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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McClatchy News
WASHINGTON — As Americans prepare to vote Tuesday in dozens of tight elections, the two major political parties and interest groups across the ideological spectrum already have lawyered up for potential problems at the polls or with election results.
On Election Day, armies of partisan attorneys and poll watchers will be at the ready at voting sites and in war rooms in almost every state, scrutinizing nearly every aspect of the voting process and prepared to spring into action if they see something that could adversely impact their candidate or cause.
“The parties are well lawyered up,” said Richard Hasen, a University of California, Irvine, law and political science professor and the author of “The Voting Wars: From 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown.” “It’s a tactic and a tool. It’s like an arms race.”
Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/...
Al Jazeera America
BALTIMORE — Kimberly Haynes recalled the two Guatemalan teens for whom her agency helped secure asylum after their harrowing trip through Mexico a few years ago.
Gang members in Guatemala kidnapped the brother and sister, then 13 and 14, forcing the boy to be a drug mule and the girl a prostitute, said Haynes, director of children’s services with the Baltimore-based Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service (LIRS).
The two later escaped north through Mexico. When the boy lost his leg in a train accident, his sister prostituted herself to pay their way across the U.S. border and reunite with their mother stateside.
“It took them almost three years to get kidnapped, [become] indentured servants and ride the death train to get asylum in the United States,” Haynes said.
Asked how she feels about Tuesday’s national midterm elections that will likely see voters re-elect incumbents who called for the deportation of the tens of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children during the summer, the Maryland-based social worker replied: “Outrage.”
“Disappointment. Real sadness, too,” she added.
The Guardian
Joni Ernst became famous by gazing into a camera and boasting of castrating hogs on the Iowa farm where she grew up.
“So when I get to Washington, I’ll know how to cut pork,” she said. The campaign ad Squeal showed images of pigs, then came her punchline. “Washington is full of big spenders. Let’s make ‘em squeal.”
Even Democrats laughed. Late-night comedians spoofed it. Few, initially, took it seriously. This was back in March. Ernst was an obscure, one-term state senator scrambling in a primary against rival Republicans for the right to run for the US senate against a favoured Democrat.
Now, on the eve of Tuesday’s midterm election, Democrats don’t see the joke. Ernst, 44, appears poised to win Iowa’s senate race – and possibly to deliver a senate majority to the GOP.
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The most expensive midterm elections in American history moved toward what could be an inconclusive finish on Monday, the last full day of campaigning before Election Day. Polls show control of the Senate trending Republican but still up for grabs and an angry electorate unclear on what it wants from Washington in Barack Obama’s final two years as president.
Unlike in previous midterms when the party out of power made strong gains, Republican candidates did not carry a defined platform into the elections of 2014, nor did they campaign on policy specifics. Instead, they have been supported by a bitter electorate that is far less sure of its views than the voters who propelled Republican majorities in both chambers in 1994, gave Congress back to the Democrats in 2006 and swept Republicans to control of the House in 2010.
A new poll conducted by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal on Monday found that likely voters favor Republican control of Congress by a single percentage point, 46 percent to 45 percent. The same poll showed voters favoring Republicans 49 percent to 43 percent in 2010 just before Republicans seized control of the House and made large gains in the Senate.
Spiegel Online
Washington has been stricken by political deadlock and partisan rancor in recent years. With the Republicans tipped to win a majority in the Senate in this week's midterm elections, will the situation get even worse?
Divided government is nothing new - in fact, it has long been the rule in Washington rather than the exception. What is new is the political polarization that has deepened since the last short spell of unity between the White House and Capitol Hill. That was broken when the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives four years ago.
President Barack Obama famously described that result as a "shellacking" at the time, and it had a major impact on his presidency. For Thomas E. Mann, a constitutional scholar at Washington's Brookings Institution, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives "effectively stopped any real opportunities to deal with problems through legislation."
