Welcome to the Overnight News Digest
(graphic by palantir)
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.
Climate Change? What Climate Change?
Yosemite like you've never seen it
(sfgate) - Check out this gallery of photos from Yosemite, where it's virtually snowless and the 9,943-foot Tioga Pass is open later than has been since at least 1933.
Tom Stienstra's Outdoors
Good thing Obama saved the auto industry, maybe, huh?
Strong sales, new ideas enliven Detroit auto show
Beyond the usual hype at the Detroit auto show, automakers have plenty to crow about this year: U.S. sales are the highest since 2008 and they're expected to keep growing. Buyers are being lured by cheap loans and an improving economy.
The timing is perfect for automakers to unveil more than 40 new cars and trucks this month at the industry's annual trade show in Detroit. While there will be a few wild concept cars, like a tiny pickup from Smart, there will also be many models that will go on sale this year.
Carmakers, feeling buoyant about their prospects for 2012, will try to outdo each other with lights, music and models to generate buzz among the show's 750,000 expected visitors.
BBC: US carmakers in record China sales, despite market fall
General Motors and Ford reported record car sales in China for 2011, despite a slowdown in the market in that country.
GM said sales of its vehicles and those of its Chinese partners rose 8.3% during the year to a record high of 2.5 million cars.
Ford saw sales rise by 7% to 519,390 vehicles.
Car sales in China skyrocketed in 2010, in part due to government incentives, but have moderated in 2011.
Intel tries to help Stephen Hawking keep talking
(latimes) Intel Corp. is trying to help physicist Stephen Hawking keep speaking.
Intel chief technology officer Justin Rattner told the Associated Press that the tech giant has a research team in Britain that is trying to come up with a new speech system for Hawking, who is severely diasabled by Lou Gehrig's disease. The goal is to keep Hawking's speech from continuing to slow.
It's a tedious process for Hawking to speak. A tiny infrared sensor translates movement in his right cheek into words spoken by a voice synthesizer. And now Hawking is losing the use of the nerves in that cheek.
Tax break for students sought in Calif. bill
Nanette Asimov, Chronicle Staff Writer
San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, January 9, 2012
As tuition steadily climbs at California's public universities, low-income students turn to financial aid for help and high-income students to the family bank account.
But middle-class students, who do not qualify for financial aid, often have nowhere to turn and simply don't enroll.
A state lawmaker is hoping that a tax break of up to $500 per year for each student from a family earning $80,001 to $140,000 would help.
Fishing: U.S. to limit catches of each species
Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post (via sfgate)
Monday, January 9, 2012
Washington --
In an effort to sustain commercial and recreational fishing for the next several decades, the United States will become the first country to impose catch limits for every species it manages, from Alaskan pollock to Caribbean queen conch.
Although the policy has attracted scant attention outside the community of those who fish in the United States and the officials who regulate them, it marks an important shift in a pursuit that has helped define the country since its founding.
Unlike most recent environmental policy debates, which have divided neatly along party lines, this one is about a policy that was created under President George W. Bush and completed with President Obama's backing.
New Monterey Bay visitors center a window to the ocean
(San Jose Mercury News) - With its plunging underwater canyons, towering kelp forests and dramatic wildlife -- from sea otters to humpback whales -- Monterey Bay has been described as the ocean equivalent of a Yellowstone or Yosemite National Park.
Now, 20 years after it was set aside as America's largest national marine sanctuary, Monterey Bay is about to finally open one of the classic trappings of a land-based national park: a visitor center.
...
The sanctuary's creation forever banned offshore oil drilling from the Marin Headlands to Hearst Castle, locking in new protections for the ocean along 275 miles of California's coastline.
But environmentalists and sanctuary officials have long lamented that the marine sanctuary hasn't received the same recognition with the general public that ordinary land-based national parks enjoy.
Knesset Approves Free Education from Age 3
(israelnationalnews.com) - The Israeli government approved on Sunday a law that would allow for free education for children starting at the age of three.
In order to allow for the new law to be applied, lateral budget cuts in all government ministries were approved. While many MKs originally said they would vote against the law because of the planned cuts, a last-minute agreement was reached with the Shas party which enabled the law to receive a majority and be approved.
The law passed by a majority of 21 supporters against eight opponents. Those who opposed the law are the members of the Yisrael Beteinu and Independence parties.
Brazil's economy marching to samba beat
By Will Smale Business reporter, BBC News, Rio de Janeiro
Brazil, one of the so-called Bric nations together with Russia, India and China, has seen its economy soar in recent years, with growth far outpacing the US and western Europe.
Continue reading the main story
While it slowed to expected growth of 3.5% in 2011, the government of President Dilma Rousseff says this was caused by external factors, primarily the financial crisis in the eurozone hitting the wider economy.
