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.
Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the new OND banner.
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Reuters
Quarantines imposed on travelers coming from Ebola-affected countries in West Africa could discourage American health workers from going there to help fight the epidemic, a senior U.S. medical official said on Sunday, warning such measures were "a little bit draconian."
New York, New Jersey and Illinois imposed 21-day mandatory quarantines in the last two days for anyone arriving with a risk of having contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. They are the three West African countries that have borne the brunt of an epidemic that has killed nearly 5,000 people.
But critics worry the policies, going beyond federal regulations and intended to ease public concern over the spread of the disease, will just make matters worse.
The Guardian
Former hedge fund executive has given nearly $56m and taken a stand against the Koch brothers by boosting liberal candidates in close races
The green billionaire Tom Steyer this week solidified his status as the leading patron of environmental causes in American politics, with the announcement that he had given nearly $56m to make climate change a top-tier issue in the midterm elections.
With just days to go until the elections, it was revealed that Steyer had poured an additional $15m of his personal fortune into his NextGen Climate Action Fund, raising his contributions to $55.9m, according to Federal Election Commission filings on Monday night.
The former hedge fund executive has now emerged as the biggest single donor of this election cycle – at least as far as publicly disclosed donations are concerned – and a favorite new punching bag for Republican opponents, a role previously reserved for Al Gore.
Reuters
The White House has told states that have imposed mandatory quarantines for some travelers from Ebola-hit West Africa that the policy could impede the fight against the disease, while the first health worker isolated under the rules plans to sue.
Kaci Hickox, a nurse placed in 21-day quarantine in a New Jersey hospital after returning from treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone, will contest her quarantine in court, her attorney said on Sunday, arguing the order violates her constitutional rights.
New Jersey and New York are imposing quarantines on anyone arriving with a high risk of having contracted Ebola in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, where the epidemic has killed nearly 5,000 people. Illinois and Florida said they were taking similar steps.
The White House voiced its concern to the governors of New York and New Jersey about the potential impact of quarantine orders, a senior administration official said on Sunday.
The Guardian
The disappointment was tangible at Wembley Stadium as news filtered through that one of the NFL’s biggest stars, Calvin Johnson, had been ruled out of Sunday’s game between the Detroit Lions and Atlanta Falcons. But a capacity crowd would ultimately get to savour something far more satisfying: a genuinely competitive game.
Three of the last four Wembley match-ups had been blow-outs, settled by a margin of 24 points or more. The expectation was that we might be in for another such lopsided encounter between a Detroit team that had won five of its first seven games, and an Atlanta group who had won only twice over the same span.
“Rise up” read the words on the Falcons-branded flags distributed to every fan. Atlanta certainly answered that call, although it helped that their opponents seemed not even to wake up until at least an hour after kickoff.
Al Jazeera America
NEWARK, N.J. — Five days after Hurricane Sandy demolished the Eastern Seaboard on Oct. 29, 2012, and left the state of New Jersey in particularly horrific disarray, an exhausted Christopher Durkin listened in on a conference call while sitting in his black 2010 Chevy Malibu, charging his cell phone outside his darkened, juice-less home.
Durkin was one of 21 county clerks who had been urged to join the hastily arranged call by Robert Giles, the state’s director of elections, who had promised an important announcement. Giles gave many of them a preview of what the coming days would be like, shortly before the lieutenant governor, Kim Guadagno, came on the line.
“Put your phones on mute,” he said, according to several clerks on the call. “The lieutenant governor will not entertain questions.” The week, no doubt, had been grueling for all. And it was about to get even more challenging.
NPR
Here's what might have sounded like a pretty shaky business plan for a neighborhood pizza café: "We'll only be open one day a week. Won't do any advertising. No prices on the menus. We'll serve mostly what we grow in the garden – and no pepperoni. And we'll look on this work as an 'experiment of faith.'"
That's what Erin and Robert Lockridge said two years ago, when they decided to open a pizza place called Moriah Pie in Norwood, a small town part of greater Cincinnati.
The better days in Norwood, an old neighborhood of two-story houses with porches, came to a close in 1989 when the Chevrolet plant shut down. But an empty, dusty café was waiting on a street corner, and Lockridges decided to start making pizzas there.
NPR
Kaci Hickox, a nurse whose return to the U.S. after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone was sidetracked when she was placed in a mandatory 21-day quarantine Friday, is criticizing the way New Jersey officials have handled her case.
Hickox says she doesn't have a fever; a preliminary blood test came back negative for Ebola. She reportedly hired a civil rights attorney Sunday to work for her release.
The medical relief group she works for says there's no word on when she could be released. And in the volunteer community, many are concerned that the quarantine policy could make medical staff think twice about volunteering to help combat the deadly outbreak overseas.
