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 with guest editors annetteboardman 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.
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DW News
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has pressed other European Union nations to do more to share the burden of this year's influx of migrants. Germany has taken more asylum-seekers than any other EU country.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the refugee crisis facing Europe was testing the core ideals about universal rights at the heart of the European Union. She added that the migrant crisis presented Germany with a major challenge that would not be resolved anytime soon, urging citizens to show flexibility and patience.
"We stand before a huge national challenge. That will be a central challenge not only for days or months but for a long period of time," Merkel said during a major press conference in Berlin, marking the end of parliament's summer break.
Al Jazeera America
Refugees packed on a crowded train destined for Vienna were detained in sweltering carriages for hours Monday, as a security clampdown on Austria’s border with Hungary underscored the crisis facing Europe and tested the EU’s commitment to free movement among member states.
The passenger train was eventually allowed to proceed and arrived in Vienna shortly after, but elsewhere logjams continued. Austria’s crackdown on people smugglers also involved increased vehicle inspections, creating a huge traffic backup on the main Budapest-Vienna highway.
The developments in Austria came as German Chancellor Angela Merkel called on European Union member states to "share responsibility for asylum-seeking refugees," saying that the future of the EU’s Schengen system — which allows for passport-free travel — would be in question if Europe fails to act.
Under EU laws, asylum seekers are required to apply in the first member country they enter — under such rules many of the recent influx of people fleeing war and poverty would have been expected to apply in Hungary.
Spiegel Online
Anger is in the air. Angela Merkel has come to Heidenau and the locals are lined up to see her. But it is anything but a friendly welcome: It is a crowd full of hate. Some call out: "Traitor to Your People!" Others yell "We Are the Pack," a reference to Deputy Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel's strong condemnation of right-wing, anti-refugee demonstrators.
It is the pride of idiots. After the chancellor disappears into the former building supplies store, where 400 refugees have found shelter, the residents of the small Saxony town begin talking about the outsiders who have become their temporary neighbors."Did you see the young men? Full of hormones and with nothing sensible to do. They can't help but get dumb ideas," says one tanned pensioner wearing a bike helmet. A woman nods and says she no longer allows her granddaughter to walk past the building supplies store alone.
The Guardian
Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, has pressed other EU countries to do more to share the burden of refugees arriving in Europe, and said “it wasn’t right” that some nations were refusing to accept them.
Merkel said the current situation, which has seen chaotic scenes in the western Balkans as tens of thousands of refugees and migrants head north towards Austria and Germany, was “not satisfactory”. She said that Europe as a whole had to deal with the problem.
Speaking at her summer press conference in Berlin on Monday, Merkel renewed her call for a new quota system to be introduced. It would see applications from asylum seekers shared out among the 28-nation bloc. The Franco-German proposal would be discussed on 14 September at a meeting of EU interior ministers, she said.
Reuters
Trains carrying hundreds of migrants started arriving in Vienna on Monday after Austrian authorities appeared to give up trying to apply European Union rules by filtering out refugees who had already claimed asylum in Hungary.
In the latest twist in a humanitarian and political crisis that is now testing the survival of both Europe's open-border regime and its asylum rules, Hungary allowed the migrants, many of them fleeing Syria's civil war, to cram into at least four trains leaving Budapest for Austria or Germany.
Many of the refugees arriving in Vienna railway station on Monday evening immediately raced to board trains heading on to Germany, as policemen looked on passively, preferring not to intervene, witnesses said.
A train also arrived in Munich from Budapest on Monday evening. German police said there were about 200 on board.
NPR
Kim Davis, the Rowan County clerk in Kentucky who has repeatedly refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, lost her bid for a stay Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court denied her application.
As is often the case in such rejections, the decision came without comment: "The application for stay presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court is denied."
The court's one-line order did not mention whether any justices dissented.The request for a stay stems from a lawsuit that was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of four couples who say in their complaint that Davis "adopted a policy and/or practice of refusing to issue marry licenses to any couple, same-sex or different-sex, even though they are otherwise legally entitled to marry."
