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. 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.
Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the OND banner.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Al Jazeera America
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, became the first big name to officially enter the 2016 presidential race Monday morning, announcing his candidacy at Liberty University, a Christian college in Lynchburg, Virginia.
In the megachurch-like setting of Liberty University’s convocation stage, Cruz paced like a televangelist in the mold of the school’s founder, Jerry Falwell. Cruz appealed to the thousands of students gathered for the mandatory weekly convocation, trying to mobilize the young social conservatives his campaign hopes will propel him to victory.
“I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America,” he said. “That is why today I am announcing that I am running for the president of the United States.”
In 2012, tea party support catapulted Cruz to an upset victory over an establishment candidate, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Cruz’s only prior experience in public office had been as a solicitor general, appointed by the governor.
The Guardian
Texas senator Ted Cruz announced he is running for president on Monday with an uncompromising speech to Liberty University in Virginia, making the firebrand Republican the first official entrant in the 2016 race.
“I believe in the power of millions of courageous conservatives rising up to reignite the promise of America,” Cruz said, “and that is why today I am announcing I am running for president of the United States.”
“We stand together for liberty,” he told an arena of students at the intensely Christian university, which advertises itself as a training ground for “champions of Christ” in rural Virginia.
NPR
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz has apparently had enough of the fig leaf most presidential candidates wear as their unofficial spring costume the year before the election actually happens.
That is a bold stroke, but entirely in keeping with the go-for-broke style the junior senator from Texas has exhibited since first challenging the Republican establishment's candidate for the Senate in 2012.
Cruz, who officially announced his candidacy for president in a midnight Monday tweet and video, has not been the buzz candidate so far in the party's 2016 discussions — nor the media's. In fact, he has seemed at times a bit of a faded rose, a skyrocket that spent much of its sparkle. There was the debacle over his brinkmanship in the 2013 government shutdown. That was followed by countless run-ins with Republican colleagues in the Senate.
BBC News: US and Canada
Republican Ted Cruz has made individual liberty the key theme of his presidential campaign announcement.
Speaking at Liberty University in Virginia, Mr Cruz is one of several Republican hopefuls to emerge from the Tea Party movement.
He described his mission as "reigniting the promise of America" because "for so many Americans the promise of America seems more and more distant".
He is the first high-profile figure to officially enter the 2016 race.
AlterNet
Immediately after Texas Senator Ted Cruz announced via Twitter Sunday night that he is seeking the presidency, Twitter exploded in mockery. The collected wisdom of Twitter wits came together to help Cruz with some winning slogans, bound to draw out the pinwheel hat wearing, gun-toting, nonsense-spewing constituents who gravitate to Cruz.
Here are 25 of the best suggestions under #TedCruzCampaignSlogans. Sure hope Cruz is paying attention.
McClatchy News
WASHINGTON — With more than 50 congressional repeal votes, a near-death Supreme Court experience and a botched marketplace debut to its credit, the Affordable Care Act has had a tortured five-year existence as the Republican Party’s legislative enemy No. 1.
And since President Barack Obama signed the health care measure into law on March 23, 2010, its troubled legislative history isn’t close to being fully written.
...
But despite the political head winds, experts say Obama’s legacy-defining law is quietly accomplishing the goals it was created to achieve.
Al Jazeera America
More than 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, many in fear of being deported, losing their jobs or being separated from their families.
Telling someone you're undocumented can be emotional, cathartic or downright terrifying — these are the stories of several young people who took that risk, and why.
The Guardian
Millionaire and accused murderer Robert Durst was in a New Orleans courtroom on Monday morning as his team of lawyers argued that a search of his hotel room and subsequent arrest a week ago by FBI agents were illegal.
A judge on Monday was hearing a challenge to a weapons charge stemming from that search, and whether Durst is a flight risk, as his attorneys seek to expedite Durst’s extradition to Los Angeles to face a murder charge in connection with the 2000 death of his friend Susan Berman, while simultaneously challenging the basis for his arrest on that charge.
Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a challenge to Wisconsin's Republican-backed law requiring voters to present photo identification to cast a ballot, a measure Democrats contend is aimed at keeping their supporters from voting.
