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
Soldiers and energy workers have stacked thousands of sandbags to protect Serbia's biggest power plant from flood waters, which are expected to keep rising after the heaviest rains in the Balkans in more than a century killed dozens of people.
On Monday, Bosnian state radio reported that the swollen Sava river, which has wreaked havoc in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia, had again overwhelmed flood defences late on Sunday and flooded parts of the northern town of Orasje.
Waters receded in other parts of Bosnia, leaving behind mud, debris and dead animals. Another 1,000 people were evacuated from the border town of Bijeljina, threatened by flood waters from the Sava and the Drina, as well as 5,000 people from the northern town of Odzak, reports said.
In Serbia, a wall of sandbags several miles long was built around the Nikola Tesla power plant in the flood-hit town of Obrenovac, 20 miles south-west of the capital, Belgrade. It covers roughly half of Serbia's electricity needs.
DW
Hasa Huseinovic is still reeling from the fright she got. "We noticed how the floor was moving," says the 53-year-old. Then a neighboring house sank down into the ground. "The concrete began to rise, the asphalt cracked, and water came out of the floor."
Huseinovic then watched as eight houses in her village, Svrake, near the Bosnian-Herzegovinian capital Sarajevo, were carried away by the flood and a mudslide.
She was scared. "We didn't want to leave the house," she says. But her son started shouting at them, telling them they would die unless they got away. "This prompted us to run out of the house. I had only gone 10 meters when I heard a crash." At that moment, the houses around her collapsed and she fell to the floor. "I somehow managed to get out of there," she adds.
Al Jazeera
Floodwaters have triggered more than 3,000 landslides across the Balkans, laying waste to entire towns and villages and disturbing land mines leftover from the region's 1990s war, along with warning signs that marked the unexploded weapons.
The Balkans' worst flooding since record keeping began has forced tens of thousands of people from their homes and threatened to inundate Serbia's main power plant, which supplies electricity to a third of the country and most of the capital, Belgrade.
Authorities on Sunday organised a frenzied helicopter airlift to get terrified families to safety before the water swallowed up their homes, Associated Press news agency reported.
Floodwaters receded on Sunday in some locations, laying bare the full scale of the damage.
NPR
The worst flooding on record in the Balkans has killed dozens of people and now threatens a power plant that is Serbia's main source of electricity.
Tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes from rising waters in Serbia, Bosnia and parts of Croatia. Thousands more remain stranded, many of them trapped in upper floors of buildings without power or phone service. More than a thousand people have been evacuated by helicopter.
The flooding was triggered by months worth of rain that has fallen during the past five days.
"Flood maps marking the affected areas make it look as though a vast inland sea has suddenly appeared across the region," The Economist reports.
Surging water from the Sava River was threatening the Nikola Tesla power plant in the Serbian town of Obrenovac, 30 kilometers southwest of Belgrade. The Associated Press reports that the coal-fired plant "supplies electricity for half of Serbia and most of Belgrade."
Heavy machinery is clearing streets in Topcic, near the Bosnian town of Zenica, after a landslide
BBC
About a quarter of Bosnia-Hercegovina's four million people are without clean water after the worst flooding since modern records began, the foreign minister has said.
Zlatko Lagumdzija said the destruction was "terrifying" and compared it to Bosnia's 1992-95 war.
At least 35 people have died in Serbia and Bosnia in flooding caused by unprecedented torrential rain.
More victims are expected to be found as the waters recede.
"The consequences of the floods are terrifying," Mr Lagumdzija told a news conference.
"The physical destruction is not less than the destruction caused by the war."
He said more than 100,000 houses and other buildings were no longer usable and the road infrastructure was badly damaged.
He also said there had been about 2,000 landslides, some of which were on minefields left over from the war. Nearly 120,000 unexploded landmines remain in more than 9,400 carefully marked minefields.
New York Times
Credit Suisse has done what no other bank of its size and significance has done in over two decades: plead guilty to criminal wrongdoing.
In a sign that banking giants are no longer immune from criminal charges, despite concerns that financial institutions have grown so large and interconnected that they are too big to jail, federal prosecutors demanded that Credit Suisse’s parent company plead guilty to helping thousands of American account holders hide their wealth.
As part of a deal announced on Monday, the Swiss bank met the demands, agreeing to one count of conspiring to aid tax evasion in a scheme that “spanned decades.” Credit Suisse, which has a giant investment bank in New York and whose chief executive is an American, will also pay about $2.6 billion in penalties and hire an independent monitor for up to two years.
