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 editors are Doctor RJ and annetteboardman.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Al Jazeera America
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that bosses of privately-run companies can object on religious grounds to a provision of President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare law that would have compelled them to provide birth control free of charge to staff.
The court held on a 5-4 vote — split along ideological lines — that closely held companies could seek an exemption from the mandatory coverage of contraception under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The decision means some employees may have to obtain certain forms of birth control, such as the morning-after pill, from other sources.
In a majority opinion by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, the court said the ruling applies only to the birth control mandate and does not mean companies would necessarily succeed if they made similar claims to other insurance requirements, such as vaccinations and drug transfusions.
Alito indicated that employees could still be able to obtain the birth control coverage via an accommodation to the mandate that the Obama administration has already introduced for religious-affiliated nonprofits.
The Guardian
Conservatives celebrated a victory over Obamacare on Monday after the supreme court ruled that some companies should be allowed a religious exemption from rules requiring them to include all forms of contraception in employee health policies.
In a judgment with significant implications for the legal rights of corporations, a narrow majority of five justices argued that “closely held” businesses such as the family-run Hobby Lobby chain of stores, which brought the test case, enjoyed the same religious protections under law as individuals.
Hobby Lobby's Christian owners and others like them will now be free to remove four controversial contraception methods from insurance plans provided to their 13,000 staff, claiming they amount to a form of abortion because they take effect after the point of fertilisation.
The wider implications for Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act (ACA) were less immediately clear, with critics arguing the ruling could open the floodgates to companies seeking other religious exemptions for treatments such as blood transfusions and vaccines, but conservative justices insisting their “very specific” ruling should not set a precedent.
NPR
The Supreme Court has ruled that family owned and other closely held companies can opt out of the Affordable Care Act's provisions for no-cost prescription contraception in most health insurance if they have religious objections.
The owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of arts and crafts stores and those of another closely held company, Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., had objected on the grounds of religious freedom.
The ruling affirms a Hobby Lobby victory in a lower court and gives new standing to similar claims by other companies.
... [updates are here] ...
The case, Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby, is perhaps the most important decision of the high court's term, legal analysts say. Burwell, you'll recall, is Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who became secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services early this month.
Here's a quick summary of the issue from NPR's Nina Totenberg:
NY Times
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that requiring family-owned corporations to pay for insurance coverage for contraception under the Affordable Care Act violated a federal law protecting religious freedom. It was, the dissent said, “a decision of startling breadth.”
The 5-to-4 ruling, which applied to two companies owned by Christian families, opened the door to challenges from other corporations over laws that they claim violate their religious liberty.
The decision, along with another closely divided one that dealt a blow to public-sector unions, ended the term with a bang. But the rulings could have had an even broader immediate impact.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the court’s five more conservative justices, said a federal religious-freedom law applied to “closely held” for-profit corporations run on religious principles.
McClatchy
Confidence in government has reached historic lows, according to a new Gallup survey, as 7 percent say they’re have confidence in Congress and 29 percent feel that way about the White House.
The Supreme Court, at 30 percent, and Congress hit record lows, while the presidential rating was a six-year low.
Congress has historically trailed the other two branches, as the White House and Supreme Court have traded places as the most trusted branch.
“But on a relative basis, Americans' confidence in all three is eroding,” a Gallup analysis reported. Over the past year, confidence has fallen four points for the Supreme Court, seven for the presidency and three for the White House.
Gallup has been asking about confidence in the White House for 23 years. At that time, as the Gulf War was ending, the office garnered 72 percent confidence, as President George H. W. Bush had a 89 percent approval rating.
Al Jazeera America
The damage to U.S. national security incurred by former-NSA contractor Edward Snowden's classified leaks has altered the way “terrorist groups” operate to avoid detection but there is no reason to worry that “the sky is falling," America’s new surveillance chief has said.
