Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Man Oh Man, rfall, and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw. The guest editors are Doctor RJ and annetteboardman.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Reuters
Hundreds of protesters marched through New York City's financial district on Monday and blocked streets near the stock exchange to denounce Wall Street's role in raising money for businesses that contribute to climate change.
Protesters stopped traffic on Broadway south of the New York Stock Exchange. Three people were arrested.
The demonstration, called Flood Wall Street, came on the heels of Sunday's international day of action that brought 310,000 people to the streets of New York City in what activists was said was the largest protest ever held on climate change.
Sunday's turnout was about triple that of the previous biggest, a Copenhagen demonstration five years ago.
The Guardian
Hundreds of people gathered in New York City’s financial district on Monday, many with the intent of getting arrested as an act of civil disobedience to bring attention to the perils of climate change.
Flood Wall Street demonstrators, primarily dressed in blue to represent climate change-induced flooding, marched to New York City’s financial center to “highlight the role of Wall Street in fueling the climate crisis,” according to organizers.
While the day started off peacefully, tensions mounted in the early evening, with the New York Police Department using pepper spray on a group of demonstrators. At least one person had been arrested on Monday afternoon, though the NYPD said it did not yet have official reports on the arrest numbers.
The demonstration comes a day ahead of the United Nations climate summit and follows Sunday’s People’s Climate March – which saw what organizers estimated was 310,000 people marching in New York City, and tens of thousands of others in 150 countries across the world, demonstrating in an effort to put pressure on world leaders to act now to slow the damaging effects of climate change.
Al Jazeera America
Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets of New York City on Sunday in a noisy march that organizers said was meant to sound the climate alarm, with participants blowing trumpets and beating drums as church bells pealed and synagogue shofar horns echoed across Manhattan on a day of massive worldwide protests demanding action to stop global warming.
Protests had been planned in more than 100 cities around the world ahead of a United Nations climate summit set to take place in New York on Tuesday, probably the last chance world leaders will have to pledge carbon cuts or other action aimed at stemming the worst effects of global warming before the negotiation of an international climate agreement next year in Paris.
For many, the People's Climate March in New York was also about income inequality and other pitfalls they ascribed to unregulated capitalism — and linked to the climate change issue.
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
Katie Price didn’t wave a sign on Sunday as she marched down Santa Rosa Avenue with more than 100 other people to raise awareness about climate change. Instead, she pushed a stroller carrying her 6-month-old daughter.
“I’ve always felt passionate about climate change,” Price said. “But having her increased my level of fear.”
Worrying that her daughter will have to face the effects of an altered climate, like prolonged drought, flooding and food shortages, prompted her to march, she said, walking with her parents, Nancy and Kevin Conway, as well as a friend she recruited.
“I think this is the time to act.”
She and other Sonoma County residents were participating in one of a series of events large and small, dubbed the People’s Climate March, held around the world two days in advance of a United Nations climate summit in New York. That’s when more than 120 world leaders will convene for a meeting aimed at galvanizing political will for a new global climate treaty by the end of 2015.
The rallies are meant to pressure global leaders to agree on meaningful steps, such as reducing carbon emissions, that would help prevent the planet’s temperature from rising further.
Huffington Post
The People's Climate March on Sunday was perhaps the largest climate change protest in history. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of New York City. Celebrities and high-profile politicians were among the marchers. The protest was a huge topic on social media.
All in all, it was a perfect opportunity for some of America's biggest news organizations to cover the topic of climate change, something that usually gets either ignored or badly handled. For Sunday talk show hosts, there was even a nice political hook, since the march was pegged to a UN summit that President Obama will be attending.
Reuters
U.S. home resales unexpectedly fell in August as investors stepped away from the market, but the decline probably does not signal renewed weakness in the housing sector.
The National Association of Realtors said on Monday existing home sales dropped 1.8 percent to an annual rate of 5.05 million units. The decline followed four straight months of gains and the sales pace was still the second highest for the year.
