Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Man Oh Man, rfall, and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw. The guest editors are Doctor RJ and annetteboardman.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
The Guardian
The US supreme court signalled a sweeping expansion of gay rights across America on Monday, declining to hear appeals from five states seeking to uphold bans on same-sex marriage and setting a course for legalisation in a majority of states in the union.
The court’s unexpected decision to slam the door on pending appeals meant there will be no imminent ruling on the constitutionality of gay marriage nationwide. But it had the dramatic effect of clearing a way for its rapid expansion to 30 states and the District of Columbia.
In some of the most conservative states in the country, county clerks were preparing to issue marriage licences within hours of the justices’ terse announcement on Monday.
An immediate impact was felt in five states. Same-sex marriage became legal in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin, where the authorities had been appealing defeats against local bans on same-sex marriage in the lower courts.
Al Jazeera America
The Supreme Court has officially declined to review all petitions stemming from state bans on same-sex marriage [PDF], meaning lower court decisions stand and laws banning such unions have been struck down in multiple states across the U.S. The decision was handed down without comment.
The justices had presaged such an action last week when none of the same-sex challenges were among the 11 cases the court added to its docket, but now it’s official. Decisions in Indiana, Wisconsin, Utah, Oklahoma and in three cases from Virginia — where state marriage restrictions were ruled unconstitutional — stand.
Bloomberg
The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for gays to marry in 11 more states while leaving the issue in doubt elsewhere as the justices rejected calls for a nationwide ruling.
Advocates on both sides had urged the court to resolve the matter following a wave of lower court rulings that the U.S. Constitution guarantees same-sex marriage rights.
The justices instead gave proponents a more limited victory that will raise the number of gay-marriage states to 30, plus the District of Columbia. The high court left intact decisions from three federal appeals courts legalizing same-sex marriage in Utah, Oklahoma, Virginia, Wisconsin and Indiana. Those decisions can now take effect.
Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to decide once and for all whether states can ban gay marriage, a surprising move that will allow gay men and women to get married in five additional states, with more likely to follow quickly.
On the first day of its new term, the high court without comment rejected appeals in cases involving five states - Virginia, Oklahoma, Utah, Wisconsin and Indiana - that had prohibited gay marriage, leaving intact lower-court rulings striking down those bans.
As a result, the number of states permitting gay marriage would jump from 19 to 24, likely soon to be followed by six more states that are bound by the regional federal appeals court rulings that had struck down bans. That would leave another 20 states that prohibit same-sex marriage.
New York Times
WASHINGTON — In a move that may signal the inevitability of a nationwide right to same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court on Monday let stand appeals court rulings allowing such unions in five states.
The development, a major surprise, cleared the way for same-sex marriages in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. Officials in Virginia announced that marriages would start at 1 p.m. on Monday.
The decision to let the appeals court rulings stand, which came without explanation in a series of brief orders, will almost immediately increase the number of states allowing same-sex marriage from 19 to 24, along with the District of Columbia. The impact of the move will in short order be even broader.
The Guardian
Two weeks after US warplanes began bombing Islamic State (Isis) positions in Syria, the Pentagon leadership has yet to make critical decisions about building the proxy rebel force central to its plan for taking territory away from the jihadist army.
US military officials consider raising a Syrian rebel force crucial for the war aim of ultimately destroying Isis without committing US soldiers and marines to another bloody Middle East ground war. But the Pentagon has yet to even assign a US officer to the task of determining which rebels are trustworthy and capable enough to comprise that force.
“No decision has been made as to who will lead the programme,” commander Elissa Smith, a Pentagon spokeswoman, confirmed to the Guardian.
Once selected for the training, the rebels will be led by Major General Michael Nagata, a special-operations veteran. The supposedly moderate Free Syrian Army is expected to form the kernel of the proxy force.
The Guardian
The fifth American to contract Ebola in west Africa arrived in Omaha on Monday morning, as the first patient diagnosed with the disease in the US fights for his life in Dallas.
