As your faithful scribe, I welcome you all to another edition of Overnight News Digest.
I am most pleased to share this platform with jlms qkw, maggiejean, wader, rfall, JLM9999 and side pocket. Additionally, I wish to recognize our alumni editors palantir, Bentliberal, Oke, Interceptor7, and ScottyUrb along with annetteboardman as our guest editor.
Neon Vincent is our editor-in-chief.
Special thanks go to Magnifico for starting this venerable series.
Lead Off Story
Viktor Yanukovych Offers Talks, But Ukraine Protesters Say No
Opposition leaders in Ukraine rejected President Viktor Yanukovych's offer of talks Wednesday, saying they will not sit down with him until he fires his government and releases all arrested demonstrators.
That stance reflected their growing confidence after the abrupt withdrawal of riot police from parts of Ukraine's capital early Wednesday raised protesters' hopes that weeks of demonstrations have eroded police support for Yanukovych and his government.
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"This is a great victory," Arseniy Yatsenyuk, leader of the largest opposition party in parliament, said of the police withdrawal. He spoke from the stage at Kiev's central Independence Square, where protesters have set up an extensive protest tent camp manned around the clock.
Western diplomats have increased their pressure on Yanukovych to seek a solution to the tensions that have paralyzed this economically troubled nation of 46 million. In response, Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and other officials promised Wednesday that police would not act against peaceful protesters.
huffpo
World News
Climate Summit Trap: Capitalism's March toward Global Collapse
The municipal utility company in the city of Potsdam is currently wooing new customers with a special "BabyBonus" offer. The slogan reads, "We value little energy robbers! Welcome to the world!" Every newborn receives a credit of 500 kilowatt hours of electricity, allowing him or her to revel from the start in a world where everything, especially energy, will always be available in abundance. These babies may later find they're in for a surprise.
When the United Nations Climate Change Conference wrapped up in Warsaw the weekend before last, it did, despite what most observers and disappointed NGO representatives believe, yield a result. It just wasn't officially announced: the termination of the at-least symbolic general agreement that urgent action must be taken to counter global warming. In other words, climate change has been definitively removed from the global policy agenda.
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The United States' lack of interest in an international treaty is dressed up by its argument that gas extracted by fracking is more climate-friendly than coal, while in Japan, the Fukushima disaster and resulting phase-out of nuclear power has provided those responsible with an excellent argument for why the country now needs to burn more coal in order to stay economically competitive. Hannelore Kraft, governor of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, feels much the same way about her own state. And Australia, Canada, Poland and Russia have never really grasped why global warming should stop anyone from burning everything the oil rigs, mines and pipelines have to offer in the first place.
Capitalism Triumphant
To put it another way: The primacy of economics has prevailed. It no longer seems to matter how we're supposed to get through the rest of this century if the world grows warmer by three, four or five degrees Celsius. National economies require an ever-growing dose of energy if their business models are to continue functioning, and, in the face of this logic, all scientific objections to the contrary are just as powerless as the climate protest movements, which are, in any case, marginal.
spiegel
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Arctic Scramble: Russia to Flex Military Muscle In Far North
The Arctic is believed to be rich in natural gas and oil, and countries with territory in the region are increasingly looking to exploit it. Russia is now planning a dedicated Arctic military force, and is revamping old Soviet military bases to stake its own claim.
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Earlier this year, Russia completed renovation of an abandoned airfield on the New Siberian Islands, and sent 10 warships and four icebreakers to beef up security there. Putin also said Russia would revamp a number of other Arctic military bases that had fallen into disrepair after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday that he would create a special military force dedicated to protecting Russian interests in the Arctic. Putin said earlier this week that Russia needs a greater military presence in the region to counter potential threats from the United States.
