Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, June 12, 2012.
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: Don't Turn Around by Black Ivory
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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Obama: GOP would make things worse
By (UPI)
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"What we've seen not just here in the United States but worldwide is something that we haven't seen since the '30s. And we've still got a long way to go. There are a lot of folks out there who are hurting; a lot of folks who are looking for work or are underemployed; a lot of folks whose homes are underwater -- and we've been reading over the last several days about because of the plunge in housing prices, the loss of that wealth that a lot of families are experiencing -- it's put enormous strains on people all across the country, including here in Maryland.
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Obama cited the bailout of the automobile industry as one measure of success in bringing America back to "number one." He said clean energy production has doubled since his inauguration and his administration has made strides in making sure America is a prolific exporter and not just a consumer of goods from other nations.
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Obama said the Republican Party's "only recipe for success is another $5 trillion worth of tax cuts on top of the Bush tax cuts that -- by every independent analyst who's looked at it -- would actually make a our debt and our deficits much worse, or alternatively, would lead to us slashing the kinds of investments that are required for us to grow over the long term."
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"And back in 2008, we had a sense that Washington had strayed away from these basic values. Think about it. We had a record surplus that was squandered on tax cuts for people who didn't need them and weren't even asking for them; two wars fought on a credit card; Wall Street speculation reaping huge profits for a few while manufacturing was leaving our shores and a shrinking number of people were doing fantastically well, but more and more people had to get by with falling incomes even while the cost of everything from college to healthcare was skyrocketing."
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Carnivorous Plants Are Becoming Vegetarian Because of Pollution
By Casey Chan
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Carnivorous plants, like the Venus flytrap, are apparently becoming less bug eating and more root-using because of the pollution humans cause. Nitrogen in the air is giving them enough nutrients that they don't need to eat as many bugs.
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According to Dr. Jonathan Millet from Loughborough University, human activities like burning fossil fuels have upped the nitrogen in the air which gets dropped to the ground by the rain to be inhaled by the carnivorous plants' roots. Plants in more heavily polluted areas only get 22% of their nitrogen deposition through bug-eating, while plants who are, uh, planted in areas with light pollution snag 57% of their nitrogen from bugs. That's a big difference! What's crazy is that according to the study, the plants are turning off their bug-eating ways by making their leaves less sticky and changing its colors. . .
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Diesel exhausts do cause cancer, says WHO
By James Gallagher
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Exhaust fumes from diesel engines do cause cancer, a panel of experts working for the World Health Organization says.
It concluded that the exhausts were definitely a cause of lung cancer and may also cause tumours in the bladder.
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IARC has now labelled exhausts as a definite cause of cancer, although it does not compare how risky different carcinogens are. Diesel exhausts are now in the same group as carcinogens ranging from wood chippings to plutonium and sunlight to alcohol.
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UN official calls Syria conflict 'civil war'
By (Al Jazeera)
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The head of the United Nations' peacekeeping operations has said that the situation in Syria now amounts to a full-scale civil war as witnesses on the ground described fresh shelling on Homs and heavy fighting in other cities.
"Yes, I think we can say that," Herve Ladsous, the head of the UN's Department of Peacekeeping Operations, said in New York on Tuesday, when asked whether he believed Syria was now in a state of civil war.
"Clearly what is happening is that the government of Syria lost some large chunks of territory, several cities to the opposition, and wants to retake control."
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Addressing a forum in Washington, Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, said: "We have confronted the Russians about stopping their continued arms shipments to Syria. They have, from time to time, said that we shouldn't worry - everything they are shipping is unrelated to their [the Syrian government's] actions internally.
"That's patently untrue."
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International |
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Ali Hasan: Bahrain's youngest detainee released on bail
By Jill Langlois
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Ali Hasan, 11, labeled Bahrain's youngest detainee, has been released on bail pending his trial for participating in an illegal gathering.
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Authorities have also accused the boy, who they claim is actually 12, of burning tires at a roadblock, according to CNN. Defense attorney Mohsin Al-Alawi said he recently visited Hasan and that the boy insisted he didn't take part in any illegal gathering. Al-Alawi also said Hasan sobbed because he was tired and wanted to go home.
