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. 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.
Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the OND banner.
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Al Jazeera America
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Monday that his plans to address Congress are not aimed at disrespecting President Barack Obama, even as he assailed the U.S. leader's bid for a nuclear deal with Iran as a threat to his country's survival.
"I have a moral obligation to speak up in the face of these dangers while there is still time to avert them," Netanyahu said during an address to a pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington.
As Netanyahu spoke, Secretary of State John Kerry was opening a new round of talks with Iran in Geneva aimed at reaching a framework nuclear deal ahead of a late March deadline.
Netanyahu's visit to Washington has exposed deep tensions with the White House. The centerpiece of his trip is an address Tuesday to Congress that was arranged by Republicans without the knowledge of the Obama administration.
The Guardian
An undaunted Binyamin Netanyahu has defended his decision to defy the White House and accept an invitation from Republican leader John Boehner to address Congress on Tuesday on the risks of a nuclear deal with Iran.
Though he acknowledged his speech may been been interpreted as a partisan intervention in US politics, the Israeli prime minister insisted it was a necessary step, given his fears that the international talks would fail to adequately contain Tehran’s nuclear potential.
“The days when the Jewish people are passive in the face of threats to annihilate us, those days are over,” he told an audience of around 16,000 people at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) annual policy conference in Washington.
BBC
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said his coming speech to the US Congress is "not intended to disrespect" President Barack Obama.
In a speech to the top US-Israel lobby, Mr Netanyahu said the last thing he would want is to make Israel a US partisan issue.
Mr Netanyahu has been invited to speak at the US Capitol on Tuesday by House Speaker John Boehner about Iran.
It is seen as a rebuke to Mr Obama's threat to veto new sanctions on Iran.
The White House has said Mr Obama will not meet Mr Netanyahu during this trip as he is visiting too close to Israel's election date.
The Israeli leader is at odds with the Obama administration's pursuit of negotiations with Iran over their nuclear programme.
Reuters
President Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu clashed over Iran nuclear diplomacy on Monday on the eve of the Israeli prime minister’s hotly disputed address to Congress, underscoring the severity of U.S.-Israeli strains over the issue.
Even as the two leaders professed their commitment to a strong partnership and sought to play down the diplomatic row, they delivered dueling messages – Netanyahu in a speech to pro-Israeli supporters and Obama in an interview with Reuters – that hammered home their differences on Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Neither gave any ground ahead of Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Tuesday when he plans to detail his objections to ongoing talks between Iran and world powers that he says will inevitably allow Tehran to become a nuclear-armed state.
Reuters
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday he hopes the United States will open an embassy in Cuba by the time of a Western Hemisphere summit in Panama in mid-April.
In an interview with Reuters, Obama also cautioned that it will take more time to fully establish normal relations with Cuba after more than a half-century rupture.
"My hope is that we will be able to open an embassy, and that some of the initial groundwork will have been laid" before the April 10-11 Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Obama said.
"Keep in mind that our expectation has never been that we would achieve full normal relations immediately. There's a lot of work that still has to be done," he said.
In a historic agreement, Washington and Havana announced on Dec. 17 that they planned to restore diplomatic relations following 18 months of secret talks.
Two rounds of "normalization" talks in Havana and Washington have since made quick progress toward renewing official ties.
Al Jazeera America
MONTEVIDEO — Late last year, six prisoners from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba were resettled in Uruguay. At the time, it seemed like an opportunity to begin a new life far from the nightmare they had endured and, for some, far from the violence plaguing their home country.
“I have no passport or papers,” Adel bin Mohammad el-Ouerghi, one of the former Guantánamo prisoners, told Al Jazeera in an interview at his home in Montevideo. “I asked for the Americans to send me back to Tunisia, but they refused.”
Three months on, the men have yet to be reunited with their families and some are disillusioned with aspects of their new home. While relieved to be away from Guantánamo, they have found that freedom is fraught with difficulties. “When we were in Guantánamo, the Uruguayan authorities made many promises,” Ouerghi said. “But when we arrived we didn’t find those promises.”
The six men — four Syrians, a Palestinian and Ouerghi — were never charged with crimes and had been approved for transfer by U.S. authorities long before their release. “I want to stay in Uruguay to rebuild my life. If I didn’t, what would I do?” Ouerghi asked.
Al Jazeera America
A California state lawmaker has introduced the "Right to Rest Act," a measure aimed at ending criminalization of the homeless — bringing to four the number of states considering similar proposals — rights advocates said Monday.
