Welcome to the Overnight News Digest
The OND is published each night around midnight, Eastern Time.
The originator of OND was Magnifico.
Current Contributors are ScottyUrb, Bentliberal, wader, Oke, rfall, JML9999 and NeonVincent who also serves as chief cat herder.
Obama honors US war dead on Memorial Day
(AFP via VOA) ARLINGTON, Virginia — President Barack Obama, in a Memorial Day address at Arlington National Cemetery, urged Americans on Monday to honor the sacrifices of their war dead by "heeding the example they set."
"Our nation owes a debt to its fallen heroes that we can never fully repay," Obama said at the military cemetery, marking the solemn national holiday in the name of the nation's fallen service members.
"But we can honor their sacrifice, and we must. We must honor it in our own lives by holding their memories close to our hearts, and heeding the example they set," he told the service on this hot and muggy day just outside the nation's capital.
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Stories and Headlines
- Obama administration steps into insulin shot fight
(SFGATE) The Obama administration has stepped into a California case involving 14,000 diabetic schoolchildren, urging the state's top court to let school employees give insulin shots if no nurses are available.
Two lower courts have ruled that California law allows only licensed doctors and nurses to administer medication, including insulin, except in emergencies. But U.S. Justice Department lawyers say that given the state's shortage of nurses, that would effectively deny care to thousands of children and violate their rights under federal disability laws.
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It's rare for the federal government to offer its opinion in a state legal case in which it's not a party. The American Diabetes Association, which wants non-nursing employees to administer insulin, says it brought the case to the Obama administration's attention.
On the other side is the American Nurses Association, which argues that allowing non-nurses to give shots could harm children and discourage schools from hiring more nurses.
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- Italians inflict political blow on Berlusconi
(FT.com) Italians voting in local elections have inflicted a resounding defeat on Silvio Berlusconi and his ruling People of Liberty party, delivering a result that is likely to widen divisions in his centre-right coalition and fuel a power struggle for a new leader.
The centre-left opposition on Monday ended nearly 20 years of centre-right rule in Milan, taking the financial capital and the prime minister’s home town power base with 55 per cent of the vote. In Naples, Mr Berlusconi’s candidate – a businessman – was crushed by an opposition anti-corruption magistrate who scored 65 per cent.
Such was the convincing swing to the opposition that Mr Berlusconi also lost Arcore outside Milan, where he keeps one of his villas, as well as Trieste in the north-east and Sardinia’s main city, Cagliari.
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libero7 has written a couple of good diaries about Italian elections.
- Food prices 'will double by 2030', Oxfam warns
(BBC) The prices of staple foods will more than double in 20 years unless world leaders take action to reform the global food system, Oxfam has warned.
By 2030, the average cost of key crops will increase by between 120% and 180%, the charity forecasts.
Half of that increase will be caused by climate change, Oxfam predicts, in its report Growing a Better Future.
It calls on world leaders to improve regulation of food markets and invest in a global climate fund.
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- Bubbling sea signals severe coral damage this century
(BBC) Findings from a "natural laboratory" in seas off Papua New Guinea suggest that acidifying oceans will severely hit coral reefs by the end of the century.
Carbon dioxide bubbles into the water from the slopes of a dormant volcano here, making it slightly more acidic.
Coral is badly affected, not growing at all in the most CO2-rich zone.
Writing in journal Nature Climate Change, the scientists say this "lab" mimics conditions that will be widespread if CO2 emissions continue.
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- E.coli cucumber scare: Cases 'likely to increase'
(BBC) A deadly E.coli outbreak linked to cucumbers is expected to worsen in the coming days, a scientist says.
Fourteen people have died in Germany and hundreds are ill from infections linked to contaminated vegetables.
"We hope the number of cases will go down but we fear it will worsen," said Oliver Grieve, of the University Medical Centre Schleswig-Holstein, where many victims are being treated.
It is thought cucumbers from Spain were at the origin of the outbreak.
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- Transpolar Flights: Good for the Planet, Bad for Your Health?
