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, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man with guest editors Magnifico and Chitown Kev. 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. Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the OND banner. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
Reuters
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz beat billionaire Donald Trump in Iowa's Republican presidential nominating contest on Monday, upsetting the national front-runner in the race to be their party's White House nominee.
Cruz, a conservative lawmaker from Texas, won with 28 percent of the vote compared to 24 percent for businessman Trump. Marco Rubio, a U.S. senator from Florida, came in third place with 23 percent, making him easily the leader among establishment Republican candidates.
On the Democratic side, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in a virtual tie with rival Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist U.S. senator from Vermont. With 88 percent of the precincts reporting Clinton led with 49.9 percent to Sanders' 49.4 percent.
Former Maryland Governor Martin O'Malley, who had trouble gaining any traction in the Democratic race, planned to suspend his campaign. He won 0.6 percent.
US NEWS
McClatchy
Seven years after President Barack Obama signed legislation that makes it easier for women to challenge discriminatory pay in court, South Carolina remains one of only four states in the country without equal pay protections.
Friday marked the seventh anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the first law Obama signed after taking office. Ledbetter, a former Goodyear Tire employee from Alabama, gained national attention after she sued the company because she made less than her male counterparts for doing the same work.
“A fair amount of South Carolinians would be surprised to find out that their state has no equal pay laws – it’s not in great company,” said Lisa Maatz, vice president of government relations at the nonprofit advocacy American Association of University Women. The other states are Alabama, Mississippi and Utah, although the latter introduced legislation this month.
Al Jazeera America
The 2016 White House race is on its way to being the most expensive in history.
Presidential candidates and the political groups supporting them combined to raise more than $837 millionduring 2015, driven by a massive influx of cash to big-money super PACs, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of new campaign finance filings.
The new filings show that Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, as well as Republican contenders Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, ranked among candidates whose campaigns raised the most impressive sums in 2015. This effectively ensures they’ll remain in the presidential race long past Monday’s Iowa caucuses.
Nearly half of the presidential money raised in 2015 came from super PACs, which have no contribution limits. Republican White House hopefuls have been particularly reliant on them.
The Guardian
When Raymond Schwab talks about his case, his voice teeters between anger and sadness.
“People who don’t understand the medical value of cannabis are tearing my family apart,” says the Kansas father of six and US veteran, who has a prescription for marijuana in neighboring Colorado, where it is legal.
Nine months ago, Schwab tried to move to Colorado to grow medical marijuana for fellow veterans. While he and his wife were there preparing for the move, the state of Kansas took five of their six children (their sixth child, the oldest, is 19) into custody on suspicion of child endangerment, ensnaring his family in interstate marijuana politics.
Cases like the Schwabs’ have become a lightning rod for marijuana activists and have left courts, family attorneys and Child Protective Services (CPS) unsure of where the lines are drawn in this brave new world of legalized cannabis.
The Guardian
Ted Cruz has presented ‘misleading’ information in the Senate, scientists say, while Marco Rubio rejects ‘destroying our economy’ – despite pleas for action coming from officials in his own state.
They have bloviated about carpet bombing, bickered about walls, and waxed anti-Muslim and -migrant, but over more than 16 hours of debate, the Republican candidates for president have almost entirely ignored what most of the world fears most: the rising tides and temperatures of climate change.
Last week, Fox News moderators asked only one question relevant to climate change, about whether Florida senator Marco Rubio would support regulation to lower emissions. Rubio said he would not: “I do not believe that we have to destroy our economy in order to protect our environment.”
Reuters
U.S. consumers are cautious about spending their windfall from cheap gasoline and are saving more, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll and official data, suggesting low oil prices are less of a boon for the U.S. economy than in the past.
Commerce Department data shows that the crude's 70 percent drop since mid-2014 cut households' annual spending on gasoline and other energy products by $115 billion, equivalent to roughly 0.5 percent of gross domestic product.
At the same time, however, savings increased by $121 billion and while the data gives no indication where the money has come from, the survey suggests the windfall accounted for a significant part of the sum.
Reuters
U.S. manufacturing activity contracted in January for a fourth straight month as factories grappled with a strong dollar and lower oil prices forced energy firms to further cut spending, but the pace of the decline appeared to be slowing.
While other data on Monday showed consumer spending was flat in December, a jump in savings to a three-year high offered hope that consumption would rebound in the coming months.
