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.
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Al Jazeera America
After a long and drawn-out process involving multiple branches of the U.S. government, the summary of an exhaustive report detailing Bush-era CIA detention and interrogation policies is anticipated to be released on Tuesday. The report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) examines the CIA’s use of torture after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and looks at the efficacy of such intelligence-gathering methods.
The report, which cost the federal government more than $40 million to produce, is said to cast doubt on intelligence gains gleaned from an interrogation program that embraced torture.
The CIA has fiercely debated the report’s conclusions, and the Obama administration has warned that its public disclosure could prove embarrassing for the U.S. and even compromise its policy positions.
In 2009, President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13491, outlawing torture. However, he has frequently expressed his disinterest in re-examining its past use — choosing instead to “look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
The Guardian
The CIA is bracing for what could be one of the most damaging moments in its history: a public airing of its post-9/11 embrace of torture.
The Senate intelligence committee is poised to release a landmark inquiry into torture as early as Tuesday, even as the Obama administration has made a last-ditch effort to suppress a report that has plunged relations between the CIA and its Senate overseer to a historic low point.
The release of the torture report will represent the third major airing of faulty CIA intelligence in 15 years, following official commissions into the 9/11 plot and Saddam Hussein’s defunct illicit weapons programs.
Despite months of negotiation over how much of the 6,000-page report will be declassified, most of its findings will never see the light of the day. But even a partial release of the report will yield a furious response from the CIA and its allies.
On Sunday, George W Bush made a show of support for CIA operatives who had participated in torture, calling them “patriots”.
CNN
Washington (CNN) -- Thousands of Marines have been put on a higher state of alert around the world in advance of the anticipated release of a Senate report on coercive interrogation techniques as a precaution, a U.S. defense official tells CNN.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest at the briefing Monday said the Senate committee has told them they will release the enhanced interrogation report Tuesday.
The Marines are all part of contingency response forces positioned in key areas to respond to a crisis. The alert status means the units are put on a shorter readiness time to be available and capable of deploying to a crisis such as an embassy or U.S. base coming under threat. Those exact warning times remain classified, but the Marines can be able of deploying within just a few hours of being notified.
New York Times
WASHINGTON — A long-awaited Senate report condemning torture by the Central Intelligence Agency has not even been made public yet, but former President George W. Bush’s team has decided to link arms with former intelligence officials and challenge its conclusions.
The report is said to assert that the C.I.A. misled Mr. Bush and his White House about the nature, extent and results of brutal techniques like waterboarding, and some of his former administration officials privately suggested seizing on that to distance themselves from the controversial program, according to people involved in the discussion. But Mr. Bush and his closest advisers decided that “we’re going to want to stand behind these guys,” as one former official put it.
Senate Panel Faces New Obstacle to Release of Torture ReportDEC. 5, 2014
Mr. Bush made that clear in an interview broadcast on Sunday. “We’re fortunate to have men and women who work hard at the C.I.A. serving on our behalf,” he told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “These are patriots and whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way off base.”
Reuters
Graphic details about sexual threats and other harsh interrogation techniques the CIA meted out to captured militants will be detailed by a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the spy agency's anti-terror tactics, sources familiar with the document said.
The report, which the committee's majority Democrats are expected to release on Tuesday, describes how senior al Qaeda operative Abdel Rahman al Nashiri, suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, was threatened by his interrogators with a buzzing power drill, the sources said. The drill was never actually used on Nashiri.
In another instance, the report documents how at least one detainee was sexually threatened with a broomstick, the sources said.
Reuters
(Reuters) - Shopkeepers boarded up windows in California and basketball stars in New York wore shirts invoking the last words of Eric Garner, a black man who died after a police chokehold, amid racially charged protests Monday over a grand jury's failure to indict the white officer involved.
Cleveland Cavaliers forward LeBron James and other players wore T-shirts emblazoned with the words "I CAN'T BREATHE" in pre-game warmups in at Barclay's Center in Brooklyn, where Britain's Prince William and his wife Kate were among thousands who came to see the team play the Brooklyn Nets.
Also on Monday, New York State's top prosecutor sought the power to probe all police killings of unarmed civilians in his state, following sometimes violent U.S. protests after two grand juries declined to indict officers in the deaths of unarmed black men.
New York Times
The mother of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old African-American boy who was fatally shot by a rookie police officer last month in Cleveland, said Monday that she would press for the officer to be indicted on criminal charges.
