Good night and welcome to the Overnight News Digest for March 23, 2011.
Oke needed a substitute editor tonight on short notice, so here I am keeping the midnight fire stoked with news from around the world.
The OND is an ongoing evening series dedicated to chronicling recent news of import and interest. The series' current team of editors include ScottyUrb, BentLiberal, wader, Oke, rfall, JML9999, and is lead by Neon Vincent, our editor-in-chief. The OND normally publishes every day near midnight Eastern, but tonight, I'm running behind schedule. So without further ado, tonight's story lineup is after the jump.
USA
- Grist - Bingaman tells the truth about gas prices, is lonely in doing so
Into this fog last week came a beam of light in the form of an extraordinary speech from Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), which didn't get the attention it deserved. Bingaman is not normally a talky guy... Nor is he given to grand political gestures... Despite his reticence, though, he is among the very few senators who actually understand energy.
Apparently, he finally had enough of the overheated, unmoored ideological fantasies that pass for public discussion of gas prices. So he dropped some knowledge.
First, he explained that the price of gas follows the price of oil. Then he explained that the price of oil is set on the global market. It is largely unaffected by domestic policies like EPA carbon restrictions and Gulf oil permitting. It is only barely affected, and only at the margins, by U.S. supply, which flows from just 2 percent of the world's reserves. (After all, U.S. production has been rising even as oil prices rise too.) The price of oil is shaped by supply constraints in petrostates, demand growth in developing countries, OPEC policy, and unrest in the Middle East. None of those, you'll note, take place in America.
What follows is an inescapable conclusion (my emphasis):
But what can Congress do to help ease the burden of high prices for U.S. consumers, when oil prices are determined mostly outside our borders? I think a realistic, responsible answer has to be focused on becoming less vulnerable to oil price changes over the medium- and long-term. And we become less vulnerable by using less oil.
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- NYT - Japan Nuclear Crisis Revives Long U.S. Fight on Spent Fuel
The threat of the release of highly radioactive spent fuel at a Japanese nuclear plant has revived a debate in the United States about how to manage such waste and has led to new recriminations over a derailed plan for a national repository in Nevada.
Pools holding spent fuel at nuclear plants in the United States are even more heavily loaded than those at the Japanese reactors, experts say, and are more vulnerable to some threats than the ones in Japan. However, utility companies have taken steps since the 9/11 terrorist attacks to make them safer.
Adding to those concerns, no plan to move the waste has emerged to replace a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert. President Obama promised to cancel the project during his 2008 campaign, and last year he told the Department of Energy to withdraw an application that it had submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a construction license.
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- McClatchy - A year later, still no cure for politics in health care
The good doctor was frustrated.
Dr. David Cull, a prominent vascular surgeon in Greenville, S.C., had invented a small valve system that could spare 300,000 dialysis patients across the country enormous suffering — and save American taxpayers billions of dollars in Medicare costs.
Yet, Cull's hometown senator, Jim DeMint, refused to write a letter supporting the surgeon's application for a federal grant under the landmark health care bill that President Barack Obama signed into law a year ago this week.
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Europe
- EUobserver - Portuguese caretaker PM could not sign up to bail-out
Engulfed in problems, Portugal's government could fall just one day ahead of a crucial European summit where the bloc's leaders are set to put the finishing touches on a grand 'comprehensive response' to the eurozone crisis.
Analysts warn however that should Prime Minister Jose Socrates step down, a caretaker administration would not have the political legitimacy to sign up to any EU-IMF bail-out should one be forced on the country.
In a political world turned upside down, the country's right-wing opposition is refusing to back the centre-left minority government's proposed cuts to social spending. The fourth round of austerity announced in a year, the governing Socialists' programme of cuts, focussing on pensions, healthcare and welfare benefits, is to be put to a vote in the parliament on Wednesday.
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- McClatchy - Europe doesn't hit oil companies in Libya as hard as the U.S. does
The divide between Europe and the United States over how best to end the regime of Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhafi isn't just about military matters. It also involves oil.
The European Union on Wednesday imposed sanctions against five Libyan oil-sector companies, following a similar action taken a day earlier by the Obama administration. On its face, the move showed common resolve, except that the U.S. Treasury Department actually sanctioned 14 companies, not five.
The EU delayed naming the five companies it will target until the names are published in official EU registers on Thursday. Asked why there were nine fewer companies sanctioned than the U.S. did, Nicolas Kerleroux, chief spokesman for the Council of the European Union, told McClatchy that European sanctions go beyond what the United Nations has so far imposed and cautioned that "one shouldn't exclude further (EU) steps."