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast sales increasing to a 5.20 million-unit pace. Compared to August last year, sales were down 5.3 percent. Sales rose in two of the four regions.
"We continue to expect the housing recovery to be sustained, and we look for the pace of sales activity to pick-up in the coming months" said Millan Mulraine, deputy chief economist at TD Securities in New York.
Reuters
A decorated Iraq war veteran who scaled a fence on Friday night and got into the White House had over 800 rounds of ammunition in his car and was arrested in July with a sniper rifle and a map marking the executive mansion, a federal prosecutor said on Monday.
Omar Gonzalez, 42, was also stopped, but not arrested in August walking by the White House with a hatchet in his waistband, federal prosecutor David Mudd told a federal judge.
The previous interactions that Gonzalez had with the U.S. Secret Service is part of a sweeping internal review underway of how the agency failed to stop him from getting inside the White House, and whether more security is needed, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.
The Guardian
The US government believes there are 20 to 30 Americans currently fighting in Syria for the panoply of jihadist groups there, according to a senior official.
The estimate is less than an earlier and much-quoted assessment of approximately 100 Americans taking part in Syria’s civil war and the spillover violence in neighboring Iraq, where the Islamic State militant group (Isis) has launched a war of conquest.
A senior administration official, speaking to the Guardian on condition of anonymity, said that the estimate of roughly 100 represented all Americans who have travelled to Syria or attempted to travel to Syria over the past 18 months, a qualification that US government spokespeople have typically not provided.
Not all of the 20 to 30 Americans went to Syria to join Isis. Some fight with rebel groups resisting the regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad or rival jihadist groups. One such fighter was a 22-year old man from Florida who in May became a suicide bomber for the Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate. At least some Americans in the past have fought alongside Assad’s forces, the official said. The Pentagon estimated earlier this month that about 12 Americans fight with Isis.
The Guardian
The family of a young black man shot dead by police in Utah after walking around a strip mall with a replica samurai-style sword say they have discovered sketchbooks in which he left drawings of manga-like characters and fantasy scenes.
Relatives of Darrien Hunt are taking increasingly seriously the possibility that he was engaged in cosplay – dressing up as comic book character for a kind of performance art – on the morning earlier this month when he was killed in Saratoga Springs, according to their attorney.
Hunt, 22, is alleged by prosecutors to have lunged with the sword at two officers responding to a 911 call reporting that he was acting suspiciously. He fled that confrontation outside a bank and died up to 100 yards away outside a restaurant, having being shot repeatedly. His family’s attorney said a private autopsy found he was struck six times from behind while running away.
The Guardian
The survivalist charged in a deadly ambush at a state police barracks 10 days ago will be caught, Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett vowed Monday, as a police official said authorities believe they are hot on his trail.
Corbett discussed the manhunt for 31-year-old Eric Frein at a news conference in Blooming Grove, near the barracks where Frein is charged with killing one trooper and seriously wounded another.
“I feel confident that we should be able to apprehend this individual. I am very positive about that,” he said.
The governor thanked the hundreds of law enforcement officials who are methodically searching the rural, rugged north-eastern Pennsylvania terrain.
“They are putting their life on the line for someone who has the intended purpose of killing police officers,” Corbett said.
NPR
The Baltimore Ravens defended their handling of the domestic violence case against running back Ray Rice with a press conference Monday. Owner Steve Bisciotti denied reports that he pressed the National Football League to be lenient with Rice.
Rice's case is one of a series of scandals plaguing the NFL that have prompted widespread criticism.
Among those most critical are women. The NFL says they make up 45 percent of its fan base, and they're a key part of its business strategy.
McClatchy
The Obama administration late Monday announced regulatory steps to deter U.S. corporations from merging with foreign companies and shifting their headquarters to countries with lower tax rates.
