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.
Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the new OND banner.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
NPR
New York Police Commissioner Bill Bratton says tensions in the city are at their worst since the 1970s. Bratton spoke two days after Ismaaiyl Brinsley shot and killed two police officers in New York. Brinsley had been arrested at least 19 times and reportedly had tried to hang himself last year.
The tragic shooting has also exposed fault lines in the relationship between Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city's police department.
Al Jazeera America
Big city police departments and union leaders around the country are warning their rank and file to wear bulletproof vests and avoid making inflammatory posts on social media after a man ambushed two New York City officers on Saturday and shot them to death inside their patrol car.
The slayings of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu on Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn heightened fears about the safety of law enforcement officials nationwide, though there is no evidence any threats are imminent. The gunman, 28-year-old Ismaaiyl Brinsley, had vowed in an Instagram post to put "wings on pigs" as retaliation for the slayings of black men at the hands of white police.
Investigators are trying to determine if Brinsley had taken part in any protests over the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, whose names he invoked in his online threat, or simply latched onto the cause for the final act in a violent rampage.
Police nationwide have faced criticism after Garner's death following a chokehold by a white New York Police Department officer and Brown's fatal shooting in Ferguson, Missouri by a white police officer. Protests erupted in recent weeks after grand juries declined to charge the officers involved in both cases.
The Guardian
New York Police Department commissioner Bill Bratton has said that he does not support police officers turning their backs on mayor Bill de Blasio as he arrived to give a press conference at Woodhull hospital in the wake of the shooting of two officers in Brooklyn on Saturday.
Speaking on the Today show with Matt Lauer Monday morning, Bratton said he didn’t think the activity was “appropriate, particularly in that setting,” but added that it was “reflective” of some officers’ anger with the mayor’s office.
On Saturday night Pat Lynch, the president of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the city’s largest police union, gave a fiery speech to press in which he laid the blame for the murder of the two officers, Wen Jian Liu and Rafael Ramos, at De Blasio’s feet.
BBC
"Our first obligation is to respect these families," Mr de Blasio said, asking the city "put aside" debate and protests in the coming days.
He has been accused of stoking tensions between police and minorities after two officers were shot dead on Saturday.
The fatal shooting came after weeks of protests following the killing of an unarmed black man by New York police.
Eric Garner died after being placed in an chokehold by police in the summer. He was one of several black men or young boys killed by police in 2014.
New York Times
Mayor Bill de Blasio, publicly silent and largely out of view the day after two police officers were killed in Brooklyn, re-emerged on Monday, straining to demonstrate leadership over a fractured city.
Mr. de Blasio visited the families of the slain officers, spoke to a nonprofit police group and, for the first time since the shooting, took several questions at a news conference at Police Headquarters.
And at every stop, the Democratic mayor of New York, who ascended to office with a pledge to reshape the Police Department, had company: Police Commissioner William J. Bratton — once renowned for helping turn back crime in the 1990s, now the essential bridge between the mayor and a department that distrusts him more deeply than ever.
Al Jazeera America
Buried amid details of “rectal rehydration” and waterboarding that dominated the headlines over last week’s Senate Intelligence Committee findings was an alarming detail: Both the committee’s summary report and its rebuttal by the CIA admit that a source whose claims were central to the July 2004 resumption of the torture program — and, almost certainly, to authorizing the Internet dragnet collecting massive amounts of Americans’ email metadata — fabricated claims about an election year plot.
Both the torture program and President Bush's warrantless wiretap program, Stellar Wind, were partly halted from March through June of 2004. That March, Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith prepared to withdraw Pentagon authorization for torture, amid growing concern following the publication of pictures of detainee abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib, and a May 2004 CIA inspector general report criticizing a number of aspects of the Agency's interrogation program. On June 4, 2004, CIA Director George Tenet suspended the use of torture techniques.
The Guardian
North Korea is threatening to retaliate against the US over a Hollywood film portraying the assassination of Kim Jong-un, saying it has “clear evidence” that Washington was heavily involved in devising the plot.