The justices declined to hear an appeal filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, which challenged the law. The ACLU said it then filed an emergency motion with a federal appeals court to try to keep the law from taking effect immediately.
Republican Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel said the law cannot be implemented for the state's April 7 election because absentee ballots are already in the hands of voters but would be in place for future elections. "This decision is final," Schimel said.
Voter identification laws have been passed in a number of Republican-governed states over Democratic objections. Republicans say voter ID laws are needed to prevent voter fraud. Wisconsin's measure, blocked by the Supreme Court last year, was backed by Governor Scott Walker, a potential 2012 Republican presidential contender.
NPR
What happens when a teacher wants to assign an extra book for class, but the school can't afford a copy for every student?
For Dana Vanderford, an English teacher at L.W. Higgins High School in New Orleans, the book was Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation. Buying enough copies for her class would have cost more than $800. Not an option.
"I get $80 a year to buy resources for my classroom," Vanderford says. "And I have 90 students per semester. So that $80 doesn't go very far."
In the past, teachers in Vanderford's position had a few options: Pay for the costs themselves, ask students to pay, or somehow try to raise the money.
In 2000, DonorsChoose.org made that "somehow" a little easier. Public school teachers can use the site to "crowdfund" classroom project ideas, raising donations to pay for everything from basic supplies to technology upgrades, field trips, and more.
NPR
The police department in Charlottesville, Va., says it has suspended its investigation into allegations of a brutal gang rape on the campus of University of Virginia in 2012.
The allegations came to national prominence after Rolling Stone published a cover story on the case.
Chief Timothy Longo said that after trying to track down the alleged attacker and other witnesses they were unable to corroborate the student's story.
"We were unable to find a statement of fact that there was even an event" at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house where the alleged attack was said to take place, Longo said.
NPR
Philadelphia police officers "do not receive regular, consistent training on the department's deadly force policy," the Justice Department said today in a review of the city's 394 officer-involved shootings between 2007 and 2014.
The department also said: "PPD recruit training is not conducted in a systematic and modular fashion. As a result, some recruit classes receive firearms training close to the end of the academy, whereas others receive it early on."
Those were two of more than 40 findings from the Justice Department review, which was conducted when the city's police commissioner asked the Justice Department to look into Philadelphia officer-involved shootings after four consecutive days of such shootings in May 2013.
BBC
Three workers are dead and one other is in hospital after a section of scaffolding has collapsed at a tall construction project in North Carolina.
Emergency responders say the platform peeled away from the glass and steel building and collapsed into a car park in Raleigh.
Authorities are working to identify the dead and the cause of the accident.
Construction industry accidents are the leading cause of workplace death in North Carolina, officials say.
The four workers were all involved in the construction project, Wake County EMS district chief Jeffrey Hammerstein said.
Reuters
The trustee recovering money for Bernard Madoff's victims on Monday announced a settlement to recoup $93 million from a "feeder fund" that sent client money to the swindler's firm, boosting the total sum raised to roughly $10.65 billion.
Irving Picard, the trustee, said the settlement calls for the Defender Ltd feeder fund to receive a $522.8 million claim in the liquidation of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC because it deposited more there than it withdrew.
Defender, which was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, will get "catch-up" payments from distributions that Picard previously made to Madoff customers. The first $93 million of the payments will go to other Madoff customers, and Defender will get its share of future payouts.
Picard has recouped roughly 60 percent of the $17.5 billion of principal he has estimated that Madoff's victims lost in a decades-long Ponzi scheme.
Reuters
The United States assured Afghanistan's leaders on Monday it would keep funding Afghan security forces at a targeted peak level of 352,000 personnel at least into 2017 to provide stability as foreign troops withdraw from the country.
The announcement by U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter came ahead of talks at the White House on Tuesday at which Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is expected to press his case for a slowing of the withdrawal of U.S. forces.
After a day of talks at the U.S. presidential retreat at Camp David, Carter, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Afghan leaders were at pains to avoid getting ahead of the White House talks, at which Obama is expected to respond to Ghani's plea.
