Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, June 18, 2013.
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: Jackass by Beck
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
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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Google challenges Fisa court's gag orders on reporting user surveillance
By Dominic Rushe
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Google has called on the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to relax its gag order on tech companies targeted in US security investigations.
. . .
The legal filing cites the first amendment's guarantee of free speech and follows on from a letter to attorney general Eric Holder asking for permission to disclose the number of requests Google receives under the foreign intelligence securities act (Fisa).
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The search firm already publishes a widely imitated "transparency report" that documents demands from the US government and from other governments worldwide. The report documents criminal requests and national security letters, which the government uses to gather information about US citizens in the US. But Google and its peers are barred from disclosing the number of Fisa requests they receive.
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Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo, the other major tech firms named in the Prism documents, have all called for greater disclosure about government requests for information. They have also strongly denied that they allow the government "direct" access to their servers, denials first reported by The Guardian when the story broke.
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Occupy Sandy: Once welcomed, now questioned
By James West
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. . . Roughly $1 out of every $5 raised — nearly $300,000 — remains unallocated. According to interviews with Occupy Sandy organizers, it’s been more than three months since the group began the process of giving this remaining money over to community groups in the hardest-hit areas. Only a fraction of the $150,000 that has already been allocated to the Rockaways has so far been disbursed.
. . .
So far, there’s no clear picture of how nearly $240,000 of funds already allocated have been, or will be, spent. Bre Lembitz, an original Zuccotti Park occupier and now Occupy Sandy’s bookkeeper, attributes the delay mostly to paperwork snags beyond the group’s control: “The documentation has fallen by the wayside,” she says. “It hasn’t been a priority for people.”
. . .
Milan Taylor, the 24-year-old director of the Rockaway Youth Task Force, says Occupy Sandy “was brilliant at first.” In the immediate aftermath of the storm that destroyed 175 houses and businesses here and left 34,000 customers were left without power [PDF], sometimes for months, Occupy Sandy volunteers worked side by side with locals to lug water and blankets to people in damaged homes or darkened residential towers. They gutted and mucked out houses and educated locals about the health risks of mold infestations, coordinating their efforts via a fleet of vans; they were applauded for agility while the big agency relief machinery ground into motion.
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But according to Lembitz, the group’s mission has always been to transition to a community-driven approach — it has just taken a little time to get up and running. “Ideologically this is the best idea, but that doesn’t mean necessarily it can be put into practice,” she says. “I naively thought it was going to be much easier to set up, and it wasn’t.” Occupy Sandy has now convened a nine-person panel to serve the specific needs of the Rockaways, including four residents affiliated with Occupy Sandy, and to decide how their chunk of money gets spent. There is no timeline for this, but organizers say some grants might begin to flow in another month’s time. As for the nearly $300,000, Lembitz says Occupy Sandy is “in the process” of having open meetings “where the community can come together and decide how best to allocate the rest of the money.” But apart from one debrief session, the group’s public calendar is bare through the end of the year.
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European Union, US 'intend to move forward fast' on transatlantic trade deal
By Talia Ralph
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The transatlantic trade deal between the European Union and the United States was announced at the G8 summit this week, as British Prime Minister David Cameron and US President Barack Obama vowed to "fire up our economies and drive growth and prosperity around the world."
The two leaders formally announced the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, also known as TTIP, at a press conference in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland on Monday, where the world's wealthiest nations gathered for their annual conference.
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The EU said that the establishment of a Free Trade Agreement would add about 119 billion euros ($159 billion) annually to the EU economy, and $127 billion dollars for the United States.
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"The UK could be the biggest winner in Europe from a transatlantic trade deal between the European Union and the US," the Guardian mused, while German paper Die Welt said the deal would especially benefit America.
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Public Resource wants to liberate tax records for US nonprofits - converting 100lbs of scanned bitmaps on DVDs into searchable data on $1.5T worth of activity
By Cory Doctorow
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Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,
On November 1, Public.Resource.Org released a new service which put 6,461,326 US nonprofit tax returns on the net for bulk download, developers, and search engines to access. We offered to give the working system to the government, and also sent them a few suggestions on ways they could better meet their mission and save themselves a boatload of money. Since then, we've been frantically trying to get the government's attention to take decisive action, but to no avail.
. . .
