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.
The Guardian
The Guardian and the Washington Post have been awarded the highest accolade in US journalism, winning the Pulitzer prize for public service for their groundbreaking articles on the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities based on the leaks of Edward Snowden.
The award, announced in New York on Monday, comes 10 months after the Guardian published the first report based on the leaks from Snowden, revealing the agency’s bulk collection of US citizens’ phone records.
In the series of articles that ensued, teams of journalists at the Guardian and the Washington Post published the most substantial disclosures of US government secrets since the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam war in 1971.
The Pulitzer committee praised the Guardian for its "revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, helping through aggressive reporting to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy".
Spiegel Online
Berlin has insisted it wants to scrutinize NSA spying in Germany. But actually inviting Edward Snowden to testify before a paraliamentary investigation is proving delicate. Some in Chancellor Merkel's party are now casting doubt on Snowden's suitability as a witness.
It was, of course, purely coincidental that Glenn Greenwald found himself in Berlin last week, just as the debate in Germany was swelling over whether Edward Snowden should be invited to testify before the NSA investigative committee in the Bundestag, the federal parliament.
Greenwald had flown in from Brazil, where he lives, to speak at the presentation of the Liberty Award, a prize honoring foreign correspondents from Germany. And he didn't pass up the opportunity to pay tribute to Snowden, the man whose source material he has relied on in helping to shed light on the global surveillance system maintained by the United States and Britain. "Every country," said Greenwald, 47, has a moral obligation to help Snowden. That, he added, is particularly true for Germany. Top politicians in Berlin were targeted by the NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ, and Germany would have been none the wiser but for Snowden. Meanwhile, Snowden's visa for political asylum in Russia, where he now lives, is set to expire this summer.
The Guardian
The US government’s troubled military trials of terrorism suspects were dealt another blow on Monday when proceedings were halted after an allegation surfaced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned a member of a 9/11 defendant’s defense team into a secret informant.
Judge James Pohl, the army colonel overseeing the controversial military commission at Guantánamo, gaveled a hearing out of session after barely 30 minutes on Monday morning, following the revelation of a motion filed by the defense stipulating that the FBI approached an unidentified member of the team during the course of an investigation into how a manifesto by accused 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed found its way to the media.
Defense attorneys argued the government plunged them into a potential conflict of interest, as they would need to potentially defend themselves against a leak investigation, risking their ability to put their clients’ legal needs ahead of their own.
NY Times
MIAMI — For rent and utilities to be considered affordable, they are supposed to take up no more than 30 percent of a household’s income. But that goal is increasingly unattainable for middle-income families as a tightening market pushes up rents ever faster, outrunning modest rises in pay.
The strain is not limited to the usual high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco. An analysis for The New York Times by Zillow, the real estate website, found 90 cities where the median rent — not including utilities — was more than 30 percent of the median gross income.
In Chicago, rent as a percentage of income has risen to 31 percent, from a historical average of 21 percent. In New Orleans, it has more than doubled, to 35 percent from 14 percent. Zillow calculated the historical average using data from 1985 to 2000.
McClatchy
WASHINGTON — The Affordable Care Act’s insurance coverage provisions will be less costly to the federal budget than first projected and premiums for a key health plan are expected to rise by about 6 percent a year, the Congressional Budget Office said Monday.
Updating estimates issued in February, the non-partisan CBO said the cost to the federal government for the insurance provisions is $5 billion less than thought earlier this year. From 2015 through 2024, the provisions should prove $104 billion less costly. That’s 7 percent below earlier projections.
The falling cost projections from the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation of Congress are due in part to further analysis of retirement trends and of the health plans being offered on the public exchanges created to help individuals buy health insurance.
The new projections and other provisions of the ACA on net “are expected to reduce budget deficits,” the CBO said, repeating an earlier prediction that the act, shorthanded as Obamacare, will result in deficits being lower than they would be in the absence of the landmark legislation.
Deeper in the CBO’s report, however, are details that show why the ACA is such a hard sell to the public.
Reuters
A group of traders has sued CME Group Inc, accusing the operator of the world's largest derivatives exchange of selling market data to high frequency traders, cheating other investors who lacked such access.
