OND Editors OND is a 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.
OND Editors 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.
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BBC
Typhoon Hagupit weakens over Philippines
Typhoon Hagupit has weakened as it continues to slowly sweep across the Philippines, causing some damage.
At least three people have been killed since the storm made landfall on Saturday but it does not appear to have been as severe as many had feared.
Around a million people have taken shelter in evacuation centres.
But correspondents say Hagupit is nowhere near as powerful as Typhoon Haiyan, which killed thousands of people last year.
In Tacloban, badly hit by Typhoon Haiyan, roofs have been blown away by Hagupit and streets are flooded, but the area has escaped the wider devastation of last year.
"There were no bodies scattered on the road, no big mounds of debris,'' Rhea Estuna told the Associated Press by phone from Tacloban. "Thanks to God this typhoon wasn't as violent.''
If anyone here can figure if the storm that is supposed to hit California is connected to this, please comment.
* Last I heard it's coming from Alaska and drawing moisture from Hawaii.
BBC
Six men released from Guantanamo Bay arrive in Uruguay
Six prisoners released by the US from the Guantanamo Bay detention centre have arrived in Uruguay as free men.
Earlier this year, Uruguay said it had agreed to received the men - four Syrians, a Tunisian and a Palestinian - as a humanitarian gesture.
The six men were detained 12 years ago for alleged ties with al-Qaeda but never charged.
President Jose Mujica described said they had been subjected to "an atrocious kidnapping".
The Pentagon identified the released detainees as Abu Wa'el Dhiab, Ali Husain Shaaban, Ahmed Adnan Ajuri, and Abdelahdi Faraj, from Syria; Mohammed Abdullah Taha Mattan, Palestinian; Adel bin Muhammad El Ouerghi, from Tunisia.
A lawyer for 43-year-old Abu Wa'el Dhiab said his client was government was grateful to the South American nation for taking him
BBC
Duke and Duchess of Cambridge arrive in New York
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have arrived in New York for a tour of the east coast of the United States.
The couple are in the country for three days, during which Prince William will meet President Barack Obama.
Catherine, who is pregnant with the couple's second child, will accompany the duke to pay respects to those who died in the 9/11 terror attacks.
Danny Lopez, the British consul general in New York, said there had been "incredible interest" in the visit.
He added there has been a huge "level of excitement" from people in the city.
Prince William is also expected to give a speech at a World Bank conference in Washington on combating illegal wildlife trafficking.
Highlighting the scale of the problem the prince is expected to say "some endangered species are now literally worth more than their weight in gold".
Al Jazeera America
Protests against police violence slow in New York, flare in Berkeley
A fourth night of demonstrations against police violence got off to a slow start on a rain-soaked Saturday in New York, after mourners held a funeral for an unarmed black man shot dead by a white police officer in the stairwell of a Brooklyn apartment building.
But protesters in Berkeley, California clashed with police, hurling objects and smashing store windows on Saturday night.
The shooting of Akai Gurley, 28, at a public housing project last month was the latest in a series of incidents fueling outrage over what protesters say is a pattern of excessive force being used by law enforcement against African-Americans.
The killings and subsequent decisions by grand juries to not indict the officers involved in the cases have rekindled a national debate over race relations in the United States.
The district attorney in the New York City borough of Brooklyn said on Friday a grand jury would consider charges against Peter Liang, the officer who shot Gurley. Police said Liang might have accidentally discharged his gun.
In Brooklyn, mourners gathered on Saturday morning at a Baptist church to remember Gurley, the father of a 2-year-old girl. Afterwards, about 75 people gathered for a vigil and brief march in his memory.
Accidentally!
Raw Story
Former Vatican bank heads accused of embezzlement, accounts seized
Two former Vatican bank managers and a lawyer have had their accounts seized as part of an investigation into allegations of embezzlement, the Vatican said Saturday.
The bank, officially known as the Institute for Religious Works (IOR), said it had pressed charges against the trio some months ago and “the accounts held by the concerned individuals at the IOR have recently been seized”.
Italian media reports named the accused as former bank president Angelo Caloia, ex-director general Lelio Scaletti, and lawyer Gabriele Liuzzo.
While the IOR would not provide details on the case “given the ongoing judicial enquiry”, Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi told Italian media they were suspected of embezzling money.
Reports said they had siphoned off between 50 and 60 million euros ($61 and $73 million) while managing the sale by the bank of 29 buildings.
In a statement the bank said the former managers and lawyer were under investigation based on “circumstances recorded between 2001 and 2008 that have emerged in the internal review process initiated in early 2013.”
Raw Story
New ‘lost’ Ayn Rand novel will bring her crimes against literature to new generation of jerks.
It was once wryly observed by author John Rogers that “(t)here are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”
Now those emotionally stunted, socially crippled man-children have new reason to rejoice. No, not the mid-term elections. No, no, not the release of Grand Theft Auto V.
No, my friends, I’m afraid it’s much, much worse than that. It’s a new Ayn Rand novel.
For the first time in more than 50 years, publishers are rolling out a new novel by the godmother of libertarianism, the previously unpublished Ideal. The book tells the story of a movie actress who is accused of murder.
Rand wrote the novel in her late 20s, but never published it, although at one point, she did write a stage adaptation, which will be included in the new edition along with the short novel.
Guardian
US defends Yemen al-Qaida raid that led to deaths of two hostages
US officials have defended the commando raid in south Yemen early on Saturday that led to the deaths of two hostages, saying they did not know the soon-to-be-freed South African teacher Pierre Korkie was being held at the site they attacked.
