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.
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The Guardian
Tributes to Martin Luther King Jr merged with protests against police violence across the US on Monday, as political leaders, community activists and demonstrators marked a federal holiday by commemorating the civil rights leader.
Thousands took to streets in New York, Philadelphia, St Louis, Oakland and elsewhere for #reclaimMLK marches. The gatherings ranged from relatively small – Reuters estimated 40 in Oakland, California – to record breaking, in Colorado, where the Denver Post estimated 30,000 people turned out.
The Rev Al Sharpton led vigils at sites in New York City where police officers and unarmed black men have been killed in recent months. He was joined at an event in Harlem by the city’s mayor, Bill De Blasio, where both addressed the tensions between police and the wider community.
“We are children, we are grandchildren, of the King generation,” De Blasio said, to a standing ovation at the National Action Network in Harlem.
Al Jazeera America
Black leaders around the country are using Martin Luther King Day to try and turn the tragedies of 2014 into action. While last year’s Martin Luther King Day rallies focused on voting rights and economic inequality, police violence against black men is taking center stage this year.
In 2014, the police killings of unarmed black men Eric Garner on Staten Island, New York, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot in Cleveland while holding a nonlethal pellet gun, sparked months-long protests, police crackdowns and 24-7 media coverage. The deaths not only highlighted the often fraught relationship between police and people of color but also wide disparities in the perception of race relations in America.
"For us Michael Brown's killing represents a deeper crisis in the country around policing, prisons and criminal justice," said Libero Della Piana, senior organizer at Alliance for a Just Society, a national network of racial and economic justice organizations.
There was also additional evidence in 2014 that income inequality is a growing problem in the U.S. According to Pew Research Center, new research shows that the median wealth of white families was 13 times higher than that of black families.
The Guardian
The Rev Al Sharpton will lead a caravan of buses to sites in New York City where police officers and unarmed black men have been killed in recent months, hours after US vice-president Joe Biden spoke about the tensions between police and minorities in some communities.
Biden spoke in Wilmington, Delaware, at a breakfast honoring Martin Luther King, and made a call for unity, following the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Michael Brown in Ferguson.
“Men often hate each other because they fear each other,” Biden said, quoting King, according to the Associated Press. “They fear each other because they do not know each other. They do not know each other because they cannot communicate, and they cannot communicate because they are separated.”
“We have to bridge that separation … particularly today between police and the community that exists in some places.”
Biden, who spoke at the Organization of Minority Women’s annual Martin Luther King breakfast, said: “There’s no reason on earth we cannot repair this breach.”
Reuters
Tributes to civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. were held around the United States on Monday as protests over the treatment of minorities by law enforcement rolled on across the country.
Observers of Martin Luther King Jr. Day have this year linked the federal holiday to a rallying cry in recent months during demonstrations over police brutality: "Black lives matter."
In a pre-dawn rally in Oakland, California on Monday, about 40 people converged on the home of Mayor Libby Schaaf, calling for harsher punishment of police who use violence against civilians. They chalked outlines of bodies on the tree-lined street, played recordings of King's speeches and projected an image of the slain civil rights leader with the words "Black lives matter," on the mayor's garage door.
Reuters
Fifty-four years after nine young black men became the first U.S. civil rights protesters to serve jail time for sitting at an all-white lunch counter, surviving members of the group will return to a South Carolina courtroom this month to be exonerated of their crimes.
Their "jail, no bail" strategy helped galvanize the fight against racial inequality in the South and became a model for other protesters. But the "Friendship Nine," as the men became known, endured personal hardships for taking the bold stand.
They say the push to clear their names so long after the Jan. 31, 1961, sit-in in Rock Hill will have little effect on their lives. Still, they welcome the message it sends at a time of sharpened focus on U.S. race relations following white police killings of unarmed black men in Missouri and New York.
NPR
In Peter Maginot's sixth-grade class, the teacher is white, but all of his students are black. They're young and they're honestly concerned that what happened to Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner could happen to them.
"Who can tell me the facts that we know about Mike Brown?" Maginot asks the class at Shabazz Public School Academy, an afro-centric school in Lansing, Mich.
