post said, after the administration began to notify Congress.
In the first deployment of U.S. military aircraft to the region, at least four CV-22 Osprey aircraft will arrive in Uganda by midweek, together with refueling planes and special forces airmen to fly and maintain them, Amanda Dory, the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs, told the Post.
The newspaper said US personnel were authorised to "provide information, advice and assistance" to an African Union force tracking Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army.
"While combat-equipped, they are prohibited from engaging LRA forces unless in self-defense," the Post said.
The Guardian
Two teenagers suspected of killing a Florida police officer, then killing themselves, left suicide notes, police said on Monday.
Brandon Goode, 18, and his British-born girlfriend Alex Hollinghurst, 17, were found dead on Saturday shortly after they were suspected of having shot and killed police officer Robert German as he made a routine patrol of the wealthy Orlando suburb of Windermere.
The Orange County sheriff's office said that before the fatal incident, the pair had been considered “missing endangered” after the discovery of their suicide notes. The sheriff’s office said the contents of the notes “will not be revealed at this time, as the investigation is active and open.”
German, 31, stopped Goode and Hollinghurst at around 4am on Saturday and called for backup, but when the officers arrived they found him fatally injured. The officers heard more shots and found the two teenagers dead of an apparent suicide.
The Guardian
No timetable has been set to reopen a major US shipping channel after nearly 170,000 gallons of tar-like oil spilled into the Texas waterway, but more help was being called in on Monday to contain the spill and protect important shorebird habitat.
A barge carrying about 900,000 gallons of the heavy oil collided with a ship on Saturday in the busy Houston Ship Channel, spilling as much as a fifth of its cargo into one of the world's busiest waterways for moving petrochemicals, according to the Coast Guard.
Oil had been detected 12 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico by Sunday, and as many as 60 vessels were either waiting to get in or out. The Coast Guard – which called it a "significant spill" – said it expected to deploy more containment booms on Monday, with 24 vessels working to skim the oil.
Environmental groups said the spill occurred at an especially sensitive time. The channel in Texas City, about 45 miles southeast of Houston, has important shorebird habitat on both sides and tens of thousands of wintering birds are still in the area.
NPR
Bob Mankoff has been contributing cartoons to The New Yorker ever since 1977 and now, as cartoon editor, he evaluates more than 500 cartoons submitted to the magazine each week.
Mankoff is proud of the many cartoons that have been published under his aegis. "Sometimes I take my aegis out of my drawer just to admire it," he writes.
His most well-known cartoon shows an executive looking at his desk calendar, saying to someone on the phone: "No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?"
Reuters
Japan will turn over hundreds of kilograms of sensitive nuclear material of potential use in bombs to the United States to be downgraded and disposed of, the two countries' leaders said ahead of a nuclear security summit on Monday.
China had voiced concern earlier this year about Japan's holding of plutonium but Washington and the United Nations nuclear agency in Vienna have made it clear they are not worried about the way Tokyo is handling the issue.
Still, U.S. President Barack Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said in a statement that all highly enriched uranium (HEU) and separated plutonium would be removed from the Fast Critical Assembly at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, used for studying the nuclear physics of so-called fast reactors.
Reuters
Syrian troops backed by war planes battled on Monday to dislodge Islamist rebels from a border crossing and northern town in the coastal province of Latakia, heartland of President Bashar al-Assad's Alawite minority.
Fighters from the Islamic Front and al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front seized the Armenian Christian town of Kasab on Sunday after taking the nearby border crossing in an offensive which follows a string of recent rebel defeats further south.
Video footage released by activists showed fighters driving through the largely deserted Kasab, passing a municipal building and a shattered statue of Bashar's father Hafez, who ruled Syria for 30 years until 2000.
DW
Two broken cottonwood trees stand next to the bridge at Varvarin. They are a stark reminder of May 30, 1999, the saddest day in the village's history. "It was a Sunday, a sunny day with no clouds," Zoran Milenkovic, mayor of the small town in central Serbia with 2,000 inhabitants, says. "Because of the market that day and the orthodox Holy Trinity celebration, Varvarin's streets were full of people."
Run, they're coming back!
