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.
Reuters
Hong Kong democracy protesters defied volleys of tear gas and police baton charges to stand firm in the centre of the global financial hub on Monday, one of the biggest political challenges for China since the Tiananmen Square crackdown 25 years ago.
The Communist government in Beijing made clear it would not tolerate dissent, and warned against any foreign interference as thousands of protesters massed for a fourth night in the free-wheeling, capitalist city of more than 7 million people.
"Hong Kong is China's Hong Kong," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying defiantly told a news briefing in Beijing.
DW
Hong Kong remains paralyzed as tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets in protest. With Britain now weighing in, China is keeping a close eye on the swelling democracy movement.
With tens of thousands in the streets of Hong Kong on Monday, blocking major intersections and prompting authorities to "withdraw" riot police, China has officially voiced its opposition to the situation in the semiautonomous region.
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said Beijing "vehemently objected to illegal actions that undermine the rule of law and social security," adding that any international intervention in China's matters was also unacceptable.
Those statements came just before Britain, which controlled Hong Kong until 1997, voiced concern with regard to the "escalating protests," calling for "constructive talks" that it hoped would eventually lead to a "meaningful advance for democracy."
The Guardian
Thousands of protesters remained defiantly in downtown Hong Kong on Monday night after days of confrontations with police that observers fear could spark wider violence. The Guardian’s Tania Branigan in Hong Kong and Jonathan Kaiman in Beijing have been reporting on the standoff since large protests began Friday. Here’s a quick summary of what’s happening:
What’s the latest?
Police equipped with riot gear visibly withdrew from protests on Monday after the use of teargas and pepper-spray on demonstrators on Sunday (video) drew widespread condemnation, as well as thousands of additional demonstrators into the streets. Late on Monday, an elevated road in downtown Hong Kong west of Admiralty remained packed with protesters (Hong Kong is eight hours ahead of GMT, 12 hours ahead of US eastern time,) and reporters at the scene around midnight said more were arriving.
What do the protesters want?
Electoral freedom is the main demand. This is a perennial concern in Hong Kong, and it has again come to a head after China announced that Beijing would vet candidates to run in the 2017 elections, thus regulating the race to be Hong Kong chief executive. Protesters see the new rules as a sign that China may be seeking to erode the “one country, two systems” rubric in place in Hong Kong since 1997, when it reverted from British to Chinese control.
Al Jazeera America
Hong Kong police defended their use of tear gas but softened their tactics Monday after forceful attempts to quell pro-democracy protests drew tens of thousands more people into the streets in an unprecedented show of civil disobedience in one of the world's major financial centers.
Instead of candlelight, a few hundred people staged a brief "mobile light" vigil Monday night, waving their glowing cell phones as the protests stretched into their fourth day. Crowds chanted calls for the city's unpopular leader, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, to resign, and sang anthems calling for freedom.
The protesters are demanding free and open elections after rejecting Beijing's decision last month to rule out open nominations for candidates under proposed guidelines for the first-ever elections for Hong Kong's leader, promised for 2017.
Earlier on Monday, pro-democracy protesters wearing masks and wielding umbrellas to protect against pepper spray and tear gas erected barricades to block security forces and expanded their reach in the territory.
NPR
As throngs of pro-democracy protesters continue to organize in Hong Kong's central business district, many of them are messaging one another through a network that doesn't require cell towers or Wi-Fi nodes. They're using an app called FireChat that launched in March and is underpinned by mesh networking, which lets phones unite to form a temporary Internet.
So far, mesh networks have proven themselves quite effective and quickly adopted during times of disaster or political unrest, as they don't rely on existing cable and wireless networks. In Iraq, tens of thousands of people have downloaded FireChat as the government limits connectivity in an effort to curb ISIS communications. Protesters in Taiwan this spring turned to FireChat when cell signals were too weak and at times nonexistent.
And FireChat's popularity is surging in Hong Kong. About 100,000 users downloaded the free FireChat app between Sunday morning and Monday morning, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Pro-democracy protesters block off Nathan Road, a major route through the heart of the Kowloon district of Hong Kong on September 29, 2014. Police fired tear gas as tens of thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators brought parts of central Hong Kong to a standstill on September 28, in a dramatic escalation of protests that have gripped the semi-autonomous Chinese city for days. (Image source: AFP/Alex Ogle/Getty Images)
Al Jazeera America
In August 2007, then–presidential candidate Barack Obama vowed that, if elected, he would “immediately” amend the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which the U.S. signed with Mexico 13 years earlier.