Adm. Michael S. Rodgers, who became director of the National Security Agency (NSA) in March, said that he would endeavor to shore up U.S. intelligence and cyber security to reduce the chances of a similar feeding of classified surveillance techniques to the media. But he added there was no way to guarantee another U.S. employee with security clearance could not do as Snowden did, and leak potentially damaging government secrets.
“Am I ever going to sit here and say as the director that with 100 percent certainty no one can compromise our systems from the inside?” Rodgers said. “Nope. Because I don’t believe that in the long run.”
Rodgers echoed many of the concerns voiced by his predecessor, Gen. Keith Alexander, who suggested that America’s enemies would alter the way they operate to avoid U.S. surveillance strategies exposed by the Snowden leaks. He said the NSA has intercepted communications among groups that target the U.S. “specifically referencing data detailed” by the Snowden revelations.
The Guardian
A legal reckoning for some of the darkest episodes of the US war in Iraq gathered momentum on Monday when a federal court found that Iraqis abused at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison could sue an American corporation involved in their torture.
Overturning a lower court, the US court of appeals for the fourth circuit in Richmond, Virginia ruled Monday that four Iraqis subjected to torture at Abu Ghraib during the 2003-2011 US occupation can seek damages against one of the contracting companies at the prison, CACI International.
It is unclear how extensive the ruling will prove to be for victims of US torture. But not only does it represent a rare instance of judges permitting foreign nationals' pursuit of legal claims against US citizens in a war zone, it comes as Iraqis are travelling to Washington DC to testify in a criminal trial against guards working for the security company formerly known as Blackwater over the 2007 shooting death of 17 Iraqis in Baghdad's Nisour Square.
The four Iraqis suing CACI over Abu Ghraib told the court that their interrogators and guards subjected them to abuses including beatings, forced nudity, being "repeatedly shot in the head with a taser gun", "beaten on the genitals with a stick", and forced to watch the "rape [of] a female detainee".
NPR
The federal minimum wage for tipped workers has been $2.13 since 1991. That pay rate tends to get lost in the larger debate over whether to raise the national minimum wage for nontipped workers, which is $7.25 an hour.
In theory, the money from tips should make up the difference in pay — and then some. But according to a White House report, tipped workers are more than twice as likely as other workers to experience poverty.
Living On Tips
Under federal law, if tips don't bring employees up to the level of the standard minimum wage, employers are required to make up the difference.
But Saru Jayaraman, founder of the labor advocacy group Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, tells NPR's Arun Rath that it often doesn't work out that way.
NPR
This political primary season has seen an unprecedented use of guns to get votes. Republican hopefuls across the country are appearing in political ads firing guns and holding political events around firearms.
Texas state Sen. Donna Campbell won the Republican nomination in her party. In one of her ads, she's seen firing a gun at a target as a narrator lauds her for reducing "the time it takes to obtain a concealed carry license, so more law-abiding Texans could exercise their constitutional rights to defend themselves."
In another, candidate Matt Rosendale shoots a rifle at an imaginary government drone — though it did not help him snatch the nomination for a Montana congressional seat.
And in a now-classic ad, Will Brooke, a candidate for Alabama's 6th Congressional District, sets up a 1-foot-thick copy of the Affordable Care Act for target practice. Then he starts blasting away.
NPR
A fund established by GM to pay claims related to defective ignition switches won't limit claim amounts and will include people who have already settled a case with the carmaker. Those and other details about the long-awaited compensation plan were announced by plan administrator Kenneth Feinberg on Monday.
"GM basically has said, whatever it costs to pay all eligible claims under the protocol, they will pay it," Feinberg said.
The ignition switch safety flaw that made GM cars and SUVs lose power — and consequently, the use of their air bags and power steering — has been blamed for at least 13 deaths and many more injuries. It also caused the recall of millions of cars with model years between 2003 and 2011.
While some claims are likely to yield payments of thousands of dollars, Feinberg said that others, for death or catastrophic injury, could bring payments in the millions.
