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
RIO DE JANEIRO — Close to the geographical heart of Brazil, in the little-known state of Tocantins, soccer players argued with a referee over a decision.
Tensions ran high at the state championship match in the small town of Peixe, and in the midst of the ruckus, an official observer called Silvio Santana Ribeiro, an Afro-Brazilian player, a “monkey.”
The incident barely made a ripple outside the town of 9,000, and police ignored the victim, a middle school teacher.
But as Brazil pulled behind its defender Daniel Alves after a banana was thrown in his direction while he was playing for Barcelona, the episode in Tocantins revealed the country’s complicated relationship with racial identity.
While a long history of intermarriage created an impression of racial tolerance, soccer is one area of life in Brazil in which scratching beneath the surface reveals lingering prejudices.
“We are men of science and principles, and we know how to deal with people,” said Santana Ribeiro, 36, from Paranã. “I was armed with substantiated arguments that I imagined would be enough, but he used a weapon that knocks down any science — prejudice — and called me a monkey.”
He said he wanted to believe the insult was not aimed at him, but his teammates refused to ignore it.
“People are indignant,” said Enedino Neto, director for the promotion of racial equality at the City Hall in Paranã, after the incident last month. “It rarely happens here.”
DW
Sao Paulo subway workers wanting a 12 percent pay rise defied a labor court ban on Monday and extended their strike into a fifth day. Three more Cup teams were due to arrive in the tense metropolis - Costa Rica, Honduras and the US.
Protestors burned bags of rubbish to block entry to the city's downtown Ana Rosa station before riot police fired tear gas and stun grenades to disperse them.
Protestors chanted "there won't be a Cup, there will be a strike!" to back the subway workers' pay rise demand. Initially at 16.5 percent, the union has reduced it to 12.2 percent. The government is offering 8.7 percent.
Stadium station idle
The World Cup kicks off on Thursday as Brazil and Croatia face off at the Arena Corinthians stadium in the northern part of the sprawling city of 20 million.
On Monday, parts of the subway were active, but trains were not arriving at the stadium, where heads of state will attend Thursday's opening ceremony.
Al Jazeera
Brazil's police have clashed in Sao Paulo with striking subway workers who are continuing to stay away from work despite a court declaring their strike to be illegal.
Riot police firing tear gas pushed about 100 striking workers out of a station on Monday, the fifth day of the protest that has thrown Sao Paulo's normally congested traffic into chaos.
"This is the way they negotiate, with tear gas and repression," Alexandre Roland, a union leader, told the AP news agency as he and others regrouped outside the station after confronting riot police.
The striking workers marched toward the city centre, where they planned to join a wide-ranging rally by various activist groups, including homeless workers demanding low-cost housing and a group calling for free public transportation.
Bruno Matos, a 24-year-old student, told Al Jazeera's Elizabeth Gorman in Sao Paulo on Monday that he came to the rally to support the subway workers who he saw as fighters for commuter rights.
"It's a fight not just for them, but also a fight over inequality in transportation. They have their specific fights for a salary, but also for the rights of the commuters," said Matos.
The Guardian
Less than four days before it hosts the opening game of the World Cup, São Paulo became the scene of protests, street fires and teargas on Monday as striking subway workers brought chaos to the city.
The strike – which disrupted half the metro stations and worsened traffic in South America's most populous city – was the latest headache for organisers as national teams from the United States, Spain and Argentina flew in for the start of the tournament on Thursday.
Security is also a major concern, particularly in Rio de Janeiro – the base of the England team – following a recent flare-up of unrest in the city's favelas. Players from Roy Hodgson's England squad were due to visit Roçinha, the nearest shanty town to their hotel, on Monday night as part of an outreach programme.
Excitement about the tournament is steadily building among the public – evident in the growing number of flags in windows and bunting on the streets – but many Brazilians are still uneasy about the $11bn (£6.5bn) costs of hosting the tournament and associate the World Cup with corruption, inefficiency, evictions and misplaced priorities.
The Guardian
Chris Christie’s most senior aide was on Monday accused of a failure to look into the role of the New Jersey governor’s office in the George Washington bridge scandal, as he continued to deny having known about or participated in it.
Kevin O’Dowd, Christie’s chief of staff, was criticised by state legislators after he claimed that he chose not to ask probing questions of colleagues even as allegations were being made that the closure of lanes to the bridge from Fort Lee last September had been politically motivated.