"It's time to address poverty, mental health and the plight of the homeless head-on as a social issue and not a criminal issue," State Sen. Carol Liu, D-LA Cañada Flintridge, said in the release. "Citing homeless people for resting in a public space can lead to their rejection for jobs, education loans and housing, further denying them a pathway out of poverty."
Liu introduced Right to Rest Act, SB 608, in the state Senate on Friday. Similar bills, widely referred to as a “Homeless Bill of Rights,” have been introduced by state legislators in Colorado, Oregon and Hawaii.
The Guardian
Fox News has admitted, in answer to questions from the Washington Post, that host Bill O’Reilly did not witness any bombings in Northern Ireland or murders in El Salvador. The network said he saw only photographs of such atrocities.
For more than a week, Fox defended O’Reilly from increasing accusations that he has for years exaggerated elements of his reporting. O’Reilly called such accusations “bullshit” and made vague threats against reporters who do not satisfy his demands about their own reporting.
The story took on increased relevancy after NBC suspended the Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, over inconsistencies in his version of events in Iraq in 2003 and around Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The new Fox statement is the second time either Fox or O’Reilly has backtracked on such issues.
The Guardian
Kelly Gissendaner will on Monday night become the first woman to be executed in Georgia in almost 70 years – subject to a last-ditch application for clemency.
Gissendaner, 46, was found guilty in 1998 of recruiting her lover to kill her husband Doug. After 16 years on death row, she was scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on 25 February, but a winter storm forced a delay.
Prosecutors said Gissendaner, a mother of three, wanted her husband dead so she could profit from two life insurance policies and the couple’s $84,000 house. Her husband’s body went undiscovered in the woods for nearly two weeks in February 1997.
Gregory Owen, Gissendaner’s boyfriend, testified against her as part of a plea bargain that landed him a life sentence but spared him the death penalty. Owen will be eligible for parole in eight years’ time, attorneys said.
The Guardian
Three young children have been shot accidentally in the Houston area in the past four days, two fatally from self-inflicted gunshots.
In the latest incident, a six-year-old boy was taken to hospital in critical condition after being shot by his five-year-old brother on Monday morning in north-east Harris County, police told reporters.
On Sunday, Codrick Beal, four, shot himself with a gun he found while staying with a family friend at a house in a northern suburb, while his mother celebrated her birthday.
Beal’s death followed that of an unnamed three-year-old boy, who died after shooting himself in the head at home in north-western Harris County on Friday afternoon.
“It’s just a terrible accident,” Leticia Beal, a cousin of Codrick’s mother, Ashley Beal, told the Houston Chronicle. “We see it all the time on the news but you never think it’ll hit home. It’s the most horrible thing.”
Reuters
U.S. President Barack Obama said on Monday that Iran should commit to a verifiable freeze of at least 10 years on its nuclear activity for a landmark atomic deal to be reached, but said the odds were still against sealing a final agreement.
In an interview with Reuters at the White House, Obama said that a rift over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned speech to Congress opposing the Iran deal on Tuesday was a distraction that would not be "permanently destructive" to U.S. Israeli ties.
But he said there was a "substantial disagreement" between his administration and the Israeli government over how to achieve their shared goal of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
Reuters
President Barack Obama on Monday sharply criticized China's plans for new rules on U.S. tech companies, urging Beijing to change the policy if it wants to do business with the United States and saying he had raised it with President Xi Jinping.
In an interview with Reuters, Obama said he was concerned about Beijing's plans for a far-reaching counterterrorism law that would require technology firms to hand over encryption keys, the passcodes that help protect data, and install security "backdoors" in their systems to give Chinese authorities surveillance access.
"This is something that I’ve raised directly with President Xi," Obama said. "We have made it very clear to them that this is something they are going to have to change if they are to do business with the United States."
The Chinese government sees the rules as crucial to protect state and business secrets. Western companies say they reinforce increasingly onerous terms of doing business in the world's second-largest economy and heighten mistrust over cybersecurity between Washington and Beijing.
NHK World
The United Nations estimates that more than 6,000 people have died in the fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian militants that began in April of last year.
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Monday that it had received reports of 5,809 deaths in eastern Ukraine by late February.
DW
Iraq's state television Al-Iraqiya television said on Monday that government forces - backed by allied Shiite and Sunni fighters - were attacking the city of Tikrit, with the support of artillery and airstrikes by Iraqi fighter jets.
Militants were reported to have been dislodged from some areas outside the city, but there were no further details.
Forces in northern Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region are also making gains against the IS. Similarly, in Syria, Kurdish fighters recently ran the group out of Kobani, a city on the Turkish-Syrian border.