"The bad news is manufacturing is still contracting, but the good news is there are some signs of stabilization. There are still some dark clouds hovering over the first quarter and we hope consumers will return as savings are high," said Thomas Costerg, an economist at Standard Chartered Bank in New York.
The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said its index of national factory activity increased 0.2 percentage point to a reading of 48.2 last month. A reading below 50 signals a contraction in factory activity.
Reuters
The Pentagon's next five-year budget proposal seeks over $13 billion in funding for a new submarine to carry nuclear ballistic missiles, plus orders for more Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin Corp fighter jets, according to sources familiar with the plans.
The plan also shifts the Navy's strategy for a new carrier-based unmanned drone to focus more on intelligence-gathering and refueling than combat strike missions, said the sources, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly before the budget's release.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter plans to map out his spending priorities for the $583 billion 2017 defense budget on Tuesday ahead of the official budget release on Feb. 9.
The Pentagon's plan will also underscore the need to fund all three legs of the U.S. strategic deterrent "triad" - a new Air Force bomber, a replacement for the Ohio-class submarines that carry nuclear weapons, and new nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, said one of the sources.
Reuters
Tension flared in the deeply divided town of Burns, Oregon, on Monday as 500 demonstrators on both sides of an armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge squared off, brandishing signs and yelling at each other days after one of the occupiers was shot dead by state police.
Only four people remain at the refuge after several were arrested or left last week.
Residents angered by the four-week presence of the armed occupiers and their supporters started crowding the streets in front of the Harney County Courthouse in late morning, seeking to serve as a counter-protest to a noon (2000 GMT) demonstration called at the courthouse by supporters of the occupation.
Shortly before noon, the mostly residential streets around the courthouse in this community of less than 3,000 had swelled with protesters - about 300 opposed to the occupiers and 200, some of them from out of town, in favor. Some of the demonstrators had sidearms.
NPR
In Flint, Mich., families are using bottled water to do everything — from cooking to bathing.
The tap water is still unsafe to drink after government officials allowed corroded lead pipes to poison the water.
People in Flint have lots of questions for those officials. Perhaps the biggest is the one Hattie Collins has.
"When are you gonna fix it? And I mean fix it right," she says.
On a recent day, Collins is distributing bottled water at Triumph Church in Flint. A massive 18-wheeler is parked in front of the church. It's from Columbus, Ohio. Two more trucks are arriving later in the day.
NPR
The Department of Justice announced today that it will review the San Francisco Police Department. The decision comes two months after officers fatally shot Mario Woods, a black man, in an incident captured on video.
Last week, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee asked for a federal probe into the death.
Member station KQED reported that police were "responding to a stabbing report in the city's Bayview neighborhood on Dec. 2 when they encountered and surrounded the 26-year-old Woods. Five officers shot and killed him after he appeared to raise an 8-inch knife and approach an officer, according to police."
Video footage, however, appears contradicts the police account, KQED reported.
WORLD NEWS
AFP
Driving to a Buddhist temple on the northern fringes of Bangkok, beauty salon owner Natsuda Jantaptim is running through her youngest daughter's likes and dislikes.
"We sleep in the same bed together, she has her own pillow and blankets," she told AFP, her daughter sitting quietly in the front passenger seat.
"We didn't switch the air-con on two nights ago because she was cold. In the morning, she likes to drink strawberry milk," she added.
On first reckoning, it sounds like the everyday observations of a dedicated mother.
…
She is a meticulously groomed plastic doll, part of the latest celebrity-fuelled superstitious craze that has swept the country -- much to the dismay of the kingdom's conservative military rulers.
NHK World
Myanmar's new parliament dominated by lawmakers from Aung San Suu Kyi's pro-democracy party convened for a historic opening session on Monday.
Win Myint, a senior member of the National League for Democracy, was chosen as speaker of the lower house. The NLD won a landslide victory in the general election last November.
A member of the military-backed party was named as the deputy speaker. The move is seen as a reconciliatory gesture toward the military by Aung San Suu Kyi ahead of the launch of the new government in March.
DW News
War crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria must be tried in court, said the UN's top rights official. His statement comes as peace talks struggle to gain ground, with a reluctant opposition insisting on its demands.
UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein said on Monday that a peace deal granting amnesty to both sides of the Syrian conflict should not include war crimes and crimes against humanity.
