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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Al Jazeera America
The Twitter and YouTube sites of the military's U.S. Central Command were taken over Monday by hackers claiming to be working on behalf of the armed group Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). American and coalition fighters have been targeting the group with airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. ISIL’s actual involvement in the attack could not immediately be confirmed.
The Twitter site was filled with threats such as "American soldiers, we are coming, watch your back." Other postings appeared to list names and phone numbers of military personnel, as well as PowerPoint slides and maps. The hackers titled the Twitter page "CyberCaliphate" with an underline that said "i love you isis." ISIS is another acronym used to refer to the group.
Some ISIL videos were posted on the YouTube site, purporting to show military operations and explosions.
McClatchy
WASHINGTON — Hackers claiming to be affiliated with Islamic State militants apparently hacked into the Twitter and YouTube accounts for U.S. Central Command, posting warnings to American troops and their families, as well as what appear to be general rosters with military personnel’s addresses, emails and phone numbers.
“While the U.S. and its satellite networks kill our brothers in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, we broke into your networks and personal devices and know everything about you,” said one tweet from the hackers.
The Guardian
In an act of cyber vandalism that appeared more embarrassing than destructive, the Twitter and YouTube accounts for US military forces in the Middle East and South Asia were hacked by supporters of Islamic State militants on Monday.
@CENTCOM, the account used by the US Central Command, tweeted out messages threatening attacks on US military personnel and expressing sympathy for Isis. Nearly simultaneously, Central Command’s YouTube channel hosted two pro-Isis videos. Its Facebook account appeared unaffected.
The Twitter avatar used by the command was replaced with an image of a masked militant and the legends “CyberCaliphate” and “I love you Isis.” Tweets included pictures showing US personnel with a goat in a command outpost, suggesting Isis sympathizers had somehow infiltrated military installations.
Compounding the embarrassment for the military was the timing of the hack, which occurred as Barack Obama gave a speech in Washington urging greater identity security for online shoppers, the first in a week of presidential speeches touching on cybersecurity.
Reuters
The Twitter and YouTube accounts for the U.S. military command that oversees operations in the Middle East were hacked on Monday by people claiming to be sympathetic toward the Islamic State militant group being targeted in American bombing raids.
U.S. officials acknowledged that the incident was embarrassing but sought to downplay its importance. Pentagon spokesman Army Colonel Steve Warren said the Defense Department "views this as little more than a prank, or as vandalism."
"It's inconvenient, it's an annoyance but in no way is any sensitive or classified information compromised," Warren told a press briefing.
NPR
The Twitter feed and the YouTube channel of U.S. Central Command were compromised on Monday, a Pentagon spokesman said.
"We are taking appropriate measures to address the matter. I have no further information to provide at this time," the spokesman said.
The hackers put up Islamic State propaganda and switched the avatar from the CentCom logo to a photo of a masked fighter.
On Twitter, the hackers released what they purported was a phone list of retired U.S. generals, as well as what appear to be presentation slides from the government-funded Lincoln Laboratory at MIT.
"Pentagon Networks Hacked," one tweet read.
DW
Hackers, apparently with ties to the "Islamic State," have compromised the Twitter feed of US Central Command, briefly posting what appeared to be sensitive information on the feed. The account was swiftly suspended.
People claiming to be Islamic State sympathizers hacked a US military Twitter feed on Monday, briefly posting threats and other sensitive information before the service was suspended.
"In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful, the CyberCaliphate continues its CyberJihad," one of the rogue Twitter entries on www.twitter.com/CENTCOM read.
C/NET
Two social-media accounts for the US military's Central Command have been hacked by an apparent Islamic State sympathizer.
The official Twitter and YouTube accounts for the organization, also known as Centcom, had their profile images replaced by a group of ISIS supporters on Monday. The group appears to call itself "CyberCaliphate." Centcom oversees US military forces in Central Asia and the Middle East, including Afghanistan and Iraq.
"We can confirm that the Centcom Twitter and YouTube accounts were compromised earlier today. We are taking appropriate measures to address the matter. We have no further information to provide at this time," according to a Centcom statement. Centcom later called the hack "cybervandalism," saying no classified information was released and none of its internal computer servers were breached.
The hacks continue a long-standing trend attacking websites and social-media accounts to send political messages. Well-known groups, such as the Syrian Electronic Army, have used the tactics for years, attacking media, business, education and government Twitter accounts, websites and other Internet channels.
