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.
DW
While it was expected, it's still a sensation: the rightwing extremist National Front (FN) got more than 25 percent of the vote in the European parliamentary elections in France. That makes Marine Le Pen's party France's strongest political force in the EU legislature. France's current government party, the Socialists, only gathered 14 percent of the vote and landed in third place behind the conservative UMP, the party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy, which got 21 percent of the vote.
Le Pen was demonstrably assertive after the results were announced. "We can be self-confident. The coalition of those who lost faith in France has shown that it doesn't want to be ruled from the outside anymore," the leader of the National Front said, alluding to the EU's influence on French politics, which she thinks is too large. "Our people demand French politics, by the French and for the French."
Le Pen immediately called for domestic consequences. She said that President Francois Hollande had no choice but to suspend the French parliament: "It's not acceptable that the National Assembly is so unrepresentative of the population."
Al Jazeera
Far-right and anti-EU parties have made sweeping gains in the European Parliament elections, with the socialist French prime minister Manuel Valls describing the results "an earthquake".
Eurosceptic parties came first in France, the UK and Denmark, among others. The European Parliament's predictions on Monday showed that there would be about 140 anti-EU and far-right members of the 751-seat assembly.
The European People’s Party, the centre-right bloc in the parliament, is expected to win 212 seats, while the European Socialists are predicted to secure 186 seats.
The turnout was 43.1 percent, according to the preliminary results, compared to 43 percent in 2009.Nathalie Tocci, from the Institute of International Affairs in Rome, specialises in EU politics. "The European Parliament elections are an expression of the EU lacking legitimacy in the eyes of EU citizens, both due to the handling of the [eurozone] crisis and the perceived disconnect between decision-makers and publics," she told Al Jazeera.
BBC
Eurosceptic and far-right parties have seized ground in elections to the European parliament, in what France's PM called a "political earthquake".
UK Independence Party and French National Front both performed strongly. The three big centrist blocs all lost seats, though still hold the majority.
The outcome means a greater say for those who want to cut back the EU's powers, or abolish it completely.
UK PM David Cameron said the public was "disillusioned" with the EU.
Mr Cameron said their message was "received and understood".
NY Times
LONDON — Members of the European political elite expressed alarm on Monday over the strong showing in European Parliament elections by nationalist and anti-immigrant parties skeptical about European integration, a development described by the French prime minister as an “earthquake.”
In France, Britain and elsewhere, anti-immigrant parties opposed to the influence of the European Union emerged in the lead. In France, the National Front won 26 percent of the vote to defeat both the governing Socialists and the Union for a Popular Movement, the center-right party of former President Nicolas Sarkozy. In Britain, the triumph of the U.K. Independence Party, or UKIP, which won 28 percent of the vote, represented the first time since 1910 that a nationwide vote had not been won by either the Conservatives or Labour.
McClatchy
With his administration under fire over allegations of misconduct at VA hospitals, President Barack Obama used his weekly radio address to pay tribute to the fallen -- and pledge greater support to veterans.
"In recent weeks, we’ve seen again how much more our nation has to do to make sure all our veterans get the care they deserve," Obama said. "As Commander in Chief, I believe that taking care of our veterans and their families is a sacred obligation. It’s been one of the causes of my presidency. And now that we’ve ended the war in Iraq, and as our war in Afghanistan ends as well, we have to work even harder as a nation to make sure all our veterans get the benefits and opportunities they’ve earned."
Obama earlier this week denounced reports of falsfied records to cover up long waiting lines for treatment -- and potential deaths linked to those wait times as “disgraceful” and vowed to punish those responsible.
NY Times
WASHINGTON — An “open letter” from a senior Republican senator to the nation’s veterans in which he castigates the leadership of veterans organizations has prompted a brutal war of words over the Memorial Day weekend, including a promise from the Veterans of Foreign Wars that its “hat in hand” approach to Congress will turn more combative.
