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
US Navy Helicopter Crashes Off Norfolk, Virginia
One of four crew members rescued after a US Navy helicopter crashed off Norfolk, Virginia, has died, officials say, while a fifth is still missing.
The US Navy MH-53E Sea Dragon was on a routine training mission.
US Coast Guard officials said they responded to a downed aircraft report at about 11:00 (16:00 GMT).
In a bizarre coincidence, the incident came a day after another US military helicopter crashed in the county of Norfolk, England, killing four people.
The helicopter involved in Tuesday's crash in the UK was a HH-60G Pave Hawk helicopter that belonged to the US Air Force.
bbc
World News
Economists Caution Government On Privatisation
Economists have warned the Abbott government not to rush to sell off Australia's remaining Commonwealth-owned businesses, saying the record of privatisation in Australia has been poorer than people think.
The chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims, sparked debate this week when he was reported to be urging the government to consider selling off assets such as Medibank Private and Australia Post. He later clarified his remarks to say he was talking about the benefits of privatisation in general.
But some economists have warned the government not to sell off the country's remaining Commonwealth-owned businesses, saying Australia had not been well served by the sale of Telstra, Qantas and Sydney Airport.
''The record of privatisation in Australia has been poor,'' John Quiggin, of the University of Queensland, said.
''In general, the price received for assets has been less than their value in continued public ownership. And conversely, in cases where privatisation was proposed but did not go ahead, the actual earnings received have been more than the return from the estimated sale price.''
sydneymorningherald
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Beijing Beefs Up Territorial Campaign
In a broadening campaign to enforce its territorial claims, China says it’s beefing up its police powers in the disputed South China Sea and requiring foreign fishermen to ask Beijing’s permission to operate within most of the vast, strategic waterway.
The move, which took effect this month, comes on the heels of the late November announcement of a new air defense identification zone requiring foreign planes to notify Beijing of flights over a huge swath of the East China Sea, where China is locked in a bitter territorial dispute with Japan.
The steps are prompting concerns that President Xi Jinping’s push to assert China’s role as a regional power could spark a confrontation with neighbors.
“These sort of assertions of sovereignty, or territorial claims, will continue. Xi believes he can’t afford to be seen as soft,” said City University of Hong Kong China politics expert Joseph Cheng.
japantimes
U.S. News
White House Designates Five Regions As Targets Of New Poverty Initiative
San Antonio, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, south-eastern Kentucky, and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma will be the first targets of President Barack Obama's plan to combat high poverty in American communities, the White House said on Wednesday.
The president will announce the five areas as the first in a series of so-called "Promise Zones" that combine various other efforts under the administration to address struggling neighborhoods, the White House said in a statement.
Obama has pledged to make income inequality in America a top priority. The selection comes on the 50th anniversary of the unofficial war on poverty launched under President Lyndon Johnson. A formal announcement is planned for 2pm ET on Thursday.
guardian
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Record Freeze Extends To Eastern United States, At Least Nine Dead
A deadly blast of arctic air shattered decades-old temperature records as it enveloped the eastern United States on Tuesday, snarling air, road and rail travel, driving energy prices higher and overwhelming shelters for homeless people.
At least nine deaths have been reported across the country connected with the polar air mass that swept over North America during the past few days. Authorities have put about half of the United States under a wind chill warning or cold weather advisory.
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Daniel Dashner, a 33-year-old homeless man who typically sleeps under a bridge on Milwaukee's south side, said he opted to seek a spot at a shelter on Monday night.
"Usually if I have four or five blankets, I can stay pretty warm, but when that wind is blowing, I don't care how many blankets I have, the wind blows right through me," he said, as temperatures dropped to minus 6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 21 degrees Celsius).
The extreme cold won't last much longer, according to AccuWeather.com. The frigid air and "polar vortex" that affected about 240 million people in the United States and southern Canada will depart during the second half of this week, and a far-reaching January thaw will begin, according to AccuWeather.com.
reuters
Science and Technology
These Flying Quadrotors Are The Robot Versions Of The Blue Angels
The International Consumer Electronics Show has just begun, but the trade show has already spawned a dance. But if you'd prefer not to see a conference full of tech industry professionals start to shimmy, fear not: The ones doing the boogeying, in this case, aren't human. The "Flying Robot Dance," instead, features flying automata (quadrotors, in this case) that hover and whizz and even tumble, all in delightful synchrony.
The dance, and the video of it, premiered at the techy trade show in Vegas today—to be watched, if not emulated, by the conference's human attendees. But if the video looks familiar, it's because it's actually a sequel—a follow-up Yuneec International, the collaboration that brought you the epic 2012 video "Robot Quadrotors Perform James Bond Theme."