Reuters
With many races still tight but polls showing a general trend in favor of Republicans, the White House on Monday blamed voter dissatisfaction with Washington for what could be an Election Day rout for President Barack Obama's Democrats.
Both parties pushed to get voters to the polls in a final effort to sway the electorate ahead of Tuesday's election, which could shift control of the U.S. Senate and upend policy priorities for the last two years of Obama's final term.
The president, who spent the weekend campaigning in Michigan, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, stayed in Washington on Monday and met with Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen about the U.S. and global economy.
Al Jazeera
A young US woman diagnosed with terminal brain cancer has committed suicide to avoid pain, following announcements to do so that triggered a national debate over the right to choose one's death.
Sean Crowley, spokesman for Compassion & Choices, an activist group that helps individuals plan their own demise "with dignity", said that Brittany Maynard passed away peacefully in her home in Oregon on Saturday.
Maynard and her husband Dan Diaz moved from their home in California to Oregon, one of a handful of US states with a "right-to-die" law. A doctor could therefore prescribe her the medication she needs to end her own life, surrounded by her family in the bedroom.
"Brittany has died, but her love of life and nature, her passion and spirit endure," Compassion & Choice's president, Barbara Coombs Lee, added.
"In Brittany's memory, do what matters most. And tell those you love how much they matter to you. We will work to carry on her legacy of bringing end-of-life choice to all Americans."
The Guardian
Virgin Galactic’s space plane broke apart in mid-air seconds after its re-entry system deployed prematurely in an accident on Friday that killed one of its pilots and left another seriously injured, US crash investigators have said.
SpaceShipTwo (SS2) was equipped with a “feathering system” to reduce its speed and stabilise its descent on return to Earth, but investigators found that the mechanism was activated before the space plane had reached the right speed during Friday’s test flight.
When the feathering system is deployed, the space plane’s twin tail booms rotate forwards and upwards, dramatically increasing aerodynamic drag and making the craft fall like a shuttlecock.
NPR
Tom Magliozzi, one of public radio's most popular personalities, died on Monday of complications from Alzheimer's disease. He was 77 years old.
Tom and his brother, Ray, became famous as "Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers" on the weekly NPR show Car Talk. They bantered, told jokes, laughed and sometimes even gave pretty good advice to listeners who called in with their car troubles.
If there was one thing that defined Tom Magliozzi, it was his laugh. It was loud, it was constant, it was infectious.
"His laugh is the working definition of infectious laughter," says Doug Berman, the longtime producer of Car Talk. He remembers the first time he ever encountered Magliozzi.
"Before I ever met him, I heard him, and it wasn't on the air," he recalls.
Berman was the news director of WBUR at the time.
NPR
What began as one of the most remarkable days of Kenneth Tate's life turned into a "nightmare."
That's the story The New York Times is telling about the man the paper identifies as having ridden an elevator with President Obama with a gun in his holster.
If you remember, Tate was thrown into a Washington firestorm over the efficacy of the Secret Service. Following an incident in which a man ran into the White House with a knife, media outlets — including NPR — reported that Secret Service agents allowed an armed security contractor with a criminal history to ride an elevator with Obama during his September visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
That revelation, coupled with others, led to the resignation of Secret Service Director Julia Pierson.
But new reporting finds that Tate did not have a criminal history. According to The New York Times and The Washington Post, Tate has been arrested before. The Times reports he has been charged with robbery and assault, but he has never been convicted.
Tate tells the Times that fateful day began like any other: He was given his weapon in the morning and then he was told he was going to operate the elevator President Obama would ride. That day, the president even struck up a polite conversation with Tate.
NPR
Nineteen-year-old college freshman Lauren Hill played her first game Sunday night, for a tiny, Division III college in Cincinnati.
That's not usually big news. But Hill has a rare form of brain cancer, and her first collegiate game might also be her last — which brought an unusual degree of attention to the court at Mount Saint Joseph University.
