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
Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen will continue until Shia rebels there "withdraw and surrender their weapons," a summit of Arab leaders decided Sunday, as they also agreed in principle to forming a joint military force.
The decision by the Arab League puts it on a path to more aggressively challenge Iran, which they accuse of backing the Yemeni rebels, known as Houthis.
A Saudi-led coalition began bombing Yemen on Thursday, saying it was targeting the Houthis and their allies, which include forces loyal to Yemen's former leader Ali Abdullah Saleh. Current and former Yemeni military officials have said the campaign could pave the way for a possible ground invasion.
At the summit, held in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm el-Sheikh, Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby read a final communiqué outlining the leaders' views.
The Guardian
Arab states have said they will try to assemble a unified military force to combat common threats across the Middle East, which regional leaders say is now more volatile and polarised than at any point in at least 35 years.
The mooted force would be 40,000 strong, based in Cairo or Riyadh and would be deployed to counter threats anywhere from Libya to Yemen.
The concept, which is effectively a joint defence pact, was tabled by the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, at an Arab League summit in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm al-Sheikh, where all 22 members of the fractious body gathered on Sunday to discuss the myriad crises reverberating around the region.
“The Arab leaders have decided to agree on the principle of a joint Arab military force,” Sisi said.
Reuters
Yemeni fighters loyal to the Saudi-backed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi clashed with Iranian-allied Houthi fighters on Sunday in Aden, the absent leader's last major foothold in the country.
Hadi loyalists in the southern port city reported a gunbattle in the central Crater district in which three people were killed, and said they recaptured the airport, which has changed hands several times in recent days.
The Health Ministry, loyal to the Houthi fighters who control the capital, said Saudi-led air strikes had killed 35 people and wounded 88 overnight. The figures could not be independently confirmed.
BBC
The heads of Arab League countries meeting in Egypt have agreed to create a joint Arab military force.
The League has been meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh amid a crisis in Yemen and the threat of jihadists who have made major gains in Iraq, Syria and Libya.
However, establishing the make-up and remit of the force could take months, analysts say.
A 10-nation, Saudi-led coalition is currently carrying out air strikes against rebels in Yemen.
The strikes are in support of President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who fled after gains by the Shia Houthi rebels.
Correspondents have described the conflict as a proxy war between Sunni Arab nations and Shia Iran.
New York Times
CAIRO — The Arab states said on Sunday that they had agreed to form a combined military force to counter both Iranian influence and Islamist extremism, a gesture many analysts attributed in large part to their drive for more independence from Washington.
The agreement came as American and other Western diplomats in Lausanne, Switzerland, were racing to beat a self-imposed deadline of Tuesday to reach a deal with Iran that would restrict its nuclear program in exchange for the removal of economic sanctions. In response, Saudi Arabia and other American allies in the region have made clear that they are seeking to bolster independent regional security measures because they see the proposed accord as a betrayal of Washington’s commitment to their security.
Regardless of Iran’s nuclear program, they complain, the deal would do nothing to stop Iran from seeking to extend its influence around the region by backing favored factions, as it has done in Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain and Yemen.
CNN
You'll see some familiar faces in the Final Four.
Duke beat Gonzaga 66-52 on Sunday, giving Blue Devils' coach Mike Krzyzewski his 12th trip to the semifinals of the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
Justise Winslow and Matt Jones each scored 16 to help Duke win the South Region. Gonzaga, led by 16 points from Kyle Wiltjer, was hoping to earn its first trip to the Final Four.
Here's how the Final Four, to be played in Indianapolis, has shaped up:
Next Saturday, Duke will face Michigan State in the first semifinal. In the next game, top seed Kentucky will battle Wisconsin.
The winners will meet on Monday, April 6, for the national championship.
Reuters
Former Hewlett-Packard Co Chief Executive Carly Fiorina on Sunday said the chances of her running for U.S. presidency were "very high" and she would announce her plans in late April-early May.
