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 with guest editors annetteboardman and Chitown Kev. 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.
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DW
Pacific ministers have reached a deal on the biggest trade liberalization pact in a generation. News agencies reported the accord would set standards for 12 nations and reduce tariffs for a wide range of products.
Trade officials said the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TTP) would affect 40 percent of the world economy and had the potential to reshape industries.
Should national lawmakers approve the deal reached Monday, it would influence everything from the price of cheese to the cost of cancer treatment in the nations concerned.
NHK World
12 countries have reached a broad agreement on a Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade initiative.
The deal came on Monday after the trade ministers from the 12 nations reached a compromise on contentious issues at a session in the US city of Atlanta.
Al Jazeera America
Pacific trade ministers have reached a deal on the most sweeping — and to many the most controversial — trade liberalization pact in a generation, in a move that will cut trade barriers and set common standards across the bloc, but potentially at a cost to consumers and employees, say public health advocates, environmentalists and labor groups.
Leaders from a dozen Pacific Rim nations are poised to announce the pact later on Monday. The deal could reshape industries and influence everything from the price of cheese to the cost of cancer treatments.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership would affect 40 percent of the world economy and would stand as a legacy-defining achievement for U.S. President Barack Obama, if it is ratified by Congress.
Lawmakers in other TPP countries must also approve the deal.
The Guardian
Trade ministers from 12 countries announced the largest trade-liberalizing pact in a generation on Monday. In a press conference in Atlanta, trade ministers from the US, Australia and Japan called the the Trans-Pacific Partnership an “ambitious” and “challenging” negotiation that will cut red tape globally and “set the rules for the 21st century for trade”.
The deal – in the works since 2008 – is a major victory for the US president, Barack Obama. “This partnership levels the playing field for our farmers, ranchers and manufacturers by eliminating more than 18,000 taxes that various countries put on our products,” the president said in a statement. “It includes the strongest commitments on labor and the environment of any trade agreement in history, and those commitments are enforceable, unlike in past agreements.”
Reuters
The United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries have reached a sweeping deal to set up a free-trade zone for 40 percent of the world's economy, but the accord on Monday faced initial skepticism in the U.S. Congress.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the most ambitious trade pact in a generation and could reshape industries and influence the cost of products from cheese to cancer treatments, presenting key issues also for drug companies and automakers.
Tired negotiators worked round the clock over the weekend to settle tough issues such as monopoly rights for new biotech drugs. A demand by New Zealand for greater access for its dairy exports was only settled at 5 a.m. EDT (0900 GMT) on Monday.
Details of the pact were emerging in statements by officials after days of marathon talks in Atlanta.
The 12 countries will cut trade barriers and set common standards for a region stretching from Vietnam to Canada. The agreement could be a legacy-defining achievement for Democratic President Barack Obama, if it is ratified by Congress.
Al Jazeera America
Authorities say an Amtrak train headed to Washington, D.C. has derailed in central Vermont, injuring at least four people.
Five cars were reportedly derailed in the incident, with three falling down a steep embankment. At least four people were transported to hospital for treatment, the Montpelier Fire and Ambulance Department told Al Jazeera. It is not believed that anyone received life-threatening injuries.
Amtrak confirmed in a Twitter post Monday that the Vermonter train had derailed. According to the Amtrak website, the 13-hour, 45-minute daily trip begins in St. Albans in northern Vermont. The train is supposed to pass through Burlington, Vermont, Springfield, Massachusetts, and New York before arriving in D.C.
Al Jazeera America
CHAMBERSBURG, Pa. — It was a mother’s worst nightmare. Maria Lopez, a single mother of three, answered her door one August afternoon to find employees from her eldest daughter’s school.
“They told me, ‘Prepare yourself. They’re taking Brenda to the hospital,’” Lopez said.
Brenda Zamorano, then 17, had been found unconscious in the bathroom at school.
Lopez later discovered that her daughter had suffered a brain hemorrhage after an arteriovenous malformation ruptured. Less than 1 percent of the population is born with this condition, and ruptures most often occur in people ages 15 to 20.
“I started to pray and pray and pray,” said Lopez, a devout evangelical Christian. “It’s purely God’s mercy that Brenda is alive.”
But the brain injury left her daughter paralyzed and unable to speak.