Reuters
London imam Abu Hamza al-Masri was convicted of terrorism charges in New York on Monday following a four-week trial that shined a spotlight on the preacher's controversial anti-Western statements.
A jury of eight men and four women found Abu Hamza, 56, guilty on all 11 counts he faced, handing Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara his second high-profile terrorism conviction in three months. The defendant could face life in prison.
In March, a different jury found Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, guilty of terrorism-related charges.
Prosecutors had charged the one-eyed, handless Abu Hamza with providing a satellite phone and advice to a group of Yemeni militants who kidnapped Western tourists in 1998. Four of the hostages were killed during a rescue mission by the Yemeni military.
Abu Hamza, who was indicted in the United States in 2004 under his birth name, Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, also was accused of dispatching two followers to Oregon to establish a militant training facility and sending an associate to Afghanistan to help al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Reuters
A U.S. grand jury has indicted five Chinese military officers on charges of hacking into American companies for information on nuclear plant design, solar manufacturing and other secrets in the toughest action taken by Washington to address cyber spying.
China denied the charges, saying they were "made up" and would damage trust between the two nations. The Chinese foreign ministry said it would suspend the activities of a Sino-U.S. Internet working group.
Officials in Washington have argued for years that cyber espionage is one of the nation's top national security concerns because foreign hackers have stolen secrets from defense contractors and technology secrets that could pose a threat to U.S. prosperity.
DW
DW: Can you can tell us more about the Texas justice system?
Kathryn Kase: The Texas justice system is based on retribution. In other words: We want to punish people when they have done something wrong. And we want to punish them severely. This is not like the justice system in Europe where there is great concern about following the law. In Texas, we are very result-oriented. And our judges are very concerned about not letting bad people get away. And as a result, our law is twisted, in order to find the guilty and to punish them.
exas is the US federal state which passes the most death penalties. Why is that?
Some of that is our history. And our history is that we are very afraid of African Amercans and Hispanics. They are overrepresented on our death row. Texas has shown a tendency to kill those it doesn't understand, whether it was Mexicans during the Mexican-American war and African Americans after the Civil War. And our death penalty is unfortunately an extension of our history.
Let's talk about Anthony Graves. What can you say about his case?
Anthony Graves was an innocent man who spent 12 years on death row and who spent 18 years in the death penalty legal system in Texas trying to prove his innocence. And he faced execution twice. He very nearly died. And even today, there are days when I wonder how he survived that experience....
McClatchy DC
The bipartisan smooth sailing towards the confirmation of Sylvia Mathews Burwell to be President Barack Obama’s new Health and Human Services secretary has hit some choppy waters as some Senate Republicans are turning her confirmation into the latest skirmish over the Affordable Care Act.
Sen. David Vitter, R-La., is the latest to enter the fray. He announced his intention Monday to oppose the choice of Burwell to replace former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebilius and cited the ACA as the reason.
‘What I find most infuriating about Obamacare is that Congress worked behind closed doors to give themselves special treatment to avoid higher costs and lower quality care,’ Vitter wrote in a letter he wrote to Louisiana congressional lawmakers. ‘I’m going to oppose Ms. Burwell’s nomination until the American people get the same relief from Obamacare as the Washington elite and their corporate allies.
Al Jazeera America
Student debt and the hiring of relatively low-paid adjunct faculty rather than full-time professors have grown fastest at public universities with the highest-paid presidents, a new report found.
University president pay has risen dramatically in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, according to the report, which focuses on 25 state universities that pay their presidents almost double the national average. Released Sunday by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a progressive Washington D.C.-based think tank, the study is called The One Percent at State U — referring to the financial gains made by executives after the 2008 recession.
Nationwide, between the fall of 2009 and the summer of 2012, average executive compensation at public research universities increased 14 percent to $544,544, according to the study.
But presidents at the 25 universities examined saw their salaries increase almost twice as fast as the national average, to $974,006. Early indications since 2012 suggest this trend will continue to accelerate.
The Guardian
An Occupy Wall Street activist has been sentenced to three months in jail for assaulting a New York police officer as he led her out of a protest.
Cecily McMillan, who had been facing a maximum sentence of seven years, was told on Monday morning by Judge Ronald Zweibel that she "must take responsibility for her conduct".