Fiorina, speaking on Fox News Sunday, put the chances of her running for president in 2016 at 'higher than 90 percent' but said she could not yet announce the bid as she was working to establish her team, get "the right support" and financial resources.
Vox
The Census Department published new population figures for 2014 this week. KQED says that "The Bay Area Is Getting Way More Crowded," and they made this map to show the trend; the reddest areas are the places where population is growing fastest.
KQED isn't wrong. The population of the Bay Area grew 1.3 percent last year, which is a lot better than the 0.7 percent average annual growth rate the Bay Area has seen since 2000.
But it's also important to keep a sense of perspective. 1.3 percent is not a very impressive growth rate. The population of the Houston metropolitan area grew by 2.4 percent between 2013 and 2014. The Dallas metro area grew by 1.8 percent during the same period. Greater Atlanta grew by 1.5 percent.
And these southern cities have been growing faster than the San Francisco Bay Area for more than a decade. Between 2000 and 2010, the Bay Area grew by about 5 percent. Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta all increased their populations by more than 20 percent.
Vox
The future of executions in Utah may not be lethal injections, but rather five professional shooters firing at a prisoner's heart.
On Monday, Utah became one of the few states to allow firing squads for executions after Gov. Gary Herbert signed a law approving this controversial method as a backup if the state can't restock its depleted supply of lethal injection drugs.
During a firing-squad execution, a prisoner is seated in a chair that's stacked with sandbags to prevent bullets from ricocheting, according to the Associated Press. Five shooters, picked from a pool of trained volunteers, aim their rifles through slots on a wall and target the prisoner's chest (because it's a larger target than the head). If the shooters hit, the prisoner's heart should rupture and cause a relatively quick death from blood loss.
Al Jazeera America
NASHVILLE — Raydhira Abreu, a middle-class Nashvillian who works as a leasing agent for an affordable housing developer in the city, says that without being able to live in one of her company’s units, she would be forced to leave the city.
“Even with the money I’m making now, I don’t think I could afford to live here,” she said. “We have zero apartments, and every day there’s more and more demand.”
Nashville is rising in national profile and quite literally: 30-story condominium towers are popping up downtown, modest homes are being torn down and replaced with 3,000-square-foot modern houses in East Nashville, and new restaurants, bars and clubs are opening seemingly every week.
While the city is booming, incomes haven’t kept pace with costs. A city study found that the median family income in the Nashville area rose 6 percent from 2000 to 2013 but rents rose 21 percent for four-bedroom apartments and 39 percent for one-bedrooms.
The Guardian
Iran has “no intention” of keeping its word on an agreement being negotiated in Switzerland over its nuclear programme, House speaker John Boehner said on Sunday.
The top Republican’s comments came as negotiations in Lausanne approached the 31 March deadline for the drafting of a framework for a deal, under intense criticism from Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu.
Speaking on CNN, Boehner said he had serious doubts about the talks.
“We’ve got a regime that’s never quite kept their word about anything,” he said. “I just don’t understand why we would sign an agreement with a group of people who have no intention of keeping their word.”
If there was no agreement, Boehner said he would move “very” quickly to impose new sanctions on Iran.
NPR
Indiana Gov. Mike Pence — facing a major backlash from a new law that would allow businesses in the state to cite religious objections to refuse to serve gay people — says he supports an effort to "clarify the intent" of the legislation while acknowledging surprise over the hostility it has sparked.
As we reported on Saturday, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — approved by the Republican-dominated Indiana legislature and signed by Pence on Thursday — immediately touched off a vociferous online campaign against the law, as well as a protest on Saturday in front of the Statehouse.
Indiana's RFRA, which goes into effect in July, has also caused some high-profile businesses, such as Angie's List, to rethink expansion plans in the Hoosier state, potentially costing the economy tens of millions of dollars in and thousands of jobs.