The robust man with the full beard is wearing a leather jacket. His voice doesn't seem to match his body - he's talking softly, in an almost melancholy tone. On the day of the festival, the air raid sirens did go off, Milenkovic recalls, but after two months of bomb warnings, no one took them seriously anymore. What could possibly happen at noon-time in a village that had neither an army-base nor any other military targets?
But May 30, 1999, dramatically changed Milenkovic's life.
DW
DW: Prime Minister, exactly a year has elapsed since the coup against President Francois Bozize. How would you describe the present situation in Central African Republic?
Andre Nzapayeke: The situation was strongly influenced by the overthrow of the regime and the seizure of power by the Seleka coalition. Both led to the total collapse of the Central African state and its public services. As regards to security, the situation remains very volatile. There are a large number of refugees in neighboring countries and a large number of internally displaced persons in various locations in the capital and in the interior of the country. The approaching rainy season is a real problem for the supply of aid to these refugees. So there are still many challenges for the government before order can be restored.
Is former president Bozize still involved in the affairs of the country behind the scenes?
The situation was deteriorating even while the former president was still in office. The lack of regard for the country's economic development, for equality of opportunity and for the needs and concerns of the population culminated in the rise of citizens' and guerrilla movements. As for the current situation, which has been largely shaped by the anti-balaka, we have evidence that former President Bozize continues to play a role. Most of the anti-balaka militia are former members of the Central African armed forces (FACA) and many supporters of President Bozize are also to be found in the ranks of the anti-balaka. They have been calling for the return of Bozize before the end of the current transitional period. One can say that he (Bozize) is somehow still involved.
Al Jazeera America
An Egyptian court has sentenced 529 members of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood to death on charges including murder, in a sharp escalation of a crackdown on the movement.
Family members stood outside the courthouse screaming after the verdict - the biggest mass death sentence handed out in Egypt's modern history, defence lawyers said.
Turmoil has deepened since the army overthrew Egypt's first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim
Brotherhood, in July.
Spiegel Online
Last Monday was a day of historic comparisons for Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Immediately prior, almost 97 percent of voters on the Crimea Peninsula had voted in favor of joining Russia, an outcome that reminded the chancellor of the East Germany where she grew up. "Every result over 90 percent in this world has to be viewed with skepticism," Merkel said. After a brief, dramatic pause, she added: "With the exception of my election to the party chairmanship, of course."
Her comment was greeted with laughter, but it would remain the only buoyant moment that morning. The focus of the meeting was squarely on Russia and the crisis in Ukraine. Hesse Governor Volker Bouffier spoke of the West's "distressing helplessness" in the face of Russia's annexation of Crimea and said he was reminded of the year 1938 when the world did nothing to prevent Adolf Hitler's takeover of the Sudetenland in what was then Czechoslovakia. CDU General Secretary Peter Tauber, who holds a Ph.D. in history, pointed out that, just as now with the Winter Olympics in Sochi, there had been an Olympics prior to the Sudetenland seizure: 1936 in Berlin.
The Guardian
The Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has backed Russia's annexation of Crimea, saying a much-criticised referendum on its future reflected its people's "free will" to decide their future.
That stance, announced at a meeting with a US congressional delegation, puts Afghanistan in company with Venezuela, Syria and a few other nations.
It was an unexpected move from a man who has little stake in Ukraine's future, spent years fighting to evict Soviet forces from his own country, and now leads a democracy funded largely by the western nations that have slapped sanctions on Moscow.
However, Karzai has always been keen to counter accusations that he is a foreign puppet, and more recently has been at odds with the United States over everything from air strikes and the forthcoming presidential election to the recent release of dozens of prisoners captured by foreign troops.
"The Scream," 1895, Edvard Munch.
NPR
President Obama is doing serious work in Europe this week, meeting with the G-7, NATO and the EU to discuss Russia's actions in Ukraine. He's also joining leaders from more than 50 countries in The Hague to talk about keeping nuclear weapons away from terrorists. But before the intense negotiations got underway, he launched this trip with a bit of culture.
Moments after Air Force One touched down in Amsterdam, the president toured the Rijksmuseum, Holland's temple of fine art. As Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte led Obama through the museum's grand hall with high vaulted ceilings, I asked on Twitter and Facebook:
"What legendary piece of art in the museum (and there are many) is the best metaphor for today's global situation?"