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A month-long Shiite-led uprising was quashed in Bahrain last March, reported AFP. Demonstrations have heated up in the last few months, with protesters clashing with police. Amnesty International has said 60 people have been killed since protests started in February of last year.
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Taliban-funding Afghan drug lord jailed for life in US
By (BBC)
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An Afghan man found guilty of funding the Taliban via one of the world's biggest heroin-trafficking rings has been sentenced to life in prison.
Haji Bagcho, 70, denied making heroin along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and sending it to over 20 countries.
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Bagcho had been brought to the US in 2009. He was convicted on 13 March 2012 after a three-week trial on charges of conspiracy and distribution of heroin for illegal import into the US; and narco-terrorism.
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Kenya's Raila Odinga wants EU to attack Somalia's al-Shabab Islamists
By (BBC)
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Kenya's prime minister has asked for funds and troops from the US and Europe in a "final onslaught" on the Somali port of Kismayo, the main stronghold of the Islamist militant group al-Shabab.
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Up to 10 warships are on patrol off the Horn of Africa as part of the EU's Atalanta operation, which was launched to protect commercial shipping against pirate attacks.
But Mr Mann told the BBC: "We have to be very careful to operate within the bounds of international law. We have our mandate for our mission, which is specifically for fighting pirates at sea and for destroying their armaments dumps.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Researchers Blow Some Holes in Stand Your Ground
By Adam Weinstein |
After avoiding major national scrutiny for more than six years, "Stand Your Ground" laws are increasingly coming under fire for making America a more dangerous place. Late last month, two economists from Texas A&M University—that hotbed of socialist leftism!—published a report (PDF) concluding that the broad "self-defense" statutes didn't actually deter crime, as proponents suggest. Rather, murder and manslaughter with firearms rose as much as 9 percent in SYG states—as many as 700 more deaths per year nationwide.
The Texas A&M report, which looked at crime stats from 2000-2009, is perhaps the clearest evidence yet that the NRA's crowning legislative triumph has been a public-policy nightmare. On the heels of the Trayvon Martin killing—in which shooter George Zimmerman initially claimed immunity from prosecution under Florida's landmark SYG law—we here at MoJo crunched the numbers and found similarly disturbing trends. So did the Wall Street Journal. Just last weekend, the US Commission on Civil Rights announced it was investigating SYG, claiming there are "some indicators of racial bias" in the law's enforcement nationwide.
. . . The law in fact originated with a coordinated approach by the NRA and its proxies in Florida's Legislature. And their direct ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council then helped them to export the law nationwide as "model legislation." Homicides in Florida have since tripled, and doubled in other SYG states. Stand Your Ground is less about law-abiding self-defense than it is about the NRA's far-right political agenda . . .
. . . There are estimated to be 200 million guns in the US. The NRA claims to have 4 million members. Which means there are a whole lot of American gun owners who aren't in the NRA—and who aren't being represented by the organization's political agenda.
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Officials: Yacht blast hoax cost $318,000+
By (UPI)
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The 5 1/2-hour search for a yacht that supposedly had exploded off the New Jersey coast but turned out to be a hoax cost $318,000, officials said Tuesday.
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The big bill was run up Monday after authorities received a report that there had been an explosion aboard a yacht 17.5 miles off Sandy Hook and that 21 people aboard had abandoned ship. The hoaxer said several people had been injured.
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Officials said making a false distress call is a federal crime punishable by up to six years in prison, a $250,000 fine and reimbursement for the search cost.
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Oh, SNAP!: Are food stamps another subsidy for Big Food?
By Twilight Greenaway
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A new report released today called “Food Stamps, Follow the Money” . . . raises questions about just how much food makers, retailers, and big banks may be profiting from food stamps. Not only do big food manufacturers such as Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Mars benefit from the SNAP economy, but retailers (such as Walmart) get a cut of those taxpayer dollars, while banks bring in processing fees. Or, as the report’s author (and occasional Grist contributor) Michele Simon sees it, SNAP “represents the largest, most overlooked corporate subsidy in the farm bill.”
The report also calls for reporting by the USDA on the types of food Americans are buying with food stamps, which are designed (in theory, at least) to make good food more accessible.