New York Times
WASHINGTON — For years, Republicans have run for office on promises of cutting taxes and bolstering business to stimulate economic growth, pledging allegiance to a Reaganesque model of conservatism that has largely become the party’s orthodoxy.
But this election cycle, the Republican presidential candidate who currently leads in most polls is taking a different approach, and it is jangling the nerves of some of the party’s most traditional supporters.
The tendency of that candidate, the billionaire developer Donald J. Trump, to make provocative, headline-grabbing speeches has helped obscure an emerging set of beliefs: that he would raise taxes in certain areas, particularly on corporations that he believes do not act in the best interests of the United States.
In recent weeks, Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on American companies that put their factories in other countries. He has threatened to increase taxes on the compensation of hedge fund managers. And he has vowed to change laws that allow American companies to benefit from cheaper tax rates by using mergers to base their operations outside the United States.
The Guardian
Last-minute settlement talks between lawyers for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady have failed, leaving a judge to decide the fate of the Deflategate scandal.
The judge had ordered both to show up for the conference before he rules whether Brady must serve a four-game suspension imposed by the league for his role in a conspiracy to use underinflated footballs during a playoff game last season.
The NFL wants confirmation it handled the case appropriately while the NFL Players Association wants the suspension nullified.
The Guardian
On Sunday, the Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker said the building of a wall on the United States’ border with Canada was “a legitimate issue for us to look at”.
Despite the novelty value of proposing a wall along the 49th parallel, and the controversy that Walker’s comment has already prompted on both sides of the border, the Wisconsin governor was addressing an increasingly familiar refrain on the contentious election issue of immigration.
Politicians in the US have long dreamt of constructing a barrier on the nation’s southern border, to keep out illegal immigrants from Mexico and points southward. But some academics and Republican politicians argue that such a concept – to erect a physical blockade as successful politics – may be ineffective.
The Guardian
A law professor who published an inflammatory article urging attacks on law professors and “Islamic holy sites” and who has been dogged by accusations of misrepresenting his academic and military credentials has resigned from the US Military Academy at West Point, the Guardian has confirmed.
A law professor who published an inflammatory article urging attacks on law professors and “Islamic holy sites” and who has been dogged by accusations of misrepresenting his academic and military credentials has resigned from the US Military Academy at West Point, the Guardian has confirmed.
Although West Point hired William C Bradford on 1 August, a spokesman said the prestigious undergraduate institution where the US army educates its future officers parted ways with the controversial academic on Sunday, the day after the Guardian published an article highlighting Bradford’s proposals to treat US scholars as “enemy combatants”.
“Dr William Bradford resigned on Sunday,” army lieutenant colonel Christopher Kasker, a West Point spokesman, told the Guardian on Monday. Bradford had taught five lessons for cadets in a common-core law course, from 17 to 27 August.
The West Point resignation marks the most recent academic departure for the controversial Bradford, following a decade’s worth of apparent exaggeration of his service record and academic career.
It remains unclear how thoroughly West Point vetted Bradford before hiring him.
The Guardian
The death of a man at a jail in Texas earlier this month was caused in part by sheriff’s deputies restraining him and one placing his knee on the man’s back and throat, authorities in Dallas said on Monday.
Joseph Hutcheson, who suffered from a heart condition and had consumed illegal drugs, died on 1 August of a homicide, according to the Dallas County medical examiner’s office.
It attributed his death in the lobby of the county jail to the “combined toxic effects of cocaine and methamphetamine compounded by hypertensive cardiovascular disease associated with struggle and restraint”. The office declined to elaborate on its findings.
A spokesperson for the sheriff’s office declined to comment on the medical examiner’s initial findings Monday morning. Sheriff Lupe Valdez expects the internal investigation into the incident to be completed within the next two weeks, according to the spokesperson.