New York Times
WASHINGTON — James Risen, a New York Times reporter, will not be called to testify at a leak trial, lawyers said Monday, ending a seven-year legal fight over whether he could be forced to identify his confidential sources.
The Justice Department said in court filings that it would not call Mr. Risen to testify at the trial of Jeffrey Sterling, a former C.I.A. officer charged with providing him details about a botched operation in Iran. Mr. Sterling’s lawyers, who had also left open the possibility of calling Mr. Risen to testify, said on Monday that they had withdrawn their subpoena.
Al Jazeera America
When the Kentucky Legislature returned to work after winter recess, its first order of business was to mull legislation that is anathema to the state’s labor movement. Senate Bill 1 would make Kentucky a right-to-work state, where unions are forbidden to automatically charge representation fees to workers in unionized shops.
Twenty-four states have right-to-work laws on the books. Kentucky probably won’t become the 25th, since S.B. 1 is expected to die in the state house. But labor unions in other states might not be so lucky. In state legislatures around the country, newly strengthened Republican majorities are expected to push right-to-work legislation and other policy initiatives feared by the labor movement.
Wisconsin, long considered a union stronghold, will also consider right-to-work legislation this year. So might New Mexico, West Virginia and Missouri, among others.
Organized labor tends to fear right-to-work laws because of what it calls the free rider problem. The union in a unionized workplace is obliged to represent the entire bargaining unit. But under right-to-work laws, individual employees in that unit are under no obligation to pay dues in exchange for that representation.
Al Jazeera America
About $25 million in federal loans to the Lower Brule Sioux tribal government appears to have been diverted from services like education and economic development and remains unaccounted for, according to a Human Rights Watch report released Monday.
The report alleges that from 2007 to 2013 the South Dakota tribe’s government engaged in “patterns of debilitating financial mismanagement” and made deliberate attempts to withhold information from tribal citizens during that time, affecting their human rights.
“This is one of the poorest places in the country, and huge amounts of money have been diverted by a government who is principally responsible for providing social benefits, education and other things,” said Arvind Ganesan of Human Rights Watch. “As a result, the conditions on the reservation are terrible, and the government refuses to disclose what it’s doing.”
The Lower Brule Sioux Reservation is small — 404 square miles — and is home to 1,664 people. In 2000 the median household income was $21,146. The tribe’s leadership has been in power since 1980, according to Human Rights Watch.
The Guardian
The White House has issued a rare statement of regret over its decision not to send a more senior US representative to Sunday’s anti-terrorism march in Paris, as Barack Obama’s perceived lack of public solidarity with European allies helped create a political storm in Washington.
At its first press briefing since last week’s attack, the White House struck a more apologetic tone as growing criticism of its decision not to attend threatened to overshadow its official response to the attack.
“I think it’s fair to say that we should have sent someone with a higher profile to be there,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters. “We here at the White House should have made a different decision,” he added, though he insisted the president was not consulted personally on the decision.
The Guardian
Police in Evansville, Indiana, arrested the the mother of a one-year-old baby and her boyfriend after they discovered a video of the child playing with a 40-caliber handgun, police said in a statement.
Police found the video on a cellphone owned by Michael Barnes, a 19-year-old robbery suspect who was arrested on Thursday night after selling a handgun to an undercover officer. Police said they searched Barnes’ phone after his arrest and found the video, which shows the child playing with the weapon. The boy is seen putting the muzzle in his mouth as Barnes instructs the child to say “pow”.
Police said they determined that Barnes’ girlfriend, Toni Wilson, 22, was present while Barnes filmed the boy playing with the gun. Police said that when they questioned the woman on Friday, she claimed the weapon shown in the video was a pellet gun.
The child and his two half-siblings, one-month-old twins, were placed in emergency care by police. Barnes and Wilson were arrested.
The Guardian
Cuba has completed the release of 53 political prisoners that was part of last month’s historic deal between the United States and Cuba, the Obama administration said on Monday. The move would clear a major hurdle for the normalization of ties between the two countries after more than five decades of estrangement.
Cuba’s leading human rights group said it had not been informed of any prisoner release since Thursday, when the total count stood at 41. The Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation has been keeping close track of the liberation of prisoners since they began last week, reporting releases within hours after hearing from family members or prisoners themselves. Most of the released dissidents belong to the Patriotic Union of Cuba, a vehemently anti-government group based in far eastern Cuba.
