The Overnight News Digest is nightly series dedicated to chronicling the day’s news of import or interest. Everyone is welcome to add their own news items in the comments. Tonight’s ad hoc OND collects news from around the world.
Reuters - Two Middle East refugees arrested in U.S. on terrorism charges
🇺🇸 Two men from the Middle East who came to the United States as refugees more than three years ago were arrested on federal charges in California and Texas involving international terrorism, the U.S. officials said on Thursday.
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Both men are Palestinians who were born in Iraq. The man arrested in Houston, Omar Faraj Saeed Al-Hardan, entered the United States as a refugee in November 2009, according to a court document. In Sacramento, the U.S. Department of Justice said Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab, 23, came to the United States in 2012 as a refugee from Syria.
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Al-Hardan was charged with providing material support to the Islamic State militant group and for making false statements about ties to the group when seeking U.S. naturalization, according to an indictment in federal court in Houston unsealed on Thursday.
In California, Al-Jayab was arrested on Thursday on a federal charge of making a false statement involving international terrorism, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
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LAT - Cliven Bundy still owes the U.S. $1 million. What are the feds doing to collect it?
🇺🇸 The law was clear: Cliven Bundy's cattle had been grazing on public land — illegally — for years. The Bureau of Land Management said so, and so did the U.S. Department of Justice. The federal courts agreed.
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In November 1998, a federal judge permanently banned Bundy, whose ranch is located about 90 miles north of Las Vegas, from grazing his livestock on a swath of federal land known as the Bunkerville Allotment and ordered him to remove his cattle by the end of the month. Bundy didn’t.
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In May 2012, federal attorneys sued Bundy to stop his “unauthorized and unlawful” grazing of livestock on federal lands, which they said contain archaeological sites, sensitive and rare plants, and the desert tortoise, a threatened and protected species.
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In their 2012 request for a restraining order, federal officials noted that they had “no adequate” legal means to “address the continuous and persistent unlawful conduct” by Bundy.
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NYT - A New Economic Era for China Goes Off the Rails
🇨🇳 When President Xi Jinping of China convened a group of top officials to discuss the economy last month, the highly publicized meeting was seen as a moment of triumph.
A stock market plunge last summer, and a messy currency devaluation that followed, had faded from global view. In the relative calm, he seemed to usher in a new era of economic management, promising policy coordination at the highest levels to prevent another bout of turmoil.
Less than three weeks later, his plans have been derailed as China’s stock market and currency once again rattle investors around the world. The latest rout sets up a challenge for Mr. Xi, who has positioned himself as the master of the country’s economy.
At every turn, the president’s efforts to manage the economy, market and currency have been undercut by global headwinds and haphazard policy making.
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NYT - Removal of Chávez Images From Venezuela Capitol Raises Tension
🇻🇪 With triple-digit inflation showing no signs of retreating and the new National Assembly vowing to remove the president,Venezuela over the last few days careered toward crises both economic and political.
Yet the great debate of the week had less to do with the economy than it did with former President Hugo Chávez — or rather whether several pictures of Mr. Chávez, who died in 2013 of cancer, should still hang in the Capitol.
The portraits, of a triumphal Mr. Chávez in military attire and addressing the United Nations, were carted away this week as rivals of his United Socialist Party, who were swept into the Assembly in a Dec. 6 vote, moved into the chamber.
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Guardian - Polish president signs bill putting state media under government control
🇵🇱 Poland’s president has signed into law a bill handing the conservative government control of state media, despite concern elsewhere in the EU and condemnation from rights watchdogs.
Andrzej Duda signed the legislation because he wants state media to be “impartial, objective and credible”, his aide Małgorzata Sadurska said. She added that the president did not believe broadcasters guaranteed objective information in their current form.
Under the new law, senior figures in public radio and television will be appointed – and sacked – by the treasury minister, and will no longer be hired by the National Broadcasting Council.
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WSJ - Missing U.S. Missile Shows Up in Cuba
🇨🇺 An inert U.S. Hellfire missile sent to Europe for training purposes was wrongly shipped from there to Cuba in 2014, said people familiar with the matter, a loss of sensitive military technology that ranks among the worst-known incidents of its kind.
The unintended delivery of the missile to Cuba has confounded investigators and experts who work in a regulatory system designed to prevent precisely such equipment from falling into the wrong hands, said those familiar with the matter.
For more than a year, amid a historic thawing of relations between the U.S. and Cuba, American authorities have tried to get the Cuban government to return the missile, said people familiar with the matter. At the same time, federal investigators have been tracing the paper trail of the wayward Hellfire to determine if its arrival in Cuba was the work of criminals or spies, or the result of a series of blunders, these people said.
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Guardian - Ex-prime ministers in two-horse race for Central African Republic presidency
🇨🇫 Two former Central African Republic premiers will vie for the presidency of the strife-torn nation in the final round of elections, provisional results have shown.
Anicet-Georges Dologuélé won 23.78% of the vote in the first round on 30 December, trailed by Faustin-Archange Touadéra, who picked up 19.42%, according to Thursday’s results that still need to be confirmed by the Constitutional Court.
Dologuélé, a 58-year-old former central banker, came to be known as Mr Clean after his attempts to clean up murky public finances during his spell as prime minister from 1999 to 2001.
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BBC - Pathankot attack: India says talks only if Pakistan acts
🇮🇳 🇵🇰 India has said that planned talks with Pakistan would go ahead only if Islamabad took action against militants that Delhi said were behind the deadly assault on the Pathankot air base.