"What amazes me, and what I find absolutely appalling through this whole process, is the lack of curiosity,” assemblyman Louis Greenwald told O’Dowd. State senator Loretta Weinberg told O’Dowd that he and senior colleagues had displayed a “curious lack of curiosity” during the saga.
Testifying to a joint committee of the New Jersey state senate and assembly, O’Dowd insisted that he had believed his former deputy, Bridget Kelly, when she told him last December she was not responsible for orchestrating the lane closures because he had a “very high opinion” of her.
The Guardian
The supreme court says migrant children who waited for years with their parents to obtain visas still have to go to the back of the line when they turn 21.
The justices on Monday sided with the Obama administration in ruling that immigration laws do not let children who age out of the system qualify for visas.
The case involved Rosalina Cuellar de Osorio, a Salvadoran immigrant who was in line for a visa along with her 13-year-old son. But after years of waiting, her son turned 21 and government officials said he no longer qualified as an eligible child. He was placed at the back of the line, resulting in a wait of several more years.
The family lost a challenge in federal district court, but the ninth US circuit court of appeals reversed that decision.
The Guardian
He eluded police for more than six years, ransacking cabins across a wide swath of Utah as he trekked hundreds of miles alone on his snowshoes with a rifle slung over his shoulder.
After authorities caught him last year, he continued his solitary ways in court as he fired his defense attorney and defiantly told a judge he would represent himself against a host of state and federal burglary and theft charges.
But on Monday in a courtroom in St George, Troy James Knapp, known by many as the "Mountain Man", is set to finally face justice by agreeing to a package of plea deals that will bring an end his court case, and start the clock on a prison sentence expected to be at least 10 years.
Knapp, 46, will go first before a federal judge who must approve parameters of a deal Knapp agreed to in April on federal weapons charges that stem from him firing shots at agents during his capture in April 2013.
From there, Knapp will go before a state judge, where he is scheduled to take plea deals from seven Utah counties, said Sanpete County attorney Brody Keisel. Details of the plea deals are not being disclosed, but Knapp is charged with more than 40 burglary-related crimes dating back to 2009.
Reuters
- A federal judicial panel ruled on Monday that lawsuits against General Motors Co from customers who say they suffered economic damages from a recall over faulty ignition switches will be heard in New York.
The cases will be sent to U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in the Southern District of New York, according to the ruling from the U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, which considers requests to consolidate related lawsuits in U.S. federal courts.
More than 80 lawsuits have been filed by customers who allege that their cars lost value as a result of the recall, which began in February. GM had asked that the cases be consolidated and transferred to New York, the same district in which it filed for bankruptcy and emerged from it in 2009.
NPR
President Obama is expected to sign an order on Monday that expands the number of Americans whose student loan payments will be capped at 10 percent of their monthly incomes.
CNN reports the new order would allow an additional 5 million borrowers to take advantage of the cap beginning in December 2015.
Bloomberg adds:
""The action marks the latest effort by Obama's administration to advance policies by executive action after being stymied on Capitol Hill. With the help of several cabinet heads, the president has spent much of this year initiating modest changes in programs that may provide a boost to Democrats in advance of the midterm elections. ...
The proposal aligns with a bill from Senate Democrats that would allow individuals to refinance their student loan debt at current rates. Democrats have argued that the $1.2 trillion worth of outstanding student-loan debt retards economic growth as young college graduates are forced to postpone home buying or other purchases."
Obama announced his intention during his weekly address over the weekend.
NPR
The U.S. Border Patrol is becoming more transparent, according to the commissioner who oversees it.
Still, there is much the agency has yet to disclose.
The agency has repeatedly used deadly force along the U.S.-Mexico border while providing little or no information about what happened or why. What follows are the stories of four notable killings that have raised unanswered questions between 2010 and 2014.
Morning Edition followed some of these stories — both reporting our Borderland series in March and since it aired.
Juarez, Mexico: June 7, 2010
This shooting came near a border bridge that crosses from El Paso, Texas to Juarez, Mexico. Graffiti on the Mexican side, positioned so the U.S. Border Patrol can see it, reads: "We judge the assassins in Mexico."
While reporting Borderland, we met near the bridge with Maria Guadelupe Guereca Betancourt. She's a Jaurez resident, and a mom. When I asked how many kids she said, she replied, "There were seven."