(MotherJones) [T]ranspolar flights have a lot of net benefits for the environment in terms of climate change. But those benefits have to be weighed against some fairly serious potential health issues for passengers—none of which were disclosed to us when I booked my ticket.
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In terms of environmental impact, those developments may be a good thing, because they shave significant amounts of flying time off trips from the US to Asia, saving hundreds of gallons of jet fuel and reducing the pollution produced by the jets. When Canadian officials were contemplating opening up the airways to more commercial jets over the North Pole in 2000, they estimated that the route would knock five hours off the usual flying time for a trip from New York to Hong Kong, for instance. That's serious money—and jet fuel.
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(but) One of the complications of flying over the North Pole is that planes and their passengers are exposed to significantly more radiation, especially during solar storms, than they would be on a traditional route. That's because the planes travel through the thinnest layer of the magnetosphere, which typically shields the earth and other commercial flights from cosmic radiation.
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- GOP is No Friend to Military Members Struggling During Recession
(The Nation) Most of the recent measures taken in Washington to help veterans aim to protect them from the economic crisis. Unemployment and foreclosure no doubt touch many Americans. But many veterans spent much of the past decade fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan, only to re-enter civilian life as the economy bottomed out. They faced an even steeper uphill battle than most, often struggling with injury, mental stress, or at the very least, many years out of the country and away from the job market.
Accordingly, lawmakers offered a wide range of bills to assist recent veterans—and Republicans opposed nearly all of them.
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- Money Blows in to a Patch of Oregon Known for Its Unrelenting Winds
(NYT) Sherman County, which earned $315,000 in property taxes from the first wind farm in 2002, raked in $3 million from wind farms in 2010. The bounty, while mostly flowing to the farmers who lease their land for the turbines, also benefits the public. Taxes, fees and assessments on more than 1,000 megawatts of wind turbine capacity have brought $17.5 million in nine years to a county with just 1,735 residents.
The county’s four towns — Wasco, Moro, Rufus and Grass Valley — are prospering. At Sherman Junior/Senior High School in Moro, wind money paid for new computers, musical instruments, robotics equipment, portions of a greenhouse and a new teacher to instruct the most gifted of its 124 students last year.
“Right now, when many districts around the state are gutting everything, we don’t have to,” said Ivan Ritchie, superintendant of the Sherman County School District and principal of Sherman Elementary School in Grass Valley.
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- U.S. Engages With an Iron Leader in Equatorial Guinea
(NYT) MALABO, Equatorial Guinea — While the United States has turned its back on some authoritarian rulers in North Africa and the Middle East, its attitude toward strategically placed autocrats in less restive corners of Africa is more ambiguous, and perhaps nowhere more so than in this oil-rich speck of a nation in the Gulf of Guinea.
Officially and unofficially, Americans do business with one of the undisputed human rights global bad boys, Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s fourth biggest oil exporter. Its widely criticized record on basic freedoms has offered little barrier to broad engagement by the United States, commercially or diplomatically.
American oil companies have billions of dollars invested here. One American diplomat, using language that makes human rights advocates fume, praised the “mellowing, benign leadership” of the dictator in power for more than 30 years, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, in 2009 cables released by WikiLeaks. And a leading American military contractor with strong Pentagon ties has a multimillion-dollar contract to protect his shores and help train his forces
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- Groundwater Depletion Is Detected From Space
(NYT) IRVINE, Calif. — Scientists have been using small variations in the Earth’s gravity to identify trouble spots around the globe where people are making unsustainable demands on groundwater, one of the planet’s main sources of fresh water.
They found problems in places as disparate as North Africa, northern India, northeastern China and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley in California, heartland of that state’s $30 billion agricultural industry.
Jay S. Famiglietti, director of the University of California’s Center for Hydrologic Modeling here, said the center’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, known as Grace, relies on the interplay of two nine-year-old twin satellites that monitor each other while orbiting the Earth, thereby producing some of the most precise data ever on the planet’s gravitational variations. The results are redefining the field of hydrology, which itself has grown more critical as climate change and population growth draw down the world’s fresh water supplies.
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