A foreign ministry spokesman said the "ball is in Pakistan's court" and the "immediate issue" was their response.
Indian troops killed six militants during a four-day battle at the base in Punjab, close to the Pakistan border.
Foreign secretaries of the two sides are due to hold peace talks next week. Although India has not officially announced any dates, Indian media reports say the meeting is due to take place on 14-15 January in Islamabad.
The assault on the Pathankot base started on Saturday, when a group of gunmen - wearing Indian army uniforms - entered residential quarters on the air base. Seven Indian troops and six militants were killed in the gun battle.
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CNN - Iraq says ISIS leader Abu Mohammed al-Adnani wounded in airstrike
🇮🇶 Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, an ISIS leader and its chief spokesman, has been injured in an airstrike, a statement from Iraq's Joint Operations Command said Thursday.
The airstrike took place in the Iraqi town of Barwanah, in Anbar province, the statement said.
Adnani was first moved to the city of Hit for treatment after "losing a large amount of blood." He was then transferred to Mosul under tight security, according to the statement.
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AP - American Charged in Bombing Attack on US Base in Afghanistan
🇦🇫 A U.S. citizen already accused of going to Pakistan to train with al-Qaida was charged Wednesday with helping build explosives for a 2009 suicide attack on an American military base in Afghanistan.
A revised indictment charges Muhanad Mahmoud Al Farekh with conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals, conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and other crimes. He is to appear Thursday in federal court in Brooklyn; there was no immediate comment by his lawyer.
The charges stem from an attack on Jan. 19, 2009, involving two vehicles driven by unidentified suicide bombers that were rigged with explosives, the new indictment says. Only one of the bombs detonated. Al Farekh's fingerprints were later found on packing tape used on the second explosive, the indictment says.
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Telegraph - Catholic worship returns to Henry VIII’s chapel for first time since 16th Century
🇬🇧 It was the backdrop for the dramatic events which severed the ties between the Church in England and Rome in the 1530s as Henry VIII’s marital travails ushered in the turmoil of the Reformation.
But the sound of Roman Catholic worship is to be heard in the Chapel Royal in Hampton Court Palace next month for what is thought to be the first time in more than 450 years, in a service led by the country’s most senior Catholic cleric and one of its most senior Anglicans.
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AFP - French oceanographer Cousteau's iconic ship to sail again
🇫🇷 Celebrated French marine explorer Jacques Cousteau's iconic ship the Calypso -- out of commission after an accident 20 years ago -- will sail again in a few months, its owners said Thursday.
The ship became a household name for millions of television viewers in the 1960s and 1970s with a gripping documentary series the "Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau."
The Cousteau Society said the vessel will "be getting a whole new life" after it sank in 1996 in Singapore when a barge rammed into the ship just as it was departing for an expedition in the Yellow River in China.
"At the end of the first trimester of 2016 Calypso will be able to leave the... shipyard, to begin its new life," a statement said.
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Time - Virus That Causes Birth Defects Could Spread to Mainland U.S.
🇧🇷 A rare virus spread by mosquitoes linked to severe birth defects in Brazil has spread to Puerto Rico and health officials worry it could travel to the continental U.S.
The Zika virus was long thought to be harmless, but recently it has been linked to a neurological disorder called microcephaly, which can stymie brain development in newborn babies. The condition causes babies to be born with abnormally small heads and can lead to early death. More than 2,400 suspected cases of the brain condition have been reported in Brazil since the Zika virus was first reported there early last year, according to government documents posted online by CNN. The country’s government has asked that families temporarily hold off on pregnancies.
The disease has appeared elsewhere in South and Central America and recently spread to the U.S. via Puerto Rico in a case reported last week. Now, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have warned U.S. travelers to the region, especially pregnant women, to take special caution to avoid mosquito bites.
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VoA - Study: Mexico Violence Caused Drop in Male Life Expectancy
🇲🇽 A new study suggests that Mexico's drug violence was so bad at its peak that it apparently caused the nation's male life expectancy to drop by several months.
Experts say the violence from 2005-2010 partly reversed decades of steady gains, noting that homicide rates increased from 9.5 homicides per 100,000 people in 2005 to more than 22 in 2010. That has since declined to about 16 per 100,000 in 2014.
The study published Tuesday in the American journal Health Affairs says "the increase in homicides is at the heart" of the phenomenon, though deaths due to diabetes may have also played a role.
"The unprecedented rise in homicides after 2005 led to a reversal in life expectancy increases among males and a slowdown among females in most states," according to the study, published by Jose Manuel Aburto of the European Doctoral School of Demography, UCLA's Hiram Beltran-Sanchez and two other authors.
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CBC - A new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, has begun, scientists say
🌎We're living through one of the most extraordinary events in Earth's history — the start of a new geological epoch, an international group of scientists says. Welcome to the Anthropocene, everyone.
Geological epochs are long periods of time — typically lasting around two million years — separated by major, global changes to the planet, such as the massive exploding meteor that ended the Late Cretaceous and wiped out the dinosaurs.
Modern humans arose during the Pleistocene epoch, and since the sudden warming that ended the last ice age about 12,000 years ago, we had been living in the Holocene epoch.
But modern human technology has had such a profound effect on our planet that we're now in a new epoch that started during the mid-20th century — the Anthropocene, argues an international group of researchers in a new paper published today in the journal Science.
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