"In the case of Syria, we are there to remind everyone that where there are allegations that reach the threshold of war crimes or crimes against humanity that amnesties are not permissible," he said.
DW News
Leaders of the right-leaning AfD Party are under attack over their remarks arguing it was okay to shoot illegal migrants at German borders. A party deputy now explained the use of firearms against children was not okay.
Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Frauke Petry triggered outrage last week by suggesting police should have the right to shoot illegal migrants at the border "if necessary."
The idea was echoed by her deputy Beatrix von Storch. When she was asked on her Facebook page on Saturday whether German border guards should use weapons against illegal female refugees with children, she answered with a clear "yes."
But in the face of outrage across the political spectrum she decided to water down her comments:
"The use of firearms against children is not permitted," von Storch said, before adding that "women are a different matter."
"The use of weapons against them can therefore be permitted," she wrote "within the narrow legal framework.”
Spiegel Online
Chancellor Angela Merkel asked Turkey to help reduce the number of refugees coming to Europe. But instead of closing its Aegean coast to migrant smugglers, Ankara shut its border with Syria, making it difficult for those threatened by the war to leave.
Suddenly, the connection breaks off. Nadim Shami* presses the telephone against his ear and cries: "Maryam! Can you hear me?" He calls the number of the smugglers, but nobody answers. Nadim Shami is sitting in a teahouse in the town of Antakya, on the Turkish-Syrian border, and taps his fingers on the table. He's waiting for a sign that his wife is still alive. Four hours earlier, Maryam Shami had set off from a refugee camp in northwestern Syria together with her two sons Yasin and Mohammed and her daughter Samira.* A migrant smuggler brought the family to the Turkish border, where Maryam Shami and her children hid in the bushes until darkness fell. The last words Nadim Shami heard from his wife on the telephone were: "We're heading out."
The Guardian
In central Havana’s Parque Fe del Valle, at the end of a street bustling with the usual scenes of queues for the bakery and clapped-out 1950s cars weaving between piles of rubble, is a glimpse of a very different Cuba. Every bench, wall, dustbin and plant pot in this tree-lined square is occupied by bodies hunched over laptops and gathered around smartphones, as people swipe at tablets and gesticulate at their screens.
Three generations of one family are huddled around a phone, the children fighting over who gets to wear the headphones while the granny holds a baby up to the camera – so that relatives in Miami, who they haven’t seen for years, can inspect the family’s new arrival. Nearby, two brothers scroll through Facebook to check the latest enquiries for their bed-and-breakfast business, their laptop balanced on a makeshift desk of crates, while a gaggle of teenage girls stream music and practise dance moves under a tree.
The Guardian
As the use of drones increasingly worries everyone from fire fighters and air traffic control to law enforcement, Netherlands’ national police have aligned themselves with a group that hates flying robots on principal: the bald eagle.
Dutch police have joined forces with Guard From Above, a raptor-training security firm based in Denmark, to keep wayward drones from causing trouble by snatching them out of the sky.
Guard From Above’s chief executive officer Sjoerd Hoogendoorn described the project in a press release as “a low-tech solution for a high-tech problem.” He and the company’s chief operating officer, Ben de Keijzer, train birds of prey to catch unauthorized unmanned vehicles – Hoogendoorn’s background is in private security, de Keijzer’s is in bird handling and training.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
Climate Central
Parts of southern England and Wales were swamped with storm after storm after storm during the winter of 2013-2014, as roads turned into streams and fields into lakes. The relentless rains flooded thousands of homes and businesses and cost more than $700 million in damages.
It was both the wettest January and the wettest winter ever measured at the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford, which has kept daily precipitation records since 1767.
Climate change could mean England is in for more such extreme rainfall events because of increasing moisture in the atmosphere and changes in atmospheric weather patterns, a new study detailed online Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change finds.
The study is the first to take so-called event attribution a step further to investigate how warming has increased the risks of flooding impacts, finding that it has likely put more properties at risk and raised the costs of such an event.
Al Jazeera America
The World Health Organization is meeting in Geneva to discuss whether the Zika virus outbreak should be declared a global health emergency.
Monday's meeting comes after warnings by the UN health agency that the mosquito-borne virus, which is linked to birth defects that have affected thousands of infants across Latin America, was “spreading explosively.” WHO is expecting up to 4 million cases in the region this year.