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The comments came just one day after Canada announced plans to claim sovereignty over the North Pole. Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird said the government has asked scientists to prepare a submission to the United Nations that would extend Canada's territory to the outer reaches of the country's continental shelf.
speigel
U.S. News
Theft Of U.S. Non-lethal Aid To Syrian Rebels Suspends Shipments
U.S. officials say they have stopped deliveries of non-lethal aid to rebels in Syria after Islamist militants there reportedly seized U.S.-provided equipment.
Washington had agreed to supply forces opposed to Syrian President Bashar Assad with the provision the aid go only to moderate elements within the rebel forces, the Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday.
T.J. Grubisha, a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, Turkey, confirmed the non-lethal aid had been suspended, the Times said. He said shipments of humanitarian aid into northern Syria by international relief organizations had not been affected.
The United States has so far provided more than $115 million in non-lethal aid such as hand-held two-way radios, medical kits, laptops and satellite communications gear to the Syrian opposition
upi
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Pope Francis Named Time's 2013 Person Of The Year
Pope Francis, the first Jesuit pontiff who won hearts and headlines with his humility and common touch, was named Time magazine's Person of the Year for 2013, the magazine revealed Wednesday on TODAY.
The iconic title goes every year to the individual chosen by Time editors as someone who has had the most impact on the world and the news — for better or worse — over the past year.
Pope Francis stood out "as someone who has changed the tone and perception and focus of one of the world's largest institutions in an extraordinary way," Time managing editor Nancy Gibbs said Wednesday.
"So much of what he has done in his brief nine months in office has really changed the tone that is coming out of the Vatican. He is saying, 'We are about the healing mission of the church, and not about the theological police work that had maybe been preoccupying us.'"
today
Science and Technology
Plastic Fishing In The Southern Ocean
Erik van Sebille is looking for something very much out of the ordinary in the Southern Ocean: plastic. He has come to one of the most remote parts of the world – as far as it is possible to go from major concentrations of people – to look for the stuff humans throw away.
Van Sebille, an oceanographer at the University of New South Wales and one of the research leaders on the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was one of the first to start his scientific work aboard the Shokalskiy. In the morning on our first full day at sea, he threw a two-metre-long plankton net, with a pint-sized jar attached to one end, overboard. After five minutes dragging the assembly behind the ship, he fished out the jar and held in his hands something that looked a bit like pea soup – seawater filled with plankton, krill and, perhaps, bits of plastic. For his research, he will take many more seawater samples at different latitudes, sieving each one to identify the constituent parts.
The plastic he is looking for is the stuff that starts off as consumer goods and ends up in the sea as waste. The plastic is broken down over time, by sunlight, into fragments no more than a millimetre across. These particles can float for hundreds to thousands of years on the surface of the sea. Scientists have identified huge areas of the North Atlantic and Pacific oceans, for example, where the water currents force the plastic particles to accumulate. In some of these places, there seems to be more plastic than plankton on the surface. The particles can attract algae, absorb toxic chemicals and have major impacts on the entire marine food chain.
So far no one has carried out measurements of plastic in the Southern Ocean, partly because it is so remote but also because oceanographers have assumed that the prevailing surface currents would limit any plastic build-up there. Van Sebille is aiming to fill that knowledge gap.
guardian
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Bibliometrics: Global Gender Disparities In Science
Despite many good intentions and initiatives, gender inequality is still rife in science. Although there are more female than male undergraduate and graduate students in many countries(1), there are relatively few female full professors, and gender inequalities in hiring(2), earnings(3), funding(4), satisfaction(5) and patenting(6) persist.
One focus of previous research has been the 'productivity puzzle'. Men publish more papers, on average, than women(7), although the gap differs between fields and subfields. Women publish significantly fewer papers in areas in which research is expensive(8), such as high-energy physics, possibly as a result of policies and procedures relating to funding allocations(4). Women are less likely to participate in collaborations that lead to publication and are much less likely to be listed as either first or last author on a paper(7). There is no consensus on the reasons for these gender differences in research output and collaboration — whether it is down to bias, childbearing and rearing(9), or other variables.