In a complaint filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court in Chicago, William Braman, Mark Mendelson and John Simms said CME and its Chicago Board of Trade unit have since 2007 given high-frequency traders early access to buy and sell orders.
They said this deprived other investors of the transparent, real-time data on futures and interest rate contracts that they thought they were getting, and were paying for.
Reuters
U.S. retail sales recorded their largest gain in 1-1/2 years in March, in the latest sign the economy was emerging from its weather-induced slumber and on track to accelerate in the second quarter.
The Commerce Department said on Monday retail sales increased 1.1 percent last month, the biggest gain since September 2012, as receipts rose in nearly all categories.
"The case continues to grow that the economy is bouncing back in March following an unusually severe winter," said John Ryding, chief economist at RDQ Economics in New York.
February's increase in retail sales, which account for a third of consumer spending, was raised to 0.7 percent from 0.3 percent. Economists had expected retail sales to advance only 0.8 percent last month.
Stocks on Wall Street opened higher on the upbeat report, while prices for U.S. Treasury debt fell. The dollar rose against a basket of currencies.
Retail sales added to employment data in suggesting the economy found momentum at the end of the first quarter after an unusually cold and snowy winter disrupted economic activity at the end of 2013 and the beginning of this year.
The Guardian
A regular US air force unit based in the Nevada desert is responsible for flying the CIA's drone strike programme in Pakistan, according to a new documentary to be released on Tuesday.
The film – which has been three years in the making – identifies the unit conducting CIA strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas as the 17th Reconnaissance Squadron, which operates from a secure compound in a corner of Creech air force base, 45 miles from Las Vegas in the Mojave desert.
Several former drone operators have claimed that the unit's conventional air force personnel – rather than civilian contractors – have been flying the CIA's heavily armed Predator missions in Pakistan, a 10-year campaign which according to some estimates has killed more than 2,400 people.
Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project, said this posed questions of legality and oversight. "A lethal force apparatus in which the CIA and regular military collaborate as they are reportedly doing risks upending the checks and balances that restrict where and when lethal force is used, and thwart democratic accountability, which cannot take place in secrecy."
The Guardian
Authorities investigating the killing of three people in attacks on the Jewish community in Kansas City declared they were treating the incident as a hate crime, as a deeper picture emerged Monday of the suspect’s longstanding ties to hate groups.
Frazier Glenn Cross, 73, was booked into Johnson County jail on a preliminary charge of first-degree murder and is scheduled for an initial court appearance on Monday afternoon. He was arrested on Sunday after a shooting spree that killed a 14-year-old boy and his grandfather outside a popular Jewish community center, and a third victim outside a nearby Jewish retirement home in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park.
US attorney general Eric Holder said he has instructed the Justice Department to provide all available support to state and local authorities. Officials said Cross would face federal criminal charges.
Television crews caught Cross yelling “Heil Hitler” during his arrest after the shooting. But at a news conference on Sunday, Overland Park police chief John Douglass said it was too early in the investigation to tell whether Cross, also known as Frazier Glenn Miller, had an anti-Semitic motive. “We know it's a vicious act of violence. Obviously two Jewish facilities, one might make that assumption," Douglass said.
Bloomberg
Six months ago, global finance officials meeting in Washington berated the U.S. for failing to put its fiscal house in order. This time, the critics were silent.
The Congressional Budget Office projected today that the 2014 deficit will be the lowest in six years and down more than 60 percent from the record $1.4 trillion in 2009. With the annual April 15 tax filing deadline looming, the U.S. has received about $80 billion more in income taxes this fiscal year than it had 12 months earlier.
The Treasury’s coffers are swelling as the almost five-year economic expansion gains momentum, generating more corporate and personal income-tax revenue and reducing spending on social services. Stronger growth, in turn, will depend less on government spending to fuel growth than it has in the past.
“Without fiscal stimulus, we’ll see over the next year or two if the economy is really standing on its own two feet,” said Ira Jersey, a fixed-income and interest-rate strategist at Credit Suisse Group AG in New York. “We suspect it is. This means further improvement of the deficit over the next few years.”
Al Jazeera America
Every day is a new beginning for Israel Sislema, a 43-year-old immigrant from Ecuador. By 5 a.m., he is usually waiting at the corner of Roosevelt Avenue and 69th Street in Queens, N.Y., hoping to find work.