The Guardian
On Halloween night in 2000, the New York real estate heir Robert Durst received word that he was under renewed investigation for the disappearance of his wife Kathie, 19 years after she vanished from their home in suburban Westchester County.
Durst didn’t wait to be contacted by the police, who had questioned him extensively at the time of the disappearance and never accused him of anything. He didn’t even wait for the news to hit the papers. Instead, according to Westchester County investigative files made available to the Guardian last week, he made immediate plans to run – “setting myself up”, he would later say, “to be a fugitive”.
And so began a frenetic chain of events, many of them kept out of the public record until now, culminating in the murder of Durst’s old friend Susan Berman in Los Angeles – the crime at the center of the recent six-part documentary series The Jinx for which Durst is now facing first-degree murder charges.
Reuters
Two bodies found on Sunday at the site of a gas explosion that destroyed three New York City apartment buildings last week, injuring 22 people, were believed to be those of two unaccounted for men, the city's top fire official said.
The bodies were found about 20 feet apart of one of the buildings reduced to rubble by the blast and fire in Manhattan's East Village neighborhood on Thursday, Fire Department Commissioner Daniel Nigro told reporters.
While Nigro said a medical examiner had not officially determined that the remains belonged to the two people who remain unaccounted for, local broadcaster NY1 News said one of the missing men, 23-year-old Nicholas Figueroa, had been identified by his family as one of the bodies found on Sunday. Also missing was Moises Lucon.
Reuters
The co-pilot suspected of crashing a passenger jet in the Alps may have been suffering from a detached retina but investigators are unsure whether his vision problems had physical or psychological causes, a German newspaper said on Sunday.
Bild am Sonntag also reported how the captain of the Germanwings (LHAG.DE) Airbus had screamed "open the damn door!" to the co-pilot as he tried to get back into the locked cockpit before the jet crashed last Tuesday, killing all 150 on board.
Another German newspaper, Welt am Sonntag, quoted a senior investigator as saying the 27-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz "was treated by several neurologists and psychiatrists" and that a number of medications had been found in his apartment.
Police also discovered personal notes that showed Lubitz suffered from "severe subjective overstress symptoms", he added
Reuters
Iran and six major powers were exploring possible compromises to break an impasse in nuclear negotiations on Sunday, but officials cautioned they were unable to move on several sticking points.
The news came as Israel said the details of a possible agreement emerging from talks in Lausanne, Switzerland were worse than it feared.
In a significant development in talks aimed at securing a preliminary nuclear deal, several officials told Reuters Tehran had indicated a willingness to accept fewer than 6,000 nuclear centrifuges and to send most of its enriched uranium stockpiles for storage in Russia.
NHK
A state funeral for Singapore's first prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, was held on Sunday.
Lee died last Monday at the age of 91. During his 25-year rule, he laid the groundwork for Singapore's economic growth.
His coffin was brought from the parliament building to the National University of Singapore.
Many people braved heavy rain to watch the funeral procession.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and South Korean President Park Geun-hye attended the ceremony, along with the leaders of southeast Asian countries.
DW
As tens of thousands of Tunisians marched against extremism, authorities said the leader of a group suspected of carrying out the attack on tourists at the Bardo Museum had been killed in an anti-terrorist operation.
Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid announced Sunday that Abou Sakhr Lokman, one of the leading suspects in the Tunis museum attack, was killed in an operation in the Gafsa region near Tunisian's Algerian border on Saturday night.
Lokman is believed to be a prominent militant active in al Qaeda's North African arm and is being held responsible by Tunisian authorities for the deaths of 22 people, including many foreign tourists and two gunmen, in the March 18 attack on the National Bardo Museum in Tunis.
Just before Essid made the announcement, a march had begun from central Tunis to the Bardo Museum. The three-kilometer march, protected by hundreds of security, was to be joined by world leaders, among them French President Francois Hollande.
Hollande, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and a number of foreign ministers from other countries were set to join an anti-terrorism ceremony in Tunis after the march through the capital ended.