The stern but vague warnings come after Sony Pictures decided last week to cancel the release of The Interview following cyber-attacks and threats against the company. North Korea also said the US government was wrong to “recklessly” claim Pyongyang was behind the hacking.
In a further response North Korea on Monday said it was refusing to take part in a UN meeting where the country’s bleak human rights situation was to be discussed. The UN Security Council is being urged to refer Pyongyang to the International Criminal Court, the boldest effort yet to confront an issue it has openly disdained in the past.
Reuters
The U.S.-led coalition conducted 12 air strikes against Islamic State militants in Syria on Monday and 10 strikes Iraq, the U.S. military said in a statement.
In Iraq, the strikes hit near the strategic northern Iraqi town of Sinjar as well as near Asad, Tal Afar, Ramdi, Mosul and Falluja, the Combined Joint Task Force said. They destroyed six units of Islamic State fighters as well as a weapons factory, numerous buildings and several vehicles, it said.
"These engagements were in support of the 7th Iraqi Army, local police and tribal fighters engaged in fighting with ISIL forces in the vicinity of Dulab," the statement said.
Reuters
A former Milwaukee police officer who fatally shot an unarmed black man was acting in self defense and will not be charged, the district attorney said on Monday, two days after dozens of demonstrators calling for justice in the case were arrested.
Christopher Manney, who was fired from the Milwaukee police force, shot Dontre Hamilton 14 times during a struggle in Red Arrow Park in downtown Milwaukee on April 30, Milwaukee District Attorney John Chisholm said in a statement.
"My decision ... does not depreciate the very legitimate concerns raised any time a law enforcement officer uses deadly force against a citizen," Chisholm said later during a news conference.
NPR
The Pentagon has forwarded its investigation into Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl's disappearance from an Afghan outpost to a general courts-martial convening authority, a Pentagon spokesman said today.
Bergdahl is the U.S. soldier who was held for five years by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The U.S. gained his freedom in May by trading him for five jailed Taliban.
The Pentagon spokesman said today that action against Bergdahl could range from no further action to convening a court martial.
"The Army cannot discuss or disclose the findings of the investigation while disciplinary decisions are pending before commanders," the spokesman said in a statement.
NPR
The "whole U.S. mainland" would be under threat of attack if America were to seek vengeance for last month's Sony hacking, North Korea says. An official at its defense commission called the U.S. a "cesspool of terrorism" after President Obama called the hack "cyber-vandalism."
North Korea's National Defense Commission, which is headed by the country's leader, Kim Jong Un, said its military was ready to fight America "in all war spaces including cyber warfare space," issuing a wide threat that specified targets in the U.S.
From the official Korean Central News Agency:
"Our toughest counteraction will be boldly taken against the White House, the Pentagon and the whole U.S. mainland, the cesspool of terrorism, by far surpassing the 'symmetric counteraction' declared by Obama."
New York Times
Representative Michael G. Grimm, a Republican from Staten Island who was elected to a second term in November despite having been indicted on federal fraud charges, has agreed to plead guilty to a single felony charge of tax evasion, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.
Mr. Grimm, a former Marine and agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who first ran for office as a law-and-order corruption fighter, is scheduled to appear in federal court in Brooklyn at 1 p.m. on Tuesday for a plea hearing, according to the docket sheet in his case, which provides no further detail.
He has said he would immediately resign if he were convicted. “If things don’t go my way, right? And I had to step down in January, then there will be a special election, and at least the people of Staten Island and Brooklyn can then have qualified candidates to choose from,” he told the radio talk-show host Geraldo Rivera in October.
DW
Six militants have been hanged since Friday amid rising public anger over Tuesday's massacre in the northwestern city of Peshawar, which left a total of 149 people dead.
After the deadliest terror attack in Pakistani history Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has ended a six-year moratorium on the death penalty, reinstating it exclusively for cases that concern terrorism.
"The Interior Ministry has finalized the cases of 500 convicts who have exhausted all the appeals, their mercy petitions have been turned down by the president and their executions will take place in coming weeks," a senior government official said.