One student speaks up, "Mike Brown, he was shot and killed by a white man." Another adds, "He didn't have any weapons, and he was walking down the street." A third student raises his hand and says, "He was a teenager."
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., marches with other civil rights protesters during the 1963 March on Washington.
Al Jazeera America
MINNEAPOLIS — It was Sunday, game day, and James Cross turned down the television volume, rose from his armchair and lifted his purple Vikings windbreaker to show off his tattoos.
“This is a drive-by scene,” he said as he pointed to the image on his stomach. “I never finished it, though. I was going to put ‘Do another drive-by to make another mother cry.’”
He turned around and pulled the purple windbreaker up to show off his shoulders.
"I got forks on the back, which represents the Disciples,” said Cross, referring to a tattoo of two hands making the sign of the Latin Gangster Disciples. “Then I’ve got tattoos on my face. I had a teardrop, but we covered it up with a feather just so everybody wouldn’t be intimidated and I could get a job. Everybody knows a teardrop is for murder.”
When they were around the age of 7, he and his twin brother first hooked up with the Latin Gangster Disciples. One day, he said, they were hanging around with the older guys and someone said, “Hey, go get that cash register,’’ referring to a nearby convenience store.
Spiegel Online
The NSA's mass surveillance is just the beginning. Documents from Edward Snowden show that the intelligence agency is arming America for future digital wars -- a struggle for control of the Internet that is already well underway.
Normally, internship applicants need to have polished resumes, with volunteer work on social projects considered a plus. But at Politerain, the job posting calls for candidates with significantly different skill sets. We are, the ad says, "looking for interns who want to break things."
The Guardian
Had their final date taken them to different seats, at another cinema, on some other warm summer night, Jansen Young and Jon Blunk might be happily celebrating Blunk’s 29th birthday in Aurora, Colorado, on Tuesday.
Instead, Young alone must face the start of the trial of the man who bought up guns and ammunition during the couple’s giddy courtship in 2012, before walking into a screening of The Dark Knight Rises and shooting dead Blunk, a navy veteran, as he shielded Young with his body.
“It left a hole in my heart,” said Young, 23. “It’s hard to lose someone you love. It’s even harder to lose someone you love in a split moment, when you didn’t think they were going to just go right then.” She is taking the coincidence of the calendar as a message of solidarity. “Jon wants this to be over with,” she said.
The Guardian
When US State Department officials and representatives of the Cuban government meet in Havana this week, it will be the first time in 35 years that a senior-level official has led a US delegation to the island nation.
Roberta Jacobson, the assistant secretary of state in charge of the western hemisphere, who has previously served as the State Department’s coordinator for Cuban affairs, will be leading the US delegation. The meetings she will lead, which begin on Wednesday, will be the first steps toward normalising diplomatic relations between the two countries.
A senior State Department official said on Monday that the US was “looking forward to the Cubans lifting travel restrictions and caps on personnel”, and that the next step, the upgrading of the US mission to full embassy status, could happen “quickly” following this week’s talks.
USA Today
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — The New England Patriots are bound for the franchise's eighth Super Bowl appearance. Amid that comes another question about whether they used a tactic against NFL rules — and whether their accomplishments merit a new asterisk.
Latest issue: Did the Patriots use footballs deflated below league requirements to get better grip in the rain during their 45-7 romp Sunday night over the Indianapolis Colts in the AFC Championship Game?
The NFL is investigating the matter.
"We'll cooperate fully with whatever questions they ask us and whatever they want us to do," Patriots coach Bill Belichick said in a conference call Monday.
"I didn't know anything about it until this morning."
NPR
There's new scrutiny this year on a federal program that's supposed to protect juveniles in the criminal justice system. Senate lawmakers want to pass a bill that would ensure young people are not locked up alongside adult offenders — and they're quietly investigating the use of federal grant money for the program.
Whistleblowers like Jill Semmerling are helping to drive the effort. Semmerling loved her job as a federal agent at the inspector general office's in the Justice Department, where she carried a firearm and a badge to work every day.
"We were there as a watchdog to ensure there was no waste, fraud or abuse," she recalls.
But when Semmerling started digging into allegations that Wisconsin had been cooking the books to get federal grant money, her own troubles began.