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Of course, with Congress — and in particular the GOP-led house — going after food stamps in this year’s farm bill (they’ve proposed cutting $33 billion over the next 10 years), this is a delicate time to look critically at SNAP. But Simon’s report makes it clear that “cutting SNAP benefits at this time of extreme need” would be a bad idea. Nonetheless, she hopes that deconstructing the program — which accounts for around 70 percent of the farm bill — will make more eaters aware of the contradictions involved.
It may seem obvious that a great deal of food stamps are now being redeemed for food that was produced by manufacturing giants like Coca-Cola, Kraft, and Mars in outlets such as Walmart (which sells around one-third of the food in this country), but the other way to see it is that our tax dollars are helping keep these giant businesses giant.
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Nearly All H-1B Visas Used for 2013; Tech Companies Push for Increased Availability
By Tiffany Kaiser
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The U.S. government announced this week that work permits in the H-1B visa program are almost entirely depleted for 2013.
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This is a significant increase, considering it took until November to use up all of last year's work permits. It is believed that this is a sign of better economic times, and U.S. companies are pushing for an expansion of the H-1B program.
Large technology companies in particular like Microsoft and Autodesk are pushing Congress to up the number of H-1B visas available each year. This would allow them and other companies in the U.S. to import workers with skills in technology and finance.
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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:
Leroy Burgess, Stuart Bascombe, and Russell Patterson were Black Ivory, an exceptional and occasionally brilliant soul group from Harlem that recorded throughout the '70s and returned sporadically during the decades following. The trio developed out of the late '60s as a group called the Mellow Souls and were eventually taken under the wing of Patrick Adams. . .
Adams scraped together all the money he possibly could in order to have the group record their first single, "Don't Turn Around." Adams took the demo to several unimpressed labels before hitting Today Records. That label had a very different opinion and signed the group on the strength of the recording. "Don't Turn Around," written by Adams, became a Top 40 hit on the R&B chart, hitting number 38 in 1971.
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Burgess left the group on good terms in 1977 to focus on a number of projects. However, he temporarily returned a year later to give the group its most spectacular song, the disco classic "Mainline." . .
By the dawn of the '80s, Black Ivory was no more. . . .However, Bascombe, Patterson, and Burgess hooked up again in the early 2000s to play sporadic dates. Burgess had long since become a cult legend as one of the primary instigators of house music. Under a gaggle of pseudonyms, Burgess was behind an even greater number of disco and boogie cuts that fans of melodic dance music continue to enjoy. . . Patterson also worked a little with Burgess in the intervening years, contributing vocals to the spectacular Salsoul singles released in 1981 under the name Logg.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Climate Change to Alter Global Fire Risk
By (ScienceDaily)
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Climate change is widely expected to disrupt future fire patterns around the world, with some regions, such as the western United States, seeing more frequent fires within the next 30 years, according to a new analysis led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with an international team of scientists.
By the end of the century, almost all of North America and most of Europe is projected to see a jump in the frequency of wildfires, primarily because of increasing temperature trends. At the same time, fire activity could actually decrease around equatorial regions, particularly among the tropical rainforests, because of increased rainfall.
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The study found that the greatest disagreements among models occur for the next few decades, with uncertainty across more than half the planet about whether fire activity will increase or decrease. However, some areas of the world, such as the western United States, show a high level of agreement in climate models both near-term and long-term, resulting in a stronger conclusion that those regions should brace themselves for more fire.
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Science and Health |
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Male Doctors Make $12k More Per Year Than Female Doctors
By (ScienceDaily)
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Male doctors make more money than their female counterparts, even when factoring in medical specialty, title, work hours, productivity and a host of other factors, according to a comprehensive new analysis from researchers at the University of Michigan Health System and Duke University.
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"To see that men and women doing similar work are paid quite differently in this cream-of-the-crop sample is both surprising and disturbing. I hope these findings will help inform policy discussions on how to address these disparities and ensure equal pay for men and women who are performing equal work," says Jagsi, who is also a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Physician Faculty Scholar.
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The researchers have been awarded a new grant that will allow them to look at whether gender differences in salary were due to initial starting salaries or whether they accumulated over time.
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Amount of nightly sleep linked to stroke
By (UPI)
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Routinely sleeping 6 hours or fewer a night significantly increases the risk of stroke symptoms among middle-age to older adults, U.S. researchers say.