NY Times
LAS VEGAS — Before 6 on Sunday morning, just hours before they killed two police officers and a civilian in a display of antigovernment violence, Jerad and Amanda Miller left their two beloved cats with Kelley Fielder, the next-door neighbor with whom they had been staying. Ms. Miller, 22, promised to return later. Mr. Miller, 31, did not. He gave Ms. Fielder a tearful hug, and said, “I got to do what I got to do.”
“ ‘The revolution has begun’ — that’s what he kept saying,” Ms. Fielder recalled on Monday. “All Jerad wanted to do is talk about overthrowing the government. I thought he was talking smack.”
But rather than idle talk, Sunday marked a bloody end to what neighbors described as Mr. Miller’s obsession with overthrowing the government.
DW
Anna Politkovskaya worked for many years for the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Now her colleagues there are insisting that the investigation into her death must continue until it establishes who ordered the killing.
Politkovskaya's children, Ilya and Vera, are making the same demand. But this is precisely where the investigators keep running into difficulties.
On Monday (09.06.2014), a Moscow court found five people guilty of carrying out the murder. They were given severe prison sentences: life imprisonment for Rustam Makhmudov, who is believed to have pulled the trigger; 14 years in a labor camp for his brother Dzhabrail, and 12 years for another brother, Ibragim.
Their uncle, Lom-Ali Gaitukayev - who organized the crime - was also sentenced to life imprisonment. And a former policeman, Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, was given 20 years for his involvement.
Spiegel Online
The appointment of the next leaders of the EU Commission has divided Europe, raising the specter that Britain could leave the bloc. London is an important ally to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and it is likely she will seek to broker a deal.
The mood was not a good one when Christian Democratic parliamentarians from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia met in Berlin last Monday evening. Normally, such gatherings focus on agreeing on a common line ahead of votes in the Bundestag, Germany's parliament. But this time, the deputies needed to vent. Angela Merkel's grand coalition, which pairs her CDU with the Social Democrats, has been in office since last autumn. And many lawmakers within the chancellor's party are tired of the SPD presenting itself as the driving force in the government.
Al Jazeera
The Pakistani Taliban has claimed responsibility for an assault on Karachi airport that has killed 29 people, and given warning that more attacks are on the way.
Besides the dead, at least two dozen people were wounded and flights were suspended as a result of Monday's attack on Jinnah International Airport, which is Pakistan's busiest.
A spokesman for the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) said the attack, which began after midnight, was in retaliation for the treatment of TTP prisoners, for air raids in North Waziristan and for the death of Hakimullah Mehsud, who was killed in a drone strike last year.
In a statement posted on Twitter, the armed group said: "We have yet to take revenge for the deaths of hundreds of innocent tribal women and children in Pakistani air strikes. It's just the beginning, we have taken revenge for one, we have to take revenge for hundreds."
Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said the TTP's Shahidullah Shahed sent a text message confirming responsibility and motive.
The raid involved heavily armed attackers disguised as security personnel, who hurled hand grenades and fired automatic weapons as they targeted the airport's cargo terminal.
The army said it had regained control of the airport around dawn after a six-hour siege, but explosions and shooting could still be heard on Monday morning and Pakistani troops relaunched their operation.
Al Jazeera
Hundreds of supporters of the newly appointed emir of Kano in Nigeria have clashed with backers of his main rival for the key post.
Supporters of the new emir, the ousted former central bank chief Sanusi Lamido, gathered in the country's second-biggest city on Monday, wearing white robes and red caps, the AFP news agency reported.
A crowd in support of Sanusi's rival for the role, the late emir's eldest son, Aminu Ado Bayero, attacked Sanusi's supporters as they headed to the state government headquarters.
According to AFP, Bayero's backers were armed with machetes, sticks and clubs.
Sanusi's appointment, announced by the Kano state government on Sunday, came after emir Ado Abdullahi Bayero died on Friday aged 83 after a long battle with cancer.
The new emir was suspended from his post at the bank in February by President Goodluck Jonathan after presenting parliament with evidence that the state oil firm Nigeria National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) had failed to pay $20bn into federal coffers.
The position of the emir of Kano was much sought after as it is the second-highest Islamic religious authority in Nigeria.
The ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of President Jonathan reportedly backed Bayero's eldest son for the position while the main opposition party, the All Progressives Alliance (APC) lobbied for Sanusi.
Reuters
Ukrainian border guards stand grim-faced and nervous at the remote Marynivka checkpoint on the frontier with Russia, fearing an attack by pro-Moscow separatists at any time.