"It was pretty awful," she says, "and you know, you didn't know where to turn."
Al Jazeera America
President Barack Obama will make what is likely to be his second-to-last State of the Union address — and his first to a Republican-controlled Congress — on Tuesday after a year fraught with racial tension over police treatment of young black men, the rising threat of ISIL extremists overseas and on the back of a dramatic reversal of U.S. policy in Cuba.
But the estimated 30 million viewers expected to tune in to the televised speech shouldn’t expect any startling revelations. The tradition of laying out the coming year’s agenda and saving some big surprise announcements for the annual address to the nation is pretty much over.
However, the president is expected to propose closing multibillion-dollar tax loopholes used by the wealthiest Americans, imposing a fee on big financial firms and then using the revenue to benefit the middle class, senior administration officials said over the weekend.
Al Jazeera America
More than half the world's wealth will be owned by just one percent of the population by next year as global inequality soars, anti-poverty charity Oxfam said on Monday
In a report released ahead of this week's annual meeting of the international elite at Davos in Switzerland, Oxfam said the top tier had seen their share of wealth increase from 44 percent in 2009 to 48 percent in 2014.
On current trends, it will exceed 50 percent in 2016.
The charity's executive director, Winnie Byanyima, who is co-chairing the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, said an explosion in inequality was holding back the fight against poverty.
"Do we really want to live in a world where the one percent own more than the rest of us combined?" she said on Monday.
"Business as usual for the elite isn't a cost free option. Failure to tackle inequality will set the fight against poverty back decades. The poor are hurt twice by rising inequality — they get a smaller share of the economic pie and because extreme inequality hurts growth, there is less pie to be shared around."
Spiegel Online
How did three, seemingly normal sons of immigrant families turn into radicalized and vicious murderers? SPIEGEL went to Paris to find out. The resulting image is one of an identity search gone horribly wrong.
They were unremarkable. Friendly. That, at least, is how neighbors describe the brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi. "Really nice boys," is how the director of the children's home where they grew up remembers them. In their closed Facebook group, former residents of the home comfort each other: "I weep this evening," writes one woman. "I weep for my friends, and I weep for the boys I once knew. I weep for the people."
Can you ever truly know a person? People in the neighborhood where the Paris terrorists lived are filled with incomprehension, and people who were close to them are horrified. Even the wives of the two brothers say they knew nothing of their plans.
Reuters
Syria has started the long-delayed destruction of a dozen underground bunkers and hangars that were used for the production and storage of chemical weapons, diplomatic sources told Reuters on Monday.
Damascus last year handed over 1,300 metric tonnes of toxic agents after joining the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), but it is months behind schedule in destroying the facilities used to make and store its deadly stockpile.
Work at a first tunnel began on Dec. 24, but was delayed by winter storms. The site will be sealed off with cement walls by the end of January, said one source in The Hague, where the global chemical weapons watchdog is based.
NPR
One day before he was to testify about an alleged cover-up after a deadly terrorist bombing at a Jewish center in Argentina, a federal prosecutor was found dead of a gunshot wound in his Buenos Aires apartment.
Alberto Nisman's body was found Sunday. Officials say they also found a gun, but no note that might indicate his death was a suicide, according to local daily Clarin. An autopsy is being performed today, the newspaper adds.
Nisman's death comes days after he accused President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of being complicit in a cover-up of a deadly attack that has been a source of controversy since it occurred 20 years ago.
Reuters
Catholics should not feel they have to breed "like rabbits" because of the Church's ban on contraception, Pope Francis said on Monday, suggesting approved natural family planning methods.
Francis used the unusually frank language during an hour-long news conference on the plane from Manila to Rome at the end of his week-long Asia trip.
The freewheeling encounters have become a hallmark of Francis's simple style, his penchant for straight talk and his ease at using colloquialisms to make his point.
DW
Houthi fighters have surrounded Yemen’s Republican Palace, where the prime minister lives. Hours earlier, a ceasefire went into effect after negotiations to end fighting between the army and Houthi militiamen.
Late Monday, Houthi fighters surrounded the residence of Prime Minister Khaled Bahah in Yemen's capital, Sanaa, government officials said. Witnesses also said that Houthi fighters had surrounded the palace.