The new measures, which take effect immediately, would not prohibit the practice, known as corporate “inversions.” But they would discourage it by preventing those companies from bringing back foreign profits. The administration repeated its recent calls on Congress to ban inversions, which result in billions of dollars in lost tax revenue.
The Treasury Department announced the regulations during a hastily arranged teleconference, and the White House weighed in almost immediately.
“While there’s no substitute for congressional action, my administration will act wherever we can to protect the progress the American people have worked so hard to bring about,” President Barack Obama said in a statement.
Obama said he was briefed by Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew, who he said “is exploring additional actions to help reverse this trend.”
Reuters
British Prime Minister David Cameron tried to head off a rebellion in his Conservative party over a promise of new powers for Scotland, highlighting the difficulty of giving Scots what they want after last week's referendum on Scottish independence.
Facing a difficult re-election contest next year, Cameron summoned a small group of disgruntled lawmakers to his country residence outside London on Monday to hear their complaints and to see what he could do to mollify them.
One of the attendees, Conservative lawmaker James Wharton, said before the meeting Cameron needed to address concern that new powers for Scotland could disadvantage the rest of Britain, including England.
"There is a need to do something for England as well, there needs to be an English settlement," he said. Although England is Britain's biggest nation, it is the only part not to have been given any devolution of powers.
Reuters
Syrian Kurds battled to defend a key border town from an Islamic State advance on Monday as Kurdish youths from neighboring Turkey rushed to their aid, heightening the pressure on Ankara to act against the Islamist insurgents.
In Turkey, which is struggling to manage an influx of more than 130,000 Syrian Kurdish refugees since Friday, security forces fired tear gas and water cannon at hundreds of Kurdish protesters who accuse Ankara of favoring Islamic State against the Kurds.
The main Kurdish armed group in northern Syria, the YPG, said its fighters had halted the Islamic State advance east of the predominantly Kurdish town of Kobani, also known as Ayn al-Arab, but that fierce fighting was continuing.
Reuters
Ukraine's military said on Monday it was pulling back artillery and heavy armor from the front line with separatists, backing President Petro Poroshenko's peace plan for a conflict that has cost more than 3,000 lives.
Taking a noticeably soft line on the Russian-backed separatists for the first time, military spokesman Andriy Lysenko said reduced fire from the rebels and Russian forces meant the Ukrainian army could begin withdrawing heavy weaponry from a proposed 30-km (19-mile) buffer zone.
His announcement was in line with a call by Poroshenko on Sunday night for people to back his peace plan which he said was needed to keep support of the U.S. and other Western governments.
DW
German anti-terror police in Berlin have arrested a man they believe had recently completed training at an "Islamic State" camp in Syria. He had reportedly also fought alongside IS militants.
A special unit of the German police force has arrested a suspected member of the self-proclaimed Islamic State ("IS") jihadist group, the public prosecutor's office in Berlin has announced.
The man is believed to have completed weapons training in an IS camp in Syria between January and August this year. DW also understands that the suspect had fought alongside Islamic State militants in Syria before returning to Germany.
The prosecutor's office said the 30-year-old man was a Turkish citizen who had a registered place of residence in the German capital.
Police issued an arrest warrant for the man after he returned to Germany last month and finally nabbed him on Friday. He has been charged under the section of German criminal law which deals with terrorism offences.
The Guardian
Three Afghan national army soldiers who did not return to a training exercise at US military base in Massachusetts were found trying to cross the Canadian border, a Massachusetts state police official said on Monday.
The men presented themselves at a border crossing near Niagara Falls, New York, said David Procopio, a spokesman with the Massachusetts state police.
“We were notified this morning by federal law enforcement that the three missing soldiers had been located at a border checkpoint by Niagara Falls and were being interviewed by federal authorities,” Procopio said. “We were told that they presented themselves to the security checkpoint.”
Military officials did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The three soldiers were reported missing from Joint Base Cape Cod, located in a beach resort area, after a Saturday trip to a nearby mall and are not viewed as a security threat, according to a spokesman for the Massachusetts national guard, which helps run the facility.