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Reuters
Nutrition and weight-loss company Herbalife Ltd said it had agreed to allow three more representatives of billionaire investor Carl Icahn to join its board, sending the company's shares up as much as 7 percent.
As part of a revised agreement, Herbalife said Hunter Gary and Jesse Lynn, both Icahn employees, and James Nelson, an independent director of Icahn Enterprises, would be put up for election, giving Icahn five seats on the 13-member board.
Herbalife, whose business practices are being investigated by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, had postponed its annual shareholders' meeting to April 29 from April 24 while it talked with Icahn about an increase in board representation.
Icahn, Herbalife's biggest shareholder with a 16.8 percent stake, has been supporting the company in its fight against fellow billionaire investor William Ackman.
Al Jazeera America
Apple Inc. is in talks with Comcast Corp. on a potential deal for a streaming television service that would allow the tech giant's set-top boxes to bypass congestion on the Internet, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
The discussions are in early stages and there are a lot of hurdles to be crossed before a definitive agreement could be reached, the Journal report said.
Apple, which wants its TV service's traffic to be separated from public internet traffic over the "last mile" for faster transmission, is looking for special treatment from Comcast's cables to bypass congestion, the report said.
Comcast and Apple declined to comment on the report.
Some analysts worry about the impact the deal would have on "net neutrality," the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all online content equally, charging everyone the same amount of fees for equally fast access to all websites.
NPR
Pediatricians often recommend some mental health counseling for children who have behavior problems like defiance and tantrums. But counseling can be hard to find. Children are much more likely to get help if the counselor is right there in the doctor's office, a study finds.
The children in the study had behavior problems, and many also had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder or anxiety. They were 8 years old, on average, and two-thirds were boys.
Half of the 321 children were referred to outside counselors who took the family's insurance. The other half had six to 12 individual or family counseling sessions with social workers placed in pediatricians' offices as part of the study, which was conducted by the University of Pittsburgh School of the Health Sciences.
CNET News
Brendan Eich, the programmer who invented JavaScript in a 10-day burst of activity at Netscape in 1995, now is the chief executive of Mozilla, the nonprofit organization that develops the Firefox browser and Firefox OS mobile operating system.
Eich worked on the Netscape Navigator browser and -- after Microsoft won the first browser wars of the 1990s -- on Mozilla's effort to make something useful of the Netscape open-source code base. Although Mozilla succeeded in restoring competition to the browser market, and JavaScript has proved remarkably adaptable as the Web's programming language, Eich is now grappling with bigger issues than just competing against Microsoft.
CNET News
Backstabbing. Lying. Murdering. Cheating. Politics. What TV show does that bring to mind for you?
If you said "Game of Thrones," you're right. Oh, and if you said "House of Cards," you're right too.
Maybe that's why sandwich seller Quiznos decided to put the two shows together in "House of Thrones," a clever new video mashup that sees Frank Underwood smooth-talking his way through Westeros and making quick work of competitors who obstruct his path to the Iron Throne. As he puts it in the introduction to the video, "Why have one little ole presidency when you can have seven entire kingdoms?"
The video sees actor Ross Marquand, who does an impeccable job impersonating Underwood, giving Arya stark a bad haircut, scorching the khaleesi with his pet dragon Stamper, and tossing a member of the Night's Watch off The Wall after distracting him by saying, "It's freezing. So why in the world would Egret be taking her shirt off?"
NY Times
ALEXANDRIA, N.H. — For most of his life, Kevin Ramsey has lived with epileptic seizures that drugs cannot control.
At least once a month, he would collapse, unconscious and shaking violently, sometimes injuring himself. Nighttime seizures left him exhausted at dawn, his tongue a bloody mess. After episodes at work, he struggled to stay employed. Driving became too risky. At 28, he sold his truck and moved into his mother’s spare bedroom.
Cases of intractable epilepsy rarely have happy endings, but today Mr. Ramsey is seizure-free. A novel battery-powered device implanted in his skull, its wires threaded into his brain, tracks its electrical activity and quells impending seizures. At night, he holds a sort of wand to his head and downloads brain data from the device to a laptop for his doctors to review.