NPR
The phrase "police militarization" conjures up an image of cops wrapped in Kevlar, barging into homes with semi-automatic weapons. But familiar as that image is, we don't know how common it is. There are simply no good statistics on police tactical operations in America. The federal government doesn't keep track, and neither do the states — with one exception: Utah.
The pressure to start counting the operations there dates back to 2012, after a drug raid gone wrong in Ogden. A tactical team from the local drug task force had gone into a little house where marijuana was being grown. But they ran into gunfire. In the chaos, five officers were hurt, and one was killed. The resident, Matthew Stewart, later said he thought he was being robbed.
Three-and-a-half years later, his father, Michael Stewart, dressed in a Second Amendment-themed T-shirt, sits across from the house, recalling the aftermath.
BBC
The White House says President Barack Obama is considering "a wide array" of options for closing the controversial US military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Spokesman Josh Earnest said winning Congress approval to close the jail would be the best option.
But he did not rule out executive action as a means to shut it down.
President Obama is determined to shut down the prison before the end of his term in 2017, but faces bipartisan opposition in Congress.
The US has slowly been sending prisoners back to their home countries or to third countries. Just 116 inmates currently remain compared to the prison's peak population of 684 in 2003.
But closing the prison would likely require the transfer of some Guantanamo inmates to jails within the US, a measure that has already been banned by Congress.
BBC
US President Barack Obama will trek through the wilderness in Alaska this week with British TV adventurer Bear Grylls, the NBC channel has announced.
He is due to tape an episode of Running Wild with Bear Grylls to observe the effects of climate change on the area, it said.
He is the first president to appear on the show, to be aired later this year.
President Obama is on a three-day tour of Alaska aimed at highlighting the pace of climate change.
It is part of his administration's efforts to build support for new legislation significantly capping carbon dioxide emissions from power plants in the US, as well as raise attention to the ways climate change has damaged Alaska's natural landscape.
Vox
The area around the mountain is inhabited by the Koyukon people, an Athabascan-speaking group of native Alaskans. Their traditional name for the mountain is Denali, or "tall," fitting for the tallest peak in North America. When Alaska was under Russian rule, the mountain was known as Bolshaya Gora — "big mountain" — essentially a Russian translation of "Denali."
In the 1880s and 1890s, white mountaineers briefly began referring to the mountain as Densmore's Mountain, after Frank Densmore, the first white explorer to reach the base of the mountain.
DW News
One police officer has been killed and more than 100 others injured amid clashes with protesters in Kyiv. The unrest comes after lawmakers voted on a constitutional amendment to help end the conflict in eastern Ukraine.
The police officer was killed in front of Ukraine's parliament buildings on Monday following an explosion caused by a grenade thrown from the crowd of protesters.
The National Guard member has been identified by the country's interior ministry as a 24-year-old conscript. The person responsible for throwing the grenade was reportedly arrested, along with around 30 other demonstrators.
"Investigation and punishment will be unavoidable," Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said, calling the clashes an "anti-Ukrainian war."
The Guardian
The Taliban concealed the “depressing news” of the death of its former leader Mullah Omar for more than two years because the movement was in the final stages of its fight against US-led forces, a detailed biography of the group’s new chief has revealed.
Until the news leaked last month, the death of the Taliban’s founder on 23 April 2013 was kept a secret “limited to the very few colleagues who were informed of this incorrigible loss”, according to the long statement published on the movement’s website on Monday.
The scheduled end of the Nato combat mission in 2014 meant the Taliban had no choice but to cover up the death of a leader whose legendary status and claim to be the “commander of the faithful” was critical to holding together Islamist fighters during the onslaught from foreign forces.
“One of the main reasons behind this decision was due to the fact that 2013 was considered the final year of power testing between the mujahideen and foreign invaders,” said the statement, which was published in several languages including English.