It has been suggested that what women lack in research output they make up for in citations, particularly in fields with 'greater career risk'(8) — that is, fields with long lags between doctoral education and securing a faculty position, such as ecology. But again, there is no consensus on the relative impact of women's work compared to men's.
The present state of quantitative knowledge of gender disparities in science has been shaped primarily by anecdotal reports and studies that are highly localized, monodisciplinary and dated. Furthermore, these studies take little account of the rise in collaborative research and other changes in scholarly practices. Effective policy cannot be built on such foundations.
nature
Society and Culture
Neo-Nazi Worries: Bavaria Pulls Plug on Annotated 'Mein Kampf'
For years, historians in Munich have been working on an annotated edition of Adolf Hitler's book "Mein Kampf" to be released when the copyright expires in 2015. The state of Bavaria gave the green light in 2012 -- but now they are trying to halt the project.
Adolf Hitler's notorious ideological treatise "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle) is likely to remain out of print in Germany after Bavaria's state government said late Tuesday it intends to keep it from being published after the copyright expires in 2015. The move reverses an earlier decision by the state to support a new annotated German-language edition -- a project long promoted by historians.
The Bavarian governor's chief of staff, Christine Haderthauer, told reporters that the state would file a criminal complaint against anyone who tried to publish the work, adding that it would be contradictory for Bavaria to allow circulation of the book while at the same time participating in thedrive to ban Germany's main far-right party, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).
For years, historians at the Munich Institute of Contemporary History have been working on an annotated version of the book, which would include explanations of where some of Hitler's ideas originated. The idea was to deflate some of the intrigue attached to a book that has long been all but verboten in Germany.
spiegel
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In A Small Missouri Town, Immigrants Turn To Schools For Help
For centuries, immigrants in search of a better life have been drawn to America's largest cities. Now, in part because of the meatpacking industry, recent immigrants have been seeking out small, rural towns. But many of these towns are struggling to provide the social services needed by such a diverse population that's largely invisible to most Americans.
Noel, Mo., has been dubbed the "Christmas City" and "Canoe Capital of the Ozarks" thanks to the Elk River, which winds through town. But this Missouri town of fewer than 2,000 residents thrives because of the Tyson Foods Inc. chicken processing complex located here — it alone employs about 1,600 people. Just 20 years ago, Noel had only about half as many residents, and most of them were white. Then in the 1990s, Hispanics — most of them Mexican — moved to Noel to process chicken. Pacific Islanders and refugees from parts of Myanmar and Africa followed.
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For Somali newcomers, Noel has been particularly challenging. In a recent incident, tires on more than a dozen of their cars were recently slashed. Police didn't have a suspect and have since dropped the investigation. Some Somalis say they also feel unwelcome at local establishments.
"Overall, this community, they are not welcoming to people [who] look different or [who are of] different religions. It's like they are still in the 1980s ..." says Farah Burale, a Somali-English translator at the Tyson plant. "Because of that reason, we are isolated, we see each other in the chicken plant or on the street without saying, 'Hi.' "
npr
Well, that's different...
Is the signature smell of Texas A&M University more “Italian lemon, bergamot, and iced pineapple" (that open into "a body of vivid florals, raw nutmeg, and cinnamon") or more "bat feces" and "chili-fest stink"? The two commentaries were contrasted in a November Wall Street Journal report on the introduction of Masik Collegiate Fragrances' Texas A&M cologne (one of 17 Masik college clients) at around $40 for a 1.7-ounce bottle. Louisiana State University’s scent conjures up, insisted one grad, the campus's oak trees, but so far has pulled in only $5,500 for the school. (To a football rival of LSU, the school’s classic smell is less oak tree than “corn dog.”) The apparent gold standard of fan fragrance is New York Yankees cologne, which earned the team nearly $10 million in 2012.
weirduniverse
Bill Moyers and Company
Encore: America’s Gilded Capital
New York Times Journalist Mark Leibovich