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- Spiegel - Will Nuke Phase-Out Make Offshore Farms Attractive?
In the wake of the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, Germany's federal government is working on a new plan for increasing energy efficiency and for the use of renewable energies, with a particular focus on offshore wind farms.
According to information obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE, under the plan massive turbines will be erected far away from the coastlines, where the wind blows more consistently than it does on land, and where the turbines' enormous rotor blades won't bother the inhabitants. The plan aims to decrease the country's dependence on energy derived from coal and nuclear power plants.
But the wind-energy industry has recently gone through some hard times. In 2008, a record number of wind turbines, with a capacity of 11 gigawatts, were installed in Europe. But, after that, a dramatic decline in demand ensued...
Now, suddenly, a gold-rush-like feverishness to support wind energy appears to be taking shape. The accident at Japan's Fukushima I nuclear power plant has triggered an aggressive debate in Germany about phasing-out nuclear energy. Politicians and lobbyists are scrambling to come up with the best plan for rapidly expanding the use of renewable energies.
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- DW-World - Cycling initiatives in Copenhagen go the distance
Aiming to increase its rate of biking commuters while gearing up the city's infrastructure, Copenhagen is paving the way for the most creative innovations in cycling across Europe.
A woman in high heels mounting her bike outside the office at rush hour is often a common sight in capital cities like Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and Berlin. In urban Europe, cycling is embraced as a way of life.
Progressiveness, however, comes with its own set of challenges, and these European cities might face being victims of their own success. According to Mike Harris, Copenhagen-based bicycle strategy specialist and landscape architect, there are around 10,000 bikes parked at Amsterdam's Central Station at any given time. Throughout the city, additional parked bicycles occupy almost every street corner and railing.
The busiest bicycling street in the world, Norrebrogade in Copenhagen, ushers through 37,000 cyclists per day and is widening its lanes to accommodate the congestion.
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- RIA Novosti - Russia's new Angara rockets to be test launched before 2014 - Space Forces
Test launches of Russia's new generation Angara booster rockets will begin no later than 2013, a spokesman for the Russian Space Forces said.
Alexei Zolotukhin said work to build on-ground infrastructure of the space complex for launches of Angara carrier rockets is currently in active stage at Russia's northern space center Plesetsk.
Angara rockets, designed to provide lifting capabilities between 2,000 and 40,500 kg into low earth orbit, are expected to become the core of Russia's carrier rocket fleet, replacing several existing systems.
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Africa
- WaPo - Fears grow of humanitarian crisis in besieged Libyan city
Aid organizations scrambled Wednesday to prepare for large-scale relief operations in Libya, as fears grew of a potential humanitarian crisis in a key city besieged by government forces.
International military forces on Wednesday stepped up attacks on government troops in Misurata, 131 miles east of Tripoli. The airstrikes seemed to bring a temporary respite from the fighting that had raged for six days between forces loyal to Moammar Gaddafi and rebels, as government tanks retreated from the city center.
But after nightfall, the tanks returned and resumed their attacks, according to a doctor at the city’s main hospital. “They are shelling everywhere,” he said by telephone.
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- Danger Room @ Wired - Who Sold Libya Its Supermissiles?
The U.S. government calls it the “one of the most lethal” weapons of its kind — an advanced, portable missile, designed to knock planes out of the sky. A variant of it just showed up in Moammar Gadhafi’s army and nobody seems to know how exactly it got there. But diplomatic cables, unearthed by WikiLeaks, suggest one potential culprit: the Chavez regime in Venezuela.
Aviation Week’s eagle-eyed reporter David Fulghum spotted a Russian SA-24 Grinch surface-to-air missile mounted on a Libyan army truck in recent cable news footage. And that’s a cause for concern: The SA-24 is more accurate, longer-flying, and more lethal than than earlier models of surface-to-air missiles. It also has a dual-band infrared seeker and is more difficult to jam than older systems.
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- CS Monitor - Ivory Coast wonders: Where's our UN intervention?
As gun, rocket, and mortar battles intensify in Ivory Coast's capital, Abidjan, functionaries in distant capitals have begun selecting more loaded vocabulary to describe the conflict: civil war, ethnic cleansing.