The NCAA allowed this game to be played two weeks early, because of her condition. And so many people wanted to see Hill play that the school had to move the game from its 2,000-seat venue to another one in town, which seats 10,000. The game still sold out.
And just after Hill's first basket, right as the game began, the crowd went wild.
NPR
International visitors who are not required to obtain a visa to enter the United States will be asked additional questions, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson said in a statement on Monday.
"The new information sought includes additional passport data, contact information, and other potential names or aliases," Johnson said.
The Washington Post reports the changes came about because authorities are concerned about people who hold Western passports but may have become radicalized.
The Post reports:
"For the first time, U.S. officials said, such travelers will be required to disclose whether they hold passports from multiple countries, or have previously used alternate names or aliases — data that can enable more accurate screening against U.S. terrorism watch lists. ...
"U.S. officials said the changes were driven by concern over how many citizens from 'visa-waiver' countries have fought in Syria and, because of their citizenship, hold passports that enable them to travel relatively freely across Europe and potentially to the United States. Many have joined an affiliate of al-Qaeda or a rival group, the Islamic State, that has seized territory and executed American and British hostages."
Spiegel Online
Twelve-year-old US-Israeli citizen Menachem Zivotofsky was born in Jerusalem, as it states on his US passport. His parents would like his place of birth to read "Israel" instead - a potentially prickly political appeal.
The US Supreme Court appeared divided on Monday (03.11.2014) as it opened a hearing asking whether American citizens born in Jerusalem should have their place of birth listed as "Israel," as opposed to "Jerusalem," on their passports. The specific case was filed by Ari and Nomi Zivotofsky, on behalf of their son Menachem. Lower courts refused to rule on the matter, given its sensitivity.
Jerusalem's status internationally is problematic; Israel recognizes the entire city as its capital, while Palestinians hope in time for East Jerusalem to be named the capital of an independent Palestine. Like many international actors, the US has not officially recognized either claim to the city, holy to three faiths. Most international embassies to Israel, the US one included, are located in Tel Aviv instead.
Reuters
Maine has reached a settlement with a nurse who was briefly quarantined in her home after treating victims of Ebola in West Africa, allowing her to travel freely in public but requiring her to monitor her health closely and report any symptoms.
The settlement, filed in nurse Kaci Hickox's home town of Fort Kent, in Maine's far north, keeps in effect through Nov. 10 the terms of an order issued by a Maine judge on Friday.
Hickox returned to the United States last month after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone and was quarantined in a tent outside a hospital in New Jersey for four days despite showing no symptoms before being driven to her home in Maine.
She sharply criticized the way both New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Maine Governor Paul LePage responded to her case. Christie and LePage have defended how they handled it.
The Guardian
For the first time since 9/11, office workers have reported to their desks at One World Trade Center, the centerpiece of the complex built on the site of the attacks, after 13 years of infighting about how to rebuild Lower Manhattan.
Condé Nast CEO Charles Townsend was among 175 employees from the magazine publisher to become the first office workers to occupy the building on Monday. More than 3,400 employees are set to work on the 20th to 44th floors of the 104-story building in the coming months.
Mitchell Moss, the Rice professor of Urban Planning at New York University’s Wagner school, attended a small opening ceremony on Monday morning. He said the entire complex was a testament to the city’s resilience.
“There was a lot of doubt about it, but what we’ve done is turn the site around and made it both important to remember those who’ve died there but also to continue its function as a place of high activity for people who want to work in lower Manhattan,” said Moss.
DW
Germany has criticized Moscow for recognizing the results of the elections in rebel-held eastern Ukraine. Russia has said the polls amount to a "mandate" for the separatist leaders to negotiate with Kyiv.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman told reporters at a news conference in Berlin on Monday that Sunday's elections in rebel-held eastern Ukraine were "illegitimate," as they contravened the country's constitution and the Minsk ceasefire signed in September.