The way the IRS releases that information is mind-boggling. They image the data onto tax forms and then release them as 200 dot per inch TIFF files. So, instead of having a computer program extract the gross revenue, or the CEO salaries, or whether or not the nonprofit operates a tanning salon on premises (an actual question on the form!), you get something that is so bad that OCR is difficult. Nonprofits are a $1.5 trillion chunk of the U.S. economy, yet we're deliberately dumbing down data that could make that sector more efficient and more vibrant. That's dumb.
Since November, we've been trying to get the IRS and the Obama Administration to release this information, but they've refused. We've met with all sorts of IRS officials such as Lois Lerner and Joseph Grant of Tea Party fame, and we've also met with a ton of boldface names in the White House, such as Todd Park (the President's CTO) and Steve VanRoekel (the Federal CIO). Nobody will release the data. The IRS is worried the big nonprofits will be upset if information such as multimillion-dollar CEO salaries is more readily available.
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Clapping reveals applause is a 'social contagion'
By Rebecca Morelle
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. . . scientists have found that clapping is contagious, and the length of an ovation is influenced by how other members of the crowd behave.
. . .
The scientists found that it took just one or two people to put their hands together for a ripple of applause to spread through the crowd.
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"The pressure comes from the volume of clapping in the room rather than what your neighbour sitting next to you is doing," explained Dr Mann.
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"And all that comes from is that you have this social pressure to start (clapping), but once you've started there's an equally strong social pressure not to stop, until someone initiates that stopping."
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"And the equivalent on Facebook or Twitter would be whether you are more likely to join in a trend if you see lots of people in the wider world mentioning it or if just your closer friends mention it."
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US reveals Guantanamo 'indefinite detainees'
By (BBC)
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The US has listed 46 inmates held at its military prison in Guantanamo Bay who it says it does not have the evidence to try but are too dangerous to release.
It revealed the men's names in response to a freedom of information request by the Miami Herald.
. . .
Of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo in Cuba, 86 have been cleared for transfer if conditions can be met, including 56 from Yemen.
Hunger strike
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After taking office in 2009, Mr Obama promised to close the prison within a year, but his plans to transfer detainees to maximum security prisons in the US and to try some detainees in the civilian justice system met fierce resistance from both parties in Congress.
More than 100 detainees have joined a hunger strike which began in early February to protest against the failure to end their detention without charge. Many have been held for more than a decade.
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International |
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Chinese science academy slaps down climate-denying Heartland Institute
By John Upton
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. . . all that happened was that one of Heartland’s climate-denial reports, “Climate Change Reconsidered,” was translated into Chinese.
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When the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) got wind of Heartland’s blog post, it was not pleased. It put out a statement harshly condemning the post:
The claim of the Heartland Institute about CAS’ endorsement of its report is completely false. …
Since there is absolutely no ground for the so called CAS endorsement of the report, and the actions by the Heartland Institute went way beyond acceptable academic integrity, we have requested by email to the president of the Heartland Institute that the false news on its website to be removed. We also requested that the Institute issue a public apology to CAS for the misleading statement on the CAS endorsement.
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G8 leaders agree to clamp down on money laundering and tax evasion
By Corinne Purtill
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The G8 summit closed Tuesday afternoon with firm agreement on what should be done about tax evasion but far less certainty about Syria’s deadly civil war.
At the end of a two-day meeting in Northern Ireland, the leaders of some of the world’s most powerful countries presented the Lough Erne Declaration addressing transparency, resource use and tax fairness.
The biggest surprise in the 10-point plan was that any of its statements needed to be spelled out.
“Countries should change rules that let companies shift their profits across borders to avoid taxes, and multinationals should report to tax authorities what tax they pay where,” the one-page statement read. “Companies should know who really owns them and tax collectors and law enforcers should be able to obtain this information easily.”
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Jail reckless bankers, standards commission urges
By (BBC)
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Senior bankers guilty of reckless misconduct should be jailed, a long-awaited report on banking commissioned by the government has recommended.
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The cross-party group's fifth report attacked the lack of accountability of bankers and also said some bonuses should be withheld for up to 10 years.
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The 571-page report also called on the government to review alternatives for selling off the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), including breaking it up, and demanded action to make the banking market more competitive.
"Too many bankers, especially at the most senior levels, have operated in an environment with insufficient personal responsibility," the report says.
