Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Doctor RJ, rfall, JML9999 and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
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DW
Russian President Vladimir Putin has appeared in public for the first time since early March, in a meeting with the Kyrgyz leader. He has laughed off speculation surrounding his 10-day absence.
Putin met with President Almazbek Atambayev of Kyrgyzstan in the Constantine Palace in Saint Petersburg on Monday.
He laughed off suggestions he had been unwell or even quietly deposed as being behind his 10-day absence, joking that without rumors life would be uninteresting.
"It would be boring without gossip," he said.
The Russian President was last seen in public on March 5, at a news conference held with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
Speculation over the reasons behind the 62-year-old's unusual absence from the public spotlight have ranged from questions over his health, to whether he had become a father again, and even that he had been quietly deposed.
NPR
Making his first verified public appearance in more than a week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the conspiracy rumors that were whipped up in his absence were silly. Putin appeared Monday with Kyrgyzstan's president in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Putin appeared in public March 5 and then dropped out of sight. His short-term disappearance from the public eye prompted a wide range of theories about his health or even a possible coup. It also inspired a flurry of Photoshopped images of Putin, as the Two-Way reported Friday.
On Monday, Putin told reporters with a smile that "life would be too dull without rumors."
The Guardian
“It would be boring without gossip.”
That pithy aside, delivered with a wry smile, may well be the only explanation the world will ever get from the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, about his whereabouts for the past 11 days – an absence that launched a thousand rumours of ill-health, childbirth and even a palace coup.
Putin, looking jovial if somewhat pale, met with the Kyrgyz leader, Almazbek Atanbayev, in a St Petersburg palace on Monday, the first time he has been seen in public since 5 March. It puts an end to the more outlandish rumours over his absence, but there are still suggestions of a crack in Putin’s well-organised “power vertical” after the murder of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov last month.
BBC
Russian President Vladimir Putin has laughed off speculation about his health after making his first appearance in public since 5 March.
Life "would be boring without gossip", he told Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev at talks in St Petersburg.
The 62-year-old appeared relaxed and smiled before the television cameras.
His disappearance from public view had sparked rumours that he might have fallen ill, died, been removed in a coup, or once again become a father.
Earlier on Monday, Mr Putin ordered the Russian navy's Northern Fleet on to a state of full combat readiness in the Arctic.
It came as more than 45,000 troops, as well as warplanes and submarines, started major military exercises across northern Russia.
Reuters
Russian President Vladimir Putin reappeared on Monday after 10 unexplained days out of public view, laughing off the "gossip" over his health that had erupted during his absence.
The 62-year-old leader met the president of Kyrgyzstan at a lavish Tsarist-era palace outside St Petersburg in his first appearance since Feb. 5. His absence had fueled rumors he was ill, had been overthrown by the army or had even flown abroad to attend the birth of a love child.
"It would be boring without gossip," Putin said, smiling easily before television cameras. He looked relaxed, if pale.
His spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, mocked the press for its interest, referring sarcastically to the various rumors: "So you've seen the broken, paralyzed president, who has been captured by generals? He's only just flown in from Switzerland, where he attended a birth as you know."
Al Jazeera America
This is the first of a two-part series on the FLDS. The second part will be published on March 17.
HILDALE, Utah — “I finally heard about this thing called Facebook, like, a year ago. I had no idea what it was,” says 22-year-old Brigham Johnson, rubbing his neat beard nervously.
He’s embarrassed it took him so long to stumble upon the social-media site. But when he finally did, it was life changing.
“I sneaked a look on a computer, even though that was forbidden, and I found some old friends who’d got out. I was, like, ‘Wow, they’ve been living here in town all this time.’ That’s when I knew I could leave,” he says.
So he packed a bag one midnight in May 2013 and told his brother he was leaving. Then he walked out on the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), the outlaw religion he was born into in a remote town on the Utah-Arizona border.
Al Jazeera America
PHOENIX — Eva Masadiego looks mildly nervous as she rises to deliver her stump speech the very first time.
Pitching herself to the be the newest member of the local school board, she tells the story of how her immigrant parents entered the United States illegally and sacrificed for her education. With the high school in Masadiego’s neighborhood in California besieged by reports of gang violence and racial tension, her mother was determined to send her somewhere better. At 55, her mother learned to drive and took the graveyard shift at a meatpacking factory so she could afford to buy a 1984 Chevy Cavalier, Masadiego said. The kids teasingly nicknamed it “the Cadillac.”
“It was so luxurious. You couldn’t roll down the windows, there was no heater, and the radio didn’t work,” she said as her audience chuckled. After school, she took a light rail and bus, then walked seven blocks each day to make it back to her house.
Reuters
New York real estate scion and accused murderer Robert Durst's bathroom muttering that he "killed them all" would likely be admissible evidence in a murder trial, legal experts said on Monday.