The Guardian
The general ultimately responsible for Saturday’s US airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital said Afghan forces attempting to retake Kunduz from the Taliban called in the deadly raid.
John Campbell, speaking at the Pentagon, said he was correcting an initial US statement that said the airstrike was meant to defend US forces under fire.
Campbell, the commander of the 9,800 US troops and residual Nato forces in Afghanistan, did not apologize on Monday for the airstrike – which Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) is calling a war crime – saying that he would have a preliminary report from US military investigators “in the next couple of days”.
Reuters
The Democratic minority on a U.S. congressional committee investigating the attack in Benghazi, Libya, intend to defy the committee's Republican leaders by releasing the transcript of a closed-door interview with a former senior aide to Hillary Clinton, they said on Monday.
The announcement came six days after Kevin McCarthy, the leader of U.S. House Republicans, went on television to boast that the federally funded investigation had successfully dented Clinton's poll numbers as she runs for the Democratic presidential nomination.
McCarthy, who is seeking to become the next House speaker, later clarified that he had not meant to suggest that harming the Democratic front-runner's chances at winning the November 2016 election was the committee's purpose.
The Guardian
Renewed calls for tougher gun control laws sent gun stocks surging on Monday as investors expected an increase in gun sales. The value of Smith & Wesson’s shares went up by 7.29% and Sturm, Ruger & Co increased by 2.75%.
It was another good day for gun stock investors. Overall this year, the value of Smith & Wesson’s shares has increased by more than 80% and that of Sturm, Ruger increased by more than 60% – making them some of the best-performing stocks of 2015.
Monday’s rally in gun stocks came hours after Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and the Democratic candidate for the president, unveiled a plan calling for tougher background checks at gun shows and online than those currently in place.
The Guardian
The US justice department has made no effort to contact Edward Snowden to discuss a plea deal that would see him return from exile in Russia, the NSA whistleblower said in an interview on BBC Panorama to be broadcast on Monday night.
Snowden, who is wanted under the Espionage Act after leaking tens of thousands of top secret documents, said he had offered to do time in prison as part of a deal. “We are still waiting for them to call us back,” he said.
His comments come just months after Eric Holder, who was US attorney-general until April, said Snowden’s revelations had “spurred a necessary debate”. He also said the “possibility exists” of a plea deal.
But senior figures in the security services in both the US and UK are unforgiving, wanting him to serve a long sentence both as punishment and to act as a deterrent to others.
Former head of the NSA Michael Hayden, asked by Panorama what would happen to Snowden, said: “If you’re asking me my opinion, he’s going to die in Moscow. He’s not coming home.”
The Guardian
An 11-year-old eastern Tennessee boy was in custody for murder on Monday for shooting and killing an eight-year-old neighbor girl with a shotgun because she would not show him her puppies, authorities said.
The unidentified boy was talking to three girls who were outside the window of his mobile home on Saturday evening and asked one of them if he could see her two new puppies, but the girl refused, according to Jefferson County sheriff GW “Bud” McCoig.
The boy retrieved his father’s 12-gauge shotgun, shot the girl in the chest from the window, and then threw the weapon outside by the girl’s body, McCoig said.
Los Angeles Times
Caught between conflicting moral arguments, Gov. Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminary student, signed a measure Monday allowing physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to terminally ill patients who want to hasten their deaths.
Brown appeared to struggle in deciding whether to approve the bill, whose opponents included the Catholic Church.
“In the end, I was left to reflect on what I would want in the face of my own death,” Brown wrote in a signing message. “I do not know what I would do if I were dying in prolonged and excruciating pain. I am certain, however, that it would be a comfort to be able to consider the options afforded by this bill. And I wouldn’t deny that right to others.”
The new law is modeled after one that went into effect in 1997 in Oregon, where last year 105 people took their lives with drugs prescribed for that purpose.
DW
The "Bild" newspaper has claimed that the German government is secretly expecting some 1.5 million asylum seekers this year. The government denied it, even as political leaders hardened their refugee rhetoric.
The tabloid "Bild" newspaper threw a grenade into Germany's migration debate on Monday morning by releasing a new figure on the number of refugees the government is expecting in the current year.