Of the six hanged so far, five were involved in a foiled attempt to assassinate former military ruler Pervez Musharraf in 2003. The other was involved in a 2009 attack on an army headquarters.
"The prime minister has also issued directions for appropriate measures for early disposal of pending cases related to terrorism," the spokesman said without specifically confirming the plan to execute 500.
Pakistan began its de facto moratorium on civilian executions in 2008. Hanging, however, remains on the law books and judges continue to pass death sentences.
DW
At least 20 people were killed in the attack at a bus station in the city of Gombe, capital of Gombe state, during rush hour on Monday morning.
"There was an explosion at the Dukku motor park. The Red Cross mobilized with 20 body bags and they have all been exhausted," said Abubakar Yakubu Gome, area secretary for the Nigerian Red Cross.
"We are still looking for more bodies among the carnage," he told the AFP news agency, adding that a further 18 people with "serious" injuries had been taken to hospital.
It has been reported that the bomb was detonated near a bus that was filling up with passengers.
DW
Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has offered a compromise he hopes will get his presidential candidate, Stavros Dimas, elected and thus avoid a snap legislative election that could not only cost him his government, but could also change the economic course of the country as it nears negotiations with its creditors over its bailout.
Ahead of the second round of voting on Tuesday, Samaras offered to bring pro-European independents into the government and hold new elections at the end of 2015, instead of 2016, in exchange for supporting Dimas.
Samaras urged members of parliament to listen to "the voice of national interest and common sense," adding that only then "can we find a suitable timeframe for national elections."
One of the pro-European independents Samaras is trying to court, Vassilis Economou, welcomed the move and called on other independents to do the same. The Democratic Left, which withdrew from the ruling coalition last year, said it would consider their response at a meeting on Monday.
Al Jazeera America
AMMAN, Jordan — Christmas in this Arab, Muslim country is for the minorities and the privileged. Middle-class Jordanians deck the halls of the malls and boulevards of the capital, Amman. Christians, about 3 percent of the population, get the day off.
Orthodox, Catholic and evangelical churches will hold midnight masses along with holiday outreach events. They plan food distributions and parties for the refugees flooding their country from conflicts across the region, trying to create some semblance of normal celebration.
But nothing about this Christmas seems normal to Milad, 26.
“I don’t feel anything,” said the young Iraqi mother, who does not want to be fully identified out of fears for her safety. “It’s a holiday, but I feel homeless.”
Milad and her 1-year-old daughter escaped from Mosul to Erbil in June, and then went to Amman in October. They had fled their home as ISIL fighters took over Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and imposed a harsh theocratic rule, including persecuting and attacking religious minorities. Now they are living in a church center along with some 80 of the more than 5,000 Iraqi Christian refugees recently arrived in Jordan. “We want a new life, a new future. We want to stop moving around,” Milad said. “There is no stability here. There are no guarantees.”
The Guardian
Joe Cocker, whose career spanned 40 years, has died after a long battle with lung cancer.
Cocker, known for his rasping voice, rose to fame with his cover of the Beatles song With a Little Help from My Friends, which went to No 1 in 1968.
A longtime US resident, he lived on a ranch in Colorado with his second wife, Pam. His death, aged 70, was confirmed by his agent, Barrie Marshall, who represented the singer for more than 30 years and said Cocker was “without a doubt the greatest rock/soul voice ever to come out of Britain – and remained the same man throughout his life. Hugely talented, a true star, but a kind and humble man who loved to perform. Anyone who ever saw him live will never forget him.”
Born John Robert Cocker in 1944, he was raised in Sheffield, the youngest son of a civil servant. His first foray into music was under the stage name Vance Arnold with his band Vance Arnold and the Avengers, mainly covering Chuck Berry and Ray Charles in the local pubs of Sheffield, but the band landed their big break in 1963 when they supported the Rolling Stones at Sheffield City Hall.