Jose Daniel Ferrer, head of the group, told the Associated Press that his count was the same as the rights commission’s and he knew of no release since Thursday.
Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court, which is in the midst of deciding whether to take up the issue of gay marriage, on Monday declined to take an early look at a challenge to Louisiana’s state ban.
The court took no action on four other pending cases concerning gay marriage bans in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, but could act on those cases as soon as later this week.
The decision not to hear the Louisiana case was not unexpected as gay rights advocates had sought to skip the regular judicial process by seeking Supreme Court review before the case had been decided by an appeals court. Gay rights advocates representing the Louisiana plaintiffs said in court papers there is a “pressing need” to resolve the issue once and for all.
NPR
In its first report since it was created, the New York City Police Department's inspector general found that chokeholds, which are banned by the department, were quick to be used by officers, who rarely received significant punishment.
NPR member station WNYC reports:
"The office reviewed 10 cases from 2009 through 2014 where the NYPD used a banned chokehold. In six of those cases where the Civilian Compliant Review Board recommended disciplinary action, then-Commissioner Ray Kelly rejected those recommendations all six times.
" 'We really don't know why the police commissioner came out with a different result, a lesser result than the CCRB recommended,' NYPD Inspector General Philip Eure told WNYC. 'That sort of thing undermines confidence.' "
In those six cases, the complaint board recommended a stiff penalty, including suspension or termination, but Kelly overruled them saying the officers should simply review the rules.
The New York Times reports that the inspector general also found that in many of the cases reviewed officers were quick to resort to chokeholds.
The Guardian
Paul Ryan, the 2012 Republican vice-presidential nominee and congressman from Wisconsin, has ruled out a run for the White House in 2016.
“I have decided that I am not going to run for president in 2016,” Ryan said in an interview with NBC News. “It is amazing the amount of encouragement I have gotten from people – from friends and supporters – but I feel like I am in a position to make a big difference where I am and I want to do that,” he said.
Calls to Ryan’s Washington and Wisconsin offices to confirm the news were not picked up – due, a recorded message said, to an overwhelming number of calls.
Ryan, who is beginning his ninth term in the House of Representatives, is his party’s leader in Congress on budget issues. He is the current chairman of the House budget committee and the co-author, with Democrat Patty Murray, of a major 2013 spending deal.
Ryan’s announcement that he would not run followed news that Mitt Romney, the top of the 2012 ticket, had not ruled out a 2016 run, which would be his third.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
h/t Raw Story
A record 25,000 people joined an anti-Islamic march in Germany on Monday, claiming their stance was vindicated by last week’s Paris jihadist attacks.
However, the impressive turnout was dwarfed by 100,000 counter-demonstrators calling for tolerance nationwide.
Chancellor Angela Merkel earlier stressed that “Islam belongs to Germany” and announced she would on Tuesday join a Muslim community rally in Berlin against extremism, along with most of her cabinet ministers.
The Guardian
The Fox News commentator who said the British city of Birmingham was a no-go zone for non-Muslims is a “complete idiot”, the prime minister, David Cameron, has said.
“When I heard this, frankly, I choked on my porridge and I thought it must be April Fools’ day,” Cameron said. “This guy’s clearly a complete idiot.”
Terrorism expert Steven Emerson claimed on US news channel Fox News that non-Muslims do not go to Birmingham, which he said had become a “totally Muslim” city. Emerson added:
In Britain, it’s not just no-go zones, there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in.
And, parts of London, there are actually Muslim religious police that actually beat and actually wound seriously anyone who doesn’t dress according to religious Muslim attire.
DW
Turkish PM Davutoglu has dismissed an accusation that Turkey is responsible for letting an alleged accomplice of the Paris attacks move freely into Syria. On a trip to Berlin, he praised Turkey's anti-terror response.
Turkey "will not accept" being assigned blame it doesn't deserve, Davutoglu told reporters during a press conference in the German capital, Berlin, where he was having talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The Syrian Foreign Ministry accused Turkey of allowing terrorists to freely cross the border into their country, after Ankara announced that the common-law wife of one of the Paris shooters entered Syria from Turkey earlier this month.