"Hospital personnel are keeping her in isolation and have not informed her of any next steps," Doctors Without Borders says, noting that the nurse hasn't been told whether her blood will undergo more tests to confirm her Ebola status with certainty.
LA Times
Residents in the flow path of the slowly erupting Kilauea volcano in the Puna district of Hawaii Island have been told to prepare for a possible evacuation in the next three to five days, county officials said Sunday.
A slow moving strip of lava that has been flowing since June crossed into the Pahoa Cemetery Sunday morning and is crawling along at 10 yards per hour toward downtown Pahoa, the county said in an alert Sunday.
LA Times
As a security detail blocked off Marysville-Pilchuck High School, where police on Saturday were investigating the state's latest deadly school shooting, Washington voters were weighing the merits of two opposing gun measures on the November ballot.
Gun control advocates are calling the election "the only up-or-down vote on gun measures in the country this year and the only ballot initiative since 2000."
The gun rights camp views this election as a bureaucratic nightmare and a blatant taking of a basic right.
On Friday, a troubled freshman football player took a gun into the Marysville-Pilchuck cafeteria and opened fire as horrified classmates watched.
Reuters
Members of a tight-knit Native American community in Washington state were struggling on Sunday to comprehend how a life-long friendship among cousins ended with one of them gunning down the other two, along with three friends, in a high school cafeteria.
The shooter and one girl, identified by a family friend as Zoe Galasso, were killed, while the other freshmen students were gravely wounded in the Friday morning shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck High School, an hour's drive north of Seattle.
The rampage, the latest in a string of violent incidents that have prompted national debate about school safety and gun control, sent shock waves through the Tulalip Tribes, a Native American organization that operates two casinos and an outlet mall, and beyond to Marysville, a town of about 63,000.
Reuters
Brazil's leftist President Dilma Rousseff narrowly won re-election on Sunday after convincing voters that her party's strong record of reducing poverty over the last 12 years was more important than an ongoing economic slump.
After the closest, most divisive campaign since Brazil returned to democracy three decades ago, Rousseff won 51.6 percent of votes in a runoff against centrist opposition leader Aecio Neves, who won 48.4 percent support.
The vote split Latin America's biggest country almost evenly in two along lines of both social class and geography. Neves prevailed in Brazil's richer south, southeast and center-west, while Rousseff took the Amazon north and impoverished northeast.
Reuters
Roughly one in five of the euro zone's top lenders failed landmark health checks at the end of last year but most have since repaired their finances, the European Central Bank said on Sunday.
Painting a brighter picture than had been expected, the ECB found the biggest problems in Italy, Cyprus and Greece but concluded that banks' capital holes had since chiefly been plugged, leaving only a modest 10 billion euros to be raised.
Italy faces the biggest challenge with nine of its banks falling short and two still needing to raise funds.
The test, designed to mark a clean start before the ECB takes on supervision of the banks next month, said Monte dei Paschi had the largest capital hole to fill at 2.1 billion euros.
DW
Iraqi Kurds have indicated they will not engage direct combat in Kobani to support their Syrian counterparts. Meanwhile, the US has struck more "Islamic State" targets in the embattled Syrian town.
Safeen Dizayee, a spokesman for Iraq's regional government in Kurdistan, told the Reuters news agency on Sunday that the Iraqi Kurdish forces would provide logistical and artillery support to fellow Kurds in the Syrian town of Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab.
"Primarily, it will be a back-up support with artillery and other weapons," he told Reuters, adding "It will not be combat troops as such, at this point anyway."
Syrian Kurdish forces, backed by US-led airstrikes, have been resisting the advance of the Sunni militant organization "Islamic State" (IS) on Kobani for weeks.
According to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 800 people have been killed in the Kobani ground battle since IS began its offensive on the Syrian-Kurdish enclave on September 16.
Al Jazeera
Tunisians have flocked to polling stations since early hours of the day to choose a new parliament in elections seen as a test of democratic transition in the birthplace of the so-called Arab Spring.
Sunday’s general election is the first under the North African country's new constitution and the second since the 2011 uprising that overthrew the regime of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali.
Turnout defied most opinion polls, which had projected a decline in popular participation in the election of a 217-member legislature with a five-year term.
Al Jazeera
British troops have ended combat operations in Afghanistan as they and US troops handed over two huge adjacent bases to the Afghan military, 13 years after a US-led invasion to topple the Taliban.
The troops handed over to Afghan forces on Sunday at camps Bastion and Leatherneck, in the southwestern province of Helmand. The timing of their withdrawal had not been announced for security reasons.