The Guardian
Parading silently along Havana’s Fifth Avenue, wearing white and carrying pink flowers, Cuba’s most famous protest movement – the Damas de Blanco – registered their opposition today to the human rights abuses of the Castro government, as they have done almost every Sunday for the past 10 years.
Unusually, however, in the wake of last week’s resumption of diplomatic relations with the US, there was no sign of the police and state security officers who have frequently detained and beaten their members in an attempt to stifle dissent.
As one of the first tests of the new political climate, the demonstration by about 70 women appeared to have passed with an encouraging lack of violence or repression, but the participants cautioned against complacent assumptions that Cuba has suddenly been transformed into a politically open and tolerant nation.
With so many foreign journalists in Havana following the announcement, participants also feared that the relaxed atmosphere may be an exception and that intimidatory tactics will be renewed when international attention has shifted elsewhere.
Reuters
Russia's government has pushed the country into an economic crisis by not tackling its financial problems fast enough, former finance minister Alexei Kudrin said on Monday, as evidence mounted of trouble spreading through the economy.
As he spoke President Vladimir Putin prepared to hold emergency talks with Western leaders to try to resolve the stand-off over Ukraine, the central bank bailed out its first victim of the collapsing currency and authorities announced a tax on grain exports to protect domestic stocks.
A Reuters poll of 11 economists predicted that Russia's gross domestic product would fall 3.6 percent next year, after only 0.5 percent growth this year.
NPR
Pope Francis blasted the Vatican's top bureaucrats at an annual Christmas gathering, accusing the cardinals, bishops and priests who make up the Curia of "spiritual Alzheimer's" and of lusting for power at all costs.
"Sometimes, [officials of the Curia] feel themselves lords of the manor — superior to everyone and everything," Francis told the Curia's assembled members, according to Vatican Radio, which carried a report of the meeting titled "Pope Francis: Christmas greetings to Curia."
The Curia, the administrative body of the Roman Catholic Church, is dominated by Italians who oversee the world's 1.2 billion Catholics. Francis, an Argentine, is the first non-European to hold the papacy in more than a millennium. The former Cardinal had not worked in the Curia before his election; he has made reform of the Vatican a major part of his agenda.
"The Curia needs to change, to improve. ... A Curia that does not criticize itself, that does not bring itself up to date, that does not try to improve, is a sick body," he said.
Spiegel Online
Disenchanted German citizens and right-wing extremists are joining forces to form a protest movement to fight what they see as the Islamization of the West. Is this the end of the long-praised tolerance of postwar Germany?
Felix Menzel is sitting in his study in an elegant villa in Dresden's Striesen neighborhood on a dark afternoon in early December. He's thinking about Europe. A portrait of Ernst Jünger, a favorite author of many German archconservatives is hung on the wall.
Menzel, 29, is a polite, unimposing man wearing corduroys and rimless glasses. He takes pains to come across as intellectual, and avoids virulent rhetoric like "Foreigners out!" He prefers to talk about "Europe's Western soul," which, as he believes, includes Christianity and the legacy of antiquity, but not Islam. "I see serious threats coming our way from outside Europe. I feel especially pessimistic about the overpopulation of Africa and Asia," says Menzel, looking serious. "And I believe that what is unfolding in Iraq and Syria at the moment is a clear harbinger of the first global civil war."
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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The Guardian
North Korea experienced sweeping and progressively worse internet outages extending into Monday, with one computer expert saying the country’s online access is “totally down”. The White House and the State Department declined to say whether the US government was responsible.
President Barack Obama said on Friday the US government expected to respond to the hacking of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which he described as an expensive act of “cyber vandalism” that he blamed on North Korea. Obama did not say how the US might respond, and it was not immediately clear if the internet connectivity problems represented the retribution. The US government regards its offensive cyber operations as highly classified.
“We aren’t going to discuss, you know, publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.
Reuters
North Korea's internet links have been restored, but it is not clear how stable they are, the U.S.-based internet monitoring company Dyn said on Tuesday.
