Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, August 30, 2011.
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 - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Sweet Georgia Brown by Ben Bernie, Maceo Pinkard and Kenneth Casey
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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Federal subsidy for COBRA health coverage to expire
By Phil Galewitz
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One of the key consumer benefits of the federal stimulus package — subsidies to help laid-off workers continue their health-care coverage — draws to a close Wednesday, raising concerns about how the unemployed will cover those expenses.
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In February 2009, at the height of the economic downturn, Congress first approved a 65 percent subsidy for COBRA premiums to help those who had been laid off starting in September 2008. While Congress extended the COBRA subsidy three times to cover workers who lost their jobs through May 2010, lawmakers last year resisted another extension amid rising concerns about the federal budget deficit. Because the subsidy lasted for up to 15 months, the last people to take advantage of the savings lose that help starting Thursday.
. . . the subsidy ends more than two years before key benefits of the federal health law take effect in 2014. The law will prohibit insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions and charging consumers higher premiums based on their health status.
In 2014, more than 30 million Americans will begin to gain coverage as a result of expansion of Medicaid, the state-federal insurance program for the poor and disabled, and subsidized coverage through new health insurance exchanges, or online marketplaces.
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Ethnic-minority kids feel stigma in school
By (UPI)
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Children stigmatized because of ethnic-minority backgrounds often feeling devalued in school and feel more anxious about school, U.S. researchers say.
Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and New York University say children who are stigmatized because of ethnicity are more likely to have less interest in school, yet ethnic-minority children in this study reported high interest in school in the face of stigma.
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Young children's awareness of stigma was similar to that of adults, with ethnic-minority children generally reporting more awareness and higher academic anxiety than ethnic-majority children, which researchers attributed to their greater awareness of stigma.
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Why do green jobs pay better than other jobs?
By Michael Levi
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I've always been skeptical of the oft-heard claim that "green jobs" are "good jobs" -- that is, that green jobs somehow pay better than other ones. A recent Brookings Institution study, though, takes a rather thorough look at the "clean economy," and concludes quite emphatically that green jobs do in fact pay better than the typical U.S. job. That invites an obvious question: Why?
. . .
There are big limits, though, to the economy-wide impact that different skills/education demands can have on wages. If jobs for people with, say, college educations pay better, and clean-economy jobs tend to require college educations, then clean-economy jobs will tend to pay better. But unless more people start attending college, the total number of Americans earning those higher wages won't actually rise. The same is true for moderately skilled workers. Of course, over the longer term, the availability of more jobs that demand more skills will create greater incentives for people to seek more education. But the presence of more green jobs won't transform high school dropouts into PhDs, or into technical college graduates, for that matter. In any case, the skills/education profile of fossil-fuel jobs is even stronger than that of green ones.
. . .
The Brookings authors report that most clean-economy jobs aren't the stereotypical ones in wind energy or home insulation retrofits. The biggest clean-economy sectors are waste management and treatment, mass transit, and conservation (working mainly for the U.S. government), which together account for nearly 40 percent of clean-economy jobs. (Wind, if you're interested, accounts for about 1 percent today.) What do these have in common? They're public-sector jobs -- and they then to be heavily unionized. (Let me make sure I'm being clear: This interpretation is mine, not the Brookings authors, who don't flag the union vs. non-union issue.) My guess is that this is a big part of the explanation for why clean-economy jobs appear to pay better for people with similar levels of education.
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East Africa famine: Ikea makes record $62m aid pledge
By (BBC)
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The funds will go through the UN refugee agency, which said it was the largest private donation it had received in its 60-year history.
Dadaab, which mainly houses Somalis, is the biggest refugee camp in the world.
Its population has swollen by 150,000 in past months, following drought and famine in the Horn of Africa.
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The money from the Ikea Foundation will be used to expand emergency relief and assist up to 120,000 people, said the UNHCR.
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International |
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Catholic officials in Ireland object to child abuse disclosure law
By Rob Beschizza
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The Irish Children's Minister Frances Fitzgerald said that priests who are given admissions of child abuse during the sacrament of confession will not be exempt from new rules on mandatory reporting. During his homily to worshippers at Knock shrine in County Mayo, on Sunday, the archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland said: "Freedom to participate in worship and to enjoy the long-established rites of the church is so fundamental that any intrusion upon it is a challenge to the very basis of a free society."
The discussion seems to center on future abuses revealed during confession, but I wonder if it's really about the ongoing use of the sacrament to hide internal discussions of undisclosed abuses from the possibility of legal scrutiny.