A specially equipped plane carrying Ashoka Mukpo, an American journalist who contracted Ebola while covering the outbreak in Liberia, landed at Eppley airfield in Omaha. Mukpo was then taken by ambulance to the Nebraska Medical Center, where he will be treated in a biomedical isolation unit – the largest in the country.
Mukpo was working in Liberia as a freelance cameraman for NBC News when he tested positive for Ebola last week. As a precautionary measure, the NBC news crew he was working with will remain in isolation for 21 days, the incubation period for the disease. The quarantined team includes NBC News chief medical editor Dr Nancy Snyderman.
Meanwhile in Dallas, Thomas Eric Duncan’s condition worsened over the weekend, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) director Thomas Frieden.
NPR
In the U.S., people born between 1980 and 2000 now outnumber baby boomers, and their numbers are still growing because of immigration. This generation is already shaping American life, and in a series of stories — largely reported by millennials themselves — NPR will explore how this new boom is transforming the country.
There are more millennials in America right now than baby boomers — more than 80 million of us.
And I'm gonna go ahead and guess that if you're not a millennial, you kind of hate us.
We seem so lazy, so entitled. We still live with our parents. We love our selfies and we're always talking about ourselves.
But, here's my case: Millennials have already shaped your life.
NPR
Low morale could be partly to blame for the recent spate of security lapses at the Secret Service.
The agency with the responsibility for protecting the president, vice president and their families rates in the bottom third in job satisfaction rankings within the federal government.
The root of that discontent could be bureaucratic. The Secret Service, which was created in 1865 to fight counterfeiters, traces its heritage back to the U.S. Treasury Department. It didn't get into the business of protecting presidents until 1901 after the assassination of President McKinley.
After the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the service was transferred from Treasury to the newly created Department of Homeland Security. It became one of 22 agencies thrown together in response to the terrorist attack.
NPR
"You have the right to remain silent."
Any devotee of TV crime dramas or police procedural shows hears the phrase regularly. But new court decisions in recent years have chipped away at that principle.
Take the case of California resident Richard Tom. In 2007, he broadsided a car, injuring a girl and killing her sister. At the accident scene, he asked to go home but was told no. He wasn't handcuffed, but police held him in the back of a police car. At no point did he ask the police about the victims. During his trial for vehicular manslaughter, prosecutor Shin-Mee Chang told the jury that Tom's failure to ask about them pointed to the "consciousness of his own guilt."
"His complete lack of concern for the occupants of the car that he had just broadsided was one factor that showed his indifference to the consequences of his reckless driving that night," Chang says.
But didn't Tom have the right to remain silent — to not ask about the victims? For decades, television shows like Columbo and the Law and Order series have told us: "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law."
NPR
Democrats this election have done a good job attracting a lot of big donors, but Republicans appear to have the big advantage when it comes to big secret donors.
The strength of Democratic House and Senate fundraising committees — and their supporting superPACs — has been a surprise development this cycle, even as the Senate seems poised to flip to Republican control and the House is almost certain to remain under GOP leadership.
Now Republicans will get even more help from their big guns from the past two elections: the tax-exempt nonprofit groups Americans for Prosperity and Crossroads GPS.
Americans for Prosperity, founded by the industrialist billionaire Koch brothers, has already been running tens of millions worth of ads attacking Democratic senators in key states. Now it says it will also run ads specifically telling voters to defeat those Democrats on Nov. 4. It will not reveal how much it intends to spend, but earlier media reports suggest the group's total outlays this election could be near $300 million, although that figure includes voter registration and turnout efforts.
Crossroads GPS, co-founded by GOP operative Karl Rove, is on track to raise some $75 million this election, according to spokesman Paul Lindsay, and will spend at least $23 million of that in the final two months of the campaign in six states, including $9.5 million in Colorado alone.
Vox
So far, we have jobs data for nine months in 2014. The economy added more than 200,000 jobs in seven of them. That's pretty impressive jobs growth — it's not enough to wipe out the losses of 2008 and 2009, of course, but it's the kind of growth that will, if given time, bring about a recovery. It's the kind of growth economists wish we had had starting in 2010.