Their departure on Sunday leaves Afghanistan and its newly installed president, Ashraf Ghani, to deal almost unaided with an emboldened Taliban after the last foreign combat troops withdraw by year-end.
McClatchy News
BAGHDAD — The Iraqi government claimed that its troops and Shiite Muslim militias captured a key Islamic State stronghold near Baghdad on Saturday in an operation to boost security for massive Islamic new year gatherings that apparently was overseen by an Iranian general.
The fall of the town of Jurf al-Sakhar _ which couldn’t be independently confirmed _ would be the first major success for Iraqi Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi, who took power with U.S. support in September and only completed assembling his Shiite-dominated government last week.
Spiegel Online
Six years after the Lehman disaster, the industrialized world is suffering from Japan Syndrome. Growth is minimal, another crash may be brewing and the gulf between rich and poor continues to widen. Can the global economy reinvent itself?
A new buzzword is circulating in the world's convention centers and auditoriums. It can be heard at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund. Bankers sprinkle it into the presentations; politicians use it leave an impression on discussion panels.
The buzzword is "inclusion" and it refers to a trait that Western industrialized nations seem to be on the verge of losing: the ability to allow as many layers of society as possible to benefit from economic advancement and participate in political life.
Reuters
About 100 police, firefighters and other emergency workers held a disaster-response drill in downtown Toronto's deserted financial district on Sunday following a week that saw two soldiers killed on Canadian soil.
Security in normally relaxed Canada has been tighter in the days since a gunman shot dead a soldier in Ottawa before charging into the parliament building and another man ran over two soldiers with a car, killing one, outside Montreal.
Toronto emergency responders donned oxygen tanks and yellow full-body hazardous material suits shortly after dawn, set up decontamination tents and practiced how they would respond in an office tower that had received a suspicious package.
Reuters
Pro-Europe parties led by a group backing President Petro Poroshenko swept a parliamentary election in Ukraine on Sunday, an exit poll showed, giving him a mandate to end a separatist conflict and pursue democratic reforms.
The survey, issued after voting stations closed in the ex- Soviet republic, gave Poroshenko's bloc 23 percent of the votes cast for the 29 competing parties, ahead of the party of his ally, Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk, on 21.3 percent.
A third pro-Europe party was in third place but a surprise was the strong performance of a group representing allies of ousted president Viktor Yanukovich. The Opposition Bloc, led by former Fuel Minister Yuri Boiko, secured 7.6 percent - enough to put his party into parliament.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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The Guardian
Heera the elephant has been the star attraction at many of New Delhi’s most lavish events. At weddings, the 50-year-old has been saddled with a silver howdah, his forehead and trunk decorated with pink, blue and green lotus flowers. At temples, Hindu devotees seek his blessings and feed him chapatis. And he marches in the Republic Day parade amid flags, children, tanks and fighter jets, showcasing India’s identity and pride.
“Elephants are a part of this city, a part of our culture,” said Heera’s owner, Rafiq Ahmed, whose family has kept elephants for five generations. “I’ve grown up with them and can’t imagine Delhi without them.”
But for how much longer? Just eight licensed, working elephants are left in the capital of India, down from 14 a year ago. Six were discovered missing or dead during an official inspection this summer.
The Guardian
The risk of severe winters in Europe and northern Asia has been doubled by global warming, according to new research. The counter-intuitive finding is the result of climate change melting the Arctic ice cap and causing new wind patterns that push freezing air and snow southwards.
Severe winters over the last decade have been associated with those years in which the melting of Arctic sea ice was greatest. But the new work is the most comprehensive computer modelling study to date and indicates the frozen winters are being caused by climate change, not simply by natural variations in weather.
“The origin of frequent Eurasian severe winters is global warming,” said Prof Masato Mori, at the University of Tokyo, who led the new research. Climate change is heating the Arctic much faster than lower latitudes and the discovery that the chances of severe winters has already doubled shows that the impacts of global warming are not only a future threat. Melting Arctic ice has also been implicated in recent wet summers in the UK.
BBC
The UK's chief scientist says the oceans face a serious and growing risk from man-made carbon emissions.
The oceans absorb about a third of the CO2 that’s being produced by industrial society, and this is changing the chemistry of seawater.
Sir Mark Walport warns that the acidity of the oceans has increased by about 25% since the industrial revolution, mainly thanks to manmade emissions.
CO2 reacts with the sea water to form carbonic acid.
He told BBC News: “If we carry on emitting CO2 at the same rate, ocean acidification will create substantial risks to complex marine food webs and ecosystems.”
He said the current rate of acidification is believed to be unprecedented within the last 65 million years – and may threaten fisheries in future.
NPR
Traditional Chinese medicine is gaining acceptance in the U.S., though still largely as a complementary treatment.