Al Jazeera America
Voting in Nigeria's tensest election since the end of military rule in 1999 continued for a second day on Sunday after technical glitches hit voter ID machines and Boko Haram fighters killed scores of people in drive-by shootings.
More than 40 people were killed in election-related violence Saturday, though millions were able to cast ballots in a presidential election that analysts say is too close to call.
Voting was extended in about 300 of the country's 150,000 polling stations, including some areas of Lagos, Nigeria's megacity of 20 million on the Atlantic coast, according to the country's electoral commission. The extended voting was necessary because new voting equipment failed to confirm voters' identities.
The race pits President Goodluck Jonathan against former military ruler Muhammadu Buhari for the favor of an electorate divided along a complex mix of ethnic, regional and religious lines.
The Guardian
When Boris Nemtsov was shot dead, as he walked home on a drizzly Friday night in Moscow last month, Russia’s beleaguered liberal opposition realised tthe rules of the game had changed in the most shocking way.
But there are also signs the highest-profile contract killing to take place during Vladimir Putin’s 15 years in charge could have triggered a battle inside Russia’s power structures, the consequences of which could reach far wider than the insular world of the minority opposition – and be much harder for Putin to control.
Given the opacity of the Kremlin, the small circle of decision-makers around President Putin, and the use of various media outlets to leak “versions” of the politician’s murder that may have varying degrees of proximity to the truth, piecing together what is really going on is extremely tricky. Much remains unknowable. But decoding the signals coming from the Kremlin and those around it, the outline of a conflict between influential members of Putin’s security apparatus is emerging.
BBC
Representatives of six world powers are intensifying talks with Iran on its nuclear programme, ahead of a 31 March deadline for a deal.
The US secretary of state and German and French foreign ministers have all cancelled their travel plans in a final push for an agreement.
Representatives from China, Russia and the UK are also at the negotiations.
US officials say all parties have agreed to a "step by step approach" to the deal, but sticking points remain.
The world powers, known as the P5+1 group - the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany - want to ensure that Iran cannot develop nuclear weapons.
Iran denies it is aiming to build nuclear weapons and is hoping that a deal will lead to the lifting of international sanctions.
The Guardian
The French right has made large gains in the country’s local elections, handing President François Hollande’s ruling Socialist party its third electoral drubbing in a year and raising fears for the future of the left.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s rightwing UMP party, in coalition with centrist allies, took the largest share of seats, wresting control of many traditional leftwing bastions from the Socialists.
But key to the changing political landscape in France was the strong showing for the far-right Front National, which marked a major turning-point as the party established a new grassroots presence across the country.
After winning only two local council seats at the last election in 2011, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigration and anti-Europe party was on track to win as many as 90 councillors, cementing the Front National’s transformation from what was once a simple national protest vote to a locally anchored movement that Le Pen hopes to use as a springboard for her presidential bid in 2017.
Reuters
(Reuters) - Brent crude oil prices fell below $56 a barrel on Monday, extending steep losses from the previous session, as Iran and six world powers tried to reach a deal that could add oil to the market if sanctions against Tehran are lifted.
Iran and world powers tried to break an impasse in nuclear negotiations on Sunday ahead of a deadline to find a preliminary agreement by Tuesday, although diplomats warned the attempt could still fall apart.
International benchmark Brent crude oil futures LCOc1 had dropped to $55.99 by 0224 GMT, down 42 cents since its last settlement and after falling 5 percent on Friday as the market began to price in the possibility of a deal with Iran.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
|
Al Jazeera America
FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — Alima Jallo Jamboria walks along a bumpy dirt road into the community of Red Pump, a suburb of Freetown. Aside from her and other volunteers the streets are empty, residents sequestered inside during a three-day lockdown aimed at stamping out Ebola.