Spiegel Online
Tens of thousands of people are expected to take to the streets of Dresden on Monday evening for the latest march of Pegida, a group opposed to the "Islamization" of Europe. Organizers have billed it as a mourning march for Charlie Hebdo. But where does the group come from?
The proprietors of the Zentralgasthof, a concert and variety show venue in the town of Weinböhla in the Elbe River valley near Dresden, know what people of the region like. "Folk hits," are part of their program as is a Dresden-based cabaret artist known for his imitations of Erich Honecker, the former leader of communist East Germany.
On a Friday evening last November, the stage was turned over to Thilo Sarrazin, the bestselling anti-Muslim author. Outside the entrance, some 50, mostly young demonstrators were gathered. They called Sarrazin a "misanthrope and a blusterer"; one poster read: "Those who believe what Sarrazin says also believe the world is flat." But inside, there were 10 times as many people, cheering the author on as an iconoclastic thinker who has the courage to say what everyone feels. The audience was full of office workers, small businessmen and tradespeople. Normal folks.
Reuters
France will deploy 10,000 soldiers on home soil by Tuesday and post almost 5,000 extra police officers to protect Jewish sites after the killing of 17 people by Islamist militants in Paris last week, officials said.
Speaking a day after the biggest French public demonstration ever recorded, in honor of the victims, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said the country remained at risk of further attacks. Soldiers would guard transport hubs, tourism sites and key buildings and mount general street patrols.
"The threats remain and we have to protect ourselves from them. It is an internal operation that will mobilize almost as many men as we have in our overseas operations," Le Drian told reporters after a cabinet meeting.
Reuters
Nigeria's military said on Monday that at least 150 people had been killed in clashes with Islamists in the northeastern town of Baga, giving a rare official death toll a few weeks before presidential elections in which security is a big issue.
Defense spokesman Major-General Chris Olukolade was reacting to reports that some 2,000 had been killed by Boko Haram insurgents who took control of Baga and the surrounding area 10 days ago. The military is fighting to reclaim it.
Scores of civilians were killed when the militants, who are fighting to establish an Islamic state in northern Nigeria, raided Baga and a nearby military base. The base is also the headquarters of a multinational force with troops from Chad, Niger and Cameroon.
Reuters
Indonesian navy divers retrieved the black box flight data recorder from the wreck of an AirAsia passenger jet on Monday, a major step towards unraveling the cause of the crash that killed all 162 people on board.
But there was confusion about what happened in the final moments of Flight QZ8501, which crashed off the Indonesian coast on Dec. 28, with one official saying the plane probably exploded before hitting the water and another disputing that theory.
The Airbus A320-200 airliner lost contact with air traffic control in bad weather less than halfway into a two-hour flight from Indonesia's second-biggest city of Surabaya to Singapore.
NPR
Haiti's magnitude 7.0 earthquake of Jan. 10, 2010, left 220,000 people dead, 300,000 injured and rubble nearly everywhere.
The catastrophe also unleashed an unprecedented flood of humanitarian aid — $13.5 billion in donations and pledges, about three-quarters from donor nations and a quarter from private charity.
But today Haiti is a long, long way from realizing the bullish goal of "building back better."
"There have certainly been improvements," says Brian Concannon of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a nonprofit in Boston that fights for human rights on the island. "The rubble is off the streets. Haiti's back more or less to normal. But there have not been the improvements there should have been, given the resources."
Reuters
China's vice premier has urged authorities to strengthen safety measures after a New Year's Eve stampede in Shanghai in which 36 people were killed, state news agency Xinhua reported.
China's response to the tragedy has drawn global attention, with critics saying it could hamper Shanghai's ambition to become a world financial center by 2020.
Vice Premier Wang Yang said on Monday authorities and tourism boards across China should identify risks, improve safety measures and step up emergency response systems, Xinhua reported.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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The Guardian
The North American International Auto Show on Monday debuted with a long-awaited electric car – but with low oil prices, a retro hatchback design and a hefty price tag, the new offering will have plenty of obstacles to hurdle in order to prove itself.
General Motors introduced its Chevy Bolt battery-electric concept car, a five-door compact that the automaker promised would feature a 200-mile range per charge and a price tag around $30,000 including the federal tax credit available for electric vehicles in the US. The list price without the tax credit is closer to about $37,500.
There’s an electric-vehicle arms race in the automotive industry this year. Over the summer, Elon Musk, chief executive of California-based Tesla Motors, promised just such a car to augment its Model S – a luxury electric sedan in the $70,000 to $100,000 price range.