The question is how long it'll last. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, the recession ended — and the expansion began — in June 2009. That means the economy has been growing for more than 60 months straight. As Jared Bernstein notes, the average post-World War II expansion ran for 58 months. This isn't the longest expansion on record — that would be the 120 months of straight economic growth that followed the 1991 recession — but it's longer than normal, and it's actually picking up steam.
NPR
Ed Graf has spent 25 years in prison in Waco, Texas, convicted of setting a fire in a shed that killed his two stepsons.
But in the years since Graf's trial, much of the forensic evidence used against him has been revealed to be nothing more than junk science, which has prompted the state of Texas to take a look old arson convictions dating back to at least 2003.
On Monday, Graf became the first person in the state to get a retrial based on new understandings of fire forensics.
Circumstances Seemed To Point To Graf
In the prosecution's portrayal of events, Graf, a banker, thought his two stepsons were coming between him and his wife, Clare Bradburn. She said Graf was too tough on the boys and she had considered leaving him over it.
Al Jazeera
Somali troops backed by African Union (AU) forces have retaken the al-Shabab stronghold of Barawe, key to the financing of the armed group.
Al Jazeera's Catherine Soi, embedded with the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) in Barawe, said: "Special forces are securing the city. They are having people open their doors, looking for al-Shabab elements."
Soi said that government officials and leaders of the AU force had held a meeting with locals on Monday, in a bid to gain their confidence.
"It has been years since the people of Barawe had seen any kind of government presence so there is still a lot of fear," said Soi.
Al-Shabab reportedly charged taxes to ships that sailed or docked at Barawe's port, raising revenues to expand its military campaign.
The AU said al-Shabab was using the town, which the al-Qaeda-linked fighters had held for six years, as a base to launch attacks on Mogadishu, the capital.
Al Jazeera America
Hong Kong civil servants returned to work at the government's headquarters Monday, as pro-democracy protests subsided ahead of a deadline to disperse.
Hong Kong's Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying insisted late last week that government offices reopen on Monday so some 3,000 civil servants could return to work or the government would "take all necessary actions to restore social order."
As dawn broke, a cluster of protesters at the entrance to Hong Kong’s government building complex arranged a narrow walkway for civil servants to access their offices.
"I'm happy the protesters opened the barriers today," said a civil servant as she pushed through the path. "I need to work."
The partial withdrawal was part of a strategy to regroup in another part of town, organizers said.
Spiegel Online
East Germany ceased to exist following the 1989 revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall. But did the former communist country help shape today's Germany? The answer is yes, and Chancellor Merkel is a big reason why.
The West will assimilate the East and transform the fruits of its revolution into profits for its companies. Nothing will remain of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and its citizens will have to submit to a foreign lifestyle. The East is taken over, an event the revolutionaries welcomed with open arms -- but it's a hostile takeover, an obliteration and eradication of what the eastern part of Germany once was. West Germany will simply expand, and that will be that.
Such were the expectations after the euphoria of the revolution -- the elation that prevailed when the Berlin Wall came down on November 9, 1989 -- had dissipated. Even worse, some even feared that a newly expanded Germany would regress into a reincarnation of a former empire of evil. In February 1990, author Günter Grass said: "The gruesome and unprecedented experience of Auschwitz, which we shared with the people of Europe, speaks against a unified Germany." Grass favored a confederation, and if it did turn into a unified state, after all, "it will be doomed to fail."
Bloomberg
Russia’s wheels of power are grinding to a halt.
That’s the assessment of five officials close to President Vladimir Putin, who say that a struggle at the heart of his inner circle is slowing decision making as sanctions squeeze the economy. With Putin focused on foreign policy, rival factions are battling for influence, said the people, who declined to be identified discussing internal issues.
One group, centered on Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, is concerned about Russia’s increasing alienation from the global financial system, said the officials. The other, which includes heads of state companies such as Igor Sechin of OAO Rosneft (ROSN) and veterans of the security services, favors greater state control over the economy, they said.
Reuters
An unexpectedly competitive runoff campaign for Brazil's presidency kicked off on Monday with leftist incumbent Dilma Rousseff and her pro-business rival Aecio Neves racing to win over supporters of an ousted third-place candidate and other voters frustrated with a stagnant economy.