Mainstream doctors are mixed on its effectiveness. Still, as alternative treatments gain traction and the demand for Chinese herbs grows, farmers in Appalachia are responding.
The Blue Ridge Center for Chinese Medicine in Pilot, Va., is surrounded by miles of mountains, forests and farmland.
Outside the building, small plots of Chinese medicinal herbs grow on terraced slopes.
"A lot of these herbs we are going to let flower and be pollinated and grow for the seed because there is such a need for the seed," says David Grimsley, co-director of the Appalachian Medicinal Herb Growers Consortium, a new project based at the center that teaches others how to grow native Chinese herbs in Appalachia.
NPR
For as many as 250 years, a bur oak has been growing on what is now the University of Michigan campus in Ann Arbor. The big tree stands in the way of an expansion of the Ross Business School.
But instead of cutting it down, the university is moving the tree. It's not easy, it's not cheap, and it's definitely not fast.
As it was prepared for its 500-foot trip down a pedestrian mall, the old oak's 44-foot diameter root ball was wrapped in plastic and burlap and rested on long pipes, inserted earlier this summer to create a platform for lifting.
"While it does look fairly radical and invasive — and it is — if it's done properly, chances of survival are fantastic," says Paul Cox of Environmental Design, one of the few companies able to move a tree that weighs about 700,000 pounds.
C/NET
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Google may be tightening the ties between its operating systems for mobile devices and PCs, but they won't be merging anytime soon, a senior member of one of Google's software teams said.
In a wide-ranging interview at Google's corporate headquarters here, Brian Rakowski, Google's vice president of product management for Android, said that the two teams in charge of the Android mobile device software and the Chrome OS software for PCs work together much more. But that won't mean sweeping changes, at least for now.
"There's no plans to change the way the products work," said Rakowski.
C/NET
Imagine being stuck in a traffic jam for nine days. Creeping along a nine-lane highway, inhaling smog and surrounded by exasperated drivers. As improbable as this sounds, it happened outside Beijing in 2010. The jam was an estimated 62 miles long.
Though many consider this among China's worst traffic jams, extreme road congestion has become common across the People's Republic. So what better place to launch a taxi-hailing and ride-sharing app and service?
Over the past couple of years, dozens of ride-sharing companies have come onto the scene in China, taking advantage of the country's crowded roads and more than 240 million vehicles. Uber, which entered the market earlier this year, faces some stiff competition. One of its biggest rivals is Kuaidi -- backed by Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba -- which already serves more than 150 million riders in 350 cities.
Climate Central
The U.S. power grid is a vital part of the nation’s infrastructure. It’s also a wasteful one.
Nearly two-thirds of every megawatt U.S. power plants produce never does a bit of useful work. Some of it is lost due to the natural resistance of power lines. Some is lost as heat during generation. And, perhaps surprisingly, some is lost by design when utilities deliberately generate more electricity than they need and shed the excess.
Not only that, but the grid renders millions of acres of public and private land prohibitive to potentially economically useful activities because the land sits under transmission lines or in related easements.
NY Times
MENLO PARK, Calif. — Many of the people who read this article will do so because Greg Marra, 26, a Facebook engineer, calculated that it was the kind of thing they might enjoy.
Mr. Marra’s team designs the code that drives Facebook’s News Feed — the stream of updates, photographs, videos and stories that users see. He is also fast becoming one of the most influential people in the news business.
Facebook now has a fifth of the world — about 1.3 billion people — logging on at least monthly. It drives up to 20 percent of traffic to news sites, according to figures from the analytics company SimpleReach. On mobile devices, the fastest-growing source of readers, the percentage is even higher, SimpleReach says, and continues to increase.
The social media company is increasingly becoming to the news business what Amazon is to book publishing — a behemoth that provides access to hundreds of millions of consumers and wields enormous power. About 30 percent of adults in the United States get their news on Facebook, according to a study from the Pew Research Center. The fortunes of a news site, in short, can rise or fall depending on how it performs in Facebook’s News Feed.
NPR
In 2009, a man named Barry Beck suffered a series of strokes, which caused extensive damage to his right occipital lobe and to the brain stem. The geologist and author of several books was left completely unable to communicate, in a state known as locked-in syndrome.
The condition was famously described by Jean-Dominique Bauby in his memoir The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, which he dictated by blinking.
But thanks to a team of researchers and some technological advances, Beck had another option.
"When I first saw him, he had a little bit of eye movement and that was really the only way he could communicate," says Eric Sellers, who directs the Brain-Computer Interface Laboratory at East Tennessee State University. His lab studies how brain activity can be measured and used to control computers, helping people with severe motor disabilities to communicate.