Steffen Seibert also said the manner in which the polls in the rebel-declared Donetsk People's Republic and the nearby self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic were conducted were "extremely questionable."
"It is all the more incomprehensible that there are official Russian voices that are respecting or even recognizing these so-called elections," Seibert said.
He added that under these circumstances there could be no thought of easing EU sanctions on Russia, and that if the situation in eastern Ukraine deteriorated further measures may be needed.
DW
Angela Merkel's spokesman says Germany wants Britain to remain within the EU. However, she is not willing to sacrifice the bloc's basis principle, the free movement of EU citizens, to persuade the UK to remain.
Steffen Seibert, the spokesman for Angela Merkel, said on Monday that the German chancellor wanted Britain to remain an "active and engaged" member of the European Union but added that she would would not give way to the British prime minister's plans to curb immigration from other EU countries.
Ahead of May 2015 elections, David Cameron has reacted to pressure from Britain's isolationist anti-EU UK Independence Party by pledging to take steps to limit the level of migration into Britain.
Seibert said that Germany shared an interest in fighting "possible abuse" of labor and social welfare benefits laws but insisted that the overall EU principle of freedom of movement must remain.
Without identifying sources, the weekly news magazine Der Spiegel reported on Sunday that German officials could envision giving up efforts to keep Britain in the European Union if Cameron continued to insist on limits.
Al Jazeera
Lieutenant Colonel Isaac Zida, Burkina Faso's interim leader, has said that the military will cede power to a transition government headed by a "consensus" leader, in a bid to calm accusations that it had seized power in a coup.
"Our understanding is that the executive powers will be led by a transitional body but within a constitutional framework that we will watch over carefully," Zida told a gathering of diplomats and journalists in the capital Ouagadougou, without giving a timeframe for the changeover.
The army stepped into a power vacuum after Blaise Compaore was forced to resign the presidency last week in the wake of violent demonstrations over an attempt to extend his 27-year-rule.
Al Jazeera
At least 20 illegal migrants have drowned when a boat taking them towards the European Union sank in the Black Sea just off Istanbul, Turkish media reported.
Six people were rescued and seventeen more were missing from the stricken boat, which had set off earlier from Istanbul and had travelled through the Bosphorus Strait on its way to Romania, the reports added on Monday.
Eleven children, five women and one man were still unaccounted for, as authorities continued their search near the northern entrance of the Bosphorus.
Al Jazeera's Bernard Smith, reporting from Istanbul, said the chances of finding survivors was slim in the rough and cold water.
Those on board were Afghans who had paid several thousand euros each in search of a better life in the EU and had set off earlier from Bakirkoy, an Istanbul suburb on the Sea of Marmara side of the Bosphorus.
Spiegel Online
To prevent dangerous deflation, the ECB is discussing a massive program to purchase government bonds. Monetary watchdogs are divided over the measure, with some alleging that central bankers are being held hostage by politicians.
At first glance, there's little evidence of the sensitive deals being hammered out in the Market Operations department of Germany's central bank, the Bundesbank. The open-plan office on the fifth floor of its headquarters building, where about a dozen employees are staring at their computer screens, is reminiscent of the simple set for the TV series "The Office". There are white file cabinets and desks with wooden edges, there is a poster on the wall of football team Bayern Munich, and some prankster has attached a pink rubber pig to the ceiling by its feet.
NPR
American Ryan Boyette knows there are many crises that compete for world's attention, but he's determined not to let a conflict in his adopted home of Sudan go unnoticed.
The young Florida man moved to the Nuba Mountains, a remote part of Sudan, in 2003, to join the Evangelical Christian aid group, Samaritan's Purse.
"I think that day was around 110 degrees," he says, joking that he wasn't sure what he was getting into. "The rest is history. I've been there ever since."
When conflict returned to the region in 2011, most aid groups left. Boyette stayed. He had married a local woman and wanted the world to know about the Sudanese government bombing raids, which he says are meant to terrorize local residents to turn them against a regional rebel movement.