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Yoshihiko Noda becomes Japan's new prime minister
By (BBC)
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Correspondents say the new PM faces a daunting agenda, including trying to unify a divided party.
Large parts of Japan need to be rebuilt after March's earthquake and tsunami, and the crisis at the crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant still needs to be resolved.
Added to that, Mr Noda, a fiscal conservative, will need to address Japan's stagnant economy.
He has said in the past that he favours raising funds through increased taxation - including a doubling of Japan's sales tax, which currently stands at 5% - to cut debt and meet social security commitments.
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China's second coming in Libya
By Jian Junbo
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With Libyan rebels taking over Tripoli and authoritarian leader Muammar Gaddafi on the run, the rebellion aided by North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led air strikes to overthrow the Gaddafi regime will come to the end soon. Now reconstruction is an urgent practical issue on the agenda for the Libyan people and international society.
China, an active player in Libya's economic affairs, had to evacuate some 35,000 Chinese nationals - workers, managers, engineers, traders and tourists - leaving dozens of projects unattended after civil war broke out in February. It has made it plain that it is ready to return "to play an active role in future reconstruction", as Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Chaoxu put it on August 24, under the United Nations' lead.
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As in the case of Sudan, China takes a hedging policy toward Libya. While China has largely remained indifferent in the Libya crisis, it doesn't mean Beijing has shut its eyes and ears to what was happening or pretended that the crisis had nothing to do with China. When the result of the civil war was unpredictable, Beijing kept open to the warring Tripoli regime and rebels.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Rights Group Slams Obama Over Warrantless Wiretapping
By Asawin Suebsaeng
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If you thought the fight over the warrantless wiretapping program that thrived under President Bush was over, think again. On Monday, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a brief in federal appeals court in an attempt to reopen a years-old case over the surveillance program.
CCR's original lawsuit, CCR v. Bush, was filed in 2006. It sought an injunction ordering the government to terminate the NSA's illegal surveillance program. The government claims to have discontinued the program in 2007. But in the final stages of the 2006 case, CCR asked the court to order the immediate destruction of any surveillance records it had on the plaintiffs (some lawyers were concerned that their attorney-client emails and phone calls had been monitored during the legal process).
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Civil libertarians have been trying for years to outflank President Obama's efforts to guard the previous administration's law-flaunting surveillance structure. Naturally, the president's soft approach to addressing civil liberties violations didn't win him much praise from his liberal base, nor did it console organizations like the ACLU, whose executive director said last year that he was "disgusted" by Obama's policy decisions. Mother Jones has covered the Obama White House's position on these issues for years: we wrote about the possible "wiretapping" of the Internet, the stunning lack of transparency, and the hefty price-tag of Obama's clampdown on state secrets.
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Liu appears to have clear path to California Supreme Court
By Howard Mintz
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For all the controversy that has swirled around University of California-Berkeley law professor Goodwin Liu the past two years, his confirmation hearing Wednesday for a spot on the California Supreme Court appears as if it will be a downright lovefest.
Documents released Monday show no individual or group has signed up to speak against Liu's nomination to the state's high court, which must be approved by a three-member commission composed of Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, Attorney General Kamala Harris and Joan Dempsey-Klein, California's senior appeals court justice.
There were almost two dozen letters submitted to the commission opposing Liu, including one from Judicial Watch, a conservative group, but the criticism and level of opposition is muted, particularly in comparison to the Republican campaign that resulted in the collapse of his nomination last year to a federal appeals court judgeship.
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New York’s one-inch escape from Irene
By Ben Strauss
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New York City dodged a bullet with Irene, but big trouble passed more closely than most people think. If the storm surge had pushed New York Harbor about one inch higher, it could have been enough to overcome some of Lower Manhattan's outer defenses and flood the subway system, FDR Drive, PATH, and the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, if history is a guide.
At 8:42 a.m. on Sunday morning, close to the peak of an unusually tall high tide, the water reached 4.8 feet above the average high tide level, as measured by a gauge at the Battery. It was the sixth-highest level ever recorded for New York Harbor. The tallest mark came in 1821, at 6.5 feet. The most recent incident topping Irene was the December Nor'easter of 1992, which reached about one inch higher at the Battery and caused enough area flooding to shut down the entire subway system and PATH for several days. Unless the city has substantially raised its defenses, 4.8 feet put Irene in risky territory.