In a telephone interview, the mother, Samaria Rice, 37, said the pellet gun that Tamir was holding when he was killed at a recreation center on Nov. 22 had been given to him to play with by a friend just minutes before the police arrived.
“It wasn’t his gun at all,” Ms. Rice said. “I don’t allow that type of thing at my house.”
Her son had just gone to the recreation center with his 14-year-old sister, who was inside when someone told her that there had been a shooting outside, Ms. Rice said. “My daughter ran outside, and police tackled her and put her in handcuffs and put her in the police car.”
McClatchy
WASHINGTON — Manufacturers are more upbeat about their own companies’ prospects than at any time in almost a decade. Yet about three-quarters of them also feel the country is on the wrong track.
The seeming contradiction is found in the latest National Association of Manufacturers/IndustryWeek quarterly survey to be released Monday, a copy of which was obtained by McClatchy in advance.
The survey of manufacturers small, medium and large found that more than 91 percent of them were positive about the outlook for their own company. That’s the first time since late 2005 that more than 90 percent of respondents were positive in their outlook, and only the fourth time since the survey began in 1997.
The optimism doesn’t extend, however, much beyond their own circumstances.
Nearly 73 percent of respondents felt the nation was on the wrong track. Only 9 percent said they felt the nation was on the right track. The rest weren’t sure.
Al Jazeera America
Washington was “unaware” of negotiations to release South African teacher Pierre Korkie on the same day that he was killed in a failed U.S.-led mission to rescue hostages held by Al-Qaeda in Yemen, the U.S. ambassador to South Africa said on Monday.
Pierre Korkie, 56, and American journalist Luke Somers, 33, died of their wounds after being shot during a special forces raid intended to free Somers shortly after midnight on Saturday. Washington says they were killed by their captors, members of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Another 11 people, including a woman, a 10-year-old boy and a local Al-Qaeda leader, were also killed during the raid in the village of Dafaar in Shabwa province, an AQAP stronghold in southern Yemen.
Gift of the Givers, a relief group that Korkie had been working with, had been negotiating for Korkie's release on behalf of his family. The teacher was due to be handed over just hours after the raid.
U.S. Ambassador to South Africa Patrick Gaspard said Washington acted swiftly to free Somers because it had information that he was going to be killed by his captors.
The Guardian
At least 200 Los Angeles firefighters were battling a massive building fire early Monday morning after flames engulfed a luxury apartment complex under construction. The blaze shut down two highways and damaged two nearby buildings.
Los Angeles firefighters responded to the blaze around 1.20am local time on Temple Street, according to the department’s Twitter account. The flames could be seen from miles away, according to reports from the Los Angeles Times, citing photos captured from the Hollywood Hills.
Two nearby buildings, including the city’s health department, were damaged by heat from the fire, and water from firefighters efforts’ to contain it. The fire was so intense that large window panes were giving way under the heat, causing firefighters to caution journalists to stay away.
The Guardian
The “secret, massive and indiscriminate” surveillance conducted by intelligence services and disclosed by the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden cannot be justified by the fight against terrorism, the most senior human rights official in Europe has warned.
In a direct challenge to the United Kingdom and other states, Nils Muižnieks, the commissioner for human rights at the Council of Europe, calls for greater transparency and stronger democratic oversight of the way security agencies monitor the internet. He also said that so-called Five Eyes intelligence-sharing treaty between the UK, US, Australia, New Zealand and Canada should be published.
“Suspicionless mass retention of communications data is fundamentally contrary to the rule of law … and ineffective,” the Latvian official argues in a 120-page report, The Rule of Law on the Internet in the Wider Digital World. “Member states should not resort to it or impose compulsory retention of data by third parties.”
Reuters
New York State's top prosecutor on Monday sought the power to probe all police killings of unarmed civilians in his state, following sometimes violent U.S. protests over two grand juries' moves to clear officers in the deaths of unarmed black men.
The morning after angry crowds hurled objects at police who responded with tear gas during protests in northern California, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said action was needed to address a "crisis of confidence" in the criminal justice system.
Cities across the United States have seen large protests in recent nights following a grand jury's decision not to charge an officer in the July killing of Eric Garner. An unarmed black father of six, Garner died after police put him in a banned chokehold.
The decision in the Garner case came a little more than a week after a Missouri grand jury cleared an officer in the August fatal shooting of an unarmed black teen, Michael Brown.
NPR
Short on the heels of a nonbinding House vote to block President Obama's executive action on immigration, some 20 Democratic U.S. mayors are meeting today in New York City to send a different message:
They want to help implement the president's plan.