With a $45,000 Kickstarter campaign, Boyette bought cameras and trained a few Sudanese as reporters to go out and get the stories.
"We got them DSLR cameras that can take GPS tagged photos and do pretty good video," he told NPR during a recent visit to Washington.
Boyette, 33, now runs media website Nuba Reports. It partners with groups like the Enough Project, an advocacy group that campaigns against genocide and has attracted celebrity support.
BBC
A Russian company that put up a giant iPhone statue in memory of Steve Jobs has taken it down again, after the new head of Apple came out as gay, according to local media.
A Western European Financial Union (ZEFS) press release accuses Apple CEO Tim Cook of "promoting homosexuality", the Ekho Moskvy news website reports. The 2m (6ft 6in) interactive installation allowed users to learn about the life of Mr Jobs, who died in 2011. But as it stood in the courtyard of an IT university in St Petersburg, the ZEFS statement says it could violate a recent Russian law banning the "advocacy of lifestyles contrary to traditional family values among minors". ZEFS founder Maxim Dolgopolov also alleges that the US security services can use Apple technology to monitor private communications worldwide. If the giant iPhone is reinstalled, he says in the statement, it will let passers-by use the interactive feature to "send a message direct to the US National Security Agency and Apple HQ, saying they are refusing to use technology that spies on its subscribers".
BBC
An iron gate bearing the Nazi slogan 'Arbeit Macht Frei' ('Work sets you free') has been stolen from the former Dachau concentration camp in Germany.
The theft happened overnight on Sunday at the site near Munich, police said.
Dachau was the first concentration camp set up by the Nazis in 1933. More than 40,000 died there before its liberation by US troops in 1945.
A sign with the same slogan was stolen from Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland in 2009 by a man with neo-Nazi ties.
There is no surveillance system at Dachau, but it is monitored by private guards.
Site officials may now review that decision, the German news agency DPA reports.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Spiegel Online
In France, climate change is no longer just an abstract problem. The culinary country's grand wine culture is threatened by rising global temperatures. Vintners are fighting to save a part of our world culture heritage that spans the last two millennia.
In the soft light of the chandeliers at Château Ausone, Alain Vauthier veers away from the issue at hand, taking flight into distant centuries, reaching for safe anecdotes, digressing into tales of the Wars of the Roses and racehorses, broken tractors and the bold adventures of his ancestors in Algeria. Against a backdrop of gold-colored silk tapestries, he mentions the '47 Cheval Blanc he once drank, finds excuses to talk about lobsters and the early days of television, and to complain about French highway tolls that make it cheaper to fly with budget airlines -- anything to avoid talking about the real issue, the issue one no one wants to talk about.
The Guardian
Privacy has never been “an absolute right”, according to the new director of GCHQ, who has used his first public intervention since taking over at the helm of Britain’s surveillance agency to accuse US technology companies of becoming “the command and control networks of choice” for terrorists.
Robert Hannigan said a new generation of freely available technology has helped groups like Islamic State (Isis) to hide from the security services and accuses major tech firms of being “in denial”, going further than his predecessor in seeking to claim that the leaks of Edward Snowden have aided terror networks.
GCHQ and sister agencies including MI5 cannot tackle those challenges without greater support from the private sector, “including the largest US technology companies which dominate the web”, Hannigan argued in an opinion piece written for the Financial Times just days into his new job.
Arguing that GCHQ needed to enter into the debate about privacy, Hannigan said: “I think we have a good story to tell. We need to show how we are accountable for the data we use to protect people, just as the private sector is increasingly under pressure to show how it filters and sells its customers’ data.
The Guardian
Hyundai and Kia have agreed to pay $100m (£62m) in fines and forfeit $200m in credits for misleading customers about the fuel economy of more than a million cars sold in the US.