One day recently, hundreds of other immigrants stood for hours along the sidewalk with him. Some leaned against a church wall, hands in pockets, trying to stay warm. Others sat on the cold pavement. When a truck pulled up, the men sprang to life and dashed toward it. The lucky few jumped in the back, and the truck pulled away.
Sislema did not make it. It was Friday, and he hadn’t found any work all week. “That’s just how it goes,” he said.
Such is the life of the day laborer. It’s a grim existence for the more than 100,000 men and women who show up at selected street corners ("paradas" in Spanish) around the United States on any given day. Many are undocumented immigrants waiting patiently for the long-promised immigration reform that would allow them to emerge from the shadows. For these willing workers, finding a job is just the beginning.
According to one national study on day laborers, stolen wages, accidents, injuries, physical threats and abuse are just a few hazards of the trade. Then there are the deportations — ramped up under the Obama administration to an unprecedented average of 1,100 a day. Amid this dark picture, however, they are now getting organized. Several groups are trying to educate these vulnerable workers on their labor rights and help them stand up together against abusive employers.
NPR
Much has been said and written about the Dust Bowl, but if you want to get a visceral feel for how it all began and the way it affected the people who experienced it, you need go no further than the opening pages of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath:
Men stood by their fences and looked at the ruined corn, drying fast now, only a little green showing through the film of dust. The men were silent and they did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men — to feel whether this time the men would break. The women studied the men's faces secretly, for the corn could go, as long as something else remained.
Steinbeck's novel follows the Joad family as they flee Dust Bowl Oklahoma for a new life in California. When the book was first published — 75 years ago Monday — it was a best-seller. But Susan Shillinglaw, an English professor at San Jose State University and author of the book On Reading The Grapes of Wrath, says it also came under fierce attack.
USA Today
CINCINNATI — A federal judge Monday ordered Ohio authorities to recognize the marriages of same-sex couples performed in other states, the latest court victory for gay-rights supporters.
Judge Timothy Black ruled that refusing to recognize gay marriage is a violation of constitutional rights and "unenforceable in all circumstances."
"The record before this court ... is staggeringly devoid of any legitimate justification for the state's ongoing arbitrary discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation," Black wrote.
The order does not force Ohio to allow gay marriages to be performed in the state.
The state plans to appeal Black's ruling, arguing that Ohio has a sovereign right to ban gay marriage, which voters did overwhelmingly in 2004.
Black delayed deciding whether to issue a stay of his ruling pending the state's appeal in the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Lawyers on both sides are to present arguments on the issue by Tuesday.
However, Black said he is inclined to stay his ruling pending appeal, except for a portion that applies to the four gay couples who filed the February lawsuit that led to the court case. That would mean the state would immediately have to recognize their marriages and list both spouses as parents on their children's birth certificates.
Reuters
A morning rush hour bomb killed at least 71 people at a Nigerian bus station on the outskirts of the capital on Monday, raising concerns about the spread of an Islamist insurgency after the deadliest ever attack on Abuja.
President Goodluck Jonathan pointed the finger of suspicion at Boko Haram, although there was no immediate claim of responsibility from the Islamist militants who are active mainly in the northeast. As well as the dead, police said 124 were wounded in the first attack on the federal capital in two years.
Visiting the scene, Jonathan denounced "the activities of those who are trying to move our country backwards" by staging such an attack. "We will get over it ... The issue of Boko Haram is temporary," he said, imploring Nigerians to be more vigilant in the face of suspicious characters.
Security experts suspect the explosion was inside a vehicle, said Air Commodore Charles Otegbade, director of search and rescue operations. The bus station, 8 km (5 miles) southwest of central Abuja, serves Nyanya, a poor, ethnically and religiously mixed satellite town where many residents work in the city.
DW
"This could be the worst fire in the city's history," Chilean President Michelle Bachelet told reporters late Sunday as smoke continued to billow from the city's hilltops where fires had broken out the day before, stoked by high temperatures and strong winds.
"The people of Valparaiso have courage, have strength and they aren't alone," Bachalet added.
Since Saturday, at least 12 people have been killed in the fires, according to Chile's interior ministry. It warned that the death toll could rise once rescue teams could begin searching for missing persons.