"The question for the next few hours is whether it will return to the unstable fluctuations we saw before the outage," Jim Cowie, chief scientist for the company, said in a telephone call.
NPR
The U.S. Department of Interior has a great Twitter account (@interior) that frequently makes lists of best Twitter feeds.
The Milky Way Steens Mountain Wilderness in #Oregon.
BBC
Bitcoin trader Charlie Shrem has been sentenced to two years in jail for indirectly helping people swap cash for bitcoins on the Silk Road marketplace.
The Silk Road shut down in 2013 following raids by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies which said it was trading in illegal drugs.
Shrem was caught in the Silk Road raids for trading a total of $1m (£640,000) for bitcoins used on the site.
His sentence also includes forfeiting $950,000 (£608,000) to the US government.
Shrem was not directly involved with the Silk Road but was charged because of his association with Robert Faiella who set up an exchange that let the marketplace's customers swap cash for bitcoins. The virtual cash was the only form of currency accepted on the Silk Road.
Bitcoins are a virtual currency built around a complicated cryptographic protocol and a global network of computers that oversee and verify which coins have been spent by whom.
BBC
new genetics project could help "unlock a series of secrets about devastating diseases", the NHS says.
Under the scheme, 11 Genomics Medicine Centres are being set up in English hospitals to gather DNA samples to help devise targeted treatments for a wide range of diseases.
It is focusing on cancer and rare genetic diseases.
The aim is to sequence 100,000 genomes within three years in order to develop new tests and drugs.
Doctors will offer suitable patients the opportunity to take part in the scheme.
They will have to agree to have their genetic code and medical records - stripped of anything that could identify them - made available to drugs companies and researchers.
C/NET
It's been a very good year for Apple.
The company got its swagger back thanks to a record-setting iPhone launch, a surging stock price and a bold -- and surprising -- $3 billion purchase of headphone maker Beats, its biggest acquisition ever. And, of course, there was the debut of the Apple Watch, that new product CEO Tim Cook had long promised.
It was a far cry from 2013, when the Cupertino, Calif., company suffered from a slumping stock and concerns that its best days were behind it. For now, uncertainty over Cook's stewardship has quieted and he's shown he can be more than just a strong operations leader, as he was under the late CEO Steve Jobs.
Highlighting Apple's recent wins, a spokesperson provided several of the company's enviable statistics. The new iPhone 6 hit a record number of orders in its first 30 days, the Mac desktop and laptop line reached its highest US market share ever in the latest quarter, and the iPad tablet series sold 237 million units over four years -- making it the fastest-growing Apple product ever, the rep said.
C/NET
The massive hack has raised questions about First Amendment rights, privacy and cyberwarfare. But there's a subtler issue at play when we look at all the news stories that have come from hacked inboxes: Why do we put this stuff in email?
Every summer, Coye Cheshire teaches a workshop to incoming grad students on how to be smart and careful on social media.
The class, held in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, involves letting students know the repercussions of posting things on networks like Facebook and Twitter. But Cheshire doesn't mention an online medium even more basic than social media: email.
"We sort of treat email as a given," said Cheshire. But after the high-profile hack against Sony Pictures Entertainment, which resulted in a leak of tens of thousands of internal emails, financial documents and other items, will he be sure to mention email specifically when he teaches the workshop again next summer?
"Absolutely," he said.
ScienceBlog
Scientists have found that decreasing the levels of or blocking a specific protein commonly found in humans and many other animals allowed them to slow the spread of two different kinds of cancer to the lungs of mice. The research indicates that when the protein becomes dysregulated it helps pave the way for cancers to spread and suggests that addressing such dysregulation is a lead worth pursuing in fighting metastasis.
“We think everybody has Chitinase 3-like-1 (CHI3L1) in them because it plays a major role in our ability to fight off infections,” said Dr. Jack A. Elias, dean of medicine and biological sciences at Brown University and corresponding author of a new study that appears online in the journal Cancer Research. “But one of the things this paper shows is that inducing this molecule seems to be very important in the ability of tumors to spread.”