Durst, the subject of a six-part HBO documentary series called "The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst," was picked up by a filmmaker's microphone apparently acknowledging his crimes and admitting that he was "caught."
He was formally charged on Monday in the first-degree murder of a longtime friend, writer Susan Berman, in a 15-year-old cold case. Also on Monday, Durst agreed to be extradited to Los Angeles County from New Orleans.
The Guardian
As the US debates expanding its campaign against the Islamic State beyond Iraq and Syria, the leading US civil liberties group is intensifying its efforts to force transparency about lethal US counterterrorism strikes and authorities.
On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) will file a disclosure lawsuit for secret Obama administration documents specifying, among other things, the criteria for placement on the so-called “kill list” for drone strikes and other deadly force.
Information sought by the ACLU includes long-secret analyses establishing the legal basis for what the administration terms its “targeted killing program” and the process by which the administration determines that civilians are unlikely to be killed before launching a strike, as well as verification mechanisms afterward to establish if the strike in fact has caused civilian deaths.
The Guardian
Nine hundred days ago today, Benito Vasquez-Hernandez and his son Moises were arrested in Madera, California. Since that day, Benito Vasquez-Hernandez has languished in a county jail near Portland, in Oregon.
Both father and son were at first charged with hindering prosecution, but those charges were dropped. Benito has not been charged with any other crime.
He is being held as a material witness in the trial of another of his sons, Eloy Vasquez-Santiago, who is charged with killing Maria Bolanos-Rivera, a 55-year-old mother of six, in Hillsboro, Oregon in 2012.
According to the Oregonian, Jeff Lesowski, the prosecutor in the Vasquez-Santiago case, told the court he sincerely regrets keeping Vasquez-Hernandez locked up, but said he had no choice.
“I’m trying to convict a man who has confessed to killing a mother,” he said. “It’s not a real easy job. It’s not perfect.”
Reuters
The United States and Iran inched closer to a political deal that would set the stage for a landmark nuclear agreement, but a U.S. official warned on Monday that Iran must make tough choices to allay fears about its atomic ambitions.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif held nearly five hours of talks in the Swiss city of Lausanne before the Iranian delegation headed to Brussels for meetings with European ministers.
After that meeting a senior U.S. official told reporters that it was not clear if an end-March deadline for a framework agreement between Iran and six major powers could be met.
"We are trying to get there but quite frankly we still do not know if we will be able to," the official said on condition of anonymity. "Iran still has to make some very tough and necessary choices to address the significant concerns that remain about its nuclear program."
Reuters
A lawyer for the man accused of wounding two policemen during a protest rally outside the Ferguson, Missouri, police headquarters last week said on Monday his client was beaten when he was taken into custody, an allegation police called "completely false."
Jeffrey L. Williams, 20, had bruising across his back, on both shoulders and his neck, and a welt on his head and a mark on his face, attorney Jerryl Christmas said, adding that he met with him for two hours on Monday but could not take pictures.
"He was beat up by the police," Christmas said in a telephone interview. "He was beaten when he was taken into custody."
Williams had appeared briefly in court Monday morning without counsel and did not enter a plea. He is charged with two counts of first-degree assault, a class A felony that calls for 10-30 years, or up to life in prison.
The Guardian
The proportion of Americans without health insurance has fallen by more than a third since the start of the Affordable Care Act, according to new government estimates that are likely to strengthen efforts to prevent Barack Obama’s flagship domestic reforms being rolled back by political opponents.
A total of 14.1 million adults are thought to have gained insurance since the act – known as Obamacare – went into full effect in October 2013, with a further 2.3 million younger adults benefitting from new rules that allow those aged 19-25 to remain on their parents’ insurance plans.
Together these net gains have reduced the national uninsured rate from 20.3% to 13.2%, or a total of 16.4 million people, based on government analysis of recent survey data.
Though tentative, the statistics may help the White House argue that its reforms are too well entrenched for future administrations to unpick – something many leading Republicans in Congress have called for due to their fierce opposition to the compulsory elements of the scheme.
DW
The leaders of Germany and Ukraine have agreed that there is no alternative to the Minsk agreement for resolving the Ukraine conflict. Both mentioned ceasefire breaches by pro-Russia separatists.
Speaking with reporters in Berlin on Monday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that she and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had just concluded a "very intensive" conversation on the situation in Ukraine.
"We will do everything to give this peaceful solution a chance," Merkel said, referring to the February peace agreement signed by Ukraine, Russia, France and Germany.
"There is no alternative to Minsk," Poroshenko said. Earlier, the 49-year-old president had said the Minsk ceasefire was not working.