"The gunmen have surrounded the palace and the prime minister is inside," government spokesman Rajeh Badi said.
Both Yemen's military and Houthis accuse each other of instigating combat earlier Monday, when gunfire broke out near the presidential palace, one of a comparatively few sites in Sanaa still under government control. The fighting marks the Houthis' biggest challenge yet to President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who is not believed to live at the palace.
NHK World
Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, now visiting Israel, laid a wreath at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem on Monday and pledged to contribute to world peace so as not to repeat the tragedies of war and the Holocaust.
The Yad Vashem museum presents experiences and photos of victims sent to concentration camps, in order to commemorate the tragedies of the 6 million Jews who died in the camps during World War Two.
Abe laid flowers at the Hall of Remembrance to pray for the victims of the Holocaust.
He also paid a visit to a tree planted within the premises in honor of a Japanese diplomat, Chiune Sugihara, who issued visas to thousands of Jews to help them escape the Nazi Holocaust.
NPR
Iran says a general in the country's elite Revolutionary Guard was killed by an Israeli airstrike in Syria on Sunday that also killed several ranking members of Hezbollah.
Though these aren't the first Iranians or Hezbollah fighters to be killed in Syria, this incident stands out because these men were on the Syrian Golan Heights, within 10 miles of Israel's northeastern border.
Iran's official news agency quoted a website for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps stating that Gen. Mohammad Ali Allahdadi was killed while in Syria advising Syrian troops. Iran and Hezbollah have been supporting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against a mix of rebel opposition forces.
Israel doesn't usually comment officially on such strikes, though it's thought to have carried out others — the latest in early December. The Revolutionary Guard statement blamed "Zionist" forces. Reuters reported that an unnamed Israeli security source confirmed that Israel carried out the strike.
Reuters
China's economic growth held steady at 7.3 percent in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, slightly better than expected but still hovering at its weakest since the global financial crisis, keeping pressure on policymakers to head off a sharper slowdown.
The world's second-largest economy grew 7.4 percent in the whole of 2014, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Tuesday, undershooting the government's 7.5 percent target and the weakest expansion in 24 years.
It was the first since 1999 that the government had missed a yearly growth target for gross domestic product (GDP).
Reuters
Australia raised the threat level of a terrorist attack against law enforcement officers to "high" on Tuesday, federal police said, citing intelligence, discussions with international partners and recent high-profile attacks in Europe and Canada.
The change in the threat level for police officers brings it in line with the current threat level against the general public, which was raised to high in September and has remained so following a hostage crisis in Sydney in December.
"As a result of intelligence information and discussions with our partners, the terrorism threat level against police is assessed as high, which is commensurate with the broader threat level for the community," the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said in a statement.
DW
Ahead of a key regional meeting in Niger on Tuesday, the UN Security Council spoke out against Islamist militant group Boko Haram.
"The Security Council demands that Boko Haram immediately and unequivocally cease all hostilities and all abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law and disarm and demobilize," it said in a statement, its first official condemnation of the terrorist organization's acts as a whole.
The extremist group has drawn significantly more international attention over the past year, due to the increase in the number of attacks it has carried out, which have spilled over into neighboring countries.
Its kidnapping of nearly 300 schoolgirls also sparked the social media campaign #bringbackourgirls across the globe, which spotlighted its exploitation of children for its terror campaign.
The UN Security Council further said that some of the group's acts could "account to crimes against humanity."
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Reuters
Brent crude oil prices fell below $49 a barrel and U.S. crude also fell more than $1 on Monday after the global economic outlook darkened and Iraq announced record oil production.
The world's biggest energy consumer, China, faces significant downward pressure on its economy, its premier Li Keqiang was quoted by state radio as saying on Monday.
China is expected this week to report growth slowing to 7.2 percent from a year ago, the weakest since the depths of the last global economic crisis. Data from China's National Bureau of Statistics showed on Sunday house prices fell for a fourth straight month.
Reuters
Iran sees no sign of a shift within OPEC toward action to support oil prices, its oil minister said, adding its oil industry could ride out a further price slump to $25 a barrel.