The burgeoning controversy over delayed access to care at Department of Veterans Affairs hospitals has always contained risks for Republicans pushing the issue. The logical conclusions of the push would be either a politically difficult effort to privatize veterans’ health care or to supply substantially more money to a system burdened by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, an option veterans groups have demanded but Republican leaders have resisted.
The Guardian
Facebook has taken down a page describing Elliot Rodger, the Isla Vista killer, as an "American hero", after refusing to for more than a day.
The page, which described the murderer as making "the ultimate sacrifice in the struggle against feminazi ideology", had been the subject of numerous complaints from Facebook users.
All reported it for violating the site's community standards, accusing it of breaking rules against harassment, hate speech, and threats of violence. The site initially refused to take action, telling users including Ian Miles Cheong, Tim Simmons and Australian campaign group Destroy the Joint that the page didn't violate their standards.
The Guardian
President Barack Obama is preparing to set out his vision for America’s role in the world following the final withdrawal from Afghanistan, in a commencement address to the US military academy at West Point on Wednesday.
In a speech that is being seen as the president’s rebuttal to critics who have attacked his foreign policy as perilously adrift, Obama is expected to articulate his vision of a “new stage” in America’s relations with the world post-Iraq and Afghanistan. Aides have indicated he will talk about the need for balance, between the US continuing to be internationalist and engaged but stopping short of overextending itself as it did with the occupation of Iraq.
The West Point address comes on the heels of a 33-hour trip to and from Afghanistan that ended with Obama's return to the White House on Monday morning. He used his fourth visit to the country, and his first since his re-election in 2012, to sound out General Joseph Dunford, commander of US forces in Afghanistan, and the US ambassador to Kabul, James Cunningham, over the latest security analysis.
The Guardian
The White House blew the cover of the top CIA agent in Afghanistan on Sunday, when the person’s name was included on a list given to reporters during a visit to the country by President Barack Obama.
The name was then emailed by the White House press office to a distribution list of more than 6,000 recipients, mostly members of the US media.
The agent in question, listed as chief of station, would be a top manager of CIA activity in Afghanistan, including intelligence collection and a drone-warfare programme under which unmanned aerial vehicles mount cross-border attacks into Pakistan.
The name appeared on a list of attendees requested by White House officials for the president’s visit to Bagram air base to mark Memorial Day, the national day of tribute to fallen service members. The list of 15 people was drawn up by the military, written into a routine press report and sent to Washington. The Obama press office then sent the list, unredacted, to the larger group.
The mistake did not come to light until the reporter who had filed from Afghanistan, the veteran Washington Post correspondent Scott Wilson, looked more closely at what he had sent and noticed the name and title.
Reuters
Texas conservatives are hoping to win two major Republican run-off elections on Tuesday, for lieutenant governor and attorney general, underscoring the Tea Party's enduring influence in the state.
Those two races were left undecided after no single candidate crossed the 50 percent threshold in the March 4 Republican primary, setting the stage for what has been a bruising run-off election between establishment candidates and conservative challengers who have the backing of both the Tea Party movement and its Texas star, Senator Ted Cruz.
The winner of Tuesday's run-offs will go on to face a Democrat in the November elections.
In the race for Lieutenant Governor, Tea Party favorite State Senator Dan Patrick took 41.5 percent of the vote in the four-candidate March primary, and is favored to win on Tuesday. The three-term incumbent, David Dewhurst, finished with 28 percent.
The Guardian
Three men are missing after a four-mile-long mudslide which a witness said sounded “like a freight train” struck rural Colorado, following a weekend of heavy rains.
"This slide is unbelievably big," Lieutenant Phil Stratton of Mesa County Sheriff's Office said on Sunday, according to the office's blog.
The sheriff's office said it was first notified of the slide and missing men around 6.15pm on Sunday, and responded to the area of Vega Reservoir and Grand Mesa, about 11 miles outside the small town of Collbran, 40 miles east of Grand Junction.
According to the 2010 census, Collbran has a population of 708.
