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 editor is annetteboardman.
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Al Jazeera America
There was less surprise in the announcement of the historic interim nuclear agreement between Iran and six world powers than there was in the revelation that Washington and Tehran have for months been holding regularly direct negotiations in secret. Those parallel talks, which are believed to have helped set the stage for the agreement concluded early Sunday in Geneva, suggest that a broader strategic shift may be on the cards to ease the bitter three-decade enmity between the U.S. and Iran – and that's a development that worries Washington's traditional allies in the Middle East.
“We have pursued intensive diplomacy – bilaterally with the Iranians, and together with our P5+1 partners: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and China, as well as the European Union,” President Barack Obama said at the White House Saturday. “Today, that diplomacy opened up a new path toward a world that is more secure – a future in which we can verify that Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful, and that it cannot build a nuclear weapon.”
Spiegel Online
Although German commentators applaud Iran's interim deal with the West to halt its nuclear program as a significant step forward, they also argue Tehran must now prove itself. The bulk of the sanctions must remain in place until a full agreement is reached, they say.
Iran The interim pact between Iran and the US, France, Germany, Britain, China and Russia runs for six months and halts Iran's higher-grade enrichment of uranium and the construction of the Arak heavy-water reactor. It also increases the frequency of United Nations inspections.and the West reached a deal on Sunday to curb the Iranian nuclear program in exchange for a loosening of sanctions, launching a rapprochement that could end a long standoff and avert the threat of war.
The Guardian
Congressional opponents of the US-Iran nuclear deal scrambled on Monday to attack the historic accord as inadequate and destined to fail, raising questions about the Obama administration’s ability to deliver on its potential diplomatic breakthrough.
Previewing a fight on Capitol Hill that will kick off in earnest when Congress returns next week, the administration faces a glut of critics, both Democrats and Republicans, who argue that President Obama is unravelling a hard-crafted regime of sanctions out of blind commitment for any deal, no matter how allegedly favorable to the Iranians.
Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican and leading Iran hawk, blasted the deal as “so far away from what the end game should look like”. He told CNN that the goal of any deal “should be to stop enrichment".
Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who chairs the Senate foreign relations committee, said in a statement: “This agreement did not proportionately reduce Iran’s nuclear program."
Pushing back against a congealing narrative, Tony Blinken, the deputy national security adviser, told NPR on Monday that the deal “is a good deal because for the first time in a decade, it halts Iran’s program, and indeed it rolls it back in certain key respects”.
McClatchy
GENEVA — Iran and six world powers announced early Sunday that they had reached an interim agreement that would for the first time roll back portions of Iran’s nuclear program. In return, some economic sanctions against Iran would be eased.
President Barack Obama hailed the accord, calling it an important first step toward a comprehensive agreement to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
“For the first time in nearly a decade, we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear program, and key parts of the program will be rolled back,” Obama said in a hastily arranged six-minute speech that he delivered from the White House after 10:30 p.m.
NPR
The track record for Middle East diplomacy is pretty dismal, yet this is where President Obama is playing all his important diplomatic cards.
With the interim deal on Iran's nuclear program, the president is now engaged in his fifth major diplomatic initiative in five contiguous countries stretching from Afghanistan in the east to Israel in the west.
Obama has spoken frequently about focusing more U.S. attention on Asia, but time and again, he is drawn back to the Middle East. Overall, these efforts are still playing out, and it's too early to judge success or failure. But after nearly five years in office, the president's legacy on foreign policy will likely to be determined by what ultimately happens in this volatile swath of territory.
The Iranian deal announced in Geneva early Sunday effectively freezes Iran's nuclear program. Now comes the bigger challenge of negotiating a permanent agreement over the next six months that locks into place safeguards against an Iranian nuclear weapon.
This is just one of several diplomatic developments over the past few days that included news on the future of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the Syrian civil war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Here's a running scorecard on the president's diplomatic moves:
New York Times
WASHINGTON — For President Obama, whose popularity and second-term agenda have been ravaged by the chaotic rollout of the health care law, the preliminary nuclear deal reached with Iran on Sunday is more than a welcome change of subject.
It is also a seminal moment — one that thrusts foreign policy to the forefront in a White House preoccupied by domestic woes, and one that presents Mr. Obama with the chance to chart a new American course in the Middle East for the first time in more than three decades.
Much will depend, of course, on whether the United States and the other major powers ever reach a final agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions. Mr. Obama himself said Saturday night that it “won’t be easy, and huge challenges remain ahead.”