Jamboria and her three team members are among 25,000 volunteers going door-to-door to raise awareness about Ebola prevention as part of the “zero Ebola” campaign. Nearly 4,000 Sierra Leoneans have died from the hemorrhagic fever, which has killed more than 10,000 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
The volunteers are also looking for sick people and if found, encourage families to call 117, the emergency hotline for Ebola.
The Guardian
Spring is starting to feel a lot like summer in California, as a record-setting heat wave punishes the parched state now in its fourth year of what is said to be the worst drought in a millennium.
Experts say the scorching spring days are part of a long-term warming pattern – driven largely by human activity – that is increasing the chances that future droughts will be as bad as this one. The warm and dry weather exacerbates already dire conditions as soil dries, snow melts and water usage is driven up.
“It’s like a one-two punch,” said Jeanine Jones, deputy drought manager for the state Department of Water Resources (DWR). “Not having enough water to fill our reservoirs and having the hot weather evaporate the little that we do have.”
NPR
Will Cheez Whiz survive the merger?
We don't need major business news to think about snack foods here at The Salt, but Warren Buffett's announcement this week that he and 3G Capital will merge Kraft and Heinz gave us a great excuse. Turns out, the story behind Cheez Whiz is emblematic of trends in the larger, global food industry.
Whether you have fond memories of spreading Cheez Whiz on crackers at parties, or you turn your nose up at any kind of processed cheese — whizzed or otherwise — there's no denying that the dull-orange cheese sauce-in-a-jar spread its way into American popular culture.
NPR
There's a new bar in New York City devoted to the fastest-growing alcoholic beverage in America. But don't expect a list heavy on craft beer or bourbon.
Wassail is a cider bar.
"You can see the color, very deep," says Ben Sandler, co-owner of the bar and restaurant on Manhattan's Lower East Side. He's filling my glass with a delicious amber liquid from E.Z. Orchards in Salem, Ore. "You can see it's kind of cloudy, so it's not filtered. Really dry."
Wassail opened this week. It features a dozen ciders on tap and another 80 or so in bottles. They range from the sour, sweet and funky ciders of traditional producers in Europe to crisp and clean offerings from American upstarts. Co-owner Jennifer Lim says she and Sandler, her husband, try to highlight the wildly divergent flavors that cider-makers can coax from fermented apples.
Climate Central
In 2012, when the High Park Fire tore through a northern Colorado forest replete with dead trees left in the wake of a mountain pine beetle infestation, blame for the fire’s spread across 87,000 acres was often placed primarily on the beetles.
The High Park Fire, which killed one person and destroyed 259 homes, and the attention to the beetles in its wake were part of the impetus for a new University of Colorado study showing that bark beetle infestations and the dead trees they leave behind have almost no effect on the amount of land burned in U.S. wildfires each year.
Climate Central
News cycles tend to be dominated by horror and carnage — a recipe for depression that spills into climate change coverage, fueling what some experts call a ‘hope gap’ that can lead people to fret about global warming but feel powerless to do anything about it.
The latest evidence that media outlets deem the myriad problems posed by climate change more newsworthy than solutions to it was contained in a study published this week in Nature Climate Change.
Researchers analyzed media coverage in the U.K. and the U.S. of three different reports published as part of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent climate change assessment. Their findings were a reminder that American outlets are bigger laggards on climate change coverage than their British counterparts. “The prominence of the IPCC reports was fairly low, particularly in the U.S.,” wrote the authors of the peer-reviewed paper, from the University of Exeter and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Science Blog
“You can observe a lot just by watching.” – Yogi Berra
Could you draw the ubiquitous Apple computer logo from memory? Probably not, as it turns out.
In a new study published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, UCLA psychologists found that almost none of their subjects could draw the logo correctly from memory. Out of 85 UCLA undergraduate students, only one correctly reproduced the Apple logo when asked to draw it on a blank sheet of paper. Fewer than half the students correctly identified the actual logo when they were shown it among a number of similar logos with slightly altered features.