Last week they fought off an assault by up to 150 rebels seeking control over supply routes from Russia to bring in arms and other war materials, forcing them to abandon two armored personnel carriers strafed with machinegun fire.
A weary border guard, wearing a camouflage T-shirt and a cap with a Ukrainian national emblem, said he feared the worst if the authorities in Kiev did not send help.
"They told us to expect reinforcements. We're hoping for them soon," said the guard, who gave his name as Vadim. "They (the separatist rebels) drove around us in circles shooting for about four or five hours."
An unexploded rocket-propelled grenade lay in the long grass 200 meters (yards) from the border post.
Washington Post
Peter Ferris Cochran is a tall, tanned North Carolina man who likes his blazers colorful, his trucks big and, if conditions are to his liking, his head shielded by a baseball hat. He speaks in a slow drawl that immediately identifies him as a Southerner, and once owned a successful business called Cochran & Associates in the North Carolina beach town of Emerald Isle.
Nothing about Cochran would alert those around him of the unusual circumstances under which he came into this world. That his name was once Andrew Michael Gallagher. That, by birth, he’s not a Southerner or even an American. That he’s Irish, born in 1957 in the now-infamous Tuam center for unwed mothers in western Ireland, where the remains of nearly 800 babies — 796 according to one historian’s estimates — may have been discarded in a massive septic tank. The full extent of what happened is now the subject of investigation, with authorities using ground sensor equipment to explore the tank.
“This was the information I’ve grown with over the last 50 years, and of every bit I knew was that this was a very evil orphanage,” he said Sunday afternoon in a phone interview. “It was evil for the orphans and it was evil for the unwed mothers. My mother was persecuted for out-of-wedlock sex, and the Catholic Church was just adamant about celibacy before marriage.”
Bloomberg
China is ready for a final settlement of its border disputes with India and prepared to invest more in the South Asian nation if trade rules are eased, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said late yesterday in New Delhi.
“Through years of negotiation, we have come to an agreement on the basics of a boundary agreement, and we are prepared to reach a final settlement,” Wang told reporters in the Indian capital near the end of a two-day visit that included a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
India and China are seeking to prevent their territorial disagreements from affecting economic ties. China is India’s largest trading partner and their combined trade was $49.5 billion in the April-December period, according to Indian government data. The two nations are home to one third of the world’s population.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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McClatchy
On Friday, the State Department revised its January report on the environmental impacts of building or not building the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline, including the number of potential injuries and fatalities if Canadian oil would move by rail instead.
The New York Times reported that the revisions projected “hundreds more fatalities and thousands more injuries than expected over the course of a decade.”
Frightening numbers that supporters and opponents of the pipeline used to boost their case _ except that the newspaper tied the wrong set of numbers to the no-build scenario.
“The initial study noted that without the pipeline, companies would simply move the oil by rail, and an addendum concluded that the alternative could contribute to 700 injuries and 92 deaths over 10 years,” wrote Times reporter Coral Davenport. “Friday’s updated report raised those numbers more than fourfold, concluding that rail transport could lead to 2,947 injuries and 434 deaths over a decade.”
Reuters
- Merck & Co Inc MRK.N said Monday it would buy Idenix Pharmaceuticals Inc IDIX.O for $3.85 billion and plans to combine the two companies' most promising drugs to produce a faster, more effective cure for hepatitis C.
Merck said it would pay $24.50 per share, more than three times Idenix's Friday closing price of $7.23.
The payoff for Merck could come from a triple therapy that may cure patients with all genotypes, or strains, of the hepatitis C virus in as little as four to six weeks, its research chief, Roger Perlmutter, said in an interview.
"An ideal therapy means something that works in every hepatitis C-infected patient, irrespective of which genotype," Perlmutter said. "Our goal is to cure everyone quickly using an oral regimen."
NPR
One running thread here at All Tech is smartphone distraction, and whether our increasing dependence on connecting through our devices is bringing us together — or tearing us apart. Whether it's smartphones and social media, or Internet dating, or outsourcing your life with various apps like Uber and Postmates, there's no question we are more digitally dependent than ever, and that means we're confronted with a set of moral questions and dilemmas.
A new interactive from The Guardian and the National Film Board of Canada is taking a closer look at these behaviors by clustering them into "7 Digital Deadly Sins" — sloth, envy, greed and the rest of the gang.