MSNBC
At a certain level, international diplomacy with Iran and a first-in-a-generation breakthrough constitute the worst possible scenario for U.S. neoconservatives. Their vision dictates that change can come to the Middle East, but only through military force – and the more diplomacy and the search for peaceful solutions makes force unlikely, the more it must be rejected.
And with this in mind, it’s understandable that neocons are even more agitated than usual this morning. With P5+1 – the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, plus Germany – having reached a preliminary agreement with Iran, the entire neocon vision is facing a historic repudiation. Michael Tomasky noted this morning that among neocons, “there is contemplation of the hideous reality that Obama and the path of negotiation just might work. This is the thing the neocons can’t come to terms with at all. If Obama succeeds here, their entire worldview is discredited. Check that; even more discredited.”
New York Times
NEWTOWN, Conn. — Four days before Adam Lanza went on a shooting rampage at a Connecticut elementary school, his mother, Nancy, cooked him some of his favorite meals and then left for a three-day trip to New Hampshire.
On the day before the shooting, a GPS device he owned showed that he took a trip to the area around Sandy Hook Elementary School.
However, after an 11-month investigation, the Connecticut State Police could not determine a motive behind one of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings, according to a 48-page report released on Monday.
The report, which had long been anticipated, was issued by Stephen J. Sedensky III, the state’s attorney in Danbury, and was heavily redacted. It was drawn from the file of the investigation, some 2,000 pages, according to law enforcement officials.
Al Jazeera America
Civil rights activists are calling on prosecutors to file felony hate-crime charges against four white students accused of harassing a black student at San Jose State University in California.
NAACP leaders are urging Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen to bring felony charges against the white students, who currently face misdemeanor hate-crime and battery charges.
"This is not simple hazing or bullying. This is obviously racially based terrorism targeted at their African-American roommate," Reverend Jethroe Moore II, president of the San Jose/Silicon Valley NAACP said in a statement Saturday. "The community will not stand idly by and allow for any student of color to be terrorized simply due to the color of his skin."
Al Jazeera America
SEATTLE — Kshama Sawant, Seattle's new socialist City Council member, bears little resemblance to the conventional image of a modern U.S. politician whose appearance — and policies — are often burnished by legions of advisers and focus groups.
A small, whip-smart Indian-American woman in faded jeans with a makeup-free face, she holds a Ph.D. in economics and was an early participant in the Occupy protest movement.
Sawant is not shy about her left-wing party affiliation — despite America’s modern habit of reacting with extreme hostility to the word "socialism," which is freely demonized on the right and treated with extreme caution even in progressive circles.
Yet Sawant is a clear exception. She told Al Jazeera that she was already going against convention by siding with the groups she sees as typically shut out of the political conversation — low-wage workers, women, immigrants and people of color — and so chose to identify her socialist affiliation to gain distance from a two-party system she sees as broken.
Now, having won office with a surprise result that captured national headlines, she is triumphant in tone and feels that being a socialist in America is not necessarily a ticket to electoral disaster, as it has been so many times in the past.
Al Jazeera America
A school superintendent and three others have been charged by a grand jury that investigated whether other laws were broken in the rape of a 16-year-old West Virginia girl last year in Steubenville, Ohio, the state's attorney general announced Monday.
The special grand jury convened in Steubenville had investigated whether adults like coaches or school administrators knew of the rape allegation but failed to report it as required by state law.
The charges against the superintendent, Mike McVey, include felony counts of obstructing justice, Attorney General Mike DeWine said.
An elementary school principal, Lynnett Gorman, 40, and a strength coach, Seth Fluharty, 26, are charged with failing to report possible child abuse. A former volunteer coach, Matthew Bellardine, 26, faces several misdemeanor charges, including making false statements and contributing to underage alcohol consumption. It wasn't immediately clear if any of them had attorneys.
"This community has been torn apart by the actions and bad decisions, not of the many, but rather, of the few," DeWine said at a news conference Monday.
McClatchy
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency’s collection of information on Americans’ cellphone and Internet usage reaches far beyond the two programs that have received public attention in recent months, to a presidential order that is older than the Internet itself.
Approved by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Executive Order 12333 (referred to as “twelve-triple-three”) still governs most of what the NSA does. It is a sweeping mandate that outlines the duties and foreign intelligence collection for the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies. It is not governed by Congress, and critics say it has little privacy protection and many loopholes. What changes have been made to it have come through guidelines set by the attorney general or other documents
Bloomberg
Pam Renshaw had just crashed her four-wheeler into a bonfire in rural Folkston, Georgia, and her skin was getting seared in the flames. Her boyfriend, Billy Chavis, pulled her away and struggled to dial 911 before driving her to the nearest place he could think of for medical attention: an ambulance station more than 20 miles away.