Neves, a centrist senator who has pushed for greater trade and lower government spending but who had been widely written off until the last few days of the campaign, rode a late surge in support to a strong second place with 33.6 percent support in Sunday's first round of voting.
He will face the leftist Rousseff, who won 41.6 percent support, in the Oct. 26 runoff that will decide what has been Brazil's most unpredictable election in decades.
Rousseff remains a slight favorite due to her enduring support among the poor, but Neves is within striking distance.
Reuters
The formation of a new EU executive hit a fresh snag on Monday when a parliamentary committee rejected the Hungarian nominated to run education and culture due to his record in a government accused of curbing civic rights.
The committee voted to accept Tibor Navracsics in another role on the European Commission but asked its incoming president, Jean-Claude Juncker, not to assign him the education, culture, youth and citizenship portfolio Juncker had proposed.
After a handful of the 27 nominees failed to secure immediate legislative approval last week, Navracsics was the first to suffer outright rejection. With confirmation hearings due to wind up on Tuesday, his fate may now depend on a package of compromises Juncker may have to offer to unblock a process that has become snarled in party rivalries in parliament.
Reuters
Street fighting raged between Kurdish defenders and Islamic State militants who advanced into Kobani on Monday after subjecting the Syrian border town to an assault lasting almost three weeks, residents and fighters said.
Islamic State had earlier raised its black flag over a building in the outskirts and forced thousands more of Kobani's mainly Kurdish inhabitants to flee for their lives across the nearby border into Turkey.
The head of the Kurdish forces defending the town said late on Monday that Islamic State forces were 300 meters inside Kobani's eastern district and were shelling the remaining neighborhoods.
"We either die or win. No fighter is leaving," Esmat al-Sheikh, leader of the Kobani Defense Authority, told Reuters. "The world is watching, just watching and leaving these monsters to kill everyone, even children...but we will fight to the end with what weapons we have."
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
|
Spiegel Online
Sand is becoming so scarce that stealing it has become an attractive business model. With residential towers rising ever higher and development continuing apace in Asia and Africa, demand for the finite resource is insatiable.
It's during the few hours when the sea retreats and reveals its underlying treasure that the people come. At first they appear like ants, small dots on the mountain slope, but the group, perhaps 100, quickly draws closer. The men carry shovels, and the women, buckets. They've come to steal Cape Verde's sand.
A young man jumps into the ocean and wades a few meters out. The water rises up to his chest. He dives under, and when he returns to the surface, his sludgy bounty drips from his shovel.
He energetically shovels the mass into a bucket held by a woman waiting next to him. As she lifts the heavy bucket onto her head, she pauses for a moment, closing her eyes. A wave hits from behind and rolls over her. Once it passes, she clenches her teeth as she wades back to shore.
The Guardian
Three neuroscientists, including a married couple from Norway, have won the 2014 Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for their discovery of the brain’s internal GPS system.
Their work, which collectively spans four decades, revealed the existence of nerve cells that build up a map of the space around us and then track our progress as we move around.
The groundbreaking research transformed neuroscientists’ understanding of the brain’s ability to navigate and answered a question that had stumped scientists and philosophers for hundreds of years: how do we know our place in the world?
John O’Keefe, 75, a US-British citizen at University College London, received half of the award and takes a share of 8m Swedish kronor (£690,000) for his pioneering work in 1971 that identified “place cells” in the brain that map the environment. Born in New York to Irish immigrant parents, he is a keen basketball player and claims never to have given up his dream of playing in the NBA.
The Guardian
Silicon Valley stalwart Hewlett-Packard announced on Monday that it will split itself into two companies.
The 75-year-old Palo Alto-based company, one of the original tech titans, had previously fought off calls for a break-up, but has now decided that it will separate its “enterprise” arm – aimed at business and including servers and data storage equipment, software and services – from its business selling personal computers and printers.
HP came close to a break-up in 2011 after its ill-fated acquisition of UK software company Autonomy. But the chief executive officer at the time, Meg Whitman, rejected the idea. “Together we are stronger,” she said. HP reorganized itself in 2012 to combine the PC business with its more profitable printer operation.