NPR
Kurdish fighters claim to have halted an advance by self-described Islamic State militants in an area of the Turkish-Syria border region that has seen masses of refugees fleeing the fighting in recent days.
Reuters quotes a spokesman for the YPG, the main Kurdish peshmerga group in the region, as saying "fierce clashes" were still underway with ISIS, but that the extremist group had been halted in its advance just east of the town of Kobani in northern Syria. The monitoring group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirms that the group calling itself the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have not made any substantial gains in the past 24 hours, Reuters says.
NPR's Deborah Amos reports that Kobani "had been a safe enclave for Syria's Kurds about 10 miles from the Turkish frontier, but since June, ISIS has been attacking it and stepped up these attacks with tanks and artillery over the past couple of days."
NPR
Last week in Gaza, half a million children went back to school after a summer of war. The academic year started late; among other things, authorities had to check buildings for unexploded ordnance and scrub schools that had been used to shelter hundreds of thousands of displaced families.
Among the students returning to class was 16-year-old Wala'a Abdelkas, a sophomore from Gaza's al-Bureij refugee camp.
A big, pink plastic watch peeked out from under the sleeve of her long, dark school uniform as she walked arm-in-arm with a friend through the courtyard. The building was unfamiliar; her neighborhood school was destroyed in the war. With dozens of schools still sheltering people, destroyed or simply too damaged to use, classrooms are more overcrowded than usual.
Also new for Wala'a: going to school without her younger sister Isma.
"We were like twins," Wala'a said. "We spent all our time together, quarreling usually. And talking."
Reuters
A United Nations Security Council committee is considering requests by the United States and France to blacklist more than a dozen foreign extremist fighters, fundraisers and recruiters linked to Islamist militant groups in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Tunisia and Yemen.
The bid to sanction people from France, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Senegal and Kuwait coincides with the expected adoption on Wednesday of a Security Council resolution to suppress foreign extremist fighters. U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to chair the meeting.
According to the confidential requests made to the Security Council's al Qaeda sanctions committee, and obtained by Reuters on Monday, 15 names will be designated on Tuesday afternoon if no objections are raised. The listings could also be delayed for administrative reasons if a member needs more review time.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Earth's spin axis isn't perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the Sun. One consequence: the celestial-coordinate system is tilted 23½° with respect to the ecliptic (the path followed by the Sun through the stars over the course of a year). Equinoxes occur when the Sun crosses from northern declinations to southern ones, or vice versa.
S&T / Gregg Dinderman
Sky and Telescope
What is the "fall equinox" — and how do we know when it happens?
To those who’ve unpacked their winter coats, closed their windows at night, and felt that telltale crispness in the air, it seems that autumn has already started. Astronomically speaking, however, the fall season only comes to the Northern Hemisphere on Tuesday, September 23rd at 2:29 Universal Time (10:29 p.m. EDT on Monday, the 22nd). At that moment, the Sun shines directly on Earth’s equator, heading south as seen in the sky. For us northerners, this event is called the autumnal equinox.
This seems awfully precise for seasons that gradually flow from one to the next, but the reason astronomers regard this event as the “End of Summer” and “Beginning of Fall” is because it is marked by a key moment in Earth’s annual orbit.
The apparent position of the Sun in our sky is farther north or farther south depending on the time of year due to the globe's axial tilt. Earth's rotational axis does not point straight up and down, like the handle of a perfectly spinning top, but is slanted about 23½° with respect to our orbit around the Sun.
San Francisco Chronicle (SF Gate)
MCCLOUD, Siskiyou County — A small Mount Shasta community is on flood watch Monday after a chunk of the Konwakiton Glacier, high on the flank of the 14,179-foot volcano, broke off over the weekend and sent high, muddy flows careening down slope toward Highway 89 and into the renowned McCloud River.