The local public hospital, 9 miles from the crash, had closed six weeks earlier because of budget shortfalls resulting from Obamacare and Georgia’s decision not to expand Medicaid. The ambulances Chavis sought were taking other patients to the next closest hospital. It took two hours before Renshaw, in pain from second- and third-degree burns on almost half her body, was flown to a hospital in Florida.
At least five public hospitals closed this year and many more are scaling back services, mostly in states where Medicaid wasn’t expanded. Patients in areas with shuttered hospitals must travel as far as 40 miles (64 kilometers) to get care, causing delays that can result in lethal consequences, said Bruce Siegel, chief executive officer of America’s Essential Hospitals, a Washington-based advocacy group for facilities that treat large numbers of uninsured or low-income patients.
Bloomberg
A wintry storm that grounded hundreds of flights across the U.S. South will combine with another system to bring rain and gusty winds to the Northeast in the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday travel rush.
Heavy rain will reach the East Coast starting tomorrow, with snow forecast for the Appalachians, said Rob Carolan, owner of Hometown Forecast Services in Nashua, New Hampshire.
“The I-95 corridor is going to see a lot of rain and a lot of wind and that will be true from the mid-Atlantic states all the way up to Boston and Portland,” Carolan said. “This is not going to be a snowstorm for the megalopolis.”
Reuters
An international peace conference aimed at ending Syria's civil war will be held on January 22, the first face-to-face talks between the government of President Bashar al-Assad and rebels seeking to overthrow him, the United Nations said on Monday.
The United Nations is hoping for a peaceful transition in Syria, building on an agreement between world powers reached in June last year in Geneva.
"We have a clear goal," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters in New York.
That was the "full implementation of the Geneva Communique of 30 June 2012", including the establishment of a transitional governing body with full executive powers, including over military and security entities.
Ban said nothing about who had been invited to the talks and took no questions from reporters.
The participation of Syria's ally Iran in the peace conference has been a major stumbling block as Washington has opposed it, while Russia has backed Tehran's attendance.
The Guardian
tEimear Cook, the ex-wife of golfing star Colin Montgomerie was accused of repeatedly lying under oath about a lunch with Rebekah Brooks in which she claimed the former News International chief excutive had told her how easy it was to hack phones.
In a tense and prolonged exchange at the Old Bailey on Monday, counsel for Brooks said Cook had fabricated parts of her witness statement to the police, including a claim that the former publishing boss had told her about an assault on her ex-husband Ross Kemp.
Brooks' counsel Jonathan Laidlaw, QC, asked her had she done this to increase the compensation she received as part of a civil claim she made against News International for phone hacking.
"Is that why you made things up?" he asked. "To get more money as a result in the settlement?".
She "categorically" denied she had lied on oath. "I have no reason to lie," she said.
Cook, who was married to the former European Ryder Cup team captain for 14 years from 1990, met Brooks at the suggestion of friends after finding herself the subject of press intrusion following the break up of her marriage, she said.
The Guardian
Egypt's interim president, Adly Mansour, has enacted a new protest law that rights groups say will severely curtail freedom of assembly, and could prohibit the kinds of mass demonstrations that forced presidents Hosni Mubarak and Mohamed Morsi from power.
The law will force would-be protesters to seek seven separate permissions to take to the streets, and bans overnight sit-ins such as the Tahrir Square protests of early 2011. Activists will have to go to court to appeal against any rejected applications – a restriction lawyers argue will render legal demonstration almost impossible.
The law also bans any unsanctioned gatherings – either in public or in private – of 10 or more people, and will give the police the final say on whether a protest can take place. As a result, the law is deemed just as restrictive as a similar protest bill debated and later discarded under Morsi, whose own authoritarian instincts contributed to his downfall. His version – which was written by the same official – would have made demonstrators seek five separate permissions, instead of seven, but outlined more draconian punishments.
The series of eruptions has forced villagers to flee their homes
BBC
Indonesian officials have raised the alert for the Mount Sinabung volcano in North Sumatra to the highest level.
The status was raised from "stand-by" to "caution" - the highest alert for volcanic activity - on Sunday.
People have also been warned to stay at least 5km (3 miles) from the crater.
Mt Sinabung has been showing signs of life since September, after being dormant for three years. Over the weekend, it shot ash and rocks far into the air, prompting the alert move.