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Lancet call for independent Guantanamo medical care
By (BBC)
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An open letter published in the Lancet medical journal calls for hunger-striking Guantanamo Bay detainees to receive independent medical care.
More than 150 doctors and medical professionals signed the letter to US President Barack Obama.
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The letter published in the Lancet on Wednesday said the detainees had "very good reason" not to trust US medical doctors, as they are required to follow orders of military commanders.
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UN warns of Nigeria refugee crisis
By (Al Jazeera)
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Thousands of people are fleeing to Chad, Niger and Cameroon as the crisis in neighbouring Nigeria deepens, the UN refugee agency has said.
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The government of President Goodluck Jonathan embarked on a major military offensive on May 15 to root out the Boko Haram group responsible for a series of bloody attacks in the African country over the past four years, killing hundreds of people.
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Aid organisation and media have been banned from accessing the frontlines and there have also been complaints that mobile networks were shut down since the offensive started, effectively cutting off the region from the rest of the country and the world.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Pentagon Moving Toward Women in Combat Weighs Standards
By Gopal Ratnam & Tony Capaccio
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U.S. military services offered glimpses yesterday of how they will deliver on the Pentagon’s pledge to let women apply for front-line combat positions, and of the challenges in devising new, gender-neutral standards for warriors.
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The military services and the Special Operations Command are beginning a year of research and scientific studies intended to design and test fitness and other standards that can be applied uniformly, without weakening them for women. The moves could mean that as many as 237,000 combat positions previously not available to women would be open to them by January 2016 as the military acts on policy changes set in motion at the start of this year by Hagel’s predecessor, Leon Panetta.
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The debate over expanding combat roles for women is unfolding even as the military copes with what Hagel has called a “huge problem” of sexual assaults. The two issues may be related, Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in January.
. . .
“I was forward-deployed with plenty of stinky men in ways we couldn’t shower, and I wasn’t assaulted or embarrassed or anything like that,” Hegar said. “It’s all about accepting that we cannot legislate behavior, but it’s a military order and discipline and it’s a leadership thing.”
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In Westchester, Progress on Housing and the Specter of Another Fight
By Nikole Hannah-Jones
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. . .
The Board of Legislators for the suburban New York county voted 15-2 Monday night to pass the legislation required by a 2009 settlement with the federal government over Westchester’s failures to comply with fair housing laws.
The Board’s vote ends one critical scuffle in an escalating conflict chronicled last fall by ProPublica that began three years ago this month when Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino vetoed legislation that would have banned housing discrimination based on income.
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The federal government won’t have long to relish its victory. The battle with Astorino will now center on requirements that the county dismantle zoning that makes it difficult for African Americans and Latinos to find housing in white areas.
And the zoning issue, which is largely seen as having the greatest potential to integrate housing in the highly segregated county, could well prove to be the greater conflict.
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Soros-Backed Super-PAC to New York Pols: Pass Reform or We're Taking You Down
By Andy Kroll
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The deadline draws closer by the hour. In New York, the band of good-government reformers, labor unions, enviros, community organizers, religious leaders, and more have until Thursday night, when the current legislative session ends, to press state lawmakers to pass legislation combating political corruption and kickstarting a public financing program for statewide elections. Standing in their way: The odd coalition of breakaway Democrats and Republicans who control the state Senate and who are blocking the public financing bill, which passed the state Assembly earlier this year and is backed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Friends of Democracy, the super-PAC run by political operatives Jonathan Soros and David Donnelly, is one of the most aggressive backers of public financing in New York State. Soros, the son of liberal financier and mega-donor George Soros, and Donnelly see New York as the front line in the post-Citizens United battle against big-money politics. In an interview on Tuesday, Donnelly had a cut-and-dry message for the independent Democrats, who broke away from the traditional Democratic caucus to form a new leadership coalition, and the Republican legislators who are denying a vote on public financing: Support reform, or we'll fight to replace you.
Donnelly says public financing should be a no-brainer for independent Democrats and Republicans given the public support for the issue. According to a recent Siena College poll (PDF), 61 percent of New Yorkers say they support statewide public financing. Indeed, in five Siena polls dating back to August 2012, a majority of New Yorkers backed a public financing program. The way it's proposed, a statewide public financing program would match each dollar of donations up to $175 with $6 in state money. The goal is to nudge political candidates into courting lots of less-wealthy donors instead of a few very wealthy ones.