“Our trade agreements should not just be good for Wall Street. It should also be good for Main Street,” he said, objecting to the influence of corporate lobbyists over labor unions and other groups in negotiating trade agreements.
Six years later, with NAFTA still untouched, Obama faced the decision to appoint the chief U.S. negotiators for the two largest trade agreements in history.
And he picked Wall Street bankers for the job.
Michael Froman, the current U.S. trade representative, received over $4 million in 2009 from his previous employer, CitiGroup, when he joined the government. Stefan Selig, the undersecretary of commerce for international trade and a former Bank of America banker, received more than $14.1 million in bonus pay when he left his old job.
Al Jazeera America
CHICAGO — Rahm Emanuel has everything a winning mayoral candidate would seem to need: name recognition, a campaign war chest nearing $10 million and famous friends in Hollywood and the White House who are more than willing to slide into town at a moment’s notice.
Yet polling has consistently shown that the former Obama administration chief of staff has one significant deficit in his campaign for re-election next February: The majority of voters in his city do not like him.
Over the last 12 months, Emanuel’s approval ratings have been on a downward spiral. A Chicago Tribune poll released in August, for example, shows that 35 percent of likely voters approve of the job he has been doing, down from 50 percent about a year ago. The results are similar regardless of voters’ race, income, age or gender. A Chicago Sun-Times poll from May shows similar dissatisfaction: Only 18 percent of those surveyed said Emanuel was doing a better job than previous mayor Richard M. Daley.
The Guardian
The Obama administration has asked a federal judge to hold a highly anticipated court hearing on its painful force-feedings of Guantánamo Bay detainees almost entirely in secret, prompting suspicions of a cover-up.
Justice Department attorneys argued to district judge Gladys Kessler that allowing the hearings to be open to the public would jeopardize national security through the disclosure of classified information. Should Kessler agree, the first major legal battle over forced feeding in a federal court would be less transparent than the military commissions at Guantánamo Bay.
Attorneys for Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a Syrian detainee on hunger strike whose court challenge is slated to begin next week, said the government was using national security as an excuse to prevent the public from learning the extent of a practice that the judge in the case has considered brutal.
But the case “includes inextricably intertwined classified, protected and unclassified information,” argued Joyce Branda, an acting assistant attorney general, in a motion filed Friday.
The Guardian
The governor of California, Jerry Brown, has signed a bill that makes the state the first in the United States to define when “yes means yes” and adopt requirements for colleges to follow when investigating sexual assault reports.
State lawmakers last month approved a bill by Senator Kevin de Leon, a Los Angeles Democrat, as states and universities across the US are under pressure to change how they handle rape allegations. Campus sexual assault victims and women’s advocacy groups delivered petitions to Brown’s office on 16 Sept urging him to sign the bill.
De Leon has said the legislation will begin a paradigm shift in how college campuses in California prevent and investigate sexual assaults. Rather than using the refrain “no means no,” the definition of consent under the bill requires “an affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.”
The Guardian
Detectives investigating a mass shooting at a packed Miami nightclub that left 15 people wounded, the youngest an 11-year-old, said on Monday they were baffled why so many children were at the venue.
One witness described Sunday’s early-morning incident at The Spot nightclub in Liberty City, a Miami neighbourhood notorious for gun crime, as like a firefight in Iraq, with groups of people blithely shooting dozens of rounds at each other.
The victims ranged in age from 11 to 25 and suffered mostly non-life-threatening injuries, although a 15-year-old boy remained in hospital in critical condition on Monday, apparently from multiple gunshot wounds.
“We are still baffled as to why so many young people were shot, and what they were doing there,” said Sergeant Freddy Cruz of the Miami police department.
“It’s not unusual for young people to be at a nightclub, but not 11-year-olds: that is quite young. We’re trying to fit all the pieces of the puzzle together and determine a motive. Was it gang-related? Was it about drugs?”
The Guardian
The judge overseeing Detroit’s bankruptcy ruled Monday that the city can continue to shut off water if people can’t pay their bill.