DW
Ahead of elections in the UK, opposition leader Ed Miliband has said that his Labour party would not form a coalition with the Scottish National Party. Polls suggest a tight vote, where a "winner" might need allies.
Less than two months before UK general elections, polls suggest it's likely that no single party will win an outright majority in parliament, despite the "first-past-the-post" voting system employed in Britain. As a result, possible coalition partnerships have dominated much of the attention during the campaign. On Monday, opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband appeared to rule out such an alliance with the Scottish National Party.
"It will not happen," Labour's Miliband told supporters in Pudsey in northern England. "Labour will not go into coalition government with the SNP. There will be no SNP ministers in any government I lead."
Al Jazeera America
Turkey has criticized U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for suggesting that negotiations would have to be opened with President Bashar al-Assad to end the conflict in Syria.
Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told Turkey’s state-run Anatolia news agency Monday that all Syria's current problems, on the fourth anniversary of the start of the uprising in March 2011, were caused by Assad’s government.
"What is there to be negotiated with Assad?" Cavusoglu was quoted as saying at the end of his visit to Cambodia.
"You are going to have what [kind of] negotiations with a regime that has killed over 200,000 people and has used chemical weapons?" he asked. "Up until now, what result has been reached [with the regime] through negotiations?"
Instead, he said all parties needed to work for a political "transformation" in Syria.
In an interview with CBS over the weekend, Kerry conceded that "we have to negotiate in the end" with Assad.
Spiegel Online
Jean-Claude Juncker understands the importance of symbols in politics. When he became president of the European Commission last fall, he surprised the political powers that be in Brussels with a mini-coup. One of the privileges reserved for the new head of the European Union executive is that of promoting a close confidant to be his spokesman. After all, the position of spokesman is crucial for ensuring that the Commission president is seen in a positive light.
But Juncker tapped a man named Margaritis Schinas, a 52-year-old lawyer from Thessaloniki who had until that moment been just another in the unremarkable army of bureaucrats that walk the Commission halls in Brussels. Even today, Schinas remains astonished at his huge promotion. What made him, a rather reserved bureaucrat, qualified to explain the daily work of the Commission to journalists from around Europe and the world? But for Juncker, the gesture was the important thing. He wanted to show that oft-reviled Greece was a crucial part of the European Union.
NPR
Officials in Vanuatu are still assessing damage from what President Baldwin Lonsdale says was "a monster" — Cyclone Pam, a strong storm that hit the small nation in the South Pacific with winds that damaged or destroyed 90 percent of the buildings in the capital, Lonsdale says.
"This is a very devastating cyclone in Vanuatu. I term it as a monster, a monster," he said. "It's a setback for the government and for the people of Vanuatu. After all the development that has taken place, all this development has been wiped out."
At least eight deaths have been blamed on the cyclone; a full tally of casualties and damage may still be days away. Some 33,000 of Vanuatu's more than 260,000 people live on outer islands, many of which were cut off from communication by the storm.
Reuters
Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a final bid to shore up right-wing support ahead of a knife-edge vote on Tuesday, said he would not permit a Palestinian state to be created under his watch if he is re-elected.
Trailing his centre-left opponent Isaac Herzog in opinion polls, the three-term leader has sought to shift the focus away from socioeconomic issues and on to security challenges, saying he alone can defend Israel.
Having previously hinted that he would accept a Palestinian state, Netanyahu reversed course on Monday, citing risks that he linked to the regional spread of Islamist militancy. He said that if he is re-elected, the Palestinians would not get the independent state they seek in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza.
"Whoever moves to establish a Palestinian state or intends to withdraw from territory is simply yielding territory for radical Islamic terrorist attacks against Israel," he told the Israeli news site NRG.
Reuters
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's march towards becoming the longest-serving leader of Israel could be halted on Tuesday in an election that has exposed public fatigue with his stress on national security rather than socio-economic problems.
Surging rhetoric against Iran and the Palestinians has apparently done little to close Netanyahu's lag behind center-left opponent Isaac Herzog in opinion polls. Should Herzog narrowly win the ballot as predicted, he would be the likely first pick to form the next government.
That would not rule out the coalition-building task reverting to Netanyahu, if Herzog fails to win enough support in a rightist-dominated parliament.
Much will depend on which candidate the smaller, centrist parties choose to crown, and the leaning of a joint list uniting Israel's four Arab parties, which is expected to come in third.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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The Guardian
As California experiences the fourth year of one of the most severe droughts in its history, a senior Nasa scientist has warned that the state has about one year of water left.
In an LA Times editorial published last week, Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory senior water cycle scientist Jay Famiglietti called for a more “forward-looking process” to deal with the state’s dwindling water supply.
Famiglietti, who is also a professor at University of California at Irvine, said the state had about one year of water in reservoir storage and the backup supply, groundwater, was low.