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Red Cross to Guantánamo judge: Don’t give 9/11 defense lawyers our confidential records
By Carol Rosenberg
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“The ICRC goes places, to places of conflict that no one else can go to. We visit and speak to people that no else can speak to,” said attorney Matthew MacLean, arguing that release of Red Cross records would jeopardize its ability to have confidential dialogues with governments worldwide.
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Defense officials want to read them because they may detail what Mohammed and the others told Red Cross representatives about their treatment by the United States. If they are convicted, the communications might help them argue against their execution.
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In a particularly pointed question, given these are death-penalty proceedings, the judge asked the Red Cross lawyer whether the organization had not on occasion breached confidentiality when a life was at risk. Yes, MacLean replied, but only when the organization decides on its own to do it.
And, in this case, he added, Red Cross officials might consider meeting 9/11 defense lawyers on a confidential basis and consider providing information that’s “not available elsewhere.”
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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:
. . . It's clear that Beck was smart enough to recognize immediately that the voice-of-a-generation label was both a medal and a noose — that the minute you accept the premise that your work speaks to something bigger than your own life, you're obligated to continue delivering generational bulletins, lest you be accused of turning inward and abandoning everyone who believed in your Importance. (For a guy who's evaded Dylan comparisons1 like bear traps in every interview he's ever given, he'd clearly absorbed a lot of the lessons of Dylan's arc.) There's this narrative in which Beck declines the generational spokesman crown early on, and that decision defines him and foreshadows the aesthetic twists and turns of his later work. To some extent it's a useful fiction, because barring a few very early press clips2 in which someone attempts to pigeonhole him, the only people bringing up the idea of Beck possibly being a Slacker Nation spokesmodel are Gen-Xers prompting Beck to deny it in interviews;3 it's not like Andy Rooney was taking him to task for glamorizing sloth.
. . .
Odelay — kinda-sorta named after a Chicano slang term equivalent to "Right on!" — didn't strike Beck or DGC as a commercial pop-rock album, which is ironic given how catchy it all sounds. It's an almost exhaustingly generous record, electric-sliding between genres not from song to song but bar to bar, imagining a room where Mantronix and the Frogs breathe the same air, or revealing that the room has always existed. No sound gets to hang around long enough to wear out its welcome; whenever the party's pace lags, somebody coughs up a fireball of feedback or drops the needle on an old Schubert record for five seconds, or the Enchanting Wizard of Rhythm shows up to low-ride you around the block.
The willful disarray of Mellow Gold has given way to the illusion of disarray, and a sound that flirts, at weird moments, with virtuosity and something resembling grace — think of the way that rippling-silver guitar line from Them's cover of Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" winds its way through "Jack-Ass" like a climbing vine, although it's still very Beck to write a song that pretty and call it "Jack-Ass" for no reason. Word-wise, it's heavy on road-bleary word-pictures ("Chainsmoke Kansas flashdance ass-pants"), cryptic bathroom-graffiti shout-outs ("Make-Out City is a two-horse town!"), and nonsensical get-fresh entreaties; years later he'd tell Rolling Stone that most of the lyrics were scratch-vocal placeholders he grew attached to. But if it's not autobiographical in the traditional way, it still feels deeply personal in sound — like 1996's other greatest California-pop-auteur album, DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, its maker has something to say and these needle drops are how he says it. And like a lot of Beck's stuff, its weird sonic/cultural/lyrical conjunctions feel less willfully random and more like the product of real-world experience if you've listened to the record while driving around his old hood, L.A.'s still-fairly-ramshackle East Side — and not just because every third male pedestrian is wearing a hat that only Beck could pull off.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Pesticides in global rivers and streams said reducing biodiversity
By (UPI)
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Pesticides commonly used in Europe and Australia are reducing the regional diversity of invertebrates in streams and rivers by up to 42 percent, scientists say.
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The overall decrease in biodiversity is primarily due to the disappearance of several groups of species that are especially susceptible to pesticides, including stoneflies, mayflies, caddisflies and dragonflies that are important members of the food chain right up to fish and birds, researchers said.
A worrying finding of the study is that the impact of pesticides on these tiny creatures is already catastrophic at concentrations that are considered acceptable under current European regulations, they said.
