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.
BBC
Nigeria becomes Africa's biggest economy
Nigeria has "rebased" its gross domestic product (GDP) data, which has pushed it above South Africa as the continent's biggest economy.
Nigerian GDP now includes previously uncounted industries like telecoms, information technology, music, online sales, airlines, and film production.
GDP for 2013 totalled 80.3 trillion naira (£307.6bn: $509.9bn), the Nigerian statistics office said.
That compares with South Africa's GDP of $370.3bn at the end of 2013.
However, some economists point out that Nigeria's economic output is underperforming because at 170 million people, its population is three times larger than South Africa's.
On a per-capita basis, South Africa's GDP numbers are three times larger than Nigeria's.
BBC
Seventy-nine people are said to have been killed in northern Nigeria
Seventy-nine people are said to have been killed in northern Nigeria, in an attack blamed by police on gunmen from the Fulani community.
The attack targeted a meeting of community leaders and vigilante groups in Galadima village, Zamfara state, a police spokesman told AFP news agency.
The meeting was discussing action against robbers and cattle rustlers.
Fulani herdsmen and farmers from other ethnic groups have frequently clashed in Nigeria over land and faith.
At least 100 villagers were killed in central Kaduna state last month in an attack that was also linked to a dispute between local farmers and the semi-nomadic Fulani herdsmen.
"The governor and other officials were today at Yar Galadima village where they participated in the burial of 79 people killed in the attack by cattle rustlers," governor's spokesman Nuhu Salihu Anka told AFP.
BBC
Malaysia flight MH370: Search ships to verify signals
A second pulse signal was detected less than 2 km (1.2 miles) from the original.
A UK ship with sophisticated detection equipment, HMS Echo, has
arrived in an area where a Chinese vessel searching for the missing Malaysian plane has twice detected a pulse signal.
Australia's HMS Shield is first investigating a possible third signal elsewhere in the massive search zone.
None have been confirmed as coming from the flight recorders of MH370.
Al Jazeera America
Maryland Legislators Vote to Decriminalize Pot
State lawmakers in Maryland’s House of Delegates voted Saturday to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana.
The state’s Senate has already approved a similar measure – but some changes made by the House would still need to be approved by the Senate in order to pass the bill before the legislative session ends at midnight Monday.
The House voted 78-55 for the bill that would eliminate criminal charges for possessing less than 10 grams of marijuana, or about one-third of an ounce.
Maximum civil fines – non-criminal penalties – had been set at $100 by the Senate, but the House bill raises the penalty to $250 for a second offense and $500 for a third. It also stipulates that certain offenders – those under 21, and those caught three times or more –be evaluated for treatment.
Maryland’s Democratic governor will review the bill if it passes the General Assembly, said Nina Smith, a spokeswoman for Gov. Martin O’Malley.
Al Jazeera America
College Spring Break Party leads to "civil unrest" in California
About 100 partygoers were arrested and at least 44 hospitalized Saturday evening after a massive California college party turned violent with assaults on police, multiple stabbings, and rioting in the streets.
An annual spring break party of about 15,000 people — known as Deltopia — turned into an out-of-control street brawl around 9:30 p.m., authorities said.
Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Kelly Hoover said the “civil unrest” began after a University of California, Santa Barbara police officer was hit in the face with a backpack filled with bottles of alcohol.
Authorities said some members of the enormous crowd began throwing rocks, bricks, and bottles at officers — lighting fires and damaging law-enforcement vehicles.
Crowds chanted “fuck the police” and “America” for hours as they battled security forces in riot gear in the beach-side community of Isla Vista, according to UC Santa Barbara’s independent student-run newspaper, the Daily Nexus.
L A Times
Indiana Jones? FBI finds thousands of artifacts in 91-year-old's home.
The FBI set up shop at the home of a 91-year-old man near Indianapolis, saying he has thousands of artifacts and cultural items originating from at least a dozen different countries and Native American tribes – some of them acquired improperly.
Agents and scientists, working in tents erected outside the house last week, were taking items from the home of Donald C. Miller and packing them up for further analysis.
“I have never seen a collection like this in my life except at some of the largest museums,” said Larry Zimmerman, an anthropology and museum studies professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who is helping the FBI figure out what's what in the private collection.
Speaking at a televised news conference Wednesday, Special Agent in Charge Robert Jones declined to describe the artifacts found at Miller's home. But Jones said they had been acquired during the span of eight decades from various nations, including Australia, China, Haiti, Italy, New Guinea, New Zealand, Peru and Russia.