'Last chance'
The offensive came hours after Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called on Sunni tribal fighters to abandon the extremist group and promised them a pardon.
DW
After an icy meeting with his Russian counterpart Lavrov, John Kerry accused the UNHRC of being preoccupied with Israel. At the same event, the Iranian foreign minister said a nuclear deal could be finished this week.
After greeting each other with neither a smile nor small talk, US Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters that he was hopeful his meeting with the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, would be "the start of a change which would be an improvement for everybody."
The meeting between the secretary of state and the Russian foreign minister followed on the heels of comments made by Kerry last week in which he accused Moscow of "lying to my face." Though US officials deny that Kerry was referring to Lavrov, insisting instead that he was referencing public statements and media reports, Lavrov is the only Russian official Kerry is known to have met face-to-face in recent months.
DW
Juergen Fitschen, co-head of Germany's leading bank, is to appear in a Munich court on fraud charges. He is accused of conspiring with fellow defendants to minimize the amount of a settlement by lying under oath.
The Munich District Court has decided to try Deutsche Bank co-CEO Juergen Fitschen on false testimony charges related to the bankruptcy of late media mogul Leo Kirch, court officials confirmed on Monday.
Fitschen and four former managers of Germany's leading commercial and investment bank have been charged with making false statements in the bankruptcy case, which dates back to the collapse of the Kirch group in 2002.
Kirch, who died in 2011, claimed that comments made by ex-Deutsche Bank head Rolf Breuer in a 2002 television appearance doubting his group's creditworthiness helped pave the way for the collapse of his business empire.
Spiegel Online
How anti-Semitic is Germany? The Central Council of Jews is warning members of the community against wearing traditional head coverings. It is a precaution that 26-year-old Mark Krasnov has been taking for some time.
Before Mark Krasnov leaves his Berlin home, he always asks himself: Should I play it safe or should I wear the kippah? "I don't want to provoke anyone or for people to get any silly ideas," says the 26-year-old Jewish man. The result is that he hardly every wears the headgear when he goes out. He feels it's too risky.
The Guardian
Mohammed Emwazi, the west London man unmasked as the Islamic State’s knife-wielding killer, said he was told by MI5 five years ago that they would keep a “close eye” on him despite denying he was involved in extremist militancy.
Transcripts given to the Guardian of Emwazi’s first interview with Cage, the advocacy group that works with communities affected by the war on terror, show a man recounting that he told an MI5 officer that the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the twin towers in New York and the London underground bomb attacks in 2005 were acts of extremism and that he wanted to be able to “make those lives [of the dead] come back”.
The MI5 handler, “Nick”, was unimpressed. Emwazi said that the agent looked at him and said: “I still believe you are going to Somalia to train.”
Emwazi said the agent “threatened him”, saying: “We are going to keep a close eye on you, Mohammed, and we already have been … We are going to keep a close eye on you”.
NPR
Police in Toronto say they have solved the riddle of a mysterious tunnel discovered near a venue for the upcoming Pan American and Parapan American Games.
Maybe.
Police say two men told investigators that they built the tunnel for "personal reasons." Police verified their account, deemed there was no criminal intent or concerns about security, and closed the case.
According to The Associated Press, Police Constable Victor Kwong said tips from the public helped authorities identify and interview two men apparently responsible for building the underground chamber, adding it has been determined there was never any danger to public safety.
As the Two-Way reported last week, police said the hand-dug tunnel is about 33 feet long and contained a gas-powered generator, moisture-resistant light bulbs, and food and beverage containers. It appeared to be well-constructed and there were still tools inside, along with a wheelbarrow and a pulley system, when it was found. Police said it was warm and comfortable inside.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Al Jazeera America
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will begin to hear arguments in King v. Burwell, the latest legal challenge to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or ACA. The case boils down to an argument over how to interpret seven words in the legislation, also known as “Obamacare,” that define who can receive a government subsidy to help pay for health insurance.
Here’s how it works: As soon as the ACA went into effect (plus a few days’ grace period), most U.S. citizens who didn’t already have health insurance were required to purchase coverage, either through their employer and the private market, or through the new public exchanges created by the law. If you didn’t, you would be hit with a tax penalty. That’s the stick. But there was also a carrot: If you (and your family) fell within a certain range of income relative to the federal poverty level, the government would cover a significant chunk of your insurance costs.
Spiegel Online
Can we still stop global warming? Only if we radically change our capitalist system, argues author Naomi Klein. In an interview with SPIEGEL, she explains why the time has come to abandon small steps for a radical new approach.