No damage was reported to structures in the remote area.
The slide is two miles wide and 250ft deep in many places, according to authorities. The sheriff's office said an entire ridge was believed to have fallen through the day. The sheriff's office said the area was "very unstable", stopping search and rescue efforts overnight.
Bloomberg
Piketty, the French economist whose book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has transformed the debate on the causes and consequences of disparities in income and wealth, called a Financial Times analysis of his statistics “just ridiculous.” He added in an e-mail to Bloomberg News that “there’s no mistake or error” in his work.
The newspaper’s economics editor, Chris Giles, wrote last week that figures underpinning the 696-page book contain unexplained statistical modifications, “cherry picking” of sources and transcription errors. He said the mistakes undermine Piketty’s conclusion that wealth inequality in Europe and the U.S. is moving back toward levels last seen before World War I.
After correcting for the alleged errors, two of the book’s “central findings -- that wealth inequality has begun to rise over the past 30 years and that the U.S. obviously has a more unequal distribution of wealth than Europe -- no longer seem to hold,” according to Giles.
Economists disputed that assertion. Scott Winship, a fellow at the New York-based Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, said the newspaper’s allegations aren’t “significant for the fundamental question of whether Piketty’s thesis is right or not.”
LA Times
Eliot Rodger enjoyed sunsets, mountain vistas, retro pop music. He said it time and again: The world was a magical, beautiful place, but only in stark contrast to his small, pitiful life. "No friends," he said one day this spring, in a video recorded on his phone. "No love."
It's tempting, now that the finale has been written, to think that someone could have stepped in before Rodger killed six people and wounded 13 Friday before apparently killing himself, that the law could have been crafted to raise a red flag, to compel someone to act.
But according to interviews with Rodger's acquaintances, law enforcement officials and mental health professionals, all that was known about the 22-year-old college student was that he was terribly sad. And being sad is not a crime, nor the sort of mental state that would, alone, cross a legal threshold requiring official response.
Reuters
A renegade former Libyan general says the country's new prime minister is not capable of restoring stability in the major oil producer and has called for a postponement of parliamentary elections planned for June.
Khalifa Haftar launched a campaign more than a week ago to rid Libya of what he calls "terrorists" and Islamist extremists, who are especially active in the oil-rich east.
Gunmen claiming loyalty to him attacked the parliament building in Tripoli a week ago to demand lawmakers hand over power, triggering the worst clashes in the capital for months.
Speaking to Reuters by phone from an undisclosed location in eastern Libya, Haftar did not rule out talking to Prime Minister Ahmed Maiteeq but dismissed him as illegitimate and not up to the job.
"We are open to talk to anyone who can defend the nation," he said. "(But) he is a businessman, not a man of war."
Reuters
A gunman who killed three people at Brussels' Jewish Museum was "cold-blooded and very determined", Belgian officials said on Monday, leading some security experts to suggest he may have been a hitman rather than an anti-Semitic 'lone wolf'.
An Israeli couple and a French woman were killed in the shooting in the centre of Brussels on Saturday. A Belgian man remains in critical condition in hospital.
Police released a 30-second video clip from the museum's security cameras showing a man wearing a dark cap, sunglasses and a blue jacket enter the building, take a Kalashnikov rifle out of a bag, and shoot into a room, before calmly walking out.
"The footage shows an individual who acts in cold blood and is very determined," said Ine Van Wymersch, spokeswoman for the Brussels prosecutors, adding that she was handing the case to federal investigators, a mark of its severity.
"The identity and nationality of the victims is an additional reason to hand the case to the federal level."
Prosecutors said they were investigating all scenarios and would not speculate on the identity or motive of the gunman.
Al Jazeera America
A fresh round of fighting between Ukrainian troops and pro-Russian rebels broke out in eastern Ukraine on Monday, knocking hopes that an offer of talks from the president-elect in Kiev and Moscow's encouraging response may bring about a timely end to the crisis.