"A civilised society must not allow an assault to be committed under the guise of civil disobedience," said Zweibel at Manhattan criminal court. However, he added: "The court finds that a lengthy sentence would not serve the interests of justice in this case."
McMillan, 25, received a three-month jail sentence to be followed by community service and five years of probation. Her lawyers expect her to serve two-thirds of the sentence. She will also receive credit for the two weeks she has been remanded at Rikers Island jail since being convicted.
McMillan was earlier this month found guilty of deliberately elbowing officer Grantley Bovell in the face at a demonstration in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park in March 2012. He suffered a black eye and spent two weeks off work with headaches and sensitivity to light. McMillan insisted throughout her trial that she swung her arm instinctively after having one of her breasts grabbed from behind.
The Guardian
It turns out that being publicly fired from the most high-profile job in American journalism is the perfect preparation for giving advice to college graduates.
That’s the way Jill Abramson made it seem on Monday, in any case, delivering a witty and lighthearted address to the graduates of Wake Forest University in North Carolina in her first public comments since losing her job last week as executive editor of the New York Times.
Abramson stuck to themes of resilience and the importance of comeback in a 15-minute commencement address that repeatedly drew belly laughs from the audience and made no display of the forbidding figure whom the Times publisher Arthur Sulzburger Jr last week described as an abrasive manager guilty of “public mistreatment” of colleagues.
Abramson called it “the honor of my life to lead the newsroom.”
“They know that I have some tattoos,” Abramson said, describing a chat with a student beforehand. “And one of them asked me: ‘Are you going to get that Times T that you have tattooed on your back removed?’
“Not a chance!”
Bloomberg News
The National Basketball Association formally told Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling that it intends to force a sale of the team in the wake of his racist comments that got him banned from the league for life.
Sterling, according to the NBA constitution, has until May 27 to respond, the league said today in an e-mailed statement. He is also allowed to present his side in front of the NBA’s Board of Governors at a June 3 hearing.
The board will then vote whether to oust the 80-year-old Sterling. A 75 percent majority, or 23 of 30, is needed to force the sale. The NBA hasn’t said when that vote would be held.
Sterling, a real-estate billionaire who bought the Clippers in 1981, told a female acquaintance in audio that was posted on the website TMZ on April 25 that he didn’t want her bringing black people to his team’s games and that he didn’t approve of her posting a photo with Hall of Famer Magic Johnson to Instagram.
NPR
In Augusta, Ga., a judge sentenced Tom Barrett to 12 months after he stole a can of beer worth less than $2.
In Ionia, Mich., 19-year-old Kyle Dewitt caught a fish out of season; then a judge sentenced him to three days in jail.
In Grand Rapids, Mich., Stephen Papa, a homeless Iraq War veteran, spent 22 days in jail, not for what he calls his "embarrassing behavior" after he got drunk with friends and climbed into an abandoned building, but because he had only $25 the day he went to court.
The common thread in these cases, and scores more like them, is the jail time wasn't punishment for the crime, but for the failure to pay the increasing fines and fees associated with the criminal justice system.
A yearlong NPR investigation found that the costs of the criminal justice system in the United States are paid increasingly by the defendants and offenders. It's a practice that causes the poor to face harsher treatment than others who commit identical crimes and can afford to pay. Some judges and politicians fear the trend has gone too far.
Reuters
From a cramped office in residential Donetsk, election officials were frantically working on Sunday to prepare for Ukraine's May 25 presidential poll, despite what they described as intimidation and threats from pro-Russian separatists.
By Monday morning, their resolve broken, they had shut down their office.
"We're not working out of safety concerns," said Volodymyr Klotsky, a member of election commission no. 43, adding that he and his colleagues had reluctantly taken the decision after "terrorists" had seized the offices of another voting commission nearby.
Klotsky's commission had been the last of five such election bodies opened up in the eastern Ukrainian city, an industrial hub of about 1 million, which is now the centre of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic.
The separatists' revolt, fuelled by heady Russian propaganda, was focused at several points in the east following the overthrow of the Moscow-backed president Viktor Yanukovich and the annexation by Russia of Crimea.
Al Jazeera
Libya's government has demanded the suspension of parliament until the next general election, as the security situation in the country goes on a downward spiral, fuelled by growing tensions between two armed groups.
In a statement issued on Monday, the cabinet said it requested that the General National Council be suspended after an impending vote on the 2014 budget, a day after the legislature's building came under attack by rebels loyal to retired general Khalifa Qassim Haftar.