Brazil's economic growth last year was enough to see it overtake the UK as the world's sixth-largest economy, according to economic research group the Centre for Economics and Business Research.
Turning trash to a source of power
By Cindy Atoji Keene
Boston Globe Correspondent / January 8, 2012
(Molly) Bales, 23, is project development associate at Harvest Power, a Waltham alternative energy start-up that uses airtight reactors to allow plant and animal wastes to decompose and produce biogas and other useful products, such as fertilizer. Bales researches and develops composting facilities for municipalities, colleges, military bases, stores, and even theme parks.
“We are basically creating a facility where bacteria happily feed on waste and produce lots of useful bioproducts,’’ Bales said. “This closes that carbon cycle loop instead of throwing something away.’’
School limits Education can’t equalise society
Le Monde Diplomatique -
More and earlier teaching won’t redress childhood disadvantages, and not everyone will be able to go to university, or get graduate level jobs afterwards. Rebalancing the future will require a different approach
by John Marsh
Just as the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests began to spread to other cities in the US and beyond, the respected, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a study that confirmed the reason that protestors had taken to the parks: rising economic inequality. The CBO found that from 1979 to 2007, after-tax income for the median household grew by 35%; the average income of the top 1% of households grew by 275% (1).
The day after the study’s release, a columnist for The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof, published an opinion piece, “Occupy the Classroom” (19 October), in which he acknowledged economic inequality in the US. But instead of calling for changes in taxes and regulations or jailing bankers, as OWS preferred, he argued: “The single step that would do the most to reduce inequality [is] an expansion of early childhood education. One common thread, whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty.” But another was that “whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator”.
This call might have seemed odd in the context of the OWS protests, since among the few concrete demands of protesters was student loan forgiveness: many of them, despite riding that escalator, had not found a good job (or any job) upon graduation. Yet in offering education as the key to reducing economic inequality, Kristof kept good company
A New Race of Mercy to Nome, This Time Without Sled Dogs
(nytimes)
Shipping delays and a major storm prevented Nome's winter supply of fuel from arriving in early fall.
NOME, Alaska
... Nome is again locked in a dark and frigid winter — a record cold spell has pushed temperatures to minus 40 degrees, cracked hotel pipes and even reduced turnout at the Mighty Musk Oxen’s pickup hockey games. And now another historic rescue effort is under way across the frozen sea.
Yet while the dogs needed only five and a half days, Renda the Russian tanker has been en route for nearly a month — and it is unclear whether she will ever arrive. The tanker is slogging through sea ice behind a Coast Guard icebreaker, trying to bring not medicine but another commodity increasingly precious in remote parts of Alaska: fuel, 1.3 million gallons of emergency gasoline and diesel to heat snow-cloaked homes and power the growing number of trucks, sport utility vehicles and snow machines that have long since replaced dogsleds.
A Big Check From a Billionaire, and Gingrich Gets a Lift
(nytimes) - By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and ERIC LIPTON
A $5 million check from Sheldon Adelson underscores how last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance has made it possible for a wealthy individual to influence an election.
... on Friday, the cavalry arrived: a $5 million check from Mr. Adelson to Winning Our Future, a “super PAC” that supports Mr. Gingrich. By Monday morning, the group had reserved more than $3.4 million in advertising time in South Carolina, a huge sum in a state where the airwaves come cheap and the primary is 11 days away. The group is planning to air portions of a movie critical of Mr. Romney’s time at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he helped found.
The last-minute injection underscores how last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance has made it possible for a wealthy individual to influence an election. Mr. Adelson’s contribution to the super PAC is 1,000 times the $5,000 he could legally give directly to Mr. Gingrich’s campaign this year.
Several people with knowledge of Mr. Adelson’s decision to donate to Winning Our Future said that it was born out of a two-decade friendship with Mr. Gingrich, his advocacy on behalf of Israel and his turbulent months as a presidential candidate.
After Beyoncé Gives Birth, Other Patients Protest
(nytimes) - The familiar area outside the neonatal unit had been transformed: partitions had been put up, the maternity ward windows were completely covered, and even the hospitals’ security cameras had been taped over with paper. Guards with Secret Service-style earpieces roamed the floor.
“We were told we could walk no further,” Ms. Nash-Coulon said Monday. And when she and her husband, Neil, demanded an explanation, she added, the guard claimed, unconvincingly, “ ‘Well, they’re handling hazardous materials,’ ” even as a large group of people screened from view were passing through the main hallway he had declared off-limits.
It was just the first of a series of indignities that they and several other noncelebrity maternity patients say they experienced over the weekend, as Lenox Hill Hospital went all-out to protect the privacy of Beyoncé Knowles and Jay-Z, whose daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, was born there on Saturday.