And what 2014's flying robots lack in Bond, they make up for in Bend: These are some extremely agile little quadrotors. "Dancing," after all, when you're talking about robots, is less about rhythm and more about control—and the video, cheeky as it may be, is a testament to the precise movements that the quadrotors are able to achieve as they fly (and float, and flip) through the air.
theatlantic
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Searching For The Amazon's Hidden Civilizations
Look around the Amazon rainforest today and it’s hard to imagine it filled with people. But in recent decades, archaeologists have started to find evidence that before Columbus’s arrival, the region was dotted with towns and perhaps even cities. The extent of human settlement in the Amazon remains hotly debated, partly because huge swaths of the 6-million-square-kilometer rainforest remain unstudied by archaeologists. Now, researchers have built a model predicting where signs of pre-Columbian agriculture are most likely to be found, a tool they hope will help guide future archaeological work in the region.
In many ways, archaeology in the Amazon is still in its infancy. Not only is it difficult to mount large-scale excavations in the middle of a tropical rainforest, but until recently, archaeologists assumed there wasn’t much to find. Amazonian soil is notoriously poor quality—all the nutrients are immediately sucked up by the rainforest’s astounding biodiversity—so for many years, scientists believed that the kind of large-scale farming needed to support cities was impossible in the region. Discoveries of gigantic earthworks and ancient roads, however, hint that densely populated and long-lasting population hubs once existed in the Amazon. Their agricultural secret? Pre-Columbian Amazonians enriched the soil themselves, creating what archaeologists call terra preta.
Terra preta—literally “black earth”—is soil that humans have enriched to have two to three times the nutrient content of the surrounding, poor-quality soil, explains Crystal McMichael, a paleoecologist at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Although there is no standard definition for terra preta, it tends to be darker than other Amazonian soils and to have charcoal and pre-Columbian pottery shards mixed in. Most of it was created 2500 to 500 years ago. Like the earthworks, terra preta is considered a sign that a particular area was occupied by humans in the pre-Columbian past.
sciencemag
Society and Culture
A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back From The Brink: Powerful And Powerless
Let me state the obvious: I have never lived on the brink. I’ve never been in foreclosure, never applied for food stamps, never had to choose between feeding my children or paying the rent, and never feared I’d lose my paycheck when I had to take time off to care for a sick child or parent. I’m not thrown into crisis mode if I have to pay a parking ticket, or if the rent goes up. If my car breaks down, my life doesn’t descend into chaos.
But the fact is, one in three people in the U.S. do live with this kind of stress, struggle, and anxiety every day. More than 100 million Americans either live near the brink of poverty or churn in and out of it, and nearly 70 percent of them are women and children.
Fifty years ago, President Lyndon Johnson envisioned the Great Society and called for a War on Poverty, naming my father, Sargent Shriver, the architect of that endeavor. The program worked: Over the next decade, the poverty rate fell by 43 percent.
In those days, the phrase “poverty in America” came with images of poor children in Appalachian shacks and inner-city alleys. Fifty years later, the lines separating the middle class from the working poor and the working poor from those in absolute poverty have blurred. The new iconic image of the economically insecure American is a working mother dashing around getting ready in the morning, brushing her kid’s hair with one hand and doling out medication to her own aging mother with the other.
For the millions of American women who live this way, the dream of “having it all” has morphed into “just hanging on.” Everywhere they look, every magazine cover and talk show and website tells them women are supposed to be feeling more “empowered” than ever, but they don’t feel empowered. They feel exhausted.
shriverreport
[Beginning January 12th, you can download a full version of the report at ShriverReport.org. Editor]
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What Happens When A Language's Last Monolingual Speaker Dies?
Emily Johnson Dickerson died at her home in Ada, Okla., last week. She was the last person alive who spoke only the Chickasaw language.
"This is a sad day for all Chickasaw people because we have lost a cherished member of our Chickasaw family and an unequaled source of knowledge about our language and culture," Chickasaw Nation Gov. Bill Anoatubby said in a news release. The Chickasaw Nation has about 55,000 members and is based in the southern part of central Oklahoma.
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"Chickasaw was the dominant language in Chickasaw Nation, both prior to and following removal [when Chickasaw people were forced to relocate to Indian Territory*]," says Joshua Hinson, director of the Chickasaw Language Revitalization Program. "It was the late 1880s, 1890s and into the 1900s when we started to see a shift toward English."
The people who still speak Chickasaw — now in their 60s and 70s — started learning English when they were forced to go to boarding schools for Indians or local public schools. Dickerson didn't learn another language because, Hinson says, she didn't need English. She was from a traditional community, Kali-Homma', and didn't work in a wage economy.
npr
Well, that's different...
Too Clever By Half:
Cops were called on two Los Angeles home-invaders, who were still on the scene when police arrived outside. The perps (who’ve seen the same movies you’ve seen) persuaded the victim-residents to tie them up, too, so that when cops entered, they’d think the perps were actually victims. Victims said, Sure. Perps appeared shocked that as soon as the cops walked through the door, the victims ratted them out (and by then of course the perps could not take off because . . they were tied up).
weirduniverse
Bill Moyers and Company:
State of Conflict: North Carolina