But GM appears to have beaten it to the punch in unveiling the Bolt, which looked like it may be nearly ready for production. GM duly crowed about the victory.
NPR
My Nintendo Wii character, my Mii, looks a lot like me. She has the same haircut, the same skin tone and even the same eyebrow shape. And while my Mii plays tennis slightly better than I do, I designed her to be a real, virtual me (albeit with balls for hands).
But it turns out I might not have needed to mimic my appearance to let people know what I'm like.
Your digital avatar gives away more hints about your personality than you might think, according to a study published Friday in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. And that's true even if you craft your avatar to look completely different from you.
NPR
Sometime in the next few weeks, we'll be hearing from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. The panel of nutrition experts is tasked with reviewing the latest science on nutrition and medicine and making recommendations on how to update the next version of the federal government's guidance on eating.
A lot of people are eagerly awaiting this report, including a group of scientists keenly interested in what the panel has to say about what we're drinking. Since the last version of the guidelines was released in 2010, more evidence has piled up showing the benefits of drinking water and the harm that can come from drinking sugary beverages.
NPR
Ignaz Semmelweis washing his hands in chlorinated lime water before operating.
This is the story of a man whose ideas could have saved a lot of lives and spared countless numbers of women and newborns' feverish and agonizing deaths.
You'll notice I said "could have."
The year was 1846, and our would-be hero was a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis.
Semmelweis was a man of his time, according to Justin Lessler, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
t was a time Lessler describes as "the start of the golden age of the physician scientist," when physicians were expected to have scientific training.
So doctors like Semmelweis were no longer thinking of illness as an imbalance caused by bad air or evil spirits. They looked instead to anatomy. Autopsies became more common, and doctors got interested in numbers and collecting data.
NPR
Two weeks after NPR and Mine Safety and Health News reported nearly $70 million in delinquent mine safety penalties at more than 4,000 coal and mineral mines, federal regulators suddenly revived a rare approach to force mines to pay.
They cited a delinquent coal mine for failing to pay $30,000 in overdue penalties and gave the mine's owner two weeks to pay. He didn't, so the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) shut down the mine. Within 40 minutes, mine officials agreed to a payment plan and the mine reopened.
It sounds like a straightforward and tough response, but it might not stand up to legal scrutiny. Federal law doesn't give MSHA the authority to shut down mines simply because they haven't paid their safety penalties. But the agency can force a mine to fix safety violations. In this case, the failure to pay penalties is considered an unfixed violation.
NPR
Des Moines, Iowa, is confronting the farms that surround it over pollution in two rivers that supply the city with drinking water. Des Moines Water Works says it will sue three neighboring counties for high nitrate levels in the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers. It's a novel attempt to control fertilizer runoff from farms, which has been largely unregulated.
Too much nitrate can be a health risk, especially for infants under the age of 6 months, and it's difficult to remove from water. Filtering out nitrates cost the Des Moines water utility $900,000 in 2013.
Bill Stowe, general manager of the Des Moines Water Works, told Iowa Public Radio in an interview last week that "we are seeing the public water supply directly risked by high nitrate concentrations."
ScienceBlog
Smoke from diesel exhaust, when inhaled, doesn’t just penetrate the senses – it can change DNA. So say researchers at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Vancouver Coastal Health.
“The researchers examined how such exposure affected the chemical ‘coating’ that attaches to many parts of a person’s DNA,” UBC insisted. “That carbon-hydrogen coating, called methylation, can silence or dampen a gene, preventing it from producing a protein – sometimes to a person’s benefit, sometimes not. Methylation is one of several mechanisms for controlling gene expression, which is the focus of a rapidly growing field of study called epigenetics.”
ScienceBlog
A new study by researchers working at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University investigated the nutritional benefits of novel beverages (vitamin waters, energy drinks, and novel juices) sold in Canadian supermarkets by assessing their micronutrient compositions. The findings were published today in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism.
According to the study novel beverages sold in Canadian supermarkets revealed extensive nutrient enrichment. On-package marketing highlighted nutritional attributes such as immune support and antioxidant properties, and some made claims related to specific nutrients. In addition, nutrients were often juxtaposed with messages related to performance and emotional well-being, benefits that go beyond conventional nutritional science.