Al Jazeera America
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that nontraditional employees in the public sector may not be compelled by a state to contribute union fees, dealing a blow to workers’ bodies that wanted to ensure that all staff — including nonsalaried positions such as home health aides — could be forced to pay dues. But the court spared unions the brunt of the damage that the case could have caused, by upholding that fully fledged public employees may still be compelled to unionize.
The Harris v. Quinn ruling means that part-time and nontraditional government employees, like home health care workers, won’t be forced to pay into unions as a condition of their employment.
The ruling — which came down in a 5-4 decision, with conservative Justice Samuel Alito delivering the majority opinion — comes after eight home health care workers refused to join an Illinois union and pay the corresponding dues. But under state law, joining the union was required for their employment. The eight filed a class action against Illinois in 2010, arguing that being forced to pay into a union as a condition of their employment violated their First Amendment rights to freedom of association.
Reuters
U.S. employers likely maintained a fairly healthy pace of hiring in June, consistent with data that have suggested a sharp economic contraction in the first-quarter was an aberration.
Nonfarm payrolls probably increased 212,000, marking the fifth consecutive month of job gains above 200,000, according to a Reuters poll of economists. That, together with signs of a housing recovery, would cement views that growth has rebounded.
"The economy is certainly headed in the right direction," said Millan Mulraine, deputy chief economist at TD Securities in New York. "While the momentum in the labor market has shifted modestly lower from the last two months, it's still quite strong."
Reuters
The leaders of Russia and Ukraine have agreed to work on a ceasefire between separatists and the Ukrainian authorities and on quickly setting up effective border controls, the French president's office said on Monday.
The statement followed a telephone conversation between German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russia's Vladimir Putin, Ukraine's Petro Poroshenko and French President Francois Hollande, the second such call in as many days.
After what Hollande's office said was a long conversation, Putin and Poroshenko also agreed to work on the liberation of more hostages and prisoners and the organisation of "substantial tripartite negotiations", according to the statement.
Poroshenko had urged Putin on Sunday to strengthen Russian control over its borders to prevent militants and arms entering Ukraine after violence led to breaches of a truce there.
Reuters
Iraqi troops battled to dislodge an al Qaeda splinter group from the city of Tikrit on Monday after its leader was declared caliph of a new Islamic state in lands seized this month across a swath of Iraq and Syria.
Alarming regional and world powers, the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) claimed universal authority, declaring its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was now caliph of the Muslim world - a mediaeval title last widely recognized in the Ottoman sultan deposed 90 years ago after World War One.
"He is the imam and caliph for Muslims everywhere," group spokesman Abu Muhammad al-Adnani said in an online statement on Sunday, using titles that carry religious and civil power.
The move, at the start of the holy month of Ramadan, follows a three-week drive for territory by ISIL militants and allies among Iraqi's Sunni Muslim minority. The caliphate aims to erase colonial-era borders and defy the U.S.- and Iranian-backed government of Shi'ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Baghdad.
Reuters
Militant Islamist fighters held a parade in Syria's northern Raqqa province to celebrate their declaration of an Islamic "caliphate" after the group captured territory in neighboring Iraq, a monitoring service said.
The Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot previously known as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), posted pictures online on Sunday of people waving black flags from cars and holding guns in the air, the SITE monitoring service said.
The Islamic State says it wants to erase national boundaries from the Mediterranean to the Gulf and return the region to a medieval-style caliphate.
Some analysts say the group is a credible threat to frontiers and is stirring regional violence while others say it exaggerates its reach and support through sophisticated media campaigns.
The group renamed itself and proclaimed its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as "Caliph" - the head of the state - on Sunday.
Al Jazeera America
On Friday, Al-Qaeda-inspired armed group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which yesterday began calling itself the Islamic State in an apparent signal of its wide-reaching aspirations in the region, claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing on the chic Duroy Hotel in the heart of Beirut’s Raouche neighborhood, which is popular with tourists. The IS declared in a statement that the attack would be the first of many on Lebanese soil.