NHK World
The governor of Okinawa has instructed the regional defense bureau to suspend its offshore reclamation work for the relocation of a US base. The southern prefecture wants to survey possible damage to the reef along the Henoko coast off Nago City.
The Okinawa Defense Bureau has begun drilling off the coast to build a US military facility. The new facility will replace the US Marine Corps' Futenma air station, which is now located in a densely populated area of the prefecture.
Governor Takeshi Onaga, who opposes the relocation plan, was speaking to reporters on Monday. He said he ordered the defense bureau on Monday to suspend all reclamation work within a week. He said he also asked them to cooperate with the prefecture's on-site survey.
DW
Greece's new prime minister has begun a much-anticipated meeting with the German chancellor in Berlin. His first visit to Germany since taking office was meant to reduce heightened tensions between Athens and Berlin.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was greeted with full military honors at the chancellery in Berlin on Monday, where he was met by Chancellor Angela Merkel. The two leaders shook hands and smiled for the cameras, before the Bundeswehr band played the national anthems of both countries.
Shortly afterwards, the two leaders went into the chancellery for their bilateral talks, which were to be followed by a meeting over dinner.
DW
A conservative alliance led by ex-President Sarkozy has emerged as the victor in the first round of local French elections. The far-right National Front has remained adamant in its message despite underperforming.
A coalition of right-wing parties, including the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) led by former President Nicolas Sarkozy, claimed victory in France's local elections on Sunday after a hotly contested race saw the far-right National Front (FN) perform under expectations and a dismal finish for the Socialists of much-maligned President Francois Hollande.
According to the latest polls, the conservative alliance took 32.5 percent of the vote across the 98 administrative regions (departments) where elections were held. Provisional official figures gave the anti-EU and anti-immigration FN around 25.35 percent, below the 30 percent expected ahead of the poll from French voters dissatisfied with the stagnant economy and current immigration policy.
Spiegel Online
Following World War II, a German return to dominance in Europe seemed an impossibility. But the euro crisis has transformed the country into a reluctant hegemon and comparisons with the Nazis have become rampant. Are they fair? By SPIEGEL Staff
May 30, 1941 was the day when Manolis Glezos made a fool of Adolf Hitler. He and a friend snuck up to a flag pole on the Acropolis in Athens on which a gigantic swastika flag was flying. The Germans had raised the banner four weeks earlier when they occupied the country, but Glezos took down the hated flag and ripped it up. The deed turned both him and his friend into heroes.
The Guardian
The son of Ukraine’s former president Viktor Yanukovych drowned after the van he was driving fell through the ice on a Siberian lake at the weekend, according to reports.
Yanukovych’s son, also called Viktor, was known for his love of extreme sports and was also an MP in Ukraine’s parliament, before the family fled to Russia in the wake of the Maidan revolution last year.
Russian authorities said only that a man named Viktor Davydov had died when a Volkswagen van fell through the ice on Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest lake. Davydov is his maternal grandmother’s name.
Reuters
The United States will not take the floor at the main U.N. human rights forum on Monday during the annual debate on violations committed in the Palestinian territories, as part of a previous agreement not to speak.
The European Union, however, reiterated "the urgency of renewed, structured and substantial efforts towards peace".
"The U.S. delegation will not be speaking about Palestine today," a U.S. spokesman in Geneva told Reuters in response to a query as the debate began.
The last time that Washington spoke under that stand-alone agenda item was in March 2013, U.N. records show.
The decision not to talk since then was part of an agreement in October 2013 when Israel resumed participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Reuters
Yemen's top factions are squaring off for battle after months of skirmishes, turning respectively to neighboring Saudi Arabia and its regional rival Iran for help in what may become all-out war.
With President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi seeking a comeback from the port city of Aden while the Shi'ite Houthi movement controls the capital Sanaa, rival administrations are trading bellicose rhetoric as fighting intensifies and factions commandeer airfields for the next stage of the struggle.
Somewhat on the sidelines, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and Islamic State are waiting to exploit what some fear could become Yemen's worst conflict since a 1994 civil war.