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Illinois' New Fracking Regulations Might Not Be So Tough After All
By Michael G McKinne
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Monday afternoon Illinois governor Pat Quinn signed what the Associated Press touted as the "nation's toughest fracking regulations," creating a framework to manage hydraulic fracturing, in which chemicals are piped into rock at high pressure to release stored-up natural gas. But the new regulatory effort, which sharply divided the state’s environmental community and inspired fervor in the southern counties where drilling is most likely to take place, looks more like a tactical concession than an environmental victory.
The law, which was crafted through six months of stakeholder negotiations between the state, select environmental groups, and representatives from the oil and gas industry, includes stringent rules meant to increase public transparency, more closely monitor environmental impact, and provide avenues for recourse in case something goes wrong. But amid biting criticism from activists and advocacy groups that were excluded from the negotiations, environmental organizations involved in the process have argued that although they believe the law was a necessary foothold in the effort to control what seemed to be an inevitable boom in fracking in Illinois, this is by no means the end of the fight.
. . .
Fracking was already legal in Illinois, although there was no fracking-specific regulation on the books, and industry interest has been growing, creating a sense that fracking was unavoidable. Illinois sits atop the New Albany shale play, an area projected to hold 3.79 trillion cubic feet of shale gas. Drilling leases have funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into the coffers of counties and residents by way of fees and leases, and according to an AP investigation of state records, high-volume fracking had already begun. After it became clear the regulatory bill would become law, major drilling operations were started in Wayne County, some four and a half hours south of Chicago.
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Germany leans on EU states to weaken car emissions law
By (Reuters via guardian.co.uk)
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Senior members of the German government have warned EU member states that German automakers could scale back or scrap production plans in their countries unless they support weakened carbon emissions rules, according to diplomatic sources.
With EU governments and lawmakers aiming to finalise the rules next week, which most of the 27 member states back, Germany has stepped up the pressure on them to water down limits on vehicle emissions to protect the country's mighty car industry, particularly luxury makers such as BMW and Daimler.
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Germany's position is backed by a handful of central European countries with domestic auto production, but France, Britain and Italy are opposed, EU sources say.
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But making less-polluting cars is costly and restricts profit margins, which is why major German manufacturers want to delay the stricter rules.
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Science and Health |
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Early-Life Air Pollution Linked With Childhood Asthma in Minorities
By (ScienceDaily)
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A research team led by UCSF scientists has found that exposure in infancy to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a component of motor vehicle air pollution, is strongly linked with later development of childhood asthma among African Americans and Latinos.
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In the study, the largest to date of air pollution exposure and asthma risk in minority children in the United States, the team found that for every five parts per billion increase in NO2 exposure during the first year of life, there was a 17 percent increase in the risk of developing asthma later in life.
. . .
One immediate implication of the study, said Burchard, is that the national standard for NO2 set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is "too lax by far." He noted that the current EPA annual standard is 53 parts per billion (ppb), while the study subjects were exposed, on average, to 19 ppb during the first year of life.
. . .
"It has been shown that changes in methylation, which can be affected by pollution, tobacco smoke and even stress, can be inherited across multiple generations," said Burchard. "Our group is currently investigating methylation as the possible outcome of exposures to a number of pollutants."
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It's the Way You Tell Em': Study Discovers How the Brain Controls Accents and Impersonations
By (ScienceDaily)
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A study, led by Royal Holloway University researcher Carolyn McGettigan, has identified the brain regions and interactions involved in impersonations and accents.
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They found that when a voice is deliberately changed, it brings the left anterior insula and inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) of the brain into play. The researchers also discovered that when comparing impersonations against accents, areas in the posterior superior temporal/inferior parietal cortex and in the right middle/anterior superior temporal sulcus showed greater responses.
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While past work has found that listening to voices activates regions of the temporal lobe of the brain, no research had explored the brain regions involved in controlling vocal identity before this study.
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Experts to convene to consider 'unusual' British weather patterns
By (UPI)
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Leading British scientists and meteorologists say they will convene to discuss the country's recent "unusual" weather patterns and identify research priorities.
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The researchers said they would be looking at the atmospheric jet stream, arctic sea ice, and ocean circulation as possible factors in Britain's run of abnormal weather.
"The ocean circulation has been stuck in a rather strange pattern for the past 10 years or so, which in fact has given the unusual weather patterns in many parts of the world," Stephen Belcher from the Met Office Hadley Centre said.
