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, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke, JML9999 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.
BBC
Greece election: Alexis Tsipras hails 'victory of the people'
Alexis Tsipras has hailed a "victory of the people" after his left-wing Syriza party won Greece's fifth election in six years.
He said Greeks faced a difficult road and that recovery from financial crisis would only come through hard work.
The conservative New Democracy party earlier conceded defeat,.
With 60% of votes counted, Syriza is projected to be just short of a majority but the Independent Greeks have agreed to join a coalition.
The latest figures give Syriza 35% of the vote, compared with New Democracy's 28%. The far-right Golden Dawn is set to be the third biggest party, with 7.1% of the vote.
The snap election was called after Syriza lost its majority in August. This followed the signing of an unpopular new financial bailout deal with international creditors.
Turnout in this poll was just over 55%, down from 63% in January and low by Greek standards.
BBC
Cuba: Pope Francis meets Fidel Castro after Havana mass
Pope Francis has met Cuba's former President, Fidel Castro, after celebrating mass in front of tens of thousands of people in Havana.
The two men discussed world affairs and religion, in what the Vatican called an "informal and friendly" encounter.
Before the meeting, Pope Francis gave a homily in which he urged Cubans to serve each other rather than ideology.
It is the first visit by the Pope to the Communist-ruled island, on a trip that will later take him to the US.
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi described the meeting between Pope Francis and Fidel Castro, which took place at the former Cuban leader's home, as low-key.
They exchanged books: Pope Francis gave Mr Castro three titles, including a book of sermons by Mr Castro's former teacher, while in return the Pope received Fidel and Religion, a collection of interviews with a Brazilian priest.
Raw Story
Pope Francis is a shrewd reformer – and this US visit could define his papacy
The one thing you could depend on when Pope John Paul II made one of his high-profile overseas trips was that he would hammer home in the most uncompromising terms Catholicism’s opposition to abortion. For the Polish pontiff, who died in 2005 and has now been declared a saint, abortion was murder, a stance which he presented as the keystone of all orthodoxy for Catholics.
This week his successor but one, the Argentinian Pope Francis, will be following in John Paul’s footsteps with his own first visit to the United States after spending the weekend in Cuba. Together, the two legs of the trip promise to be among the defining moments of what has already been an extraordinary two-and-a-half-year papacy.
Like John Paul, Francis will be addressing the United Nations and visiting the White House, but those Americans, Catholic or not, hoping that he too will be speaking out unambiguously on the pro-life/pro-choice stand-off that has so dominated church-state relations in the US for a generation are likely to be disappointed.
Al Jazeera
New batch of US-trained fighters enter Syria to fight ISIL: report
A group of 75 fighters, recently trained by U.S. and coalition forces in Turkey, have entered northern Syria to join the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a monitoring group reported on Sunday.
The fighters entered Syria in a convoy of a dozen cars with light weapons and ammunition, under air cover from the coalition that has been carrying out strikes against ISIL in Syria and Iraq, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British human rights group, said on Sunday.
"Seventy-five new fighters trained in a camp near the Turkish capital entered Aleppo province between Friday night and Saturday morning," Rami Abdel Rahman, director of the Syrian Observatory, told Al Jazeera.
U.S. officials on Sunday did not issue an immediate response to the report. On Wednesday, Gen. Austin Lloyd, who oversees the U.S. campaign against ISIL, told Congress that four or five U.S.-trained rebels were fighting in Syria. On Friday his spokesman, Col. Patrick Ryder, told reporters that four more had re-entered Syria since Austin spoke.
Abdel Rahman said the new group of U.S.-trained fighters crossed through the Bab al-Salama border point, the main gateway for fighters and supplies heading into Aleppo province.
N Y Times
ISIS Defectors Reveal Disillusionment
LONDON — A small but growing number of defectors from the Islamic State are risking reprisals and imprisonment to speak out about their disillusionment with the extremist group, according to a research organization that tracks former and current militants.
The Islamic State considers defectors as apostates, and most of the hundreds thought to have left the group have gone into hiding.
But 58 defectors, nine of them from Western Europe and Australia, have gone public with their testimonies since last year, according to a report to be published Monday by the International Center for the Study for Radicalization at King’s College London.