NPR
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apologized to his country's Arab citizens for his comments ahead of last week's elections, saying he did not intend to offend them when he said Israel's Arabs were voting "in droves" to unseat his government.
"I know the things I said a few days ago hurt some of Israel's citizens and hurt Israel's Arabs. I had no intention to do that. I apologize for it," he said at a meeting with representatives of Israel's minority communities.
Last week, when polls suggested his party might lose the national election, Netanyahu wrote a Facebook post urging his supporters to come out and vote. It read, in part: "The right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls. Left-wing organizations are busing them out."
Netanyahu's Likud party comfortably won the elections, but his remarks were criticized both inside and outside Israel.
BBC
David Cameron has told the BBC he will not serve a third term as prime minister if the Conservatives remain in government after the general election.
The PM said if re-elected he would serve the full five years of another Parliament and then leave Number 10.
After that, he said, "it will be time for new leadership".
Mr Cameron tipped Home Secretary Theresa May, Chancellor George Osborne and London Mayor Boris Johnson as potential successors.
In an interview with BBC deputy political editor James Landale, Mr Cameron described the three Conservative heavyweights as "great people" with "plenty of talent".
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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NHK World
Japan's Board of Audit says it could take the government up to 30 years to recoup the funds it provided to help compensate victims of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident.
The government issued bonds worth nine trillion yen, or about 75 billion dollars, to help the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, pay compensation. The money is mainly intended to help those who have been forced to evacuate and to cover the costs of decontamination work.
The funds were given to TEPCO through the government-backed Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation.
McClatchy News
The University of Delaware has declined a congressional request for documents related to the external funding of one of its professors - a known climate contrarian - saying it was an intrusion into academic freedom.
Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, had requested documentation related to the funding sources of professor David Legates and six other researchers who are climate skeptics. He did this after it was reported that Wei-Hock (Willie) Soon had failed to disclose funding from fossil fuel companies for his published work, studies that advanced discredited theories about the causes of climate change.
Legates is a professor of climatology at the University of Delaware, and has co-authored several academic studies with Soon, including four of the papers for which Soon accepted funding from major utility company Southern Company. Soon reported the papers as "deliverables" without having disclosed his funding source.
Al Jazeera America
AHMEDABAD, India — Dr. Dinesh Joshi puts on an N95 medical mask and opens the door to the swine-flu ward at Civil Hospital in India’s western state of Gujarat. With 5,000 beds, it is one of the largest hospitals in Asia. The swine-flu ward is at the end of a long corridor, its walls lined with drawings made by schoolchildren on the importance of washing one’s hands after using the toilet, of eating a diet rich in protein and of avoiding public gatherings — all actions that Joshi believes will prevent a worse outbreak of the virus that is currently sweeping the country.
Inside the ward for swine flu ward, labeled by its official medical name, H1N1, 6-year-old Purvi sits on a bed with an IV tube in her nose. Her chances of survival, like those of the 15 or so other patients in the room, are uncertain. In the corner, medical assistants enter details of swine-flu cases into the state and central government database. Across the hall is another room, with the word “Suspect” written on the door in Gujarati, reserved for those who may have the virus.
“The suspect room is empty,” Joshi says, beaming.
Al Jazeera America
Archaeologists in Argentina believe a collection of ruins found deep in a remote jungle region may be the remains of a secret hideout built by German Nazis to flee to after World War II, a report said Sunday.
A team of archaeologists is studying the remains of three buildings located in the Teyu Cuare provincial park in northern Argentina on its border with Paraguay, Clarin newspaper reported.
The University of Buenos Aires researchers have found five German coins minted between 1938 and 1941 and a fragment of porcelain plate bearing the inscription "Made in Germany."
"Apparently, halfway through the Second World War, the Nazis had a secret project of building shelters for top leaders in the event of defeat — inaccessible sites, in the middle of deserts, in the mountains, on a cliff or in the middle of the jungle like this," the archaeologists' team leader Daniel Schavelzon told Clarin.