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High air pollution areas linked to double the risk of autism
By (UPI)
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U.S. mothers-to-be exposed to high levels of air pollution while pregnant were twice as likely to have a child with autism, researchers say.
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Other types of air pollution -- lead, manganese, methylene chloride and combined metal exposure -- were associated with higher autism risk as well, Roberts said.
The study found pregnant women who lived in the 20 percent of locations with the highest levels of pollutants were about 50 percent more likely to have a child with autism than those who lived in the 20 percent of areas with the lowest concentrations.
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Laser reveals hidden network of ancient Cambodian city
By Kristin Deasy
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Laser technology has confirmed the existence of a 1,200-year-old Cambodian city obscured by mountain growth, according to The Cambodian Daily.
Lead excavator Jean-Baptiste Chevance said the airborne laser technology allowed archeologists to see "a whole network of roads and dykes," revealing a vast urban design uniting it with Cambodia's Angkor Wat temple complex, reported The Cambodian Daily.
. . .
“We’re talking about a city that is more than 1,000 years old and is all underground," she said. "What you see at the site is what looks like termite hills. If you didn't know, you might think it’s natural."
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NASA Introduces Asteroid Grand Challenge to Protect Earth
By Tiffany Kaiser
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NASA also issued a request for information (RFI) for ideas on locating, redirecting, and exploring asteroids
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"NASA already is working to find asteroids that might be a threat to our planet, and while we have found 95 percent of the large asteroids near the Earth's orbit, we need to find all those that might be a threat to Earth," said Lori Garver, NASA Deputy Administrator. "This Grand Challenge is focused on detecting and characterizing asteroids and learning how to deal with potential threats. We will also harness public engagement, open innovation and citizen science to help solve this global problem."
. . .
Back in March of this year, NASA told Congress to "pray" if a meteor similar to the one that hit Russia back in February is ever three weeks away from the U.S. During that House Committee hearing, NASA administrator Charles Bolden Jr. told Congress that the U.S. doesn't have the proper equipment to identify a small meteor (the size of Russia's meteor).
"If it's coming in three weeks ... pray," Bolden said. "The reason I can't do anything in the next three weeks is because for decades we have put it off. We are where we are today because, you know, you all told us to do something and between the administration and the Congress, the funding to do that did not - the bottom line is always the funding did not come."
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Technology |
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Buzzfeed sued by photographer for $3.6m over 'copyright breach'
By Josh Halliday
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A photographer who failed to see the funny side of a Buzzfeed post on "The 30 Funniest Header Faces" is suing the site for $3.6m (£2.3m) over claims it breached his copyright.
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His picture of a grimacing player was removed from the article – now titled "The 29 Funniest Header Faces" – after he made an initial complaint in May 2011.
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If the claim succeeds, Buzzfeed is likely to find itself open to lawsuits from other photographers whose work has been used without permission on its site. The site's lists often use pictures taken from Flickr, where the provenance of some images is unclear, alongside photographs from agencies including Reuters and Getty.
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Science Has Built Luke Skywalker's Robotic Hand, Touch and All
By peter ha
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Amputees may one day regain actual feeling thanks to Darpa and researchers at Case Western University who have created what we thought was once only possible in science fiction. As a part of DARPA's Reliable Neural-Interface Technology (RE-NET) program, CWRU's flat interface nerve electrode (FINE) system has demonstrated that it can provide enough sensation to each individual finger to give amputees the ability to feel their way around, just like Luke Skywalker.
DARPA's RE-NET program studies the longevity and viability of brain interfaces and their accompanying peripherals. What Case Western's FINE system does is provide direct sensory feedback by intertwining itself with what nerves are left intact. So instead of relying on visual feedback to make a prosthetic work or do what the amputee wants, FINE allows them to feel and touch their way around.
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"Pocket Telephones" Made for Cheap Calling All the Way Back in 1910
By Matt Novak
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. . .
A story in the April 30, 1910 Reno Evening Gazette explained a new gadget that was being used by police to call back to their precincts. It was a primitive, battery-powered wiretap that could be plugged into existing telephone lines that anybody may have access to on the street.