The disaster has driven 8,000 people from their homes into now overflowing shelters. Initial figures put the number of homes destroyed so far between 500 and 2,000.
President Bachalet authorized the deployment of 2,000 of military personnel to assist firefighters in their emergency operation.
A blaze quickly swept across an underdeveloped area above the city center on Saturday, which lacks proper water and natural gas supplies. The neighborhoods situated on the affected hilltops proved a challenge for emergency responders who often could not gain access to the narrow streets with fire trucks.
McClatchy
BEIJING — The pings have sputtered out in the multinational search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, forcing search crews to deploy an underwater robot to find a plane that’s eluded human efforts.
In a last-ditch effort to find the Boeing 777 and its black box flight recorders, a U.S. Navy submersible vehicle will be used to scan an area in the southern Indian Ocean for debris.
“We haven’t had a single detection in six days, so I guess it’s time to go underwater,” Angus Houston, who heads Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Center, told a news conference in that country’s western city of Perth on Monday.
The remote-controlled Bluefin-21 was to start sonar scans of the seabed possibly later Monday. That seabed lies about 2.8 miles below the surface of the water _ right at the edge of the Bluefin’s operating range _ and about 1,360 miles northwest of Perth.
Detection of electronic signals in the area last week raised hopes that search crews would soon find the flight recorders from MH370, a Beijing-bound jet that disappeared more than a month ago with 239 people aboard, two-thirds of whom were Chinese citizens. The flight recorders are vital in determining who or what caused the airliner to veer off course and presumably crash in the southern Indian Ocean.
Al Jazeera America
Pro-Russian armed rebels ignored an ultimatum Monday from Ukraine's interim president Oleksandr Turchynov to leave government buildings being occupied in the country's east or face a military action — an offensive that has so far failed to materialize.
As the 9 a.m. local time deadline passed, there were seemingly few signs that the protesters were prepared to leave their barricades. Moreover, in an apparent further challenge to Turchynov to make good on his threat, a group of rebels stormed and seized a police headquarters in Horlivka, close to Ukraine’s border with Russia.
Turchynov insisted on Monday that an offensive against the rebels would take place. But he sacked the state security chief in charge of the operation shortly after making the comment — signaling possible discord behind the scenes.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday said Kyiv was "demonstrating its inability to take responsibility for the fate of the country" and warned that any use of force against Russian speakers "would undermine the potential for cooperation," including talks due to be held on Thursday among Russia, Ukraine, the United States and the European Union.
Lavrov also said it was not in Russia's interest for the former soviet country to split, but Moscow wanted all citizens of Ukraine to be given equal treatment under the law. Russia has amassed troops on the border with Ukraine for the stated purpose of protecting ethnic Russians who live in its eastern region. However, Kyiv and its allies allege the troops are there for purposes of intimidation
DW
A brilliant golden sunset cast a spotlight on Mount Gerizim in the southern valley of Nablus in the West Bank on Sunday night. The most scared site to the world's remaining 800 Samaritans, it's a beautiful, yet unlikely place for a ritual slaughter.
As the sun slipped behind the mountain, 50 men in white boiler-style suits stood over a man-made ditch framed by rocks. They each had a sheep between their legs.
These designated butchers had blades at the ready. The sheep were chased, herded and taunted all afternoon by young boys from the Samaritan community; kicked into a small holding space inside a large stadium until they were bought into the center of the stadium.
Alongside the 800 Samaritans from the village of Kiryat Luza near Tel Aviv were 1,200 curious tourists, Palestinian and Jewish spectators and media. The heavily guarded stadium on top of the mountain was packed. Another 1,000 onlookers watched from the outside.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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DW
Against all odds, climate researcher Ottmar Edenhofer says global climate protection is possible. But it's time for bold steps, the co-chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns.
Ottmar Edenhofer: Climate policies are extremely difficult. I've just spent a week in plenary sessions, grappling with more than 110 governments. It's like facing a global parliament, and once you let that sink in, you realize very quickly how difficult global cooperation is.
What makes it so difficult?
One reason is that the owners of coal, oil and natural gas deposits have to face the fact that their assets will be diminished. They don't think that's a great idea. Emerging countries in particular fear they might have to forgo growth. Many obstacles have to be overcome.