According to a "secret" government document - the paper did not elaborate on the exact authority or department that had leaked it - some 1.5 million people are now going to seek asylum in Germany this year. Not only that, as many as 920,000 of these are expected to arrive before the year's end.
McClatchy DC
ISTANBUL
A Russian warplane on a bombing run in Syria entered Turkish airspace Saturday and was intercepted by Turkish Air Force planes, the Turkish Foreign Ministry announced Monday.
Turkey summoned the Russian ambassador in Ankara, Andrey Gennadiyevic Karlov, on Saturday and warned that if the violation were repeated, the Russian Federation “will be responsible for any undesired incident that may occur.”
Turkish Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioglu telephoned his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, to protest and conferred with his U.S., French, Italian, and British counterparts.
The Foreign Ministry announcement confirmed a McClatchy report Sunday that an incident had taken place, though it provided a slightly different account of the most serious international confrontation in years between the two countries.
Spiegel Online
Both men were Syrians -- a taxi driver and his passenger. They met during an hour-long drive in April from the airport in the southern Turkish city of Adana toward the east. Within a few minutes, they realized that they were from the same place, the northern port city of Latakia, which is controlled by the Syrian regime.
Things got tricky when the two men began to wonder whose side the other had been on.
They avoided direct questions for a while. Before, on the other side of the border, they may have shot at each other. But now they were sitting in the same car. Eventually, the driver began to tell his story. He had been a bank manager and had told jokes about Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. After an informer betrayed him to the government, a man from Syrian intelligence gave him a warning, saying: "Get out now. They're coming to get you in half an hour."
Spiegel Online
The panoramic terrace with views of the buildings in Lisbon's Old Town glows in the evening sun. Couples snuggle on benches, a street musician plays Brazilian melodies on saxophone, the Tagus River flows down beneath and a giant Jesus statue can be seen on the other bank. Tourists and locals alike raise their mobile phones into the air as they try to snap the prettiest views. Then they stroll over to the lime-green Piaggio Ape owned by Mónica Santos and João Reis.
The two Portuguese set up Mariá Limão, a small food truck that sells homemade lemonade and crêpes here in mid-July. Originally, Mónica Santos, 33, had previously been employed as a social worker, but she lost her job during the debt crisis. The same happened to her friend Reis, 38, who studied math and marketing at college. Neither wanted to leave the country the way so many others from their generation did. And they didn't want to give up, sit back and take things easy and move back in with their parents.
NPR
Catholic bishops and other representatives of the world's more than 1 billion Roman Catholics are meeting in Rome on Sunday for the start of the Synod on the Family. This meeting will guide Church teaching on issues like marriage, divorce and contraception.
Lively and contentious debate is expected. The 279 bishops, from 120 countries, will tackle questions of marriage, divorce and homosexuality — hot-button issues in the U.S. and the world at large. They could fundamentally alter more than 2,000 years of Catholic understanding — "going all the way back to the Hebrews and the law of Moses," according to the National Catholic Register.
"They are discussing issues that go to the heart of what it means to be a Catholic living in a particular culture," says Kathleen Sprows Cummings, head of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. She spoke with NPR's Michel Martin about the synod, in the first installment of a new series, Words You'll Hear.
NPR
North Korea has returned a New York University student and South Korean national who had been detained in Pyongyang since April.
21-year-old Joo Won-moon was in North Korean custody after he crossed the border from China into North Korea, hoping to help strengthen ties between the two Koreas.
"I thought some great event could happen and hopefully that event could have a good effect in the relationship between the North and the South," Joo told CNN in an interview in May.
Reuters
The United States and NATO denounced Russia on Monday for violating Turkish airspace and Ankara threatened to respond, reporting two incursions in two days and raising the prospect of direct confrontation between the former Cold War adversaries.
NATO held an emergency meeting in Brussels of ambassadors from its 28 member states to respond to what Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg called "unacceptable violations of Turkish airspace" after a Russian jet crossed its frontier with Syria on Saturday.
A Russian warplane again violated Turkish airspace on Sunday, a Turkish foreign ministry official said late on Monday, prompting Ankara to summon Moscow's ambassador.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Climate Central
At least 10 million of the world’s poorest people are set to go hungry this year because of failing crops caused by one of the strongest El Niño climatic events on record, Oxfam has warned.