According to the report, some of the defectors said they disapproved of the Islamic State’s hostility to other Sunni rebel groups that opposed President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and its indiscriminate killings of civilians and hostages. Others grew weary of what they saw as favoritism and mistreatment by commanders, or were disappointed that the life of a militant was far less exciting, or lucrative, than they had imagined. Two left after they found out that they had been selected as suicide bombers.
Raw Story
Carly Fiorina: Opponents must ‘prove to me’ they watched my non-existent fetus videos
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina insisted on Sunday that anyone who wanted to debate her about Planned Parenthood funding would have to “prove” that they watched videos of a fetus that fact checkers say don’t exist.
During last week’s Republican presidential debate, Fiorina had claimed that she saw undercover videos from a Planned Parenthood that showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”
However, fact checkers like FactCheck.org and The Washington Post have said that there was no such scene included in the videos that were recently released by an anti-abortion group.
“Do you acknowledge what every fact checker has found?” Fox News host Chris Wallace asked the candidate on Sunday. “As horrific as the scene is, it was only described on the video by someone who claimed to have seen it. There is no actual footage of the incident you just mentioned.”
“No, I don’t accept that at all,” Fiorina shot back. “I’ve seen the footage. And I find it amazing, actually, that all these supposed fact checkers in the mainstream media claim this doesn’t exist, they’re trying to attack the authenticity of the videotape, I haven’t found anyone in the mainstream media who has ever watched these things.”
CNN
For first time, company owner faces life sentence for food poisoning outbreak
[snip]
Shirley Mae Almer, 72, survived lung cancer and a brain tumor, but not one of America's favorite foods: peanut butter. Parnell's company, PCA, had manufactured the creamy stuff that she slathered on her toast at a nursing home in Minnesota. It was laced with deadly salmonella.
[snip]
Parnell faces life in prison, according to court documents that detailed the sentencing guidelines. His brother and food broker, Michael Parnell, faces 17 years, and a plant manager, Mary Wilkerson, could be behind bars for five years.
It is the first time that a food executive has been convicted on federal felony charges linked to a food poisoning outbreak. A life sentence for Parnell would be the harshest sentence ever doled out.
N Y Times
Oregon’s Legal Sale of Marijuana Comes With Reprieve
PORTLAND, Ore. — About 15 years ago, when she was in her 20s, Erika Walton handed a bong to someone who turned out be a police officer, and was cited for marijuana possession. She paid the fine, she said, but the violation lingered on, haunting her record.
On a recent afternoon, Ms. Walton was at a free legal clinic here in Oregon’s largest city, filling out paperwork to have that infraction forever sealed. Once the process is complete, she will be able to legally say to an employer, landlord or anybody else who asks that she has never been convicted or cited for any drug crime at all.
“It’s taken away a lot of my life,” Ms. Walton said as she inked out her fingerprints, which Oregon requires applicants for sealing to file.
The mark on her record was minor — a citation for possession under Oregon law, even back then, was below the level of a misdemeanor, roughly equivalent to riding the light rail without a ticket. But it still cost her, she said, when she had to divulge it on applications for jobs and volunteer positions at her children’s school.
C/Net
'Doctor Who' series 9: 'The Magician's Apprentice' has a lot of thrills up its sleeve
"Where is the Doctor?" "Where he always is: right behind you... and one step ahead."
"Doctor Who" bursts back onto our TV screens today -- and the show's not messing around. "The Magician's Apprentice," the first episode of season 9 of the revived show, is one of the most idea-packed and high-stakes episodes I can remember. The premiere feels more like a pedal-to-the-metal season finale or big screen movie version. While certainly a treat for longtime fans of the show, newcomers are likely to be left feeling alienated by the alien adventures.
The Guardian
Tracking the inferno: where wildfires are hitting California, other states hardest
Destructive wildfires have roared across California, threatening thousands of homes and displacing thousands more people. But it isn't the only state in the American northwest that's fighting the combustible mix of drought, heat and dangerously fire-prone topography. “The fire season hit very hard in the west, with multiple geographic areas burning at the same time,” said Kari Boyd-Peak, a representative of the National Interagency Fire Center.
In five western states, there are 15 large fires (defined by the Guardian as more than 50,000 acres in size) burning right now. A third of these are "megafires", an official term for fires that span more than 100,000 acres.
Here are the largest fires burning in the west today:
(All are listed and described in the linked article)