You need reasonable incentives, for instance national carbon dioxide taxes. They would contribute to economic development, but they could be staggered so less affluent households would barely be affected. Governments are only now realizing these possibilities.
SF Gate
Google isn't known for its sense of humor - at least, not when it comes to tech backlash.
That made the stand-up comedy event on Saturday night - the "Roast of a Techie" - a bit complicated to execute. A real, live Googler was willing to sit on a stool onstage and be roasted by a group of comedians at a San Francisco bar, and
a Google a cappella group had planned to perform. But when the employees double-checked with the company, organizers claim Google didn't take kindly to the language.
"They were concerned that the flyers originally used the term 'bus-riding' techie and encouraged people to 'bring their best protest sandals and a carton of eggs,' " said Pete O'Keefe, 27, who organizes the bimonthly roasts, which have previously lambasted other San Francisco archetypes like street kids, drag queens and immigration lawyers. "They said they were concerned for (the Googler's) safety."
NPR
The approximate moment when grumpiness kicks in for men, according to a recently released report, is around age 70.
Then you'd better get off his lawn.
Researchers found that as men grow older — from, say, 50 on — they have fewer obstacles and annoyances to worry about in life and, furthermore, they are more equipped to deal with adversity. But around age 70, life — or at least the perception of happiness — begins to go downhill.
The study, published in the March 2014 issue of Psychology and Aging, examined 1,315 men — mostly military veterans who participated in a 15-year survey — between the ages of 53 and 85. Some 80 percent said that at age 50, life became easier. About 20 percent said they were happier after they retired.
Both groups, however, agreed that good feelings about life began to decline at age 70 — for myriad reasons, including health problems, cognitive slide and the losses of loved ones.
BBC
A leading UK site for parents and the Canadian tax authority have both announced they have had data stolen by hackers exploiting the Heartbleed bug.
Mumsnet - which says it has 1.5 million registered members - said that it believed that the cyber thieves may have obtained passwords and personal messages before it patched its site.
The Canada Revenue Agency said that 900 people's social insurance numbers had been stolen.
These are the first confirmed losses.
The Mumsnet site's founder Justine Roberts told the BBC that it became apparent that user data was at risk when her own username and password were used to post a message online.
She said the hackers then informed Mumsnet's administrators that the attack was linked to the Heartbleed flaw and told them the company's data was not safe.
"On Friday 11 April, it became apparent that what is widely known as the Heartbleed bug had been used to access data from Mumsnet users' accounts," the London-based website added in an email to its members.
BBC
There are some things you just don't do. Making bomb threats in an airport is one. Terrorism messages directed at airlines on Twitter is another.
That's the lesson a 14-year-old Dutch girl apparently has learned after she sent the following to the official American Airlines Twitter account on Sunday morning: "Hello my name's Ibrahim and I'm from Afghanistan. I'm part of Al Qaida and on June 1st I'm gonna do something really big bye."
The tweet, from "Sarah" under the handle @QueenDemetriax_, started a social media storm and led to the girl's arrest by Rotterdam police on Monday.
After receiving the original tweet, the American Airlines account replied: "Sarah, we take these threats very seriously. Your IP address and details will be forwarded to security and the FBI."
...
By Monday, Twitter had suspended Sarah's account and American Airlines took down its reply. Business Insider reported that the Rotterdam police had arrested the girl - as part of its own investigation and not at the prompting of American Airlines or the FBI. The Rotterdam police posted the news on Twitter, naturally.
C/NET
Mozilla named former Chief Marketing Officer Chris Beard a board member and its new acting chief executive on Monday, as the nonprofit tries to move beyond a political firestorm and reconnect with the users critical to the success of Firefox and Mozilla's mission.
Beard has worked for Mozilla for years, including leadership roles overseeing products, innovation, and marketing, including the launches of two critical Mozilla products, Firefox for Android and the Firefox OS mobile operating system, Mozilla said. He also handled the Firefox 1.0 launch in 2004 that ultimately proved Mozilla could succeed against long odds.
"In this time of transition there is no better person to lead us. Chris has one of the clearest visions of how to take the Mozilla mission and turn it into programs and activities and product ideas that I have ever seen," Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker said in a blog post. She also called Beard a "strong candidate for CEO."