We've embedded the trailer for this project, which features some of its conceits. Questions like: Is it OK to download that movie for free? Are we a little too pleased with ourselves on Facebook? Since when did Twitter become so much more interesting than that flesh-and-blood, right-there-across-the-table-from-you boyfriend?
BBC
apan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said Japan will step up efforts to resume its annual whale hunt in the Antarctic.
"I want to aim for the resumption of commercial whaling by conducting whaling research," Mr Abe said.
In March, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the whaling programme was not for scientific research as Japan had claimed.
Australia, backed by New Zealand, brought the case against Japan in 2010.
Japan had stopped the hunt in the Antarctic after the ruling but vessels have carried on hunting Minke whales along Japan's northern coast. Japan says these are also for research purposes.
How Mr Abe intends to get around the international court ruling concerning the hunt in the Antarctic remains unclear, the BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes reports from Tokyo.
The Guardian
Web hosting company GoDaddy announced plans on Monday to raise $100m in an initial public offering.
The Scottsdale, Arizona company, famous for its controversial ads, provides domain-name registration and website-hosting services to more than 12 million customers world-wide.
According to its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, GoDaddy had revenues of more than $1.1bn in 2013 and made a loss of $199.8m. In the first quarter of this year it lost $51m on revenues of $320m.
The share sale, which is likely to be much more than the $100m initially announced, will come two years after GoDaddy was bought by current major shareholders include investment firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Silver Lake and Technology Crossover Ventures for $2.25bn.
Since the sale, the 17-year-old company has toned down its controversial ads which had previously featured scantily clad models and led the New York Times to dub the company the “supremo of Super Bowl sleaze.”
CNET
The takeaway: Trust us, we've listened and learned since last year -- the Xbox One entertainment vision is in the backseat, and it's now all about the games.
"You are shaping the future of Xbox and we are better for it," said Xbox head Phil Spencer, the first Microsoft executive to take the stage before the conference launched into its first demo, a gameplay showing of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. "We are dedicating our entire briefing to games," he added to strong applause.
So began a press conference where barely a sliver of time was dedicated to even acknowledging the existence of the Kinect camera and motion sensor, which was unbundled from the Xbox One last month, or any of Microsoft's original television programming or entertainment features.
CNET
What started off as your typical tech conference session ended up looking and sounding a lot closer to Jerry Springer.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who now runs Social+Capital Partnership, was on stage Monday morning at a tech gabfest sponsored by Bloomberg, riffing about the growing gap between haves and have-nots in San Francisco.
The social and financial impact of the tech industry has led to sometimes angry confrontations in San Francisco. Earlier this year, the Brookings Institution issued a report on urban inequality which found that the wealth gap between rich and poor is growing faster in San Francisco than in any other city in the United States.
So it was that Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive, ticked off a myriad number of steps that he thought the city and local industry ought to take. He closed his talk by warning that if things don't change, San Francisco would suffer the sort of social riots that have hit Paris and London in the last couple of years and needled Mayor Ed Lee for letting the social fissures widen.
That's when fireworks broke out.
Bloomberg
An additional hacking group linked to the People’s Liberation Army may have targeted U.S. defense and European satellite and aerospace industries since 2007, according to network security company CrowdStrike Inc.
The group, known as Putter Panda, “is believed to hack into victim companies throughout the world in order to steal corporate trade secrets, primarily relating to the satellite, aerospace and communication industries,” according to an undated report from the company released on June 9.
The unit is probably working on behalf of PLA Unit 61486, CrowdStrike said, identifying Chen Ping, also known as cpyy, as being responsible for registering the command and control needed to run the malware used in the attacks.
NY Times
TEXARKANA, Tex. — On a hazy, hot evening here, Janice Marks ate a dinner of turkey and stuffing at a homeless shelter filled with plastic cots before crossing a few blocks to the Arkansas side of town to start her night shift restocking the dairy cases at Walmart.
The next day, David Tramel and Janice McFall had a free meal of hot dogs and doughnut holes at a Salvation Army center in Arkansas before heading back to their tent, hidden in a field by the highway in Texas.
None of the three have health insurance. But had Ms. Marks, 26, chosen to sleep on the side of town where she works, or had Mr. Tramel and Ms. McFall, who are both in their early 20s, made their camp where they had eaten their dinner, their fortunes might be different.
Arkansas accepted the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. Texas did not.