The charity said several countries were already facing a “major emergency,” such as Ethiopia, where 4.5 million are in need of food aid because of a prolonged scarcity of rain this year.
Floods, followed by drought, have slashed Malawi’s maize production by more than a quarter, farmers in central America have suffered from two years of drought and El Niño conditions have already reduced the Asian monsoon over India, potentially triggering a wider drought across the east of the continent.
Indonesia’s government has declared drought in 34 of the country’s provinces because of El Niño, while 2 million people in Papua New Guinea have been affected by crops shrivelling in heat in some parts of the country and severe frosts in its highlands.
Spiegel Online
Tuesday saw the first piece of good news in quite some time for Volkswagen. The company's board of directors was meeting, under the leadership of freshly installed CEO Matthias Müller, and developers were reporting on how they planned to equip 11 million vehicles with law-abiding emissions filtering systems.
That task is VW's most pressing as it seeks to confront the vast emissions scandal of its own making. Germany's Federal Motor Transport Authority has given Volkswagen a deadline of Oct. 7 for submitting plans as to how it proposes to solve its emissions problem. If it doesn't, the vehicles in question could be declared un-roadworthy -- meaning their owners could no longer drive them. That would be the greatest possible disaster for the automobile company.
The Guardian
Scientists say climate change has exacerbated the effects of a storm blamed for at least nine deaths in the south-eastern US.
On Monday, after weekend downpours, flooding continued to overwhelm large parts of South Carolina and North Carolina in what was described as a “once-in-a-millennium” storm.
Individual weather events cannot be attributed to climate change, but climatologists say atmospheric conditions tied to climate change intensified this downpour.
“This is yet another example, like Sandy or Irene, of weather on ‘steroids’, another case where climate change worsened the effects of an already extreme meteorological event,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.
The Guardian
Three scientists from Ireland, Japan and China have won the Nobel prize in medicine for discoveries that helped doctors fight malaria and infections caused by roundworm parasites.
Youyou Tu discovered one of the most effective treatments for malaria while working on a secret military project during China’s Cultural Revolution.
The 84-year-old pharmacologist was awarded half of the prestigious 8m Swedish kronor (£631,000) prize for her discovery of artemisinin, a drug that proved to be an improvement on chloroquine, which had become far less effective as the malaria parasites developed resistance.
NPR
Federal and state claims against BP for the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill have been resolved, the Justice Department says, with the oil and gas company agreeing to pay more than $20 billion in penalties.
Calling it "a historic resolution," U.S. Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said Monday that the deal is "the largest settlement with a single entity in American history," with a record environmental penalty. The deal was first announced in July.
"The Deepwater Horizon accident killed 11 workers and led to a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. This settlement money will pay for additional clean-up and restoring the land, water and wildlife harmed," NPR's Jeff Brady reports. "The federal government is settling for less than it might have collected in court. But [Lynch] says this agreement ensures money will get to Gulf Coast communities that need it sooner."
Climate Central
Catastrophic wildfires in the Western U.S. are often discussed in superlatives these days, with blazes burning land more violently and more frequently in recent years than at any point on record. Those changes are considered partly driven by global warming, and a new University of Wyoming study shows that even the smallest increase in average temperature — 0.5°C (0.9°F) — could bring a dramatic increase in wildfire activity at higher elevations.
The study also suggests that global warming may be ushering in an era of high-elevation wildfires unlike any seen in more than 1,000 years.
NPR
In ancient China, black rice was considered so superior and rare, it was reserved exclusively for the emperor and royalty. These days the grain, also known as forbidden rice, has become the darling of gourmets and people seeking superior nutrition.
These folks are onto something: The color of black rice is the result of plant pigments called anthocyanins, which research has linked to a number of positive health effects: from anti-inflammatory properties to healthier arteries and better insulin regulation.
And now, geneticists report they've traced the birth and spread of black rice.
Modern, domesticated rice comes in a range of colors, usually described as white, red and black. The wild rice from which it was domesticated has reddish grains, but the early farmers who created the rice we eat today selected for white grains. Collectors have never found black grains in more than a thousand samples of wild rice stored in genebanks. And yet black varieties are fairly widespread, albeit sporadically, across Asia — from India to Japan — with black varieties in each of the three subspecies of edible rice.