The meeting, hosted by New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, is significant because cities, in association with their networks of nonprofit service providers to immigrants, will be the spear point of the effort to persuade some 4 million undocumented residents to come forward and apply for deferred action.
"These mayors support the president because they know the economic benefit to their cities," says Laura Burton Capps, spokeswoman for the mayors' coalition Cities United for Immigration Action. "They know this will help keep families together and enable immigrants to trust law enforcement and government."
BBC
A private jet has crashed into a house in a suburb of Washington DC, killing three people on board.
The small plane came down in Gaithersburg, Maryland, on Monday morning, setting the house and two other homes on fire.
Fire crews later searched the homes and three people living in one are unaccounted for.
Witnesses told local media that the plane appeared to be struggling to maintain altitude before it crashed.
A Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman said the jet was trying to land at a nearby airfield.
DW
Right-wing groups have organized protests with less politically extreme citizens to voice their concern over what they see as the Islamization of Europe. Counter demonstrations, however, are expected to be bigger.
Anti-Islamist protests are set to take place for the second Monday in a row, this time in Dresden and in Düsseldorf.
The demonstration was organized by the umbrella group "Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the West," or PEGIDA, a group led by previously apolitical Dresdeners who wish to distance themselves from right-wing extremists and neo-Nazis while protesting the perceived prevalence of Islamists and Salafists in Germany and the possible return of "Islamic State" (IS) fighters who hold European passports.
"Dear Friends, dear fellow citizens, dear Patriots! Monday is PEGIDA DAY and today too we wish to show a peaceful sign...Bring your friends and neighbors and let us show the counter-demonstrators that we are NOT XENOPHOBIC and NOT ISLAMAPHOBIC …" reads the call to action on PEDIGA's Facebook page.
Al Jazeera America
Kenyan police have assassinated nearly 500 terrorism suspects as part of an extrajudicial killing program supported by intelligence provided by Israel and the United Kingdom, an Al Jazeera investigation has revealed.
Officers from four units of Kenya’s Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) said that police assassinated terrorist suspects on government orders.
The police killings, according to an ATPU officer, were ordered by Kenya’s National Security Council and run into the hundreds every year. “Day in, day out, you hear of eliminating suspects," the officer said.
“Since I was employed, I’ve killed over 50. Definitely, I do become proud because I’ve eliminated some problems,” added another officer.
The ATPU officers contend that Kenya’s weak judicial system had forced them to resort to assassinations, as police have failed to produce strong enough evidence to prosecute terrorism suspects.
“If the law cannot work, there’s another option … eliminate him,” an officer explained.
Spiegel Online
On the day Hanif Masih is to be freed after spending half of his life as a slave, the 28 year old rubs olive oil into his hair. He wants the part to stay in place so he can look his best on such an important occasion.
He is standing in the courtyard of the brick factory where he has spent so many years working. There's a massive smokestack in the background. The plant, about the size of a football field, is located in Kasur, a Pakistani city about 50 kilometers (31 miles) south of Lahore near the Indian border.
Masih looks on as two men sitting on plastic chairs at a table complete a transaction that will change his life forever. Though there is a third chair available, Masih stands quietly next to it as if the matter at hand has nothing to do with him. Having long ago learned his place, he wouldn't dare sit down.
Reuters
A senior Russian diplomat accused the United States on Monday of trying to bring down President Vladimir Putin with the sanctions it has imposed on Moscow over the crisis in Ukraine.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told parliamentary deputies that ties between Moscow and Washington were in a very deep chill and were likely to remain so if the sanctions remained for a long time.
"It is hardly a secret that the goal of the sanctions is to create social and economic conditions to carry out a change of power in Russia," Sergei Ryabkov told a hearing in the lower house. "There will be no easy or fast way out of this."
He said he did not expect the United States to recognize Crimea as part of Russia "for decades to come" and accused Washington of trying to drive a wedge between Russia and the other former Soviet republics.
Reuters
The United States has little faith in U.N.-backed peace talks in Libya because Middle Eastern countries are defying requests to end their war by proxy in the oil-rich North African nation, senior U.S. officials said.
U.N. special Libya envoy Bernardino Leon last week called on the main factions to meet this Tuesday to initiate a dialog in a spirit of "objectivity and conciliation," but a time and place have still not been made public.