Fresh from a victory at the polls on Sunday, Ukraine's incoming president, Petro Poroshenko, said he was willing to open dialogue with Moscow, an overture that Russia welcomed. The exchange raised optimism that the protracted standoff, which has seen East-West relations plummet to levels unseen since the end of the Cold War, could be easing.
But on the ground, violence continued. On Monday, Ukraine's military launched air strikes against pro-Russian groups that had taken over an airport in the eastern regional capital of Donetsk in what appeared to be the most visible operation of pro-Kiev troops since they started a crackdown on insurgents last month.
Vladislav Seleznyov, a spokesman for Kiev's so-called anti-terrorist operation, wrote on his Facebook account that the military gave an ultimatum to the armed men who had occupied the airport to lay down their arms. He said the gunmen didn't comply and the military launched an assault
The Guardian
Moscow and Kiev promised to resume dialogue on Monday after preliminary results suggested that the pro-west businessman Petro Poroshenko had won Ukraine's presidential election – although renewed fighting in the east of the country dampened hopes of an immediate solution to the crisis.
Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Moscow was ready to enter talks with the new leadership, in his country's first high-level response to Saturday's election. "We shouldn't miss the chance that we have now to establish an equal dialogue of mutual respect considering the vote that has taken place, the results of which Russia is ready to respect," Lavrov said.
Pro-Russia forces who have occupied government buildings in eastern Ukraine since April followed Moscow's lead in welcoming Poroshenko's election. Denis Pushilin, supreme council chairman of the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic, said they were ready to negotiate with Ukraine's new leadership, but only with the participation of intermediaries including Russia.
Violence flared in the east on Monday morning when armed men seized Donetsk airport. There were reports of gunfire later in the day.
NY Times
JERUSALEM — Making history for the second day running, Pope Francis laid a wreath Monday on the grave of the founder of Zionism, becoming the first pope to do so, a gesture of support to Israel after several symbolic signals the day before that lent a spiritual lift to Palestinian aspirations for sovereignty.
At the request of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Francis added to his marathon morning in Jerusalem a stop at an Israeli memorial to victims of terrorist attacks, offering some counterbalance to the powerful lift he provided to Palestinians with an unscheduled stop Sunday at the concrete barrier dividing Bethlehem from Jerusalem. Mr. Netanyahu told the pope that building the barrier, which snakes along and through the West Bank, “prevented many more victims that Palestinian terror, which continues today, planned to harm.”
NPR
ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Nigeria's defense chief says the military has located nearly 300 school girls abducted by Islamic extremists but cannot use force to free them.
Air Marshal Alex Barde told demonstrators supporting the country's much criticized military on Monday that Nigerian troops can save the girls. But he added, "we can't go and kill our girls in the name of trying to get them back."
He would not say where they have found the girls.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Reuters
On a sunny day in San Francisco last January, AstraZeneca Chief Executive Pascal Soriot was on his way to the Westin St. Francis hotel on Union Square to give investors some unexpectedly good news.
After long refusing to put a date on when the British drugmaker's sales figures would pull out of a nosedive, Soriot surprised the market on January 14 with a bold prediction that sales by 2017 would be back at 2013 levels.
What shareholders did not know at the time was that two days earlier AstraZeneca had written to U.S. rival Pfizer rejecting its offer to buy the London-based group for close to $100 billion.
Shares rose on the 2017 sales forecast as investors looked forward to a time when AstraZeneca would finally put behind it a wave of patent expiries on its drugs. It was a defiant performance by Soriot - CEO for little over a year - whose long-term forecast suggested much of Wall Street had got his firm's valuation all wrong.
"Essentially we believe that we can return to growth faster than most people have been forecasting so far," he told the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. "Our next step would be that, by 2020, we want to launch at least 10 new medicines."
NY Times
WASHINGTON — A Reagan-era law that allows the government to read email and cloud-stored data more than six months old without a search warrant is under attack from technology companies, trade associations and lobbying groups, which are pressing Congress to tighten privacy protections. Federal investigators have used the law to view content hosted by third-party providers for civil and criminal lawsuits, in some cases without giving notice to the individual being investigated.