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After adjusting for body-mass index, the researchers found a strong association for middle-age to older adults with daily sleep periods of fewer than 6 hours and a greater incidence of stroke symptoms -- even beyond other risk factors. However, the study found no association between short sleep periods and stroke symptoms among overweight and obese participants.
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The Tough-Minded and the Tender-Minded
By Daniel Callahan
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Some people are addicted to crossword puzzles, others to new shoes, and still others to collecting baseball statistics. One of my addictions is that of comparing policy arguments in very different contexts. Of late, I have been looking at three issues, each of which despite their obvious differences has some features in common with the others: health care reform, global warming, and obesity. They share an argument about the use of force. By that I mean a struggle between policies that I will call holistic and those that can be termed disruptive. . .
A holistic policy is one that calls for very broad but incremental change to entire cultures and patterns of social behaviors. This strategy is attractive when the problem to be addressed is caused by a wide range of social practices and behaviors: when there are no “silver bullet” solutions; when the issue is politically and ideologically charged; and when it is believed that an incremental strategy will be more acceptable, less jarring and controversial, than something more immediate and forceful.
A disruptive policy might be called a brute force or blunt instrument strategy. The problem needs to be dealt with as soon as possible, not incrementally. It needs to directly achieve its chosen goals in a tough-minded way, and it is willing to put up with a political battle and popular resistance. There may be no silver bullets, but some of its shotguns will fire large-gauge projectiles, designed to cut through bullet-proof vests.
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Most important, the public must be led to accept strong government interventions in their private lives and choices and to undertake in their own lives the hard work of holding down their weight, of getting rid of excessive fat. The fear of stigmatization has hampered efforts to find acceptable means of deploying social pressure. That is my candidate for disruption.
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Technology |
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The New Science of Computational Advertising
By The Physics arXiv Blog
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Google is undisputed king of the online advertising world having pioneered search-related advertising, the auctioning of advertising slots by keyword to the highest bidder and the development of increasingly sophisticated computer-based tools that advertisers can use to get the biggest bang for their buck.
As a result, advertising is no longer a black art but an emerging science in its own right. Today, Shuai Yuan and buddies at University College London review the new field of computational advertising and discuss the research challenges that it faces.
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For example, Yuan and co say there is increasing need for a futures market for advertising space that allows advertisers to take an option on advertising space several months in advance but without being obliged to buy the space when the time comes.
This has long been in print media where travel agents, for example, need to know they can advertise their products in the run up to the holiday season.
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GM, Dow Land Energy Department Grants to Improve Energy Efficiency
By Shane McGlaun
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The Energy Department has unveiled a $54 million program for grants that help manufacturers design energy-efficient products. General Motors and Dow have both announced that they received grants from the program to improve energy efficiency in operations.
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The goal is to reduce the cost of manufacturing carbon fiber by 20% and reduce carbon dioxide emissions from production by 50%. Carbon fiber is very lightweight, and strong making it ideal for use in aerospace and automotive applications. However, the high cost of working with carbon fiber has kept the material out of mainstream use in the automotive market. Lighter weight materials such as carbon fiber would mean better fuel economy and longer driving distances for EVs.
General Motors will use its $2.7 million grant to develop an integrated die-casting process for creating car doors. General Motors hopes to save 50% of the energy needed to create car doors while reducing the weight of the doors themselves to improve fuel economy and carbon emissions savings.
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Indie author gets sticker shock from Amazon "delivery fees"
By Cory Doctorow
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Andrew Hyde wrote and self-published a great-looking travel book and put it up for sale on Amazon, iBooks, B&N, and an indie marketplace called Gumroad that retails the PDF. The book had an exciting launch and the sales on Amazon were really high, but he got some sticker-shock when he found out that Amazon was charging very high "delivery fees" for his books, even when the buyers were buying from WiFi. He calculated the book-delivery markup over the rate Amazon charges for website hosting and concluded that Amazon charges authors a 129,000% markup for moving a file from A to B. Apple did better, but are total jerks about it. B&N didn't sell enough to move the needle for him. The whole post is a bracing reality-check. |
Defensive Patent License: judo for patent-trolls
By Cory Doctorow
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Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin has an in-depth look at the "Defensive Patent License," a kind of judo for the patent system . . . It's a license pool that companies opt into, and members of the pool pledge not to sue one another for infringement. If you're ever being sued for patent infringement, you can get an automatic license to a conflicting patent just by throwing your patents into the pool. The more patent trolls threaten people, the more incentive there is to join the league of Internet patent freedom fighters.