Lots of things could have tipped the balance this time, but didn't. If Irene had moved more quickly, or blown more fiercely; if it had arrived about 12 hours earlier, during a slightly higher tide. But perhaps the most important element shaping Irene's outcome was the year it blew in.
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Texas abortion law: Judge blocks sonogram provisions
By (BBC)
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A federal judge in Texas has ruled key parts of a new state law which requires women seeking an abortion to undergo a sonogram are unconstitutional.
Judge Sam Sparks upheld the requirement of the law, due to take effect on Thursday, that sonograms be performed.
But he struck down provisions requiring doctors to describe the ultrasound foetus images to patients and that women should hear those descriptions.
He said this would violate free speech rights of both doctors and patients.
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Now we’re getting somewhere
By Kay
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. . .
A group of Cleveland and Akron charter schools is in open rebellion against the for-profit management firm that runs the schools. An unusual lawsuit brought Monday by 10 governing boards of Hope Academies of Cleveland and Akron and Life Skills Centers of Cleveland and Akron alleges that a 2006 state law passed by majority-party Republicans is unconstitutional and gives the for-profit company unchecked authority.
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And this month, we (the people) got a good ruling on a discovery request:
Although charter school operator and GOP donor David Brennan has long maintained that he does not have to show how his charter schools spend the millions they receive in taxpayer money each year, a Franklin County judge disagreed and ordered Brennan to open his books.
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White Hat has control of 96% of state funding, but they also have control of 100% of federal funding, with oversight by a community board where the members of the board themselves state in the complaint that they are “virtually impotent to govern the schools”.
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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:
"Sweet Georgia Brown" is a jazz standard and pop tune written in 1925 by Ben Bernie and Maceo Pinkard (music) and Kenneth Casey (lyrics).
The tune was first recorded on March 19, 1925 by bandleader Ben Bernie, resulting in a five-week No. 1 for Ben Bernie and his Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra. As Bernie's then nationally famous orchestra featuring the number did much to popularize the number, Pinkard cut Bernie in for a share of the tune's royalties by giving him a co-writer credit to the song.
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The version used by the Globetrotters is a 1949 instrumental by Brother Bones and His Shadows, featuring whistling and bones by Brother Bones. It was adopted as the Globetrotters theme around 1950, and today is inextricably associated with the team.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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The Death of Watermelon
By Kevin Drum
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My mother was just on the phone complaining that it's impossible to find anything other than seedless watermelons these days. Is this true? As a summertime public service to her and all the rest of my melon-loving readers, here is Jane Black's investigative reporting on this vital issue in the Washington Post last year:
According to the National Watermelon Promotion Board, only 16 percent of watermelons sold in grocery stores have seeds, down from 42 percent in 2003. In California and the mid-South, home to the country's biggest watermelon farms, the latest figures are 8 and 13 percent, respectively. The numbers seem destined to tumble. Recently developed hybrids do not need seeded melons for pollination — more on that later — which liberates farmers from growing melons with spit-worthy seeds.
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ExxonMobil clinches Arctic oil deal with Rosneft
By Tom Parfitt in Moscow and Dominic Rushe in New York
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Exxon, the world's largest company, and Rosneft signed a deal to develop oil and gas reserves in the Russian Arctic, opening up one of the last unconquered drilling frontiers.
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Calling the deal a "truly strategic partnership" and hailing Exxon's experience in exploiting Arctic reserves in Canada, Putin said: "New horizons are opening up. One of the world's leading companies, ExxonMobil, is starting to work on Russia's strategic shelf and deepwater continental shelf," Putin said.
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Those regions "are among the most promising and least explored offshore areas globally, with high potential for liquids and gas," Exxon said in a statement. Rosneft, meanwhile, will be offered an equity interest in a number of Exxon exploration projects in North America, including deep-water Gulf of Mexico and tight oil fields in Texas, as well as in other countries.
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Science and Health |
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Novel Alloy Could Produce Hydrogen Fuel from Sunlight
By (ScienceDaily)
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Scientists from the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville have determined that an inexpensive semiconductor material can be "tweaked" to generate hydrogen from water using sunlight.
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Using state-of-the-art theoretical computations, the University of Kentucky-University of Louisville team demonstrated that an alloy formed by a 2 percent substitution of antimony (Sb) in gallium nitride (GaN) has the right electrical properties to enable solar light energy to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, a process known as photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. When the alloy is immersed in water and exposed to sunlight, the chemical bond between the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in water is broken. The hydrogen can then be collected.