USA Today Another feather in 60 Minute's Cap
CBS' '60 Minutes' admits to faking Tesla car noise
What is it about Tesla and its ability to make major media outlets look like fools?
The latest example came a week ago today when CBS' 60 Minutes aired a report on Tesla and its amazing electric car. It was basically the kind of coverage that any automaker would kill to have (and must have left flummoxed General Motors executives wondering why they never got it for the plug-in Chevrolet Volt).
Just one problem: As the Associated Press reported, a CBS editor made what is being called an "audio error" in dubbing the sound of a loud traditional car engine over footage of the much quieter Tesla electric car. The Model is whisper quiet, no matter how hard you push it.
N Y Times
Young, Rich and Ruling Radio, Country Walks a Broader Line
NASHVILLE — On the radio, it has displaced Top 40 as America’s most popular musical format.
Its biggest star is Taylor Swift, a 24-year-old phenomenon who last year earned more from music than any other singer — nearly $40 million, according to Billboard magazine. And in June, Rolling Stone, the rock ’n’ roll bible, will introduce a website devoted to the genre.
Country has long been a mainstay of American music. But as the music industry continues to struggle financially and once-dominant types of music like hip-hop recede on the charts, country’s audience has grown stronger, wider and younger — a fact that has not escaped the notice of media companies that have invested heavily in the genre. On Sunday night, country’s increasingly mainstream appeal was on display during the Academy of Country Music Awards on CBS, which last year had 15.5 million viewers, its biggest audience in 15 years, according to Nielsen.
“Nashville has become a musical superpower,” said Scott Borchetta, chief executive of Big Machine Label Group, the record company behind Ms. Swift and other popular acts like the Band Perry and Florida Georgia Line.
Rawstory Skip this if you have a weak stomach.
Jeb Bush’s presidential 2016 plans depend on if he can run with a ‘hopeful, optimistic message’
Speaking at an event that closed to the press, but moderated by a Fox News anchor, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said that he would consider running for president in 2016 if he can run on a “hopeful, optimistic message” and not become mired down in the mudslinging that mars most modern campaigns.
The Washington Post reports that Bush made his comments at an event held at at the library and museum that bears the his father, former President George H.W. Bush’s, name.
Bush explained that his decision would be based on whether a candidate can “run with a hopeful, optimistic message, hopefully with enough detail to give people a sense that it’s not just idle words and not get back into the vortex of the mud fight.”
Salon This is good news for John McCain.
Behind the scenes of Charles Keating’s sexist financial empire
The infamous savings & loan founder Charles H. Keating Jr. died Wednesday at age 90, a relic from a bygone era. He was by turns the celebrated emblem of American progress, the pious don of a moneyed realm and the symbol of the follies of financial deregulation. His rise and fall took place against the backdrop of America’s S&L crisis, a time in which oil prices, inflation and the fancy-sounding Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 turned the once-staid savings vault into a tomb of broken mom-and-pop dreams.
[snip]
In the 1980s, Charles Keating sat atop a crowded pantheon of Big West businessmen. Michael Milken operated out of Beverly Hills; Ross Perot from Texas; and brothers Essam and Adnan Khashoggi hovered in the airspace above LAX. But Keating, at 6 feet, 5 inches, loomed above them all. He had a lantern jaw, aviator-style glasses and canyon-size cracks that lined his weathered face. He’d taken a small-time institution in Orange County — Lincoln Savings & Loan of Irvine, Calif. — and, using newly unfastened federal rules, parlayed the S&L into a juggernaut. He poured depositors’ money into speculative real estate, junk bonds, hastily built housing tracts and high-yield bling
.
C/Net
The Web can make you lose your religion, study says
Beliefs take a lot of belief.
With information flying at us from all sides of our eyes and ears, challenges to our innermost tenets scratch at our innards like rabid gerbils on the bars of a cage.
Can it be, then, that the more information at our disposal, the more we stop to wonder whether our God, our church, and our supposedly holy books are really as believable as they once seemed?
Allen Downey, a computer scientist at the Olin College of Engineering in Massachusetts, thought he'd see whether religious affiliation was taking a hit from Mammon's constant virtual dissemination.
His study, published in the MIT Technology Review, might send chills down the pocket-linings of more than one tele-evangelist. For the figures show that there is a significant correlation between increased Internet use and a decline in religiosity.
Between 1990 and 2010, 25 million Americans shed their religion. At least officially. Using the University of Chicago's General Social Survey, Downey plotted the rise of the Internet against this fall in holy devotion.