The proposal, submitted by Prime Minister Abdullah al-Thinni, was made to parliament as a solution to Libya's political chaos and violence, Reuters news agency cited the cabinet's statement as saying.
Al Jazeera
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's coalition won the most seats in Iraq's parliamentary elections but fell short of a majority, leaving him in the driver's seat to retain his post despite vocal opposition.
Monday’s results from the election commission showed Maliki's State of Law alliance garnered 92 out of 328 parliamentary seats, with the incumbent himself winning more than 721,000 personal votes.
Both were by far the highest such figures from the April 30 election.
But he still fell short of a majority, meaning he will have to win the support of rivals from across the communal spectrum, some of whom have sharply criticised Maliki and refused to countenance his bid for a third term in office.
State of Law won 30 seats in Baghdad alone, and came first in 10 provinces overall, all of them in the bloc's traditional heartland in the Shia-majority south of the country.
Maliki's main rivals all finished with between 19 and 29 seats overall, according to an AFP news agency tally of election commission results.
Spiegel Online
They were big words, spoken almost as if they had been written in stone. "Our commitment to collective defence is rock solid, now and for the future," NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said more than a week ago, first in the Polish capital Warsaw and then, on the same day, in the Estonian capital Tallinn. Before that, the US ambassador to Latvia, speaking to local and American soldiers at a military base in the country, had sounded equally forceful when he insisted that the NATO partners and Latvia are standing "shoulder to shoulder."
Rasmussen's remarks were well intentioned but relatively toothless -- little more than whistling in the dark. The Balts and Poles sense it, and the NATO secretary general knows it.
Spiegel Online
The belongings of Asli Yildirim's husband were returned to her in a blue garbage bag lying on the ground in front of her. She pulls his clothes from its cold plastic folds and presses them to her face.
"Let me smell him one last time," she cries over and over again, pushing away her father, then her mother, and hugging the garments, blackened by smoke, to her chest. Her husband's yellow rubber boots lie at her feet.
Then she passes out.
Asli Yildirim's sisters and cousins bend over her, splashing her face with water from a garden hose. Don't lose your mind, Asli, they tell her, or they'll take away your children. The state will help you, they'll give you money. You're not alone, just because you've lost your husband, they say.
NY Times Opinion Pages
Italy’s interior minister, Angelino Alfano, has given the European Union an ultimatum: Either step in to help Italy cope with the waves of African migrants who risk drowning in the Mediterranean to reach its shores or Italy will begin sending the people it rescues to neighboring European countries. After the sinking of an overloaded boat last week — 206 people were rescued off the coast of Italy, 17 bodies were recovered, and an unknown number are missing — the European Commission responded. It said Italy should communicate what it expects. This is not an acceptable response.
The commission knows very well what Italy expects. It wants Europe to compensate it for the cost of rescuing migrants. Italy also wants Europe to take ownership of its marine rescue operation, Mare Nostrum, which was set up after a boat sank off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa last October, with 350 lives lost. Since then, as two new reports on migration to Europe confirm, the worsening turmoil in sub-Saharan Africa and the dire situation in Syria have pushed thousands more to risk crossing the Mediterranean, more than 40,000 in 2013 alone.
Reuters
Thailand's army declared martial law on Tuesday to restore order after six months of anti-government protests which have left the country without a proper functioning government, but the move did not constitute a coup, military officials said.
The caretaker government was still in office, said deputy army spokesman Colonel Winthai Suvari, following the surprise announcement on television at 3 a.m. (4.00 p.m. ET Monday).
"This martial law is just to restore peace and stability, it has nothing to do with the government. The government is still functioning as normal," Winthai told Reuters.
Thailand has been stuck in political limbo since Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and nine of her ministers were dismissed on May 7 after a court found them guilty of abuse of power. An acting prime minister has since taken over.
The crisis, the latest installment of a near-decade-long power struggle between ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Yingluck's brother, and the royalist establishment, has brought the country to the brink of recession.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Al Jazeera America
People are eating more fish. This might seem a relatively neutral phenomenon in terms of global consequences, but a new report released Monday by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) argues that while fish has become an increasingly important part of human nutrition and a booming industry, increased consumption has negative implications for the Earth’s oceans.
The U.N. report focuses on the growth of aquaculture — fish farming — as well as the capture of wild fish. It suggests that growing demand threatens to destabilize the fishing industry, potentially leading to serious environmental consequences.