And given that more than 400 people have died and nearly 400,000 have fled since renegade President Laurent Gbagbo refused to step aside after losing the Nov. 28 election, the conflict is earning comparisons to what's happening in Libya.
On Monday, rightful President Alassane Ouattara asked the United Nations to provide "legitimate force" to protect civilians after a mortar attack last week killed at least 25 people. But West Africa security specialists say Ivory Coast is hardly set to receive the kind of international military push currently underway in Libya.
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Middle East
- Guardian - Israel warns of 'aggressive' response to Jerusalem blast
Israel's prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has vowed to react "aggressively" after a suitcase bomb exploded in Jerusalem, killing a 60-year-old woman and injuring dozens of others.
The bombing, the first in the city for almost seven years, follows several days of rising tension along the Gaza border. The violence poses a serious threat to the prospects of reactivating peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.
Three people were seriously hurt and about three dozen suffered minor to moderate injuries in the attack.
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- Globe and Mail - Syria moves to crush growing protests
Syria has moved suddenly to crush growing protests in the country, an act in sharp contrast to previous conciliatory efforts by President Bashar al-Assad. As many as 15 people were killed Wednesday when security forces moved on a mosque in the southern city of Daraa in which protest organizers were based.
When the same security forces killed half a dozen pro-democracy protesters in the southern district of Horan on the weekend, Mr. al-Assad acted as if it had been a terrible mistake. He took the uncharacteristic step of apologizing to the families of the victims in a telephone call to community leaders. He then dismissed the town’s mayor and dispatched a delegation of senior officials to hear the people’s complaints.
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- Guardian - Yemen passes emergency laws to quell protests
Yemen's parliament has approved a sweeping set of emergency laws giving broader powers of arrest and censorship to the president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, despite growing calls from opponents demanding he quit to make way for a military-backed democratic transition.
The emergency law, last evoked during Yemen's 1994 civil war, suspends the constitution, allows for greater media censorship, bans street protests and gives security agencies arbitrary powers to arrest and detain suspects without judicial process.
The approval of the emergency laws came as talks between oil giant Saudi Arabia and Major General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, a top Yemeni commander who abandoned the president on Monday, failed to yield a clear transition of power.
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South Asia
- Danger Room @ Wired - Video: ‘I Got Blown to Hell in Afghanistan’
Staff Sgt. Marcus Jimenez was pissed. On March 19, he had led a force of U.S., Afghan and Jordanian soldiers into the village of Pakhab-e’Shana, in eastern Afghanistan, with what Jimenez considered the best of intentions.
While the Americans conferred with village elders, the Jordanians and Afghans would inspect the town’s four mosques, to see if there were any repairs NATO and the Afghan government might help pay for. In addition, the Americans and Jordanians had some soccer balls to hand out.
But the elders greeted the soldiers with what looked like cool indifference. And the village’s legions of children greeted them with rocks, hurled artillery-style over mud walls. A rock struck one of Jimenez’s American gunners in the face, drawing blood...
An hour later, Jimenez would be dragged, barely conscious and badly hurt, from the twisted wreckage of an armored truck blown up by an improvised explosive device just a stone’s throw from Pakhab-e’Shana. I was lucky — and so was a medic named Michael Sario. We were sitting in the very back of the vehicle, farthest from the explosion. I escaped with gashes and, later, a minor case of the shakes. Sario was rattled but apparently otherwise OK.
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- DAWN - Pakistan erupts into joy
The quiet mid-week Pakistan Day holiday erupted into spontaneous and joyful celebration as the national team swept aside the West Indies in the World Cup’s first quarterfinal to secure its place in the semifinals.
Cricket fans in most cities came out on the streets to express their excitement and happiness. The expression took more or less the same shape in most cities and towns — music filled the air as primarily male gatherings danced the “bhangra”. In case recorded music did not provide the background to the celebrations, it was because the people were dancing to the beat of the dhol.
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- BBC - Pakistan suicide car bombing kills five
At least five people have been killed in a suicide car bomb explosion in the troubled Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province in north-west Pakistan, police said.
Nearly 25 people, including a policeman and some pedestrians, were injured in the blast which took place near a police station, reports said.
The incident took place in Doaba town, 30km (18 miles) from Hangu district, reports said. The blast is the latest in a series of attacks near the Afghan border.
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- Times of India - Army probe faults 10 top officers in Adarsh building scam
An Army court of inquiry (CoI) has found two former Army chiefs, Gen Deepak Kapoor and Gen N C Vij, and several other senior Army officers responsible for the Adarsh housing society scam.