Korkie and a US photojournalist, Luke Somers, were in the same room and were apparently killed by their captors when a US special forces squad was within 100 metres of their mountain compound.
A senior US administration official said intelligence experts had concluded, before the raid, that two hostages were being held side-by-side. “One was assessed to be Luke Somers,” the senior US official told the Guardian. “We did not know who the second hostage was.”
South Africa said it did not want to assign blame for Korkie’s death. “This is no time for finger pointing,” said a foreign ministry spokesman, Nelson Kgwete. “We are working with the government of the United States, as well as the government of Yemen, to ensure that we bring finality to this tragic incident.”
Local people said 11 people had died, including a woman and a 10-year-old child. The US said five militants had died, while others escaped
.
The Independent
Pierre Korkie and Luke Somers killings analysis: More failures than successes in hostage rescue attempts
Successful saving of hostages, or operations to kill or capture an enemy target, get widespread publicity, spinning into books or even films. But they are few and far between: for every mission accomplished, there are many others which fail.
The killing of Luke Somers, a British-born American photojournalist, and South African teacher Pierre Korkie during a failed attempt to rescue them in southern Yemen should not come as a surprise. Such operations are notoriously difficult, with the kidnappers, especially when they are well-organised terrorist groups, usually having all the advantages.
Questions, however, have arisen over key aspects of this particular raid. Mr Korkie was about to be freed by his kidnappers, the aid group he worked with, Gift of the Givers, has disclosed. His wife, Yolande, who was freed earlier this year, said in Cape Town that she was preparing to fly out to meet her husband and has been left devastated by the death.
[snip]
The West has not been very successful in rescuing Islamist-held hostages recently. In July a raid by US special forces to free those being held by Isis failed. The group went on to behead five American and British prisoners. At the same time, however, it freed four French, three Spanish and a German national. The difference was governments had agreed to pay ransoms.
New York Times
Ralph H. Baer, Inventor of First System for Home Video Games, Is Dead at 92
Ralph H. Baer, who turned television sets into electronic fantasy lands by inventing and patenting the first home video game system, died on Saturday at his home in Manchester, N.H. He was 92.
Video games have become more than just a ubiquitous pastime and a gigantic market (by some estimates, total worldwide sales of console hardware and software and online, mobile and computer games exceeded $90 billion in 2013). They are also an engine that has driven scientists and engineers to multiply computer speed, memory and visualization to today’s staggering capabilities.
Flash back to the sultry late summer of 1966: Mr. Baer is sitting on a step outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan waiting for a colleague. By profession, he is an engineer overseeing 500 employees at a military contractor. Today, a vision has gripped him, and he begins scribbling furiously on a yellow legal pad with a No. 2 pencil.
The result was a detailed four-page outline for a “game box” that would allow people to play board, action, sports and other games on almost any American television set. An intrigued boss gave him $2,000 for research and $500 for materials and assigned two men to work with him. For all three, as they plowed through prototype after prototype in a secret workshop, the project became an obsession.
In March 1971, Mr. Baer and his employer, Sanders Associates in Nashua, N.H., filed for the first video game patent, which was granted in April 1973 as Patent No. 3,728,480.
S F Gate
Intense storm to wallop Bay Area on Wednesday
An intense storm — expected to cause widespread damage and flooding — will slam the Bay Area with heavy rain and high winds midway through the week, forecasters said.
The blast, the likes of which only hit Northern California once every few years, will swing in sometime around Wednesday evening and continue into Friday. Winds in some areas will gust up to 50 mph and close to 4 inches of rain may drench urban areas, said Steve Anderson, a forecaster with the National Weather Service.
“We haven’t seen this kind of rain in almost two years now,” he said. “It won’t take much to saturate the ground, so we may get flooding and mudslides. The rain is a little out of the ordinary, but the wind will be the most damaging part of the storm.”
A storm last week brought much needed rain to drought-ravaged California, but also caused havoc across the region. Urban floodwaters cascaded down San Francisco’s sloping neighborhoods and pooled around city streets. Several sinkholes opened up around the city while commuters and travelers were brought to a sliding halt on wet Bay Area highways.
Wednesday’s system will be stronger.
“The last storm dumped a lot of rainfall and the ground is still saturated,” Anderson said. “This will be much worse. Expect the same thing but on a more widespread scale — more intense.”
C/Net
NASA's New Horizons awakens for meeting with Pluto
Almost 9 years and 3 billion miles ago, NASA launched New Horizons -- a space probe with a big mission -- to boldly go where no space probe had gone before. Its destination was the solar system's most famous dwarf planet, Pluto, and its home, the asteroid-rich region called the Kuiper Belt.
In order to travel the distance, New Horizons -- launched from Earth on January 19, 2006 -- was put into hibernation for about two-thirds of its journey, or 1,873 days. As its long journey comes to an end, so too has that hibernation: at 9:53 p.m. EST, the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory confirmed that it had received the signal that indicated the pre-programmed "on" switch had toggled (a signal, NASA noted, that took 4 hours and 26 minutes in transit between New Horizons and the NASA Deep Space Network in Canberra, Australia). The space probe is awake.
"This is a watershed event that signals the end of New Horizons crossing of a vast ocean of space to the very frontier of our solar system, and the beginning of the mission's primary objective: the exploration of Pluto and its many moons in 2015," said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern.