Sacramento Bee:
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday signed a bill that will let students who entered the country illegally receive private financial aid at California's public colleges, even as debate continues over a more contentious bill that would allow access to public funding.
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"It's crucial that we invest in every child that lives and is born in this state. Signing this Dream Act is another piece of investment in people because people drives the culture, the economy," Brown told a crowd of about 100 students and community leaders who gathered inside the city college's library. "This is another piece of a very important mosaic which is a California that works for everyone."
The governor did not address the second bill in the package, which is more contentious because it would allow illegal immigrants to receive state-funded scholarships and financial aid. That bill, AB131, is in the state Senate.
Welcome to the Overnight News Digest
The OND is published each night around midnight, Eastern Time.
The originator of OND was Magnifico.
Current Contributors are ScottyUrb, Bentliberal, wader, Oke, rfall, JML9999 and NeonVincent who also serves as chief cat herder.
Stories and Headlines
- Giant White House Meeting
WASHINGTON, July 25 (UPI) -- The San Francisco Giants Monday were at the White House Monday for the perk afforded national sports champions -- a chance to meet the president.
Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson
The 2010 World Series winners received praise from President Barack Obama and in return gave him a jersey (No. 44), a bat signed by team members and a glove, accented not with the Giants' colors but silver and black -- those of the White Sox in Obama's home town of Chicago.
Obama congratulated Bill Neukom, head of team's ownership group, and club President Larry Baer "for building such an extraordinary franchise."
Obama noted it had been 56 years since San Francisco had won the World Series, back when Willie Mays, who also attended Monday's festivities, was on the team, and that even current Manager Bruce Bochy had once called his team "a bunch of 'misfits and castoffs.'"
Politico - San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee, California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta were among those in the audience. (Newsom and Feinstein are both former mayors of San Francisco.)
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- Giants fan's alleged attackers appear in court
sfgate.com (07-25) 12:14 PDT LOS ANGELES --Two men charged in the near-fatal beating of Giants fan Bryan Stow after an Opening Day ballgame at Dodger Stadium made their first court appearance today.
Louie Alex Sanchez, 29, and 30-year-old Marvin Eugene Norwood - who are close friends and neighbors in the San Bernardino County city of Rialto, about an hour east of Los Angeles - appeared briefly in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Each is charged with three felonies: mayhem, assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury and battery.
Sanchez is also charged with misdemeanor battery stemming from an attack on two unnamed Giants fans at Dodger Stadium that same night. The men are being held on $500,000 bail each.
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Stow, a 42-year-old paramedic from Santa Cruz, has been hospitalized since the attack. He underwent emergency surgery last week at San Francisco General Hospital after fluid built up in his brain during a seizure.d>
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- Drug prices to plummet in wave of expiring patents
07-25) 07:55 PDT (AP) --The cost of prescription medicines used by millions of people every day is about to plummet.
The next 14 months will bring generic versions of seven of the world's 20 best-selling drugs, including the top two: cholesterol fighter Lipitor and blood thinner Plavix.
The magnitude of this wave of expiring drugs patents is unprecedented. Between now and 2016, blockbusters with about $255 billion in global annual sales will go off patent, notes EvaluatePharma Ltd., a London research firm. Generic competition will decimate sales of the brand-name drugs and slash the cost to patients and companies that provide health benefits.
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- Avoid voice-mail hacking with password
sfgate.com - Hacking implies technological prowess, but in fact, there seems to have been very little actual hacking involved in the shenanigans perpetrated by News of the World staffers in pursuit of sordid gossip. I suspect most of the time they simply exploited a feature that lets mobile phone users access their voice mail remotely, from other phones.
Many mobile phone carriers don't require a password for voice mail, and many users don't bother to create one, thinking their voice mail is secure as long as they don't lose their phone. Au contraire! If you call a mobile phone number and get a voice mail greeting, accessing the voice mail system is usually as simple as pressing the star button on your phone. If there is no password, you can listen to the person's voice mail.T
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- Immigration: Brown signs (half of) Dream Act
latimes.com - On Monday, Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB 130, the bill that allows undocumented immigrant students attending California state colleges or universities to apply for scholarships funded by private donors. Three previous attempts at similar bills failed or were vetoed.
AB 131 doesn't guarantee students access to additional funds nor state aid. A companion bill, AB 131, remains stuck in the Senate. That bill would allow illegal immigrants to apply for state loans and grants.
Brown's decision is sure to stir strong reaction. Opponents argue that AB130 rewards and encourages illegal immigration, while supporters say it allows those students who had no say in how they were brought to the U.S. access to a college degree. Brown signed the bill during a stop at the Los Angeles City College Library,
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UPDATE: The article from the Sacramento Bee might be a bit better:
SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- Gov. Jerry Brown on Monday signed a bill that will let students who entered the country illegally receive private financial aid at California's public colleges, even as debate continues over a more contentious bill that would allow access to public funding.
,,,
"It's crucial that we invest in every child that lives and is born in this state. Signing this Dream Act is another piece of investment in people because people drives the culture, the economy," Brown told a crowd of about 100 students and community leaders who gathered inside the city college's library. "This is another piece of a very important mosaic which is a California that works for everyone."
The governor did not address the second bill in the package, which is more contentious because it would allow illegal immigrants to receive state-funded scholarships and financial aid. That bill, AB131, is in the state Senate.
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More News
- Kentucky Sues McKesson Corp. over Medicaid Drug Prices
Mike Wynn,courier-journal.com
FRANKFORT, Ky. – Attorney General Jack Conway alleged in a lawsuit Monday that drug wholesaler McKesson Corp. conspired with a price data service to illegally inflate the drug reimbursements paid out through state Medicaid.
McKesson — the largest drug distributor nationwide — plotted with First DataBank to distort pricing information on more than 1,800 brand-name prescription drugs over the past decade, the suit alleges.
The scheme allowed pharmacies to reap higher profits, but Medicaid made up the difference, overpaying for drugs by tens of millions of dollars, according to the Attorney General's office.>
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- California pot sellers pursue higher prices in other states, face arrest
California Watch - Police outside California say more and more marijuana is drifting into their territory – as the Golden State’s burgeoning medical marijuana trade has pushed down prices here and prompted growers to seek more lucrative business across the country.
In a recent string of high-profile arrests in places like Michigan, Ohio, Utah and Illinois, Californians have been caught with large hauls of marijuana. Kansas highway patrol officers also recently arrested two men from California after a traffic stop yielded $260,000 worth of pot.
“The whole United States has seen marijuana that’s being grown in California being transported all over the country for sale,” said Kirk Simone, a recently retired lieutenant who worked with the Kansas Highway Patrol for 30 years. “We’ve seized anywhere from 750 pounds down to one pound. It’s not uncommon to find hundreds of pounds.”
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- Norway Suspect Denies Guilt and Suggests He Did Not Act Alone
nytimes OSLO — Anders Behring Breivik, the anti-immigrant extremist who is charged in the bombing and shooting rampage in his native Norway, told a judge on Monday that he did it to save the country from ruin, denied that he was guilty of any crime and hinted for the first time that he had collaborators.
Mr. Breivik’s remarks at a closed-door custody hearing were relayed by the judge, Kim Heger, at a news conference. The police said later they were not ruling out the possibility that Mr. Breivik’s claim of accomplices, which he described as “two more cells” in an organization he called Knights Templar, was accurate. But they also noted that he had previously told them he had acted alone.
Some security analysts, like Tore Bjorgo, a professor at the Norwegian Police University College and an expert on right-wing extremism, were also skeptical, questioning whether the Knights Templar organization that Mr. Breivik claimed in his manifesto to have helped form in 2002 really existed or was simply an effort to claim a more elaborate history and role.
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- Lawsuit Says Drugs Were Wasted to Buoy Profit
By ANDREW POLLACK, nytimes.com
One of the nation’s largest providers of kidney dialysis deliberately wasted medicine in order to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in extra payments from Medicare, a former clinic nurse and a doctor are charging in a whistle-blower lawsuit.
The lawsuit says that the company, DaVita, used larger than necessary vials of medicine knowing that Medicare would pay for the unused portion of each vial if it were deemed unavoidable waste. DaVita, which treats nearly a third of the nation’s dialysis patients, denies the accusations.
The accusations are the latest related to how financial incentives may have driven overuse of pharmaceuticals in the dialysis business. In January, Medicare began a payment system that pays for the overall treatment and does not pay separately for the drugs accompanying it. Many practices, including the size of some vials used, suddenly changed, providing an instant case study of how financial incentives can influence treatment choices.
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- Plan for Greece Favors Creditors
Reuters Breakingviews (Opinion)
A deal was better than a disaster. But last week’s plan to rescue Greece has the astonishing byproduct of increasing the country’s debts. It also lets private creditors off lightly while making taxpayers elsewhere in the euro zone pay through the nose. It doesn’t even mean the end of the crisis.
True, the sustainability of Greek debt has been improved. Greece’s government will receive 109 billion euros of new 15- to 30-year loans from the euro zone at an interest rate of 3.5 percent. Private sector creditors will swap or roll over 135 billion euros of existing bonds into new, longer-term instruments.
But this private sector involvement comes at a huge cost. Because the European Central Bank put the fear of God into politicians about the consequences of a Greek default, private creditors have been handled with kid gloves. Though they are going to suffer 21 percent losses compared to the face value of their bonds (assuming a 9 percent discount rate), it’s much less than the 50 percent haircut that is needed to put Greece’s finances on a stable footing.
What’s more, the financial fiddling used to corral the creditors actually means Greece’s debt will rise. This is mainly because Athens will need to borrow 35 billion euros to buy collateral to partly guarantee the new bonds it will give its creditors. /td>
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- Gawker Files Suit, and News of a Dinner is Shared
nytimes media decoder blog - In apparent reaction to a lawsuit filed by Gawker and the American Civil Liberties Union, the office of the New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, on Monday released a record of a meeting last year between Mr. Christie and Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News Channel.
John Cook, a reporter for Gawker, had filed the suit to inquire into Mr. Ailes’s relationship with Mr. Christie as part of a series of stories about the political engagement of Mr. Ailes and his cable news channel. He asserted in an interview that Mr. Ailes, a former Republican strategist, continued to act in that capacity informally and behind the scenes.
The suit came about after Mr. Christie’s office resisted Mr. Cook’s request for public records of any meetings, phone calls or correspondence between the governor and Mr. Ailes.
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- Mass rallies for Norway victims
BBC - 25 July 2011 Last updated at 20:54 ET
Torchlit processions have been held in towns and cities across Norway to remember the victims of Friday's twin attacks by Anders Behring Breivik.
Crown Prince Haakon told 100,000 people gathered in Oslo that "tonight the streets are filled with love".
Earlier Mr Breivik appeared in court, accepting responsibility for the attacks but denying terrorism charges.
Police have reduced the death toll of the massacre at an island youth camp and bombing in Oslo from 93 to 76.
'Affected us all'
Scores of thousands of Norwegians poured on to the streets of the capital in the early evening, many of them raising up flowers in memory of the eight people killed in the Oslo blast and 68 now known to have died
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