Monday’s announcement follows news that the company would cut 5,000 more, bringing the total number of layoffs in 2014 to 34,000.
Reuters
Facebook Inc (FB.O) closed its acquisition of mobile messaging service WhatsApp on Monday, with the final price tag rising an additional $3 billion to roughly $22 billion because of the increased value of Facebook's stock in recent months.
WhatsApp founder Jan Koum will receive nearly $2 billion in stock, vesting over a four-year period, as an inducement for him to stay with the company, according to a regulatory filing on Monday.
The acquisition, which Facebook announced in February and recently received regulatory approval in Europe, underscores the sky-rocketing values of fast-growing Internet startups, and the willingness of established players such as Facebook and Google Inc (GOOGL.O)(GOOG.O) to pay out for them.
NPR
Freelance journalist Ashoka Mukpo, who contracted Ebola in Liberia, arrived at the University of Nebraska Medical Center today, becoming the second patient with the deadly disease to be treated there.
Why is he being sent to Nebraska instead of some other facility? Because the hospital is home to the largest of four high-level biocontainment patient care units in the U.S.
The Nebraska Medical Center says the unit was commissioned in 2005 as a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
NPR
If your image of a computer programmer is a young man, there's a good reason: It's true. Recently, many big tech companies revealed how few of their female employees worked in programming and technical jobs. Google had some of the highest rates: 17 percent of its technical staff is female.
It wasn't always this way. Decades ago, it was women who pioneered computer programming — but too often, that's a part of history that even the smartest people don't know.
I took a trip to ground zero for today's computer revolution, Stanford University, and randomly asked over a dozen students if they knew who were the first computer programmers. Almost none knew.
"I'm in computer science," says a slightly embarrassed Stephanie Pham. "This is so sad."
A few students, like Cheng Dao Fan, get close. "It's a woman, probably," she says searching her mind for a name. "It's not necessarily [an] electronic computer. I think it's more like a mechanic computer."
Vox
A rare virus — enterovirus D68, also known as EV-D68 — is infecting more than 500 children across the country and sending them to hospitals with severe respiratory infections and breathing problems.
The virus was also detected in the bodies of five children who died.
Now, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning doctors and parents to be on the lookout. Here's what we know and what we don't know so far.
What we know
— As of October 6, 594 people in 43 states have been infected with EV-D68. There have also been confirmed cases in Canada. And the virus shows no sign of slowing down. Investigations into suspected clusters in "many other states" are ongoing, according to the World Health Organization.
Climate Central
As California’s historic drought dries up the state’s water supplies and withers its crops, it’s also shaking up the way electricity is produced there.
There’s so little water available in the state’s reservoirs that California’s ability to produce hydropower has been cut in half, while its use of renewables and natural gas power has spiked, a U.S. Energy Information Administration report published Monday shows.
Normally, 20 percent of California’s power comes from hydroelectric sources. But not anymore.
For the first six months of 2014, only 10 percent of the state’s electricity was hydropower, roughly between 900,000 megawatt hours in January and 2.3 million megawatt hours in June, EIA data show. The average hydropower generation for January is about 2 million megawatt hours, and nearly 4 million megawatt hours in June.
NPR
The classic slogan for Firestone tires was "where the rubber meets the road."
When it comes to Ebola, the rubber met the road at the Firestone rubber plantation in Harbel, Liberia.
Harbel is a company town not far from the capital city of Monrovia. It was named in 1926 after the founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, Harvey and his wife, Idabelle. Today, Firestone workers and their families make up a community of 80,000 people across the plantation.
Firestone detected its first Ebola case on March 30, when an employee's wife arrived from northern Liberia. She'd been caring for a disease-stricken woman and was herself diagnosed with the disease. Since then Firestone has done a remarkable job of keeping the virus at bay. Its built its own treatment center and set up a comprehensive response that's managed to quickly stop transmission. Dr. Brendan Flannery, the head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's team in Liberia, has hailed Firestone's efforts as resourceful, innovative and effective.