Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, March 15, 2016
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 near 12:00AM Eastern Time. Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - respect is due.
This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Closing Time by Semisonic
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Top News |
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Zimbabwe hunger may spiral out of control, UN warns
By (BBC)
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The country has endured two years of failed rains, with this year's problems linked to the El Nino weather pattern.
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"We have not seen these levels of malnutrition in more than 15 years," Unicef's Zimbabwe representative Jane Muita said.
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According to the most recent survey, published last month but carried out in January, 37% of households are hungry, twice the figure from May last year.
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Zimbabwe Unicef spokesman Victor Chinyama told the BBC that there might be a very low yield from this year's harvest, which could mean that things would be a lot worse by the end of the year.
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E.U. biodiesels could be dirtier than fossil fuels, according to new report
By Melissa Cronin
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A new analysis conducted by the Ecofys Consultancy for the European Commission shows that biodiesel from palm oil can produce three times the emissions of conventional diesel oil and biofuel from soybeans can produce twice as many emissions as diesel. It’s an important finding for the E.U., where countries are pushing for 10 percent of transport fuel to come from renewable sources by 2020.
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The report was taken down shortly after publication and a source told the Guardian that its original release was delayed due to biofuel-friendly pressure. The industry has publicly pushed back against the study’s findings, with the European Biodiesel Board telling Biofuels News that the research is based on “a model which has still not been disclosed nor validated by peers.” The board called into question the academic validity of the report, arguing that other research conducted in California showed lower values for emissions from indirect land-use changes.
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Though soybean and palm oil are considered, even encouraged, as renewable energy sources by the E.U., they are, according to the research, changing the emissions of an entire continent. With that in mind, a different, stricter, version of the word “renewable” might be necessary.
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A sinking jail: The environmental disaster that is Rikers Island
By Raven Rakia
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Hailey-Means was sent to Rikers on Feb. 22, 2012, when she was 28 years old. Six weeks after her arrival, Hailey-Means was sent to solitary confinement after an incident with one of the guards. (Hailey-Means says the guard assaulted her but she was written up for assaulting the guard.) She spent two years and three months in solitary, locked in a 6-by-10-foot cell for 23 to 24 hours a day. A small slot in the door, where she would receive meals, was her only connection to the outside world. . . .
Hailey-Means described the summer heat in solitary as unbearable. She developed heat rashes, and cited the high temperatures as part of the environment that led her to attempt suicide: “Imagine being stuck in an elevator for three years and the temperature is [unbearably] hot.”
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The problems at Rikers tend to overwhelmingly afflict certain groups of people, too. About 40 percent of the Rikers population has been diagnosed with a mental illness. And the overwhelming majority of the people incarcerated on the island — about 90 percent — are black or Latino.
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As air pockets pop up beneath Rikers, the ground sinks and shifts to fill the gaps. All this sinking and shifting is unpredictable, and the ground settlement threatens the very foundation of the building. “[The ground] does not shift or sink in a uniform way,” says Suddleson. “So for a building that large, only say, a corner of the building will have ground underneath it that goes down and that corner will go down with it.” The result is cracks in the walls or ceilings of the building, which adds to the flooding issue.
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Teamsters object to $12.25m Lyft drivers deal that falls short of employee status
By Julia Carrie Wong
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The Teamsters union and several drivers for the ride-hailing company Lyft are charging that the $12.25m settlement reached in a class-action lawsuit over the employment classification of drivers is not good enough.
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“We want to continue fighting for employee status for the drivers,” said Rome Aloise, president of Teamsters Joint Council 7. “This settlement will leave Lyft’s business model intact, allowing Lyft to continue to treat its current and future drivers as independent contractors, and avoid properly paying them under California law.”
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The court questioned why it should approve a settlement that resulted in drivers ending up “closer to independent contractor status” than before, a result that is “contrary to the original goal of the lawsuit”.
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“The settlement money isn’t that big of a deal. I would rather be classified as an employee,” Kelsey Tilander, one of the objecting drivers, said in a statement. “We’re not covered for unemployment, workers’ compensation or social security. I worked 48 hours last week for Lyft, but somehow I’m not an employee?”
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International |
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Rare act of dissent at China's annual parliament
By John Sudworth
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After 11 days of interminable speeches, followed by ritualistic voting to approve everything put before it, China's annual parliamentary gathering will, once again, leave little worthy of note in its wake.
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As thousands of his fellow delegates began arriving in Beijing two weeks ago, with their rubber stamps at the ready, Mr Jiang had different ideas.
He had already given an interview to a Chinese online current affairs magazine, Caixin, suggesting that delegates should be free to speak their own minds, rather than be compelled blithely to follow the will of the party.
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Before we could finish our interview, Jiang Hong was hurried away by an official who insisted that we would make him late for his meeting - something other media outlets have experienced amid reports that delegates have been advised against impromptu discussions with the foreign media.
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The response to his comments suggests that there is growing disquiet over the recent tightening of the restrictions on freedom of expression, with even one state-run newspaper weighing in with an old saying that "a thousand yes men cannot compare with one person who criticises frankly".
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USA |
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America's universities: Hedge funds saddled with inconvenient educational institutions
By Cory Doctorow
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US universities have over $100 billion in endowment funds invested with hedge funds, and pay over $2.5B in fees to hedge fund managers every year. More than half of America's universities let their endowment board members do business with the university, and sometimes the trustees manage the funds themselves, sitting on both sides of the transaction to hire themselves and pay themselves handsome fees. Sometimes they decline the fees they're paying themselves, call them "donations" and get buildings named after them for their generosity.