The CoI probing the scam, which was exposed by The Times of India, has said the conduct of several top Army officers—among them the two ex-Army chiefs, four lieutenant generals and three major generals—was "blame-worthy". This is the first time that so many top Army officers have been indicted by an Army court...
The possibility of a full-fledged court-martial is being ruled out for now. The Army had constituted a three-member CoI in December last year in Pune, the headquarters of Southern Army Command, in the wake of TOI's expose of senior Army officers who overlooked objections or played along with the lead players of the housing scam and received apartments in the upscale Mumbai complex.
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Asia
- LAT - Japan's fishing industry a major casualty of nuclear crisis
Standing on the deck of his 91-foot trawler, veteran fisherman Tomoyuki Kondou winces over reports that radioactivity from Japan's damaged nuclear power plant in nearby Fukushima has contaminated the local food supply after this month's deadly earthquake and tsunami.
The bespectacled third-generation angler has heard the warnings that milk, spinach and other vegetables grown around the plant have been found to contain traces of the radioactive isotopes iodine-131 and cesium-137.
Now Kondou and others in Kesennuma worry that radiation from the seaside nuclear plant might also affect the region's long-bustling fishing industry, which provides tuna, oysters, shark, squid and seaweed to restaurants and supermarkets throughout Japan and around the world.
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- CS Monitor - Tsunami dolphin rescued from rice paddy 1 mile inland
A baby dolphin has been rescued in Japan after being dumped in a rice field by a giant tsunami that hit the coast on March 11.
The dolphin was spotted in the flooded field, about 2 km (a mile) from the coast, said Ryo Taira, a pet-shop owner who has been rescuing animals abandoned after the 9.0 magnitude quake and tsunami left 23,000 people dead or missing.
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- China Daily - China set to be top economy by 2030
The World Bank's chief economist said on Wednesday that China's economy will probably become the world's biggest by 2030, when it will be twice the size of the United States, if measured in terms of purchasing power parity (PPP).
"China could maintain GDP growth of 8 percent over the next 20 years, which will make it the world's biggest economy," said Justin Lin, senior vice-president and chief economist at the bank. He added that by 2030 the Chinese economy may be approximately the same size as that of the US at market exchange rates in terms of nominal GDP.
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- Xinhua - China's low-carbon economy faces pressure from global trading mode, experts say
China's development of low-carbon economy faces pressure from the imbalanced global trading mode, according to an academic report released on Tuesday.
Experts from research institutions in China, Japan and the United States said in the Annual Report on China's Low-carbon Economic Development (2011) that China should seek more intensified participation in the global division of labor.
To illustrate the imbalanced trading mode, the report took a made-in-China Barbie doll as an example. It said that from production to the customers' purchase, three-quarters of the total carbon emission occurred in China, while it only keeps one tenth of the value added.
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- Bernama - Malaysia Police To Beef Up Strength
The police force plans to increase its personnel strength from 122,000 to 150,000 by 2015 to meet the growing needs of the community and rapid development of the country.
Bukit Aman Director of Management Datuk Robiah Abdul Ghani said the need to beef up strength was also prompted by the changing landscape of the country which demanded an effective and efficient police force.
"More police personnel are needed due to the increase in population and to cater for the development process," she told reporters in an interview recently in conjunction with the 204th Police Day to be celebrated tomorrow.
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Oceana
- Miller-McCune - Australians Have Learned to Drive Less
Australia, a booming economy with a higher rate of car ownership than the United States and even more wide-open spaces, is a model for what we must do.
The “car culture Down Under,” however, has turned the public acceptance corner and is building, with strong citizen support, seemingly expensive bike-pedestrian infrastructure, bus rapid transit and commuter rail with local, state and — only recently — federal dollars.
Infrastructure Australia allowed 2010 money to be spent on roads only if they primarily carried freight and set aside 55 percent of each federal transportation dollar for commuter rail. (In the United States, 80 percent of federal transportation money goes into highways — and that’s before the $28 billion in stimulus dollars President Obama put into shovel-ready highway projects. Our total subsidy for roads was $145 billion in 2004, four times the subsidy for mass transit.)
Australia still has freeways and suburbs, still has conflict between liberal and conservative parties, still has wide-open spaces, still has economic growth at the forefront of planning. And yet, led by dozens of “soft” transportation demand management (or TDM) projects in cities as diverse as Brisbane, Adelaide, Melbourne and Perth, it has found the key to moving individual transportation behavior away from the convenience of the single-occupancy vehicle.