Though the bomb was a near miss meant to detonate at a popular Shia restaurant in southern Beirut — the Saudi suspect prematurely blew himself up when Lebanese security forces raided his room on an apparent tip — it nevertheless vindicated a prescient warning from Lebanon’s speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, who said only hours earlier that Lebanon could feel shock waves of the IS’s astonishing surge across Syria and Iraq.
The Guardian
The bodies of three missing Israeli teenagers, including one with US citizenship, have been found close to the southern West Bank city of Hebron.
Israeli Security officials said the bodies were found on Monday near the village of Halhul, not far from the location where the teenagers disappeared on 12 June. "The bodies are currently going through forensic identification. The families of the abducted teens have been notified," the army said.
Binyamin Proper, who was among the civilian volunteers that found the bodies, told Channel 2 TV that a member of the search party "saw something suspicious on the ground, plants that looked out of place, moved them and moved some rocks and then found the bodies. We realised it was them and we called the army."
The three, Eyal Yifrach, 19, and Gil-ad Sha'er and Naftali Frankel who were both 16, went missing while hitchhiking back from their religious schools in settlements on the West Bank, prompting claims from the Israeli government that they had been kidnapped by the militants from the Islamist organisation Hamas.
FIFA, soccer's governing body, suspended Suarez for nine games and fined him 100,000 Swiss francs (about $112,000) for the act, and banned him from any soccer activity for four months. Uruguay, playing without their star player on Saturday, lost to Colombia in the knockout stage of the World Cup being held in Brazil.
Chiellini himself said he thought the ban was "excessive," and on Monday, responding to Suarez's tweet, he tweeted:
Reuters
The president of China, North Korea's only major ally, visits South Korea this week where the leaders of the two countries are expected to call on Pyongyang to end its pursuit of nuclear weapons, although Beijing will make sure it is not seen as taking sides.
In a visit certain to be watched carefully in Pyongyang, President Xi Jinping will be holding talks with South Korean President Park Geun-hye for the fifth time in a year, without yet meeting the North's leader, Kim Jong Un.
North Korea's nuclear and missile program, and its plans to hold a fourth nuclear test, will dominate the agenda, officials in Seoul said.
"There will clearly be an expression of the commitment by the two leaders and their governments that North Korea's nuclear weapons will not be tolerated," South Korea's Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se told parliament on Monday.
Reuters
Newly elected Iraqi lawmakers convene on Tuesday, under pressure to name a unity government to keep the country from splitting apart after an onslaught by Sunni Islamists who have declared a "caliphate" to rule over all the world's Muslims.
The meeting of the new legislature in Baghdad's fortified "green zone" could spell the end of the eight-year rule of Shi'ite Islamist Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, with foes determined to unseat him and even some allies saying he may need to be replaced by a less polarizing figure.
Iraqi troops have been battling for three weeks against fighters led by the group formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Fighting has raged in recent days in former dictator Saddam Hussein's home city, Tikrit.
ISIL, which rules swathes of territory in an arc from Aleppo in Syria to near the western edge of Baghdad in Iraq, has renamed itself simply the Islamic State. It declared its leader, secretive guerrilla fighter Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to be the "caliph", the historic title of the ruler of the whole Muslim world.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Bloomberg
New York’s cities and towns can block hydraulic fracturing within their borders, the state’s highest court ruled, dealing a blow to an industry awaiting Governor Andrew Cuomo’s decision on whether to lift a six-year-old statewide moratorium.
The case, closely watched by the energy industry, may invigorate local challenges to fracking in other states and convince the industry to stay out of New York even if Cuomo allows drilling. Pennsylvania’s highest court issued a similar ruling last year, striking down portions of a state law limiting localities’ ability to regulate drillers.
C/NET
Seven years ago, Jeremy Bachrach, then a 17-year-old high school student, waited in line outside a mall in Thousand Oaks, Calif., with his 12-year-old brother Harry. They'd been there for more than 24 hours to get their hands on Apple's original iPhone.