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And it gets worse. In a report called “Educational Endowments and the Financial Crisis,” Joshua Humphreys, president and senior fellow at Croatan Institute, points to an even more disturbing consequence of risky investment practices. By embracing speculative trading tactics, exotic derivatives, hedge funds, and private equity, “endowments played a role in magnifying certain systemic risks in the capital markets,” Humphreys writes. What’s more, their initial success encouraged other institutional investors (think pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and foundations) to follow in their footsteps, amplifying the system’s overall volatility and instability. In other words, endowments were not just innocent victims of the 2008 financial crisis, but actually helped enable it.
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
This song has a very literal meaning - being asked to leave a bar - but it goes much deeper than that. Semisonic lead singer Dan Wilson wrote the song when his wife was pregnant with their first child, which turned out to be a daughter named Coco. "It's all about being born and coming into the world, seeing the bright lights, cutting the cord, opening up into something deeper and more universal," Wilson told Mojo.
Shortly before recording was scheduled to begin, Wilson's wife experienced complications with her pregnancy, and Coco was born three months premature weighing just 11 ounces. Wilson's bandmates offered to postpone the sessions, but he asked to move forward with them, since there was very little he could do in the hospital. This song took on a new meaning with the line "I know who I want to take me home," as Wilson was looking forward to the day he could bring Coco home.
That day finally came nearly a year after Coco was born; she left the hospital in February 1998 on the same day "Closing Time" was released as a single. According to Wilson, the ambulance driver who transported them home asked if he was the same Dan Wilson from the band. That's when the full gravity of the song hit him, and he realized how much Coco influenced it.
Back to what's happening:
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Environmental |
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Tougher pollution laws put forward in wake of Palmer Queensland Nickel saga
By Joshua Robertson
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The Palaszczuk government has introduced a bill that would let environmental authorities pursue parent companies, executives or ultimate owners for the cost of rehabilitating industrial sites after the operator collapsed.
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The message to corporate players was “if you try to avoid your responsibilities by hiding behind elaborate, artificial corporate structures, we will impose a chain of responsibility to reach beyond those contrived legal barriers,” he said.
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Peabody’s six Queensland mines and its three New South Wales mines appear to be held via a subsidiary in the low-tax jurisdiction of Gibraltar, according to Environmental Justice Australia.
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“This legislation targets those who stand to make large profits – those that are really standing behind the company and whose decisions have put the environment at risk,” he said.
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Science and Health |
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CDC Wants to Curb Opioid Use For Chronic Pain
By Kevin Drum
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It's worth noting that the actual text of the guidelines makes it very clear that they're aimed at chronic pain sufferers. There are 12 recommendations, and only one addresses acute pain:
Long-term opioid use often begins with treatment of acute pain. When opioids are used for acute pain, clinicians should prescribe the lowest effective dose of immediate-release opioids and should prescribe no greater quantity than needed for the expected duration of pain severe enough to require opioids. Three days or less will often be sufficient; more than seven days will rarely be needed.
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Beyond that, there are obviously cases where acute pain can last longer than seven days. When I broke a bone in my back, I took morphine on and off for a couple of months. But I'm naturally skeptical of opioid painkillers, and my doctor had to talk me into taking more pills, not fewer. I can easily imagine someone with a different attitude who's determined to rid themselves of any pain whatsoever and gobbling down more pills than they should.
As usual with laws and guidelines, the actions of a modest number of abusers is likely to make life more annoying for everyone else. Hopefully, doctors will take these rules seriously, but will still be allowed to use their common sense to decide when the rules need to be bent.
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Technology |
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As FBI war on crypto intensifies, Facebook, Google and WhatsApp intensify encryption
By Xeni Jardin
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Facebook, Google and Snapchat are working to increase privacy and security measures for users, while Apple continues to defend its use of basic user data security measures under assault by the U.S. government.
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Within weeks, Facebook’s messaging service WhatsApp plans to expand its secure messaging service so that voice calls are also encrypted, in addition to its existing privacy features. The service has some one billion monthly users. Facebook is also considering beefing up security of its own Messenger tool.
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Engineers at major technology firms, including Twitter, have explored encrypted messaging products before only to see them never be released because the products can be hard to use – or the companies prioritized more consumer-friendly projects. But they now hope the increased emphasis on encryption means that technology executives view strong privacy tools as a business advantage – not just a marketing pitch.
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Cultural |
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Historian uncovers secrets of the Reformation hidden in England’s oldest printed bible
By (ScienceDaily)
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Researchers have used complex image analysis to uncover annotations that were hidden for nearly 500 years between the pages of England's oldest printed bible.
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The annotations are copied from the famous 'Great Bible' of Thomas Cromwell, seen as the epitome of the English Reformation. Written between 1539 and 1549, they were covered and disguised with thick paper in 1600. They remained hidden until their discovery this year. According to Dr Poleg, their presence supports the idea that the Reformation was a gradual process rather than a single, transformative event.
"Until recently, it was widely assumed that the Reformation caused a complete break, a Rubicon moment when people stopped being Catholics and accepted Protestantism, rejected saints, and replaced Latin with English. This Bible is a unique witness to a time when the conservative Latin and the reformist English were used together, showing that the Reformation was a slow, complex, and gradual process."
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He added: "The book is a unique witness to the course of Henry's Reformation. Printed in 1535 by the King's printer and with Henry's preface, within a few short years the situation had shifted dramatically. The Latin Bible was altered to accommodate reformist English, and the book became a testimony to the greyscale between English and Latin in that murky period between 1539 and 1549.
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already.