Klein: Bad luck. Bad timing. Many unfortunate coincidences.
SPIEGEL: The wrong catastrophe at the wrong moment?
Klein: The worst possible moment. The connection between greenhouse gases and global warming has been a mainstream political issue for humanity since 1988. It was precisely the time that the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama declared the "End of History," the victory of Western capitalism. Canada and the US signed the first free-trade agreement, which became the prototype for the rest of the world.
SPIEGEL: So you're saying that a new era of consumption and energy use began precisely at the moment when sustainability and restraint would have been more appropriate?
Klein: Exactly. And it was at precisely this moment that we were also being told that there was no longer any such thing as social responsibility and collective action, that we should leave everything to the market. We privatized our railways and the energy grid, the WTO and the IMF locked in an unregulated capitalism. Unfortunately, this led to an explosion in emissions.
SPIEGEL: You're an activist, and you've blamed capitalism for all kinds of things over the years. Now you're blaming it for climate change too?
NPR
George Dante fell in love with taxidermy as a young child. His parents took him to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and he couldn't tear his eyes away from the dioramas in the Hall of African Mammals.
When Dante was 7, he preserved his first specimen: a small fish he caught in Barnegat Bay. He formed the body with green floral foam, added a pair of dolls' eyes that his mother bought at a craft store, and painted the faded scales with watercolors.
In high school, Dante started Wildlife Preservations, the taxidermy business he still owns and operates. He became a rock star in the taxidermy world, famous for his scientifically accurate specimens. He even started contracting with the museum that had inspired him as a child. So when that museum encountered a taxidermy emergency, they knew whom to call.
NPR
Here's your task: Based on information about individual applicants to an MBA program, you need to predict each applicant's success in the program and in subsequent employment. Specifically, you'll be given basic information — such as the applicant's undergraduate major, GMAT scores, years of work experience and an interview score — and you'll need to assess the applicant's success (relative to other applicants) in terms of GPA in the MBA program and other metrics of achievement. Will the person be in the top quarter of all applicants? In the bottom quarter?
Now, you have a choice. You could either make these predictions yourself, or you could let a sophisticated statistical model make the predictions. The model was designed by thoughtful analysts and based on data from hundreds of past students. It will make predictions based on the same information presented to you: undergraduate major, GMAT scores, years of work experience, and so on. Which do you choose, you or the model?
NPR
Tinder, the immensely popular dating app that lets users pick a potential match with just the swipe of a finger, launched a paid version this week in 140 countries. But there's a catch: Your age will determine how much you pay.
Tinder told NPR that U.S. users will pay $9.99 for Tinder Plus if they're under 30, and $19.99 per month if they're 30 and above. U.K. users between the ages of 18-27 will be charged 3.99 pounds per month, and users 28 and above will be charged 14.99 pounds per month.
In a statement to NPR, Tinder defended the move, and said testing has proved the tiered pricing will work.
NPR
When you ask people what impacts health you'll get a lot of different answers: Access to good health care and preventative services, personal behavior, exposure to germs or pollution and stress. But if you dig a little deeper you'll find a clear dividing line, and it boils down to one word: money.
People whose household income is more than $75,000 a year have very different perceptions of what affects health than those whose household income is less than $25,000. This is one key finding in a poll conducted by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. One third of respondents who are low income say lack of money has a harmful effect on health.
Nomadic herders moved en masse into Europe from the steppe around 4,500 years ago
BBC
DNA analysis has revealed evidence for a massive migration into the heartland of Europe 4,500 years ago.
Data from the genomes of 69 ancient individuals suggest that herders moved en masse from the continent's eastern periphery into Central Europe.
These migrants may be responsible for the expansion of Indo-European languages, which make up the majority of spoken tongues in Europe today.
An international team has published the research in the journal Nature.
Prof David Reich and colleagues extracted DNA from remains found at archaeological sites around the continent. They used a new DNA-enrichment technique that greatly reduces the amount of sequencing needed to obtain genome-wide data.
New York Times
HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — This quaint and quirky seaside community south of Los Angeles has had a conflicted relationship with the oil industry for close to a century. It has variously approved oil drilling, banned it, approved it and prohibited it again. During one yes-on-oil stretch, it contracted with an energy company to put 34 wells on a 1.3-acre city maintenance yard a few blocks from a stretch of beach that normally bustles with surfers and swimmers.
On Tuesday, the residents of Hermosa Beach are going to vote yet again on an oil and gas drilling initiative — whether to allow a contract with the energy company E&B Natural Resources Management to proceed despite a current drilling ban.