Despite months of American requests, the U.S. officials said Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, all of which are U.S. allies, continue to encourage local factions to fight instead of compromise."What is the objective? What is the plan for success here?" asked a senior American official who declined to be identified. "It seems quite clear that the more foreign countries get involved in Libya, the more unstable the situation becomes."Egypt and the United Arab Emirates back the internationally recognized government led by Abdullah al-Thinni operating in the east. U.S. officials say Qatar has supported Libya Dawn, which controls the capital Tripoli, but Qatar denies this.
NPR
Here's a fact that might surprise you: All of the top 10 U.S. companies that were born on the Internet — including Google, Amazon and eBay — have overseas corporate headquarters in Ireland.
The American tech sector is huge in Ireland. It's growing rapidly — and having a huge impact on life there.
But the tax system that's fueling the growth is also infuriating some people in the U.S. and Europe — and has Ireland reconsidering its tax code.
A City, And Country, Transformed
Cork is one of the places benefiting from the U.S. tech boom. The Irish city is home to 120,000 people — as well as Apple's only global corporate headquarters outside the United States. That headquarters — all gleaming metal and glass — employs 4,000 people.
The Guardian
The Greek government has announced that it will bring forward presidential elections.
The announcement of the high-stakes gamble that will make or break its survival was made only a few hours after lenders agreed on Monday to grant Greece a two-month extension of its financial rescue programme.
The ruling coalition surprised party leaders and political pundits by saying the process to replace the country’s head of state would begin next week, two months ahead of schedule.
“Prime minister Antonis Samaras and vice-premier Evangelos Venizelos … have asked the president of the parliament for the procedure of presidential elections to move as quickly as possible,” said Sofia Voultepsi, the government spokeswoman.
Samaras, in power since July 2012, is expected to announce later this week a candidate to succeed president Karolos Papoulias, a second world war veteran whose term expires in March.
Reuters
Typhoon Hagupit weakened further on Tuesday as the storm crawled across the central Philippines, while rescue workers struggled in its aftermath to reach towns in central provinces where thousands of homes were wrecked and at least 27 people killed.
Nearly 13,000 houses were crushed and more than 22,300 were partially damaged in Eastern Samar province, where Hagupit first hit land as a category 3 typhoon on Saturday, local officials said.
"Access is very difficult, roads are spotty. There are landslides, some are one-lane roads. In the inner barangays (villages), many of them are washed out by flash floods," Richard Gordon, chairman of the Philippine Red Cross, told Reuters.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Spiegel Online
British medical expert Jeremy Farrar is a key figure in the fight against Ebola and other infectious diseases. In a SPIEGEL interview, he says that the development of vaccines is key because drug-resistant viruses and bacteria pose immense dangers.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Farrar, the Wellcome Trust has an endowment of around €22 billion and provides close to €880 million to support scientific and humanities research and public engagement each year. What is it like to be the master of so much money?
Farrar: (laughs) Well that sounds more powerful, than it is. I am not involved in every detail of every decision. Whether a grant application or research project will be supported or not is determined by an internal and external panel of experts. But of course I wouldn't have accepted the job if I didn't believe that the Wellcome Trust could help to change the world.
Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected BP's challenge to its multibillion-dollar settlement agreement over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, which the oil giant complained has allowed payouts to some businesses that are unable to trace their losses to the disaster.
The court's decision not to hear the London-based company's appeal is the latest setback for BP, which is trying to limit payments over a disaster that killed 11 people and triggered the largest U.S. offshore oil spill.
The action, disclosed in an unsigned order, means BP must make the payments as it continues to deal with the spill's aftermath.
BP signed a 2012 settlement agreement to compensate businesses claiming financial losses due to the spill. But BP has since argued the agreement has been interpreted improperly by Patrick Juneau, the settlement fund's court-appointed administrator, forcing it to pay businesses that could not show damages.
NPR
When children reach 6 years old, their drawings matter.
Not because of those purple unicorns or pinstripe dragons but because of how kids sketch themselves and the very real people in their lives.
In a new study, researchers found that children who experienced chaos at home — including high levels of noise, excessive crowding, clutter and lack of structure — were more likely to draw themselves at a distance from their parents or much smaller in size relative to other figures.
In some cases, these kids drew themselves with drooping arms and indifferent or sad faces.
Their drawings were a reflection of this simple fact: Chaos at home meant parents were interacting with them less and, in many cases, the interactions that were happening were shorter and interrupted.
NPR
It's one of the worst fears we have for our parents or for ourselves: that we, or they, will end up in a nursing home, drugged into a stupor. And that fear is not entirely unreasonable. Almost 300,000 nursing home residents are currently receiving antipsychotic drugs, usually to suppress the anxiety or aggression that can go with Alzheimer's disease and other dementia.