The comments are a further sign that despite lobbying by Iran and Venezuela, there is little chance of collective action by the 12-member OPEC to prop up prices - entrenching the reluctance of individual members to curb their own supplies.
In remarks posted on the Iranian oil ministry's website SHANA, Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh called for increased cooperation between members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
NPR
Could studying ants reveal clues to reducing highway traffic jams? Physicist Apoorva Nagar at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology thinks the answer is yes.
Nagar says he got interested in the topic when he came across a study by German and Indian researchers showing that ants running along a path were able to maintain a steady speed even when there were a large number of ants on the path.
Nagar says there are three main reasons ants don't jam up. No. 1, ants don't have egos. They don't show off by zooming past people.
"The second thing is, they do not mind a few accidents or collisions," say Nagar. So unless there's a serious pileup, they just keep going.
NPR
Dr. Paul Abramson is no technophobe. He works at a hydraulic standing desk made in Denmark and his stethoscope boasts a data screen. "I'm an engineer and I'm in health care," he says. "I like gadgets." Still, the proliferation of gadgets that collect health data are giving him pause.
Abramson is a primary care doctor in San Francisco and lots of his patients work in the tech industry. So it's not surprising that more and more of them are coming in with information collected from consumer medical devices — you know, those wristbands and phone apps that measure how much exercise you're getting or how many calories you're eating.
The "wearables" market is growing fast. Credit Suisse estimates it's already worth between $3 billion and $5 billion. Add to that nearly 50,000 health apps, and you have a booming new digital health industry aiming to transform health care in the same way Amazon took on publishing.
Washington Post
Poll after poll has shown overwhelming support for building the Keystone XL oil pipeline. So when Congress passes a bill authorizing its construction, people want the White House to sign it immediately, right?
Wrong.
A new poll from the Washington Post and ABC News gets at this question in a different way, and it suggests that support for Keystone is softer -- and less urgent -- than previously thought. The survey asks people whether they think the pipeline should be authorized now, or whether they think a review should be completed to determine that the project is in the nation's interest.
NPR
On a graph, they look like detonations. Scientists call them "fast radio bursts," or FRBs, mysterious and strong pulses of radio waves that seemingly emanate far from the Milky Way.
The bursts are rare; they normally last for only about 1 millisecond. In a first, researchers in Australia say they've observed one in real time.
NPR's Joe Palca reports:
"The giant Parkes radio telescope in southeastern Australia detected the burst on May 14 last year. Within hours of the discovery, 12 different telescopes both on Earth and in space were pointed in the direction of the burst, but none recorded any unusual activity.
"Most of the events that astronomers know about that could cause a burst of radio waves, such as an exploding star, would continue to give off light or X-rays or gamma rays for some time.
"Finding nothing only deepens the mystery about what's behind the bursts. Details of the finding appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society."
C/NET
Well before the Internet of Things becomes an actual thing, chipmakers are jockeying to get a piece of the potentially huge new market.
References to the Internet of Things -- the idea of connecting more devices and objects to the Web -- were everywhere at this month's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. There was hardly a booth or press conference without mention to the shorthand "IoT" and how it could change the way people interact with their cars, clothes and coffee makers.
There's still an enormous amount of work to be done to make the concept a reality, but that's not stopping chip companies from diving into the nascent space to define what a connected world will look like. The stakes are high. Chipmakers that succeed will be able to call the shots in a new and potentially lucrative market, while those that fall behind could be relegated to also-ran status.
C/NET
The National Security Agency was tracking North Korea's hackers long before they attacked Sony Pictures, according to report that sheds light on how US officials so quickly concluded North Korea was to blame for the hack.
The NSA used malware to track North Korean hackers as part of a program launched more than four years ago, The New York Times reported on Sunday, citing former US officials, computer experts and a newly released top secret document, (PDF), which was provided to Der Spiegel by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
"Spurred by concerns over North Korea's maturing capabilities," the spy agency penetrated North Korea's networks in 2010 with help from South Korea and other American allies, the Times reported. A classified program evolved into an "ambitious effort" to place malware that could track the internal workers of computers and networks used by the North's hackers -- "a force that South Korea's military recently said numbers roughly 6,000 people," the Times reported.