“California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain,” Famiglietti wrote. “In short, we have no paddle to navigate this crisis.”
The Guardian
There has been a lot of attention on the influence of rapid warming of the Arctic on weather in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes. Much of the work has focused on changes to the Jetstream amplitudes and association of these changes to ice loss in the Arctic.
We know that the Arctic is heating faster than the planet as a whole. Consequently, there is more energy in the Arctic which can be transmitted to the atmosphere. Much of the excess heat is transferred to the atmosphere in the late fall or early winter. This extra energy is connected to what’s called Arctic geopotential height, which has increased during the same times of the year. As a consequence, the Jetstream might weaken in the cold seasons.
The Guardian
The Koch brothers’ conglomerate Koch Industries has refused to comply with an investigation by three Senate Democrats into whether the company has funded groups or researchers who deny or cast doubt on climate change.
In response to a request from senators Barbara Boxer, Edward Markey and Sheldon Whitehouse for information about Koch Industries’ support for scientific research, Koch general counsel Mark Holden invoked the company’s first amendment rights.
“The activity efforts about which you inquire, and Koch’s involvement, if any, in them, are at the core of the fundamental liberties protected by the first amendment to the United States constitution,” Holden wrote the senators in a letter dated 5 March and posted online by Koch Industries this week.
NPR
Since his birth 33 years ago, Jonathan Keleher has been living without a cerebellum, a structure that usually contains about half the brain's neurons.
This exceedingly rare condition has left Jonathan with a distinctive way of speaking and a walk that is slightly awkward. He also lacks the balance to ride a bicycle.
But all that hasn't kept him from living on his own, holding down an office job and charming pretty much every person he meets.
"I've always been more into people than anything else," Jonathan tells me when I meet him at his parents' house in Concord, Mass., a suburb of Boston. "Why read a book or why do anything when you can be social and talk to people?"
BBC
Boston has broken the record for the snowiest winter in the city's recorded history.
The National Weather Service said the city received 108.6in (275.8cm) of snow this winter, beating the 1995-1996 record of 107.6 inches.
The record was broken around 19:00 local time (23:00 GMT) on Sunday, when 2.9in fell on the city.
This season, the Massachusetts city saw more snowfall than any winter since 1872, when records were first kept.
"Boston, you survived the snowiest winter on record!!!" the local branch of the National Weather Service wrote on its Facebook page.
CNET
When building an app for Apple Watch, Mikael Berner and his team at EasilyDo quickly learned that their work could carry over to the iPhone.
The EasilyDo developers found it sometimes took too long for users to find the information they wanted in the company's namesake app -- which acts as a virtual assistant by managing your email, calendar, travel information and services like LinkedIn. When you're wearing a smartwatch, you need to be able to glance down and see what you're looking for without digging through menus.
Deciding that also made sense on the iPhone, the developers restructured their smartphone app to also be "more micro-moment," said EasilyDo CEO Berner, showing quick glances of information that's relevant to what you're doing at a particular time. If you're heading out on vacation, it won't display a menu with all of your travel information, as the phone app did before. Instead, EasilyDo will notify you about gate changes or pop up your boarding pass while you're in the airport. It then will display your hotel's address after you land or provide other information based on what you need in that moment.
Climate Central
There is a scene in the movie “Gattaca” in which Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman’s characters walk through a giant concentrating solar power plant spread across a broad flat California desert.
It’s a striking moment in the film, partly because it illustrates how visually imposing and vast utility-scale solar power plants can be as they sprawl across the desert.
But what if those solar power plants could be built in developed areas between or atop buildings and homes without having to impact the desert, many parts of which are environmentally sensitive? A Stanford University study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change says that can be achieved in many California’s cities, which are often overlooked as areas ideal for both utility-scale photovoltaic and concentrating solar power generations.
The research looked developed land more efficiently by encouraging the construction of utility-scale solar development there rather than building large solar installations in environmentally sensitive undeveloped places. The study specifically modeled land-use efficiency for solar only in California because the state leads the U.S. in solar power generation.
New York Times
NASHVILLE — Al Gore wants to make a point about cellphones, and he has a helpful set of slides on his laptop. “Do you want to see that?” he asks, and starts to turn the MacBook around.
“It’s not two hours — don’t worry.”
Mr. Gore knows he is The Guy With the Slides, the man who will talk about the environment until you can no longer remember the color of the sky. He long ago mastered the self-deprecating gestures that let you know that he knows what you are thinking. And then he shows you the slides anyway.
Slides have been very good to the former vice president of the United States, almost president, environmental activist and now successful green investor. His slide show on the threat of climate change, presented in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award. His efforts to spread the word about global warming earned him, along with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a Nobel Peace Prize. His was a dire call to strenuous and difficult action.