Antipsychotics, however, are approved mainly to treat serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. When it comes to dementia patients, the drugs have a black box warning, saying that they can increase the risk for heart failure, infections and death.
None of this was on Marie Sherman's mind when her family decided that her mother, 73-year-old Beatrice DeLeon, would be better off in a nursing facility near her home in Sonora, Calif. It wasn't because of her Alzheimer's disease, explains Sherman — it was because her mother had had some falls.
NPR
he United Nations Children's Fund calls 2014 a devastating year for children, reporting that as many as 15 million young people are caught in conflicts in the Central African Republic, Iraq, South Sudan, the Palestinian territories, Syria and Ukraine.
Among the grim statistics in a newly released UNICEF report: There are more than 1.7 million child refugees from the conflict in Syria, and 105 children have been killed in the more than 35 attacks on schools in that country. In the Central African Republic, as many as 10,000 children are believed to have been recruited by armed groups in the past year and more than 430 have been killed or maimed.
NPR
Humanity has snapped detailed portraits of planets and moons throughout our solar system. But there's one missing from the album: Pluto.
Although Pluto was discovered in 1930, it has remained stubbornly hard to photograph. The Hubble Space Telescope has taken the best pictures, and frankly, they stink.
"They can just barely resolve Pluto in the distance just a few pixels across," says Alan Stern, an associate vice president at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas.
Our hazy view of Pluto is about to change. Over the weekend, a NASA probe that is overseen by Stern from Earth awoke from a state of hibernation. After nearly a decade in space and 3 billion miles, the New Horizons spacecraft has one primary job: Get a better picture of Pluto.
Climate Central
By Bobby Magill
In the summer of 2003, when temperatures soared above 100 degrees throughout western Europe, the heat wave killed more than 14,800 in France alone and 35,000 people across the continent. It was the most intense heat Europe had seen in more than 500 years.
A new study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change shows that not only could such a heat wave occur again, Europe is now 10 times more likely to see a repeat of such an intense heat wave than it was just a decade ago because of human-caused global warming.
That kind of heat wave could come every 127 years and be "very common" by the 2040s, much more frequently than the once every 1,000 years or so as previously thought as global warming is increasing the likelihood of such catastrophic heatwaves.
Climate Central
By Daniel A. Gross
It was January 1997, and the Pacific was turning pink. The color was spreading from deep beneath the surface, starting near New Guinea and creeping east toward the coast of Peru — a distance of nearly 11,000 kilometers. On the map, it seemed as though the patch might come to encompass the entire ocean, growing and rising, expanding at the surface almost like the film of an oil spill.
In the actual ocean, there wasn't much to see. David Pierce was looking at a map superimposed with projected ocean temperatures, and pink was a representation of anomalous warmth in the Pacific. The map told Pierce that according to the climate model developed by him and his colleagues at Scripps Institute of Oceanography, huge swaths of the southern Pacific were about to heat up.
A warmer ocean would mean a lot more than better surfing in Baja California. In fact, it would mean torrential rainfall across South America, record winter warmth and wetness in the United States, and $4 billion of damage in the country of Ecuador alone. Climate scientists had even found that through long chains of cause and effect, warm Pacific temperatures were linked to warm air over the Arctic and cold air over Russia — regions that were literally half a world away.
C/NET
The long list of challenges facing Uber has now extended to India.
The ride-sharing service has been banned from India's capital territory of Delhi after the report of an alleged rape late Friday.
"The services of Uber have been blacklisted, Delhi's special commissioner for the city's Transport Department, Satish Mathur, told the India Times on Monday. Mathur charged that Uber is "misleading customers."
According to Mathur, Uber drivers in Delhi had All India Permit Taxi licenses. While those would be enough to get people around other parts of India, Mathur said that the permit does not apply to Delhi and that Uber has therefore been operating "illegally," the India Times reported.
According to a national poll on children's health, over 80 percent of parents believe all children in day care should be required to be up to date on their vaccines.
NPR
There's been a lot of attention drawn to people who don't believe in vaccinating their children, but there are many more people who believe that vaccines are the best way to protect children from contagious disease. A recent poll shows just how concerned parents are about vaccines when it comes to putting their children in day care.
According to a poll conducted by the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health, 81 percent of parents say they believe all children in day care should be required to be up to date on vaccines. In fact, 41 percent said children who aren't up to date should be kept out of day care.
Furthermore, 70 percent of parents said they would take their children out of a child care facility where one-quarter of the children were not fully vaccinated.