Nearly 30 years after Congress passed the law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, cloud computing companies are scrambling to reassure their customers, and some clients are taking their business to other countries.
Ben Young, the general counsel for Peer 1, a web hosting company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, said his customers were keeping their business out of the United States because the country “has a serious branding problem.”
CNET
Apple plans to launch a new smart home platform at next month's Worldwide Developer Conference that will allow iPhones and iPads to control a home's lights, security system, and other connected appliances, according to a Financial Times report.
The new "software platform," which will be unveiled at WWDC on June 2, will be built into the iOS devices, according to the report, which cited anonymous sources. As with Apple's "Made for iPhone" program, the new platform will be open to third-party device makers, allowing their gadgets to work on Apple's automation system.
One application of the new software platform cited by the newspaper was the ability to automatically turn on the lights when an iPhone paired with the system enters a building. Apple outlined its ideas for a home automation system in a patent filing last November.
The move is seen as a "big play" to challenge device giant Samsung and Google, which in February closed its $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs, maker of the Learning Thermostat and the Protect smoke and carbon monoxide detector.
CNET
At CES earlier this year, I checked out a solar-powered cooler. I never expected to one day discover its mirror-universe twin: a dirt-powered cooler. The eCool beer cooler harnesses a very old concept. Cellars, dug into the earth, have been used to keep food cool for centuries. That same idea drives the eCool, a compact, crank-operated cellar that keeps beer underground, but makes it easily accessible for consumption.
The entire contraption is nearly 4 feet (1.2 meters) tall. It can hold 24 cans and is designed to live in the ground all year long. The eCool creators suggest using a garden drill to make room to install it, unless you're a total shovel champion. The top pops up and a hand-crank moves the cans up so you can grab a cold one or lower some fresh cans down into the ground.
The eCool will keep your beers as cold as the surrounding ground. That should make for some pretty cool beers in a lot of climates. It would be interesting to test the gadget in a hot desert climate to see what temperature you're able to get down to. It would definitely be better than letting your craft brews just sit out in the sun.
ScienceBlog
Calorie restriction, a kind of dieting in which food intake is decreased by a certain percentage, has been touted as way to help people live longer. New research suggests that there may be other benefits, including improving outcomes for women in breast cancer. According to a study published May 26th in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, the triple negative subtype of breast cancer – one of the most aggressive forms – is less likely to spread, or metastasize, to new sites in the body when mice were fed a restricted diet.
“The diet turned on a epigenetic program that protected mice from metastatic disease,” says senior author Nicole Simone, M.D., an associate professor in the department of Radiation Oncology at Thomas Jefferson University. Indeed, when mouse models of triple negative cancer were fed 30 percent less than what they ate when given free access to food, the cancer cells decreased their production of microRNAs 17 and 20 (miR 17/20). Researchers have found that this group of miRs is often increased in triple negative cancers that metastasize.
ScienceBlog
Research presented by Dr. Lynn Raymond, from the University of British Columbia, shows that blocking a specific class of glutamate receptors, called extrasynaptic NMDA receptors, can improve motor learning and coordination, and prevent cell death in animal models of Huntington disease.
As Huntington disease is an inherited condition that can be detected decades before any clinical symptoms are seen in humans, a better understanding of the earliest changes in brain cell (neuronal) function, and the molecular pathways underlying those changes, could lead to preventive treatments that delay the onset of symptoms and neurodegeneration. “After more than a decade of research on the pre-symptomatic phase of Huntington disease, markers are being developed to facilitate assessment of interventional therapy in individuals carrying the genetic mutation for Huntington disease, before they become ill. This will make it possible to delay onset of disease,” says Dr. Raymond. These results were presented at the 2014 Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, the 8th annual meeting of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience – Association Canadienne des Neurosciences (CAN-ACN), held in Montreal, May 25-28.