Judge Steven Rhodes said there was no “enforceable right” to water and the Detroit water department would face a significant risk of higher defaults if a moratorium was issued. “The last thing it needs is this hit to its revenues,” he said.
Detroit’s Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) began shutting off water to customers who were behind on payments this spring, cutting off around 22,000 people between March and August.
In court, city attorney Thomas O’Brien argued the department would suffer financially if ordered to supply water without payment. “There are limits” to what the department can do, he said.
The shutoffs sparked a wave of protests, and criticism from United Nations officials who said for those with a “genuine inability to pay, human rights simply forbids disconnections”.
Reuters
A photo of American journalist James Foley shortly before his beheading by the Islamic state militant group is being removed from anti-Islam advertisements appearing on Monday on 100 New York City buses and two subway stations.
In response to a complaint from the Foley family, the advertisement is being altered to include an unidentifiable severed head held by the masked militant seen wielding a knife in the video of Foley's beheading, said David Yerushalmi, lawyer for Pamela Geller, whose group is sponsoring the ads.
"The use of Mr. Foley's photo in your advertisement will cause profound distress to the Foley family," family lawyer J. Patrick Rowan said in a letter to Geller.
Geller writes a blog criticizing Islam. Her group, American Freedom Defense Initiative, paid for a six-ad series scheduled to run for a month on the city's mass transit system.
The Guardian
An armed intruder said by prosecutors to have been a threat to the president made it far further into the White House after jumping a perimeter fence than the secret service first admitted, according to damning new evidence to be heard by a congressional panel on Tuesday.
Witnesses have told the House oversight committee that Omar Gonzalez overpowered an officer at the front door and was not stopped until he reached a separate room toward the back of the White House, according to testimony first reported by the Washington Post.
After running past a stairway leading to the first family’s living quarters, Gonzalez, a former army sniper, sprinted the 80-foot length of the East Room and was finally apprehended at the doorway to the Green Room – another formal room overlooking the South Lawn – the Post reports.
DW
The government of Afghanistan will sign an urgently-needed security deal with the United States. Although the official US combat mission ends in December, the deal allows for a US troop presence in the country past 2014.
Afghanistan will sign a crucial security deal on Tuesday that will allow American troops to remain in the country after 2014, a senior adviser to US President Barack Obama announced Monday.
John Podesta, counselor to President Obama, confirmed at a press conference at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul on Monday that the security deal was to be signed.
"The BSA (bilateral security agreement) will be signed tomorrow, not by the president but by a senior minister," Daoud Sultanzoy, an adviser to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani told news agency Agence France Presse.
Spiegel Online
For years, Ankara has been tolerating the rise of the extremist Islamic State. But now that the jihadists are conquering regions just across the border in northern Syria, concern is growing that Islamist terror could threaten Turkey too.
Islim Ali is dragging a torn trash bag behind her, clothes spilling out of the growing holes. Twenty-two years old and in her sixth month of pregnancy, she heaves the sack into her arms and crosses the border, followed by her husband, himself overloaded with possessions, and their two daughters, Esma, 6, and Rodin, 2. A Turkish disaster management agent notes down the Kurdish family's personal details and they then sit down on the ground behind the metal barricade. A gust of wind kicks up a cloud of dust, covering everything with a fine layer. But the Alis don't seem to care. They are in Turkey -- in safety.
Al Jazeera America
A separatist shell killed at least seven Ukrainian soldiers when it hit their armored personnel carrier near Donetsk airport in eastern Ukraine, a military spokesman said Monday, putting additional strain on a fragile cease-fire.
Meanwhile, at least three civilians died and five suffered injuries overnight in the shelling of a residential area in the northern part of the city, where fighting has centered on the government-held airport, the Donetsk city council said.
In a separate incident, rebels fired a shell from a tank, wounding nine Ukrainian soldiers, and the army returned fire, destroying the tank, said Yuri Biryukov, an adviser to Ukrainian President Poroshenko.
All told, civilian and military deaths total at least 10, with at least 32 wounded in the largest outbreak of violence the region has seen in more than a week. The bloodshed in the last two days undermines the optimism of Poroshenko, a chocolate magnate elected in May, who last week praised the fact that military clashes had diminished and that military casualties had dwindled to zero.
The Guardian
US-led forces launched air strikes overnight on territory controlled by Islamic State (Isis) in northern and eastern Syria while the Syrian army continued bombing areas in the west, according to a group monitoring the war.