Monday’s fine for the South Korean car-makers is the largest in the 50-year history of the Clean Air Act, and could set a precedent for Ford and other car companies audited for similar practices.
Hyundai and Kia agreed to the fines after the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Justice Department found the car-makers had misled consumers about fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions on several models, including the popular Accent and Elantra.
After fuel prices spiked in 2008, Hyundai gained a marketing edge by claiming that its cars got 40 miles per gallon in highway driving. The inflated fuel economy claims involved about 1.2m vehicles, about a quarter of the 2011-2013 models sold in the US, the EPA found.
NPR
Twice a year, most Americans do a truly bizarre thing. In coordinated fashion, we change our clocks an hour ahead or behind and proceed as if the new time tells us what we should be doing: when to eat, when to sleep, when to wake and when to work.
The earth, of course, spins and rotates on its merry course, unperturbed by our temporal machinations. If we used to wake after sunrise, we might now wake before morning light. If we used to drive home with the setting sun, we might now drive home in darkness.
The experience can be discombobulating. Our appetite typically rises and falls throughout the day in predictable fashion, along with alertness, arousal, sleepiness and the hundreds of subtle gradations of experience governed by circadian rhythms: biological processes that cycle with a roughly 24-hour period. When we suddenly shift our behavior as we "spring forward" in March or "fall back" in November, it takes those biological processes time to catch up, and the experience is rarely a pleasant one.
NPR
Nigeria has been a stubborn hot spot of polio — and that turned out to be a good thing when it came time to fight Ebola.
In late July, a patient with the deadly Ebola virus arrived from Liberia. Health workers knew what to do. The country has created a massive public health effort to wipe out polio; institutions and strategies were repurposed to fight Ebola.
On the other hand, anti-polio efforts in the countries hit hardest by Ebola are on hold — and that could lead to disaster.
First, the good news, from Nigeria.
One of the country's polio institutions is an emergency operations center run by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. At the request of the government, senior officials from the center were sent to Lagos to help set up an emergency operations center for Ebola.
Because of the anti-polio efforts, health workers in Nigeria were ready for Ebola. They had already been trained in contact tracing. And hospitals had procedures in place for reporting polio cases, says Jay Wenger, head of polio efforts at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which provides financial support to NPR as well as the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.
ScienceBlog
USC scientists suggest a connection that could be a huge boost to string theory.
Two USC researchers have proposed a link between string field theory and quantum mechanics that could open the door to using string field theory — or a broader version of it, called M-theory — as the basis of all physics.
“This could solve the mystery of where quantum mechanics comes from,” said Itzhak Bars, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences professor and lead author of the paper.
ScienceBlog
Studies have shown that tea provides numerous health benefits, and now a new study published in the British Journal of Nutrition suggests it may help lower blood pressure.
Researchers looked at 25 randomized controlled trials to learn more about the link between tea and blood pressure. They found that people who drank tea for more than 12 weeks experienced a reduction of systolic blood pressure by 2.6 mmHg and diastolic blood pressure by 2.2 mmHg
The Guardian
Anti-tar sands campaigns have cost the industry a staggering $17bn (£11bn) in lost revenues, and helped to push it onto the backfoot, according to a study by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), and Oil Change International.
Another $13.8bn has been lost to transportation bottlenecks and the flood of cheap crude coming from shale oil fields, says the Material Risks report, which presents the first quantification of the impact that environmental campaigners have had on the unconventional energy business.
“Industry officials never anticipated the level and intensity of public opposition to their massive build-out plans,” said Steve Kretzmann, Oil Change International’s executive director. “Legal and other challenges are raising new issues related to environmental protection, indigenous rights and the disruptive impact of new pipeline proposals. Business as usual for Big Oil – particularly in the tar sands – is over.”
The industry is currently facing a decline in increased capital expenditure on new tar sands projects, due to problems in transporting the crude, which the study links to public campaigns.