The Guardian
Residents in the historic city of Palmyra reported a massive explosion in its ancient ruins but the temple of Bel, one of Syria’s most prized treasures, remains standing, the country’s antiquities chief told the Guardian.
“The temple structure is on a raised terrace that can be seen from afar, and our information is that the temple is still there,” said Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s director of antiquities, in a telephone interview from Damascus.
Earlier this month, Islamic State destroyed the temple of Baal Shamin, a second-century structure dedicated to the ancient sky god. The group also beheaded Khaled al-Asaad, 82, the elderly keeper of antiquities in Palmyra. The city is one of the best preserved sites of antiquity and a Silk Road hub that was conquered by Isis in May, after the militant group routed forces loyal to the regime of president Bashar al-Assad.
Reuters
The head of hedge fund manager Man Group Plc's (EMG.L) China business has been taken into custody to help authorities in a probe into recent market volatility, Bloomberg reported on Monday, while separately a local financial reporter confessed on national TV to having spread false information that caused "panic and disorder".
Both are likely to jangle nerves in the financial industry as regulators try to find out who they think was behind China's wild stock market rollercoaster ride in the past three months.
Authorities have been investigating possible market manipulation following wild swings in the stock markets, .CSI300 .SSEC which have plunged around 40 percent since mid-June on concerns of a slowing economy and a surprise devaluation of the yuan currency CNY=CFXS earlier this month.
Officials are probing the financial industry amid allegations of malicious short-selling and other strategies seen as weakening confidence in the market.
Al Jazeera America
An explosion shook a chemical plant in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong late Monday, state media said, though there were no immediate reports of casualties in a country on edge after other industrial facility blasts killed more than 145 people last month.
A single, loud blast occurred at the plant in Dongying shortly before midnight, state radio said on its official Weibo microblog, showing pictures of the explosion in what appeared to be a relatively remote industrial area.
No other details were available, and officials could not immediately be reached for comment.
One person died weeks ago when an explosion hit a chemical plant in a different part of Shandong.
The Guardian
They stroll through Syntagma Square, laughing, bantering and hotly debating the one issue now dominating dinner tables across Greece: the upcoming general elections.
Like students almost everywhere, Lydia Markou and Petros Xenios are not short of idealism. They want to make the world a better place and they want to start right here, in front of the Greek parliament, in the city that gave its name to democracy. “What we want is hope, hope for a better tomorrow,” says the 20-year-old Xenios, fresh-faced, jovial, breaking into a smile.
“We really thought that as our youngest prime minister, Alexis Tsipras would have done something positive for our country. He did not.”
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Al Jazeera America
President Barack Obama is set to become the first serving U.S. president to witness firsthand the impact of global warming in Alaska’s Arctic Circle when he visits the state this week to press for urgent action against climate change. But many activists have charged him with hypocrisy following his administration’s recent decision to formalize Royal Dutch Shell’s permit to drill for oil off Alaska’s northwest coast. Protests against the administration's policies are planned Monday in Anchorage, Seattle and Portland.
“We think it’s deeply hypocritical,” said Travis Nichols, spokesman for Greenpeace. “For a president who’s done so much for the climate, to see him do something that could undo that is a real tragedy.”
Obama’s express goal for the trip is to bolster his agenda to combat global warming by highlighting the toll rising temperatures have begun to take on Alaska. On Monday, the president will speak at a conference on Arctic issues and meet with the state’s governor in Anchorage, before departing to hike the Exit Glacier in the Kenai Mountains, meet with fishermen and visit Kotzebue, a Native village of 3,100 people that sits just above the Arctic Circle.
Al Jazeera America
On March 2, 135 large cardboard boxes arrived at the Port of Savannah, in the U.S. state of Georgia. They were packed with hundreds of pairs of shorts in two patterns and delivered to the warehouses of the largest kids’-clothing-only retailer in the United States, the Children’s Place. The first pattern featured blue pineapples on red cotton twill and the second, red palm trees on a dark blue background. Both styles were a bargain, just $19.95 at retail and, after discount, well under half that on TCP’s website at the time of writing. Belying their carefree design, the mini surfer dude shorts came from a cheerless factory in a landlocked city in a country half a world away — Shams Styling Wears, located on the outskirts of Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka.