The US has been carrying out strikes in Iraq against the militant group since last month and in Syria since last week with the help of Arab allies. It aims to destroy the bases and forces of the al-Qaida offshoot that has captured large areas of both countries.
The overnight raids hit Isis in the northern Syrian town of Manbij, said the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which gathers information from sources in Syria.
Manbij sits between Aleppo city in the west and Kobani on the northern border with Turkey, which Isis has been trying to capture from Kurdish forces, forcing tens of thousands of Syrian Kurds to flee over the frontier.
Reuters
At least 36 people are feared to have died after a Japanese volcano erupted without warning at the weekend, raining ash and stones on hikers, but the search for victims was abandoned on Monday because of fears of toxic gases.
Rescuers at the peak of Mount Ontake, now an eerie moonscape under a thick layer of grey ash, on Monday found five more victims of Saturday's eruption at Japan's second-highest active volcano but authorities did not immediately confirm them as dead.
The eruption of the 3,067-metre (10,062-foot) peak, 200 km (125 miles) west of Tokyo, took place as the hiking site was packed with climbers, including children, admiring autumn foliage under a brilliant blue sky.
Twelve people have been confirmed dead in Japan's first fatal volcanic eruption since 1991, and 63 have been injured, some with broken bones. Eight were missing, but officials said some of them could possibly be among those who perished.
Reuters
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday tried to shift the spotlight away from Islamic State fighters and back to Iran, warning the United Nations that a nuclear-armed Tehran would pose a far greater threat than "militant Islamists on pickup trucks."
It was the fifth day of speeches at the annual gathering of the 193-nation General Assembly in New York, where Islamic State's seizure of large swaths of Syria and Iraq and its alleged massacres of civilians and soldiers have dominated discussions at the U.N. podium and on the sidelines.
Describing Iran, Islamic State and the militant group Hamas that controls the Gaza Strip as part of a single team, Netanyahu compared them all to Germany's Nazis, who killed six million Jews in World War Two.
"The Nazis believed in a master race, the militant Islamists believe in a master faith," Netanyahu said. "They just disagree who among them will be the master of the master faith."
Al Jazeera
Spain's Constitutional Court has temporarily halted an independence referendum called by the rich northeastern region of Catalonia, a decision which the region's leaders vowed to ignore despite warnings by the central government.
The court's unanimous decision to hear the government's case automatically suspended the November 9 non-binding referendum from going forward until the court hears arguments and makes a decision, a process that could take months or years, a court spokeswoman said.
She spoke on condition of anonymity because of court rules preventing her from being named.
The court acted hours after Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy said the referendum decree represents ``a grave attack on the rights of all Spaniards.''
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Al Jazeera America
Teen girls who have sex should use intrauterine devices (IUDs) or hormonal implants— long-acting birth control methods that are effective, safe and easy to use, the nation's most influential pediatricians' group recommends.
The American Academy of Pediatrics released its updated policy on Monday, which said condoms should also be used every time teens have sex to provide protection against sexually transmitted diseases that other forms of birth control don't provide and to boost chances of preventing pregnancy.
Condoms alone are the most common birth control choice among teens, but with typical use they're among the least effective methods at preventing pregnancy. Both IUDs and hormonal implants are nearly 100 percent effective, with lower failure rates than birth control pills, patches and injections, the academy said.
Reuters
The number of deaths linked to a faulty ignition switch in General Motors Co (GM.N) cars rose by two last week to 23, according to a report Monday from the lawyer overseeing a program set up to compensate accident victims.
Since Aug. 1, 867 claims for compensation for serious injuries or deaths said to have been caused by the switch had been received by the program, which is being overseen by lawyer Kenneth Feinberg. That is up from 850 last week.
As of Friday, 23 death claims had been deemed eligible, as well as 16 claims for serious physical injuries, according to updated statistics provided by Feinberg’s office. Last week, those numbers were 21 and 16, respectively.
NPR
The heavyset man with a bandage on his throat is having trouble repeating a phrase. "No ifs ..." he says to the medical students and doctors around his bed at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.
"Can I hear you say no ifs, ands or buts?" says Dr. Allan Ropper, the Harvard neurologist in charge. The patient tries again. "No ifs, buts, ands or," he says.