On Monday morning, the flows had receded enough to minimize any imminent danger. The Forest Service announced a flash-flood watch was in place with dangerous conditions if more large pieces of the melting glacier broke off and plummeted into the Mud Creek Canyon. No evacuations were ordered and no structures have been damaged.
The event comes less than a week after a catastrophic fire damaged and destroyed 150 homes and buildings on the other side of Mount Shasta, in the town of Weed near Interstate 5.
New York Times
SAVOY, Ill. — From afar, the three young men tramping through a corn field here looked like Midwestern farm boys checking their crop. And a fine crop it seemed to be, with plump ears hanging off vibrant green stalks.
But as they edged deeper into the field, the men — actually young scientists, not farmers — pointed to streaked, yellowing leaves on some of the corn plants. “You’re definitely seeing some damage,” said Tiago Tomaz, a biochemist from Australia.
The injured leaves signaled trouble down the road, and not just for a single plot of corn a few miles from the main campus of the University of Illinois. By design, the scientists were studying the type of damage that could put a serious dent in the food supply on a warming planet.
New York Times
La Perouse Bay, Manitoba — The sea ice here on the western shore of Hudson Bay breaks up each summer and leaves the polar bears swimming for shore. The image of forlorn bears on small rafts of ice has become a symbol of the dangers of climate change.
And for good reason. A warming planet means less ice coverage of the Arctic Sea, leaving the bears with less time and less ice for hunting seals. They depend on seals for their survival.
But the polar bears here have discovered a new menu option. They eat snow geese.
Because the ice is melting earlier, the bears come on shore earlier, and the timing turns out to be fortunate for them. As a strange side-effect of climate change, polar bears here now often arrive in the midst of a large snow goose summer breeding ground before the geese have hatched and fledged. And with 75,000 pairs of snow geese on the Cape Churchill peninsula — the result of a continuing goose population explosion — there is an abundant new supply of food for the bears.
NPR
California's historic drought is partly to blame for the recent rise in West Nile virus infections, public health officials say. There have been 311 cases reported so far, double the number of the same time last year, and the most of any state in the country.
West Nile virus is spread by mosquitoes. They contract the virus when they feed on infected birds, then spread it to the birds they bite next. A shortage of water can accelerate this cycle.
"When we have less water, birds and mosquitoes are seeking out the same water sources, and therefore are more likely to come in to closer proximity to one another, thus amplifying the virus," says Vicki Kramer, chief of vector-borne diseases at the state Department of Public Health.
Also, the water sources that do exist are more likely to stagnate. Stagnant water creates an excellent habitat for mosquitoes to breed.
NPR
The tiny, island nation of Iceland is in the middle of a growth spurt. For the past month, the country's Bardarbunga volcano has been churning out lava at a prodigious rate. And the eruption shows no signs of abating.
It all began with a swarm of earthquakes in late August, according to Rikke Pedersen, with the Nordic Volcanological Center at the University of Iceland. Volcanologists watched as the tremors moved north about 25 miles. A fissure opened and lava began pouring forth.
So far, the lava field has covered more than 14 square miles.
"That corresponds about to the size of Manhattan," Pedersen says.
C/Net
In Silicon Valley, even the smallest team of talented engineers can hit the jackpot.
Take Instagram, which entered into tech folklore when its 13 employees -- only half of whom were developers -- created a simple photo-sharing app that wound up getting bought by Facebook for a $1 billion in 2012. WhatsApp took that dynamic even further. With just 32 engineers, the company built a messaging tool that Facebook -- once again digging into its considerable coffers -- bought for $19 billion in February.
That's why the best software engineers are difficult to find these days. In some ways, the most bitter competition between tech rivals isn't for market share; it's to hire these skilled workers, who can easily command multiple $100,000-plus job offers replete with attractive perks and equity packages. In an attempt to control the hiring market, companies like Apple, Google, and Adobe were found to have illegally conspired on a wage-fixing scheme, leading to a nine-figure settlement in April.