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Gallium nitride is a semiconductor that has been in widespread use to make bright-light LEDs since the 1990s. Antimony is a metalloid element that has been in increased demand in recent years for applications in microelectronics. The GaN-Sb alloy is the first simple, easy-to-produce material to be considered a candidate for PEC water splitting. The alloy functions as a catalyst in the PEC reaction, meaning that it is not consumed and may be reused indefinitely. University of Louisville and University of Kentucky researchers are currently working toward producing the alloy and testing its ability to convert solar energy to hydrogen.
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Treating mental illness with cigarettes
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
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While nationally, only about 20% of Americans smoke, 80% of schizophrenic Americans smoke. That's interesting, but it's not the most interesting part. Apparently, there's some evidence that those people with schizophrenia are using tobacco as a form of self medication.
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This is really interesting to me. I've heard people talk about cigarettes as self-medication for ADHD, as well, and for much the same reasons. I sure found that smoking made it easier for me to study and write back in college. Although, for my ADHD, behavioral therapy and methylin ended up being a much better option. So I quit. But this poses an interesting question: If my official therapies carried the kind of side-effects that people with schizophrenia have to deal with, would smoking be more attractive?
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Magnetic mysteries of Earth's Core
By Gaby Hornsby
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When Jules Verne wrote A Journey to the Centre of the Earth over a hundred years ago, he imagined a place of glowing crystals and a turbulent sea, complete with prehistoric animals and giant mushrooms.
What was actually beneath our feet was a complete enigma. Even to this day scientists astonishingly know more about the rings of Saturn than they do about the core of our own planet.
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"You might think of the core like the atmosphere of the Earth, being a very restless place with storms and fronts and bad weather," says geophysicist Professor Dan Lathrop from the University of Maryland. He has built himself a massive model of the core to help explain something strange about the field - it is never fixed but constantly fluctuating.
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It is a known hazard for spacecraft because it creates a dip in the field, allowing charged particles into the orbit of satellites and upsetting their electronics and instrumentation.
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Childcare costs stopping mothers going to work, says study
By Hilary Osborne
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The high cost of childcare and commuting is forcing women to give up their jobs to avoid ending up out of pocket, according to new research.
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The report acknowledges the figures do not take into account non-financial benefits of working. "Many people – parents in particular – report further reasons for working, such as the social interaction and mental stimulation it brings," it says. "The question of whether to work becomes even more difficult if people genuinely enjoy their jobs and want to work, but find themselves just breaking even – or even financially worse off – if their childcare costs are beyond their income."
It also warns that moving from two incomes to one can leave families exposed to potential problems. Louise Colley, head of protection at Aviva, said: "As care costs rise, it's quite possible we will see more and more couples relying on one salary while the other person looks after the children – simply because they may actually be worse off if both people work. However, while this may make financial sense, it can also leave families vulnerable should anything happen to that income earner."
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Technology |
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The irony of the Anonymous mask
By Leo Benedictus
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They call themselves "Anonymous", and they are the world's most famous group of hacker-anarchists. When they have left the glow of their computers to protest in public – against anti-piracy laws, perhaps, or the imprisonment of Julian Assange – they have taken, very wisely, to wearing masks. Since 2008, the mask of choice has been the eerie "Guy Fawkes" design made famous by the film of Alan Moore's graphic novel V for Vendetta.
In Moore's story, the mask is worn by a lone freedom fighter against government iniquity. . .
Now, it is not nice to sneer – nor is it wise, when one's target is a rather touchy criminal collective. But there is a tasty irony about the fact that the V mask is itself a copyrighted product. Every time that Rubies sells one – for $6.49, £5.16 or €10.50 – a cut of the profit goes to Warner Bros, which made the film. . .
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The $40 Million Delivery Blimp
By Andrew Tarantola
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The Ice Road Truckers may soon have themselves some competition if Canadian specialty aviation company, Discovery Air, has its way. They want to deliver supplies to the Great White North's most remote locales via dirigible by 2014.
Discovery Air and Hybrid Air Vehicles have announced plans to launch a commercial Heavy Lift Air Vehicle service serving mining camps and secluded villages in the Northwest Territory using airships originally developed for long-term reconnaissance by the US military.
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U.S. Pressured EU to Approve the Oracle's Acquisition of Sun
By Jason Mick
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The Obama administration is facing some tough questions after Wikileaks published a fresh set of leaked State Department cables, which indicate that the U.S. applied pressure to the European Union to get the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle Corp. (ORCL) approved.