Shams occupies a drab nine-story concrete tower in Savar, a polluted industrial suburb. The structure is less than five miles from Rana Plaza, the eight-story garment factory building that collapsed on April 24, 2013, killing more than 1,100 workers and injuring at least twice as many. The disaster was supposed to mark a turning point in the manufacturing of ready-made garments, the largest industry in Bangladesh. In the aftermath, multinational brands launched two major initiatives to improve the structural, fire and electrical safety of their Bangladeshi factories. In May of that year, a European-led consortium that included the brands Primark and H&M launched the legally binding Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh. The agreement created a system of inspections that would warn, punish and eventually disqualify factories that didn’t meet basic safety benchmarks.
Reuters
Apple Inc on Monday teamed up with network gear maker Cisco Systems Inc to improve the performance of its iPad and iPhone devices on Cisco's corporate network.
Cisco will provide services specially optimized for iOS devices across mobile, cloud, and on premises-based collaboration tools such as Cisco Spark, Cisco Telepresence and Cisco WebEx, the companies said in a statement.
Apple is expanding its foothold in the enterprise arena at a time when iPad sales are shrinking. Cisco, on the other hand, has been investing in products and services such as data analytics software, security and cloud-management tools.
NPR
Participation in sports by girls and young women has soared in recent decades — by 560 percent among high school students since 1972, and 990 percent among college students, according to the Women's Sports Foundation. Highly committed young female athletes now run track and play soccer, basketball, water polo and other demanding sports that require strong bodies.
But many girls aren't eating enough to satisfy the physical demands of those sports, scientists say, and that's putting them at risk for health problems that can last a lifetime.
These athletes are essentially malnourished. The danger they face is called female athlete triad syndrome because it typically includes three symptoms: irregular menstrual cycles, low energy and low bone density.
BBC
A hurricane, with winds of up to 140km/h (85mph) has hit the island nation of Cape Verde, off the coast of West Africa.
The government has grounded all flights until further notice.
No hurricane has ever been recorded further east in the tropical Atlantic.
Climate Central
The West continues to be a fiery inferno as August fades into September. Wildfires have exploded across the region this month.
There have been 117 large wildfires to date including 70 large fires that are still burning. Those fires along with thousands of smaller blazes have contributed to 7.8 million acres burned in the U.S., a record for this time of year.
Washington has officially had its most destructive wildfire season on record, including its largest wildfire in state history. In Alaska, 5.1 million acres have burned. Even if all the fires went out across the West tomorrow, this year would still rank as the seventh-most destructive wildfire season in terms of acres burned. But with the season set to continue for at least another month, 2015 will continue to climb the charts, though whether it displaces 2006 for the record remains to be seen.
That puts it right in line with trends since the 1970s of more large fires and more acres burned by these large wildfires as the West dries out and heats up according to an updated Climate Central analysis. Climate change is one of the key drivers helping set up these dry and hot conditions favorable for wildfires.
NPR
Dr. David Burkons graduated from medical school and began practicing obstetrics and gynecology in 1973, the same year the Supreme Court issued its landmark abortion decision in Roe v. Wade.
Burkons liked delivering babies. But he is also committed to serving all his patients, including those who choose abortions.
On a recent day a 30-something woman comes to the clinic. She is six weeks pregnant. Her birth control failed her, she says. Burkons greets the woman warmly as she comes to the clinic for the second round of the medical abortion process, a two-dose drug regimen to end a pregnancy.
"We're going to give you this," Burkons says, handing the woman the pills.
"And what are these two?" asks the woman, who requested anonymity.
"These are the misoprostol pills," Burkons says.
On this day a steady stream of women visit Burkons' clinic for medical abortions.