Senior WHO officials, joined by representatives of affected countries and experts from around the globe, will meet behind closed doors to determine if Zika should be considered a public health emergency of international concern.
Tarik Jasarevic, a WHO spokesman, said that the meeting “will look really into what we know and will also see what level of health emergency this represents.”
Al Jazeera America
Scientists in Britain have been give the go-ahead to edit the genes of human embryos for research, using a technique that some say could eventually be used to create designer babies.
Less than a year after Chinese scientists caused an international furor by saying they had genetically modified human embryos, Kathy Niakan, a stem cell scientist from London's Francis Crick Institute, was granted a license to carry out similar experiments.
"The Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has approved a research application from the Francis Crick Institute to use new gene editing techniques on human embryos," Niakan's lab said on Monday.
The Guardian
Conservationists have announced the “amazing discovery” of a previously unknown lion population in a remote north-western region of Ethiopia, confirming local reports with camera trap photographs for the first time.
Lions were spotted in the Alatash national park on Ethiopia’s border with Sudan, lion conservation group Born Free said.
“The confirmation that lions persist in this area is exciting news,” Born Free Foundation said in a statement.
“With lion numbers in steep decline across most of the African continent, the discovery of previously unconfirmed populations is hugely important.”
Hans Bauer, a lion conservationist from Oxford University who led the tracking expedition in Ethiopia, said there could be up to 200 lions in the area.
“Considering the relative ease with which lion signs were observed, it is likely that they are resident throughout Alatash and Dinder [in Sudan],” he said.
The Guardian
The sound of Niagara Falls’ unmistakable belligerent roar as 85,000 cubic feet (2.4m liters) of water crash down to its rocky base every second quite literally takes one’s breath away.
But according to plans revealed on Wednesday, for the second time in history the falls may soon go silent. The manmade stoppage will last just a few months.
Two deteriorating, century-old commuter bridges connecting the town of Niagara Falls to the state park islands in the middle of the Falls themselves are in need of repair; a repair engineers and park officials say almost certainly involves diverting water flowing through the American part of the falls to the Canadian side.
The plans – still not finalized and still lacking funding – are being put forward by New York State offices of parks and transportation. They attracted national and international attention when they were first reported in the Buffalo News last week.
NPR
Praying for rain? You'll get (slightly) less when the moon is very high, a new study finds.
Scientists at the University of Washington say the moon's position impacts the amount of rainfall on Earth.
"As far as I know, this is the first study to convincingly connect the tidal force of the moon with rainfall," researcher Tsubasa Kohyama says in a press release from the university.
Kohyama and John Wallace, co-authors of the study published this week in Geophysical Research Letters, based their conclusions on 15 years' worth of data from NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission satellite.
NPR
Two E. coli outbreaks linked to Chipotle restaurants "appear to be over," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.
The first, larger outbreak hit 55 people in 11 states, with Washington having the most cases, the CDC says. The second outbreak, which was caused by a different strain of E. coli, infected five people in Oklahoma, Kansas and North Dakota.
The CDC says it last received a report of an illness related to the outbreaks on Dec. 1, 2015.
"The epidemiologic evidence collected during this investigation suggested that a common meal item or ingredient served at Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurants was a likely source of both outbreaks," the CDC says. However, the investigators were not able to determine the source of the infections.
NPR
If the advice to eat more fiber seems easy to ignore, you're not alone. Most Americans don't get the 25 to 38 grams a day that's recommended, depending on age and gender.
But if you're skimping on fiber, the health stakes are high, especially if you're a teenage girl.
A study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics concludes that eating lots of fiber-rich foods during high school years may significantly reduce a woman's risk of developing breast cancer.
The findings are based on a long-term study of 44,000 women who were surveyed about their eating habits in high school. The women also completed detailed questionnaires about their dietary habits every four years.
BBC
Indigenous tribes, timber firms and environmental groups in western Canada have welcomed a deal to protect one of the world's largest remaining tracts of temperate rainforest.
The Great Bear Rainforest on the Pacific coast of British Columbia is home to many animals and ancient trees.
Logging will be banned across a huge area of the forest.
Environmental campaigners say the deal is a model for resolving similar land-use disputes around the world.
The forest is inhabited by the spirit bear, a rare sub-species of the black bear with white fur, and is also home to 26 aboriginal groups, known as First Nations.