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The Department of Justice/Antitrust views this matter as a high priority... Its senior officials and investigative staff are currently engaging productively and intensely with their DG COMP [EU Director-General for Competition] counterparts, and are in close touch with Oracle and Sun, in the hopes of preventing a divergent outcome.
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In the end, the European Union agreed to approve the merger several months after its American peers did. And in the end the merger had a larger destructive effect on open source software, as Oracle has tried to aggressively monetize its new holdings.
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New body 'liquefaction' unit unveiled in Florida funeral home
By Neil Bowdler
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A Glasgow-based company has installed its first commercial "alkaline hydrolysis" unit at a Florida funeral home.
The unit by Resomation Ltd is billed as a green alternative to cremation and works by dissolving the body in heated alkaline water.
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The system works by submerging the body in a solution of water and potassium hydroxide which is pressurised to 10 atmospheres and heated to 180C for between two-and-a-half and three hours.
Body tissue is dissolved and the liquid poured into the municipal water system. Mr Sullivan, a biochemist by training, says tests have proven the effluent is sterile and contains no DNA, and poses no environmental risk.
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Cultural |
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Studies Question Effectiveness of Sex Offender Laws
By (ScienceDaily)
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Two studies in the latest issue of the Journal of Law and Economics cast doubt on whether sex offender registry and notification laws actually work as intended.
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Prescott and Rockoff find that a registration requirement without public notification reduces reported sex crime substantially, most likely through better police monitoring and more effective apprehension of recidivists. For a state with an average-sized registry, a registration requirement reduces crime by about 13 percent from the sample mean. The drop in crime gets larger as registries grow larger, indicating that registry laws lower crime by discouraging registered offenders from re-offending, as opposed to discouraging potential first-time offenders.
In contrast, public notification laws, such as the listing of released offenders on the Internet, may actually undo some or all of a registry's crime-reducing power. While Prescott and Rockoff discover that the threat of being subjected to notification deters some potential first-time sex offenders from committing crime, released offenders appear to become more likely to do so. In fact, adding public notification to an average state's registration law leads to slightly higher levels of total reported sex crime. Taken as a whole, the research shows that while police registration discourages sex offender recidivism, public notification actually encourages it.
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The death of books has been greatly exaggerated
By Lloyd Shepherd
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According to Nielsen BookScan, the publishing industry standard for book sales data, book sales are pretty healthy, with one significant proviso which I'll come to. Ten years ago in 2001, 162m books were sold in Britain. Ten years later ? a decade in which the internet bloomed, online gaming exploded, television channels proliferated, digital piracy rampaged and, latterly, recession gloomed ? 229m books sold. So, a 42% increase in the number of books sold over the last 10 years.
But wait, say the gloomy. What about the cash? Haven't publishers been forced by avaricious retail giants into a fearsome downward spiral? Discounting has sharpened, but not as much as you'd think. The standard discount on the recommended retail price of a book in 2001 was already at 17.6%. In 2010 it was 26.7%. We'll return to this later.
. . .
So why the very, very deep uncertainty and the gloom? Because 2011 is the year this may all change. Here's the proviso on the sales figures I mentioned. These numbers above do not include any ebook sales at all. Nielsen BookScan hasn't yet finalised its tracking of ebooks, and the year to date has seen a drop in printed book sales against 2010. But again, not as much as you'd think. Up to the week ending 13 August, overall sales were down almost 6% on 2010 in volume terms, and just over 4% in value.
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What does all this data add up to? Hardly an industry in its death throes, so one must ask why there are so many long faces about the place. Let's not be naive. These are times of massive change, and change is never, ever comfortable. The retail sector worries publishers and authors alike; in the past year, publishers have lost Woolworth, Borders and British Bookshops as sales channels and, as Kate Pool from the Society of Authors says: "The increasing dominance of Amazon (as retailer, increasingly as publisher, as owner of the Kindle, etc) is potentially very worrying."
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Men, women both prefer guns for suicide
By (UPI)
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Firearms are the preferred method of suicide for both men and women, though women are less likely to shoot themselves in the head, U.S. researchers found.
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"To suggest that women are less likely to shoot themselves in the face or head because they are more concerned about their appearance than men is to minimize the significance of the act of suicide," Callanan and Davis said in a statement.
"What we do know is that those experiencing stressful life events are at far greater risk of employing an especially lethal method of suicide than those not experiencing such events."
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