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The “all-in” provision was put in place to prevent companies from joining the network while only providing their lamest patents. The ability of DPL members to sue non-members, meanwhile, preserves the right to monetize inventions. It also keeps members on a level playing field with non-members.
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Cultural |
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Times Have Changed, It's OK to Lie
By Kevin Drum
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Last month David Corn noted that Mitt Romney was claiming that "government" would control half the economy once Obamacare was up and running. He's still saying it, and today Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post gives it a score of four Pinocchios and says Romney should drop it. "No amount of tweaking will get it right," he says.
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It also doesn't matter. Politicians have increasingly discovered over the past couple of decades that even on a national stage you can lie pretty blatantly and pay no price since the mainstream media, trapped in its culture of objectivity, won't really call you on it, limiting themselves to fact checking pieces like Kessler's buried on an inside page. And because virtually nobody except political junkies ever sees this stuff, it doesn't hurt their campaigns at all.
This discovery — that you can tell almost any lie without paying a price — is, in some sense, an example of national politics becoming a lot more like local politics. Blatant lying has always been routine in local races that don't get a lot of press coverage, but the brighter media spotlight kept at least a bit of a lid on it in higher-profile races. However, with the splintering of the mainstream national media in recent years and the rise of the web and social media, national politics is local again. And being called on your lies by the occasional earnest fact checker now matters about as much as it does when a local columnist for a weekly newspaper calls you on it.
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Executive pay: the smart money is on a sensible salary
By Michael White
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There are slow learners in Britain's boardrooms, it seems, even though they pay themselves all that money because they are supposed to be so much smarter than most of us. The annual survey of pay and perks among FTSE 100 chieftains reveals that executive rewards rose by an average 12% last year when the overall average was 1% or 2% (if lucky) . . .
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The FTSE 100 index dropped 5% this year – perhaps not the CEOs' fault as such (markets rise and fall without paying much attention to performance), but nor are most of those losing their jobs to blame either. We can't blame Mr Baggs for the two-year drought or the subsequent floods. We can blame him for selling off reservoirs and paying £5bn in dividends since 1989 – unlike the water, most of it goes abroad, too.
Are we making progress on top pay which has expanded so much when most pay is flat? A little. Shareholder revolts which goad people such as Sorrell into ill-judged newspaper articles are one positive sign and there have been half a dozen big ones this year in Britain, though few pay packets have been cut as a result. In large companies top pay remains only a small percentage of costs so the cosy racket that characterises too many remuneration committees goes undisturbed. The media complains about fat cat pay but it is far from exempt itself.
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But mockery is also a useful weapon. Sorrell, for example, is a workaholic and obsessive micro-manager, famous for answering text messages at all hours of the day or night. Knowing Sir Martin was in a different timezone and meant to be asleep, an ex-colleague once sent him a blank text, only to receive a near-instant reply of: "Delighted to hear from you, how can I help?"
That sort of behaviour from someone who is 66 and worth £174m is crazy and deserves to be more widely seen as such. Having recently watched a far richer and older media tycoon giving evidence in court I concluded that much of his conduct was self-deluding in the extreme: a mixture of sad, bad and mad with lingering flashes of commercial acumen.
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Gay marriage gets ministerial approval
By Juliette Jowit
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Ministers have pledged to push through legislation to give same-sex couples equal rights to get married despite mounting opposition from within the Conservative party and the threat of a split with the Church of England.
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Anglican leaders ignited another heated debate on Tuesday by declaring that the government proposal could make the church stop carrying out legal weddings, and take a fundamental step towards separating the church and state.
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However, a Downing Street spokesman said the government was "committed to legislate by 2015 – in this parliament". He also said that the proposal set out in the consultation was "very clear that no religious organisation will be forced to conduct same-sex marriages". In fact the consultation goes further, saying: "It will not be legally possible under these proposals for religious organisations to solemnise religious marriages for same-sex couples."
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Ben Summerskill, Stonewall's chief executive, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "There's manifestly no evidence that the recognition of long-term, same-sex relationships has any impact on the institution of marriage for hetrosexuals."
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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. |