"I was pretty stoked," recalled Bachrach, now a real-estate investment analyst. "At the time it met nearly all my expectations."
It was the start of what's become an annual tradition: Fanboys lining up for hours -- or sometimes days -- at their local Apple store to be one of the first to walk away with the latest iPhone.
That waiting-in-line-to-buy-a-new-Apple-gadget phenomenon, a spectacle few other companies can boast of, underscores the appeal and importance of the iPhone. There will undoubtedly be lines when Apple unveils the iPhone 6, the eighth generation in the franchise, sometime in the fall. In a field where the term "game-changer" is trite, few dispute that it can rightfully be applied to Apple's marquee product, which has been hailed as the one, the true "Jesus phone." In the past seven years, Apple has sold more than half a billion iPhones.
C/NET
Secret loopholes exist that allow the National Security Agency to bypass Fourth Amendment protections to conduct massive domestic surveillance on US citizens, according to leading legal academics.
A research paper released Monday by academics at Harvard University and Boston University details how the US government can "conduct largely unrestrained surveillance on Americans by collecting their network traffic abroad," despite constitutional protections against warrantless searches.
One of the paper's authors, Axel Arnbak at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, told CNET that US surveillance laws presume Internet traffic is non-American when it is collected from overseas.
"The loopholes in current surveillance laws and today's Internet technology may leave American communications as vulnerable to surveillance, and as unprotected as the internet traffic of foreigners," Arnbak said.Although Americans are afforded constitutional protections against the US government conducting unwarranted searches of their emails, documents, social networking data, and other cloud-based data while it's stored or in transit on US soil, the researchers suggest these protections do not exist when American data leaves the country.
C/NET
Blackphone, a privacy-obsessed smartphone developed in response to Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency's mass surveillance of Americans' phone records, started shipping Monday.
The $629 phone, created as a joint venture between Silent Circle and Geeksphone, was unveiled at Mobile World Congress in February. The device's sales pitch claims that security and privacy are put "ahead of everything else."
ScienceBlog
New research reports that more than one third of total knee replacements in the U.S. were classified as “inappropriate” using a patient classification system developed and validated in Spain. The study, published in Arthritis & Rheumatology, a journal of the American College of Rheumatology (ACR), highlights the need for consensus on patient selection criteria among U.S. medical professionals treating those with the potential need of knee replacement surgery.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality reports more than 600,000 knee replacements are performed in the U.S. each year. In the past 15 years, the use of total knee arthroplasty has grown significantly, with studies showing an annual volume increase of 162% in Medicare-covered knee replacement surgeries between 1991 and 2010. Some experts believe the growth is due to use of an effective procedure, while others contend there is over-use of the surgery that relies on subjective criteria.
ScienceBlog
By switching off a single gene, scientists at Columbia University’s Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center have converted human gastrointestinal cells into insulin-producing cells, demonstrating in principle that a drug could retrain cells inside a person’s GI tract to produce insulin.
The new research was reported today in the online issue of the journal Nature Communications.
“People have been talking about turning one cell into another for a long time, but until now we hadn’t gotten to the point of creating a fully functional insulin-producing cell by the manipulation of a single target,” said the study’s senior author, Domenico Accili, MD, the Russell Berrie Foundation Professor of Diabetes (in Medicine) at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC).
NPR
The American College of Physicians said Monday that it strongly recommends against annual pelvic exams for healthy, low-risk women.
In fact, the intrusive exams may do more harm than good for women who aren't pregnant or don't have signs of problems, a group of doctors wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
When we heard that news here at Shots, we were happily surprised. No more stirrups? No more stripping down below the waist or hearing those dreaded words: "Now, you're going to feel a little pressure"?
Sounds great! I'm canceling my annual visit now.
Not so fast. Not all doctors agree about these new guidelines.
"This recommendation will be controversial," obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. George Sawaya wrote in an accompanying editorial with a colleague at the University of California, San Francisco. "Pelvic exams have long been considered a fundamental component of the well-woman visit."