The report contends that aquaculture — if it is done correctly — can help meet the growing demand for protein worldwide and can help relieve pressure on wild fish populations. But the FAO also warns that bad management practices could lead to unnecessary food waste and strain already parched ecosystems.
While the report does not address the interaction between wild and farmed fish, it comes at a time of growing concern over the environmental implications of aquaculture in the United States and elsewhere. Some environmental groups warn that farmed fish — especially genetically modified salmon — have the potential to overwhelm wild populations and weaken their genetic pools, contributing to a decline in wild populations around the world.
The Guardian
Antarctica is shedding 160 billion tonnes a year of ice into the ocean, twice the amount of a few years ago, according to new satellite observations. The ice loss is adding to the rising sea levels driven by climate change and even east Antarctica is now losing ice.
The new revelations follows the announcement last week that the collapse of the western Antarctica ice sheet has already begun and is unstoppable, although it may take many centuries to complete.
Global warming is pushing up sea level by melting the world’s major ice caps and by warming and expanding oceans waters. The loss of the entire western Antarctica ice sheet would eventually cause up to 4 metres (13ft) of sea-level rise, devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world.
The new data, published in journal Geophysical Research Letters, comes from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite, which was launched in 2010.
NPR
If the prices of a margarita or guacamole have been too high for you lately, blame it on a key ingredient of the Mexican treats — the lime. Prices for limes, imported almost exclusively from Mexico, hit record highs this year, and demand remains high. But now the price is dropping and farmers couldn't be happier.
You can see it firsthand at the outdoor wholesale lime market in Apatzingan, Michoacan. Dozens of buyers stand in the dirt parking lot waiting for beat up pick up trucks full of limes to roll in. The men rush to the backs of the trucks, filled high with crates of limes. Here the round fruit is known as green gold.
Lime buyer Geraldo Fernandez scrambles up the back of the crates and peers over the top. In Spanish he says, "the trucks barely stop and the limes are sold...they're selling like hotcakes."
While Mexico's other lime producing states were hit hard by bad weather and a fungal outbreak earlier this year, as we've reported, the orchards in Michocan have been flourishing, netting record profits for the state's farmers.
But with every boom comes the bust. And prices are falling fast.
NPR
CNET
For AT&T and DirecTV, the sales pitch begins.
The companies have a lot of convincing to do. Consumer advocacy groups have already bashed the deal as the creation of another media industry giant, while financial analysts remain skeptical about the potential advantages of combining the second-largest wireless carrier in the US with the nation's largest satellite-TV provider.
AT&T 's planned $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV will allow it to expand its video services' reach across the nation, beyond the limits of its own wireline infrastructure. DirecTV, meanwhile, can finally pair its satellite TV service with an Internet connection -- long seen as its missing link. The deal comes after Comcast's own proposed $45.2 billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable.
That's why AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and DirecTV CEO Mike White hopped on a Monday conference call to answer questions from Wall Street -- part of what will be a 12-month campaign to win over investors, regulators, and consumers.
CNET
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Nvidia is shifting gears again.
The company, which has risen to prominence by creating graphic processing units, or GPUs, for computers, has long been looking for other avenues of growth. It had sought to break into the smartphone and tablet business, but has largely been shut out, and is now looking at gaming devices and cars as its next big opportunity.
Whatever the area, Nvidia needs to capitalize on it fast. Last year, PC shipments posted their worst-ever drop of 10 percent, according to Gartner. And the tech research firm expects shipments to drop more than 6 percent this year and fall again next year.
Even as most smartphones passed on Nvidia's Tegra chip, it found its way into notable products like the Xiaomi Mi Pad tablet and the first two versions of Microsoft's Windows RT-powered Surface tablet. But the latest reports suggest Qualcomm will supply the chip for Microsoft's new smaller-screen Surface instead of Nvidia.
Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang didn't want to talk about Surface with CNET as much as the company's new strategy, which he believes will pay off for the chipmaker. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation, which took place Wednesday here at the company's headquarters.
ScienceBlog
Most discrimination in the U.S. is not caused by intention to harm people different from us, but by ordinary favoritism directed at helping people similar to us, according to a theoretical review published online in American Psychologist.
“We can produce discrimination without having any intent to discriminate or any dislike for those who end up being disadvantaged by our behavior,” said University of Washington psychologist Tony Greenwald, who co-authored the review with Thomas Pettigrew of the University of California, Santa Cruz.