The newspaper predicted that soon, everyone would be carrying these pocket telephones with them. And that it would mean instantaneous communication might soon be possible from just about anywhere — provided there was a telephone line within arm's reach. The telephone booth, they promised, would soon be a thing of the past. And talking to other people within your own house would be as easy as pushing a button.
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Why didn't this pocket telephone take off? For a number of very good technological reasons, but the most pressing had to do with money. Reference to "talk will be cheaper" was referring to the fact that people would be able to talk for much longer, but dollars and cents were a larger concern for the phone companies.
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Cultural |
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Breaking Bad News To Kids: How Media Has Tweaked The Process
By (Talk of the Nation)
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. . .
DONVAN: And take me into the head of the eight-year-old who is watching perhaps the Boston bombings coverage.
POWELL-LUNDER: The eight-year-old is seeing life in picture, and the pictures are very, very scary, and that's why for younger viewers it is so important that parents are there to monitor and watch and really sit with them to help explain things because the pictures are coming at them so quickly.
So for example take a show like "Sesame Street," which has many, many different parts to it. They run from sequence to sequence. The reason they do that is that younger brains can focus on sequence to sequence. So if you're showing them sequence to sequence of really horrific things, then that's going to impact them greatly. So it's really important to be there and guide them and talk with them because the way they're going to remember it is in the pictures they've seen.
. . .
POWELL-LUNDER: You know, great point, and really what it has to do with is exposure. So the events that you mentioned earlier, you would see them on the news, but in today's world, we have so many mediums that kids are bombarded constantly with these pictures. Take 9/11 for example. We saw, you know, the events of 9/11 over and over again.
There wasn't any type of visual media you could turn on where you didn't see it. So the impact, to answer your question, is that the kids are exposed to it far more. So it - there are two worries that we have. One is that it makes people less likely to react, and we see this, believe it or not, with kids who are watching a lot of violent video games and violent television programming.
And this is a very controversial subject, but the truth is that the more you're exposed to certain levels of violence or trauma, you have less of a reaction when something happens. So we want to make sure that our kids are not underreacting, but we want to strike the balance and make sure they're not overreacting in the moment.
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Leave Miss Utah alone
By Tauriq Moosa
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Consider this individual: she has appeared on ABC's "What Would you Do?" and is the ambassador for "Healing Hands for Haiti," which aims to bring rehabilitation medicine to the country. She has attended Westminster College and Brigham Young University. Her profile explains that she wants to be an advocate for adoption. Her parents adopted her little brother, who was subsequently diagnosed with several medical issues, including an inoperable brain tumor.
. . .
Marissa Powell, Miss Utah in the Miss America 2013 competition, had mere seconds to answer, no preparation. She thus fumbled. This wasn't an examiner asking a doctoral candidate about her paper; this wasn't a teacher testing a student who was supposed to have prepared. This was a beauty pageant contestant thrust into answering a difficult – though important – question of economics and gender inequality.
She fumbled. And the internet was provided with yet another plaything, yet another tool to throw into the laughing factory. Look how silly she is. Look how stupid this dumb American beauty pageant person is. Wow.
. . .
There are enough actual bad people to hate, enough actual stupid and suffering policies to fight – which can be fought with the tools of mockery and derision. Better these than briefly confused individuals, who are suddenly put on a spotlight so their mistakes will be digitally engraved for longer than is necessary.
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Seattle woman Naveena Shine drops attempt to live on light
By Adam Gabbatt
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A Seattle woman is to abandon her controversial attempt to live on light on Wednesday after 47 days of surviving on water and tea.
Naveena Shine, 65, had been attempting to go without food for 100 days. She said the "overt" reason for ending what she described as an "experiment" was financial – she claimed she will lose the trailer she has been staying in on Wednesday – but said she believed her monetary woes were "a simple a message from the universe that it is time to stop".
. . .
Shine had said she would stop the fast if her weight dropped below 120lb. In daily posts to Facebook and YouTube she had complained of light-headedness and nausea, and said her extremities felt cold. Commenters have been a mixture of those who appear to believe living on light is possible and others urging her to stop.
"From the feedback I am getting, it is becoming patently clear that most of the world is by no means ready to receive the information I am attempting to produce," Shine said. "Even if it were true that a person can 'live on light' and I were successful in demonstrating that, I see that it would be synonymous with putting a non-driver behind the wheel of a huge truck. It would be an accident in the making."
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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. |