More than 15,000 villagers in the area had already been moved to temporary shelters, disaster management officials said in a statement.
Airlines have also been advised not to fly near the area.
DW
Thai police say about 30,000 protesters marched on more than a dozen state agencies across the capital, Bangkok, on Monday, in an escalating anti-government campaign to topple Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra's government.
Hundreds of demonstrators, spurred on by former opposition lawmaker Suthep Thaugsuban, also stormed the compounds of the Finance Ministry and Foreign Ministry.
Addressing the crowd through a loudspeaker, Suthep said, "Tomorrow we will seize all ministries to show to the Thaksin system that they have no legitimacy to run the country."
Monday's rally comes one day after about 100,000 peaceful anti- and pro-government demonstrators marched in Bangkok, the largest rally Thailand has seen in three years.
Organizers estimated that by Sunday evening the crowd had grown closer to 400,000 people, many of whom came from the south, where the opposition Democratic Party enjoys strong support.
Protesters say they want Yingluck to step down amid claims that her government is controlled by her brother, ousted leader Thaksin Shinawatra.
SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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NPR
Well, it looks like a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles has taken the whole DIY fermentation idea to an entirely new level.
Microbiologist Christina Agapakis teamed up with the artist Sissel Tolaas to create cheese using the microbes that grow on their skin. They also made selfie fromage for food writer Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and other titles, and the artist Olafur Eliasson.
The curious curds currently live at the Science Gallery, at Trinity College in Dublin, where visitors are encouraged to sniff — but, thankfully, not eat — the displays.
"People were really nervous and uncomfortable, and kind of making these grossed out faces," Agapakis says about visitors to her exhibit. "Then they smell the cheese, and they'll realize that it just smells like a normal cheese."
NPR
Lots of studies have shown that cigarette smoke isn't good for a fetus. So many pregnant women use nicotine gum or skin patches or inhalers to help them stay away from cigarettes.
A few years ago, Megan Stern became one of those women. "I smoked heavily for the first seven weeks of my pregnancy because I didn't know I was pregnant," she says. "It was an accidental pregnancy and I found out while I was in the emergency room for another issue."
Stern, who lives in Massachusetts, was 21 at the time and had been smoking since she was 14. So she spoke with an attending physician at the hospital about quitting. "I said, 'I want to, but I'm afraid I'll mess up and I won't be able to do it,' " Stern says. "He suggested that I use the patch and prescribed it for me."
No one knows exactly how many women use nicotine replacement therapy during pregnancy. But the number is probably large. Each year, more than 500,000 babies in the U.S. are born to women who smoked while they were pregnant. And surveys show that up to 30 percent of doctors offer nicotine replacement to pregnant women who smoke.
CNET
Want a better camera on your Android device? Google does, too.
For that reason, the company has overhauled the mobile OS's plumbing. Google has built deep into Android support for two higher-end photography features -- raw image formats and burst mode -- and could expose those features so that programmers could tap into them, the company said.
Evidence of raw and burst-mode photos in the Android source code surfaced earlier in November, but Google has now commented on the technology. Specifically, spokeswoman Gina Scigliano said the support is now present in Android's hardware abstraction layer (HAL), the part of the operating system that handles communications with a mobile device's actual hardware.
CNET
Ever since developers got their hands on Google Glass earlier this year, software coders have clamored for greater access to the programming internals of the controversial headset. Google accommodated them this week -- albeit to the sound of muted applause.
To be sure, Google's Glass Development Kit (GDK) does fill in a key puzzle piece that had been missing from Google Glass. Yet many developers are worried. They say that in the absence of more leadership or more access from Google, they're being asked to figure out the final picture on their own -- knowing that it might change by the time Glass gets mass produced.
The Glass Development Kit preview released by Google opens up many of the options that had been absent from the developer's toolbox. Previously, developers had only been able to code for Glass' limited Mirror API.
New York Times
Terroir is a concept at the heart of French winemaking, but one so mysterious that the word has no English counterpart. It denotes the holistic combination of soil, geology, climate and local grape-growing practices that make each region’s wine unique.
There must be something to terroir, given that expert wine tasters can often identify the region from which a wine comes. But American wine growers have long expressed varying degrees of skepticism about this ineffable concept, some dismissing it as unfathomable mysticism and others regarding it as a shrewd marketing ploy to protect the cachet of French wines.
Now American researchers may have penetrated the veil that hides the landscape of terroir from clear view, at least in part. They have seized on a plausible aspect of terroir that can be scientifically measured — the fungi and bacteria that grow on the surface of the grape wine.