Ropper has heard enough. "I think he's probably had a little left temporal, maybe angular gyrus-area stroke," he tells the students and doctors, once they're assembled outside the patient's room. A brain scan confirms his diagnosis.
Later, Ropper tells me that the patient's inability to repeat that simple phrase told him precisely where a stroke had damaged the man's brain. "What we did was, on clinical grounds we nailed this down to a piece of real estate about the size of a quarter," he says.
NPR
Heart disease is the number one killer of people worldwide, so you'd think that we'd be up to speed on the risks. Evidently not, based on a poll of people in the United Kingdom.
Are you smarter than a Brit when it comes to risk factors? Take our quickie quiz and find out:
...
So are you smarter than a Brit? Here's how the 2,000 people polled by the British Heart Foundation fared:
Ninety percent wrongly believe that high blood pressure comes with symptoms. Alas, no.
One-third of people don't realize that smoking doubles the risk of having a stroke or heart attack.
Half of Brits said there's no link between diabetes and heart disease. In fact, people with diabetes are twice as likely to develop heart disease, and often at a younger age.
BBC
The global loss of species is even worse than previously thought, the London Zoological Society (ZSL) says in its new Living Planet Index.
The report suggests populations have halved in 40 years, as new methodology gives more alarming results than in a report two years ago.
The report says populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish have declined by an average of 52%.
Populations of freshwater species have suffered an even worse fall of 76%.
Severe impact
Compiling a global average of species decline involves tricky statistics, often comparing disparate data sets.
The team at the zoological society say they've improved their methodology since their last report two years ago - but the results are even more alarming.
Then they estimated that wildlife was down "only" around 30%. Whatever the numbers, it seems clear that wildlife is continuing to be driven out by human activity.
C/Net
In the race to add more capabilities into a smartphone, often what gets neglected is the actual phone part.
With the speaker and microphone shrinking down and packed in with computer chips, cameras and sensors, voice quality hasn't improved at the pace of the rest of a smartphone. This predicament led Consumer Reports to declare in May that making phone calls on these devices "still sucks."
There are plenty of noise cancellation technologies out on the market, but a Salt Lake City-based startup, called Cypher, is hoping its approach will help take some of the annoyance out of day-to-day phone conversations.
C/Net
Tuesday, September 30, will be the day Microsoft takes the official wraps off an early build of Windows Threshold.
While some can't wait for the new name of the next version of Windows client to be revealed, and others are anxious to hear about the first of the new features aimed at business users in particular, I'm hoping to learn about what Microsoft has done on the back end to change the way Microsoft delivers operating systems, going forward.
The unified Operating Systems Group has been working on new mechanisms for user feedback, testing new features in a way to gauge user acceptance, tracking bugs and rolling out new functionality and fixes starting with Threshold.
Until recently, Microsoft typically has taken three to six months to roll out new "milestone" test builds of Windows. But starting with Threshold, that window is going to become closer to one month between updates.
New York Times
The savage heat waves that struck Australia in 2013 were almost certainly a direct consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases, researchers said Monday. It is perhaps the most definitive statement climate scientists have made that ties a specific weather event to global warming.
Five groups of researchers, using distinct methods, analyzed the heat that baked Australia for much of last year and continued into 2014, shutting down the Australian Open tennis tournament at one point in January. All five came to the conclusion that last year’s heat waves could not have been as severe without the long-term climatic warming caused by human activity.
“When we look at the heat across the whole of Australia and the whole 12 months of 2013, we can say that this was virtually impossible without climate change,” said David Karoly, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne who led one research team.
Three other research groups analyzed the drought afflicting California, but could not come to a unanimous conclusion about whether the odds had been increased by human emissions. One paper found that they had been; two others found no clear evidence of that.
Reuters
Apple Inc's (AAPL.O) iPhone 6 can now be sold in China, after the firm received a license for the device to be used on China's wireless networks.
The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said on its website on Tuesday that it had approved the iPhone 6 after Apple addressed potential security risks that could allow personal data to leak.
The iPhone 6 had been released in other countries, including the United States, on September 19 but Apple did not give a release data for China.
The approval paves the way for Apple to sell the iPhone 6 in China, the world's largest smartphone market and one of Apple's biggest for iPhone sales. Analysts expect the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus to sell well in China, where many people prefer phones with larger screens.