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- SMH - PM Gillard suffers climate setback
The Gillard government has suffered a serious blow to its carbon tax sales pitch with the Productivity Commission saying it is not able to compare the burden on Australian industries with competitors overseas.
Labor commissioned a comparative study of the ''effective'' total price imposed by carbon taxes, regulations and subsidies in key economies to help make the case that Australia was not moving ahead of the rest of the world, and limit assistance to trade-exposed industries.
But the Productivity Commission chairman, Gary Banks, said such comparable measurement was ''highly problematic''.
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Americas
- BBC - Chile President Pinera to ask Obama for Pinochet files
Chilean President Sebastian Pinera has said he will formally ask the US for classified intelligence documents on human rights violations during the rule of Gen Augusto Pinochet. Mr Pinera was speaking a day after US President Barack Obama said he would consider any Chilean requests.
Mr Obama - who was visiting Chile - ducked a request that he apologise for US support for Gen Pinochet. More than 3,000 Chileans were killed under military rule in 1973-90.
More than 1,000 human rights cases are still unresolved, and hundreds are being investigated by Chile's independent judiciary.
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- LAHT - Petrobras: U.S. Must Strengthen Energy Alliance with Brazil
The United States must lend more importance to its strategic alliance with Brazil if it wants to benefit from state-controlled Petrobras’ recently discovered deep-water oil and natural gas reserves in the Atlantic Ocean, the company’s CEO, Jose Sergio Gabrielli, said.
The executive commented after U.S. President Barack Obama expressed interest in helping Petrobras develop those massive reserves during an official visit to Brazil on Saturday and Sunday.
If the U.S. government views oil imports from Brazil as strategically important, “it must create the conditions that attach importance to the strategic alliance. That’s the challenge facing the United States,” Gabrielli said Tuesday during an investors’ seminar in Rio de Janeiro.
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- MercoPress - In twelve Argentine provinces inflation is two times and a half the official index
Several Argentine provinces mistrustful of government statistics, particularly inflation have mounted their own offices which show that consumer prices in the last twelve months have soared on average 27.5%, which is almost two and a half times the official index applicable to Buenos Aires City and Buenos Aires province
According to the think tank IERAL (Studies of Argentina and Latin America’s reality), which if financed by one of Argentina’s most respected foundations, Mediterranea, based in Cordoba, the situation is extensive to most of north east Argentine provinces.
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- CS Monitor - Nicaragua opposition unites to contest legality of President Ortega's candidacy
Nicaragua’s contentious presidential elections are already off to a rocky start as civil society groups and opposition parties move to block President Daniel Ortega’s controversial candidacy for reelection.
Despite a constitutional ban prohibiting acting presidents and two-term office holders from seeking reelection, President Ortega on March 18 officially inscribed his candidacy for the 2011 elections. Ortega was president from 1985 to 1990, and reelected in 2006.
Supporters insist their leader’s sixth consecutive bid at the presidency is legal, pointing to a 2009 ruling by a group of loyalist judges who determined that Article 147 of the Constitution is “inapplicable” because it violates Ortega’s right to equal treatment under the law. The ruling was upheld by the Ortega-controlled Supreme Court last year.
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- Globe and Mail - Tories, Quebec ink oil exploration deal
The Conservatives are getting rid of a long-standing irritant with the Quebec government just days before an expected election call, signing a deal that opens the door to oil exploration in the St. Lawrence and fuels hopes for economic development in poor parts of the province.
The agreement to be unveiled on Thursday in Gatineau, Que., will lead to exploration for billions of barrels of oil and natural gas in the Old Harry field in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which straddles Quebec’s boundary with Newfoundland.
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- LAT - Ouster of U.S. ambassador to Mexico continues to reverberate
Several days have passed since the U.S. government announced it was removing its ambassador in Mexico City, and still the tongues are wagging.
Pascual fell victim in part to WikiLeaks' disclosures of secret diplomatic cables that offered frank if uncomfortable assessments of how the Mexican government was waging its drug war. In the cables, Pascual or his staff described Mexico's army as "risk averse" and government security services as being hampered by internal squabling. One described the ruling party's uninspiring candidates for major offices.
President Felipe Calderon, furious, said during a recent trip to Washington that it would be hard to work with Pascual, and over this past weekend, the ambassador was out.
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