The Guardian
Apple has been valued at more than $1tn – almost three times as much as Google, the US’s second most valuable company.
Analysts at Cantor Fitzgerald on Monday said they thought Apple’s shares – which are currently trading at about $127, valuing the company at $733bn – could soon be worth $180 each, which would value the iPhone maker at $1.05tn.
It is the first time any company has ever been valued at more than $1tn, and would make Apple more valuable than the gross domestic product (GDP) of Indonesia, the Netherlands or Saudi Arabia, according to World Bank statistics. It would also mean Apple would be worth 2.6 times as much as Google, the second most valuable company in the US, with a market valuation of $383bn.
Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White said he thought Apple was worth that much because of its continued strong performance in China, where sales are increasing by 70% year-on-year, and the introduction of the Apple Watch, its first new type of product in five years.
NPR
According to a news feature from the journal Nature, shortsightedness could be on the rise because children are spending less time outdoors than they used to.
In short: myopia has undergone a marked increase in the past 50 years, and several studies link this rise to the amount of time that children are spending indoors and away from high levels of light, which could play a role in regulating eye development. An Australian researcher cited in the story, Ian Morgan, estimates that children need at least three hours of strong light per day to be protected against this vulnerability.
The so-called "myopia boom" provides a nice illustration of the complexities that arise in attempting to parcel out environmental versus genetic influences on biological traits. One way to quantify how much variation in a trait — such as shortsightedness — is due to variation in genetic factors is in terms of the trait's "heritability," a technical notion that (in its narrow sense) is defined as the "proportion of the phenotypic variance that can be attributed to additive genetic variance."
A photo taken on Feb. 12 shows the Eiffel Tower in Paris through thick smog.
NPR
Paris has banned cars with license plates ending in even numbers from its roads today to reduce smog that last week briefly made the City of Lights among the world's most polluted places.
NPR's Eleanor Beardsley, who is reporting on the story for our Newscast unit, says the Paris Metro and other public transportation are free for the next few days to encourage people to use them. The ban on cars doesn't extend to electric, hybrid or emergency vehicles.
"Pollution spiked in the Paris region and northern France," Eleanor says. "According to one company that measures air quality, the French capital briefly dethroned [New] Delhi and Beijing as the world's most polluted city."
C/NET
President Barack Obama is making good on his promise to bring more broadband to Americans.
On Monday he signed a memorandum formally creating the Broadband Opportunity Council, a federal initiative aimed at increasing broadband investment from private industry while also reducing barriers to broadband deployment and adoption.
The new council will include 25 federal agencies and departments that will work with private industry to understand how the federal government can help communities increase broadband investment and reduce barriers to deployment. The council will be co-chaired by the US departments of Commerce and Agriculture. The council will report back to Obama, within 150 days, with the steps each agency will take to advance these goals, including specific regulatory actions or budget proposals.
C/NET
Famed movie producer Brian Grazer aims to show people how curiosity -- even more than innovation and creativity -- can be the force that drives success at work and in life.
When you're an award-winning Hollywood producer, people do everything they can to get a meeting with you. But for the past 35 years, Brian Grazer -- who co-founded Imagine Entertainment with friend and director Ron Howard -- has been the one chasing face-to-face meetings with people he's curious about.
Grazer, whose film credits include "Apollo 13," "Splash" and "A Beautiful Mind," has now transformed more than 450 of these "curiosity conversations" with visionaries from a variety of fields into a new book, "A Curious Mind," coming out this April from Simon & Schuster.
New York Times
PAHOA, Hawaii — If a disaster movie played out in slow motion, it might look a bit like the Puna District on the Big Island of Hawaii.
As a mass of smoldering black lava has inched since June toward the town of Pahoa, the commercial center of this isolated stretch of Puna, there has been no need for residents to run screaming from a flaming river rumbling down the mountain.
Instead, there has been a pervasive, static anxiety over where the fickle, hot blob might ooze next — not quite the scenario in “When Time Ran Out.”
“We’ve kind of been living day by day,” said Jeff Hunt, 55, a surfboard shaper with a shop along the main drag. “You just really don’t know how to act.”