Overnight News Digest
Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors jlms qkw, maggiejean, wader, rfall,side pocket,Man Oh Man and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, and Oke. The guest editor is annetteboardman.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
I always seem to start out with some
terrible news but it's always out there.
Egypt: '50 dead' in clashes amid rival demonstrations
At least 50 people have been killed and scores hurt in Egypt in clashes between police and supporters of the deposed Islamist President Mohammed Morsi.
More than 200 members of the Muslim Brotherhood were arrested in Cairo, where most of the deaths were reported.
Supporters of Mr Morsi marched in several cities, as the military-backed government marked the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
BBC
Typhoon Fitow hits eastern China after mass evacuation
Powerful Typhoon Fitow has made landfall in eastern China after triggering the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.
With winds up to 151km/h (93mph), the storm landed in Fujian province early on Monday, bringing heavy rains and causing widespread power cuts.
Some homes are said to have collapsed in neighbouring Zhejiang province and two port workers are missing.
The authorities earlier issued the highest alert - red - for the area.
BBC
Maine lobstermen threatened by climate change and Canada (Video)
Plenty is not normally a problem for those who harvest the seas; decks and holds full of fish generally gladden the hearts of fishermen everywhere.
But for the lobstermen of the US state of Maine, the abundance of lobsters has turned into a headache.
The catch is up six-fold in just over a decade as climate change warms the waters and encourages huge hauls. Yet the price the lobstermen receive for their crustacean catch has fallen steadily.
BBC
See, not everything about the shutdown is bad. Now if we could shut down the TPP talks.
US government shutdown halts EU free trade talks
Negotiations on a sweeping free trade pact between the US and the EU have been postponed because of a partial government shutdown in America.
US officials had been due in Brussels next week to discuss the deal aimed at boosting bilateral ties.
US President Barack Obama earlier cancelled his trip to Asia because of the shutdown.
The US government closed non-essential operations on Tuesday after Congress failed to agree a new budget.
Since then hundreds of thousands of government employees have not been working or paid.
BBC
Rio de Janeiro favelas occupied after major operationBBC
Hundreds of Brazilian security officers, backed by armoured vehicles and helicopters, have occupied 12 shanty towns in Rio de Janeiro.
The major operation is part of an ongoing drive by authorities to push drug gangs away from poor areas.
Two new police pacification units (UPP) will be set up in Lins de Vasconcellos, home to about 15,000 people.
Since 2008, another 34 UPPs have been set up across the state but there have also been reports of police brutality.
Rio will host the 2016 Olympics and matches of next year's football World Cup.
CNET Google won't leave us alone.
Google wants to patent splitting the restaurant bill
It's easy to forget sometimes, but Google exists to make you happy.
In the pecking order, you do come slightly behind its own engineers, for whom many of its products are truly designed. But you're still in the company's thoughts somewhere.
Clearly, though, some of its engineers (and, by extrapolation, Google assumes you too) have been having difficulties in restaurants.
It's not so much that they've been leaving phone prototypes in them. It's that they've been going out for group dinners and then one or two Googlies have guzzled beyond the norm, leaving the splitting of the bill in an unbalanced state.
"Jason had 7 kir royales. Marina had 6 margaritas and Azielina must have knocked back 14 glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. So, um, dividing the total by, um, 7 and multiplying it by, oh, whatever, I'm drunk anyway."
Days later, though, the person who feels they've paid too much of the whole feels wholly resentful.
This resentment has now been turned, as all resentments should, into a patent application. For Google has applied for a patent on restaurant bill splitting.
N Y Times
Boehner Hews to Hard Line in Demanding Concessions From Obama
WASHINGTON — Speaker John A. Boehner stood his ground on Sunday alongside the most conservative Republicans in Congress, insisting that the House would not vote to finance and reopen the government or raise the nation’s borrowing limit without concessions from President Obama on the health care law.
“The fact is, this fight was going to come one way or the other,” Mr. Boehner said on the ABC News program “This Week,” adding, “We’re in the fight.”
With his hard line, Mr. Boehner reaffirmed that the stalemate with the White House over the six-day-old government shutdown was now compounded by an even more economically risky fight over raising the government’s borrowing limit by Oct. 17 to pay for bills already incurred.
Salon
GOP’s massive fraud: The shutdown isn’t really a shutdown!
If a government shutdown genuinely shut the entire government down, you might be able to trace a few silver linings from an otherwise bad situation. Military conflicts might end (or at least be temporarily suspended), the destructive drug war might grind to a halt, mass surveillance might be put on hold and congressional legislators might be financially punished for their malicious behavior. But a government shutdown is mostly just a shutdown of good things — stuff like Head Start and food assistance to low-income moms and kids. Indeed, because of the way shutdowns are structured, the only silver lining from a budget stalemate is that you might get to hear a few curse words and see some nudity on television.
Of course, there is an insidious method to the madness of government shutdowns. In general, the dividing line between what gets shut down and what doesn’t is a similar dividing line between what America’s political culture typically venerates as The State and what that culture lambasts as The Government. Consider what will not be shut down:
Salon
No one could have suspected:
NSA director admits to misleading public on terror plots
In so many words, NSA director Keith Alexander admitted Wednesday that the Obama administration had issued misleading information about terror plots and their foiling to bolster support for the government’s vast surveillance apparatus.
During Wednesday’s hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy pushed Alexander to admit that plot numbers had been fudged in a revealing interchange:
“There is no evidence that [bulk] phone records collection helped to thwart dozens or even several terrorist plots,” said Leahy. The Vermont Democrat then asked the NSA chief to admit that only 13 out of a previously cited 54 cases of foiled plots were genuinely the fruits of the government’s vast dragnet surveillance systems:
“These weren’t all plots, and they weren’t all foiled,” Leahy said, asking Alexander, “Would you agree with that, yes or no?”
“Yes,” replied Alexander.