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
Chechen Leader Kadyrov Denies Sending Troops To Ukraine
In a statement, Ramzan Kadyrov said that as part of the Russian Federation, Chechnya had no armed forces - and that any Chechens operating in Ukraine were there in a personal capacity.
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The separatists say they lost up to 100 fighters as they tried to seize Donetsk airport from pro-Kiev forces.
Ukraine's interior ministry says the military is now in full control of the airport, although gunfire was reported in Donetsk itself on Wednesday.
[...]
In a statement released on Wednesday, Mr Kadyrov said: "Ukrainian sources have been circulating reports that some Chechen units from Russia have invaded Donetsk. I officially declare that this is not true."
He added: "There are three million Chechens and two-thirds of them live outside the Chechen Republic, including in the West. We cannot know and are not supposed to know which of them goes where."
bbc
World News
A Real National Front: The French Far Right Aims High
Marine Le Pen shed tears of joy after her triumph in European Parliament elections on Sunday. When she arrived after midnight at a Parisian night club for the victory celebration with her fellow party members, the head of the far-right Front National (FN) embraced fans and family before letting the champagne flow. Marine's father Jean-Marie, who was re-elected to the EU body for the seventh time, was also on hand to congratulate his daughter. "It was a historic victory," he said.
By Monday morning, the emotional evening had already been forgotten and strategists were once again busy at work at the party's headquarters in Nanterre. Until Sunday's election, the Front National had occupied but three seats in European Parliament -- one each for Marine, her father and his political companion Bruno Gollnisch -- and had led a largely unnoticed existence on the political fringes in Brussels. Now, though, the party's caucus will grow by 21 representatives.
After pulling in a triumphant 25 percent of the vote, the Front National will now have the largest number of seats of any French political party in the European Parliament. Marine Le Pen has every intention of using the party's presence at parliament's headquarters in Strasbourg and Brussels for political gain. Some within the far-right in France are already considering their political futures -- all the way up to the presidential palace in Paris.
The first step in the "long march," as Marine Le Pen has termed it, is the creation of a party group in the European Parliament comprised of skeptics of the euro common currency, EU opponents and the far-right or right-wing populists. Doing so would provide the parties with greater access to money and key posts and would also raise their profile. To create a group, at least 25 members of parliament from seven different EU member states must join together in a bloc. Given the divergent ideologies on Europe's right wing, that won't be an easy task.
The only true support Le Pen can count on is from the Austrian right-wing Freedom Party. Right-wing populist parties in Belgium and the Netherlands failed to deliver on Sunday, managing only disappointing results. Meanwhile, radical political forces in Denmark and Britain have said they will not join an alliance with the Front National.
derspeigel
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European Elections 2014:
EU Citizens Vote Against Immigrants, Austerity And Establishment
Marine Le Pen declared victory in European Union elections tonight as voters backed populist, far-Right and Left-wing parties in a backlash against immigration and the euro's economic policies.
In a stunning defeat for the European political establishment, exit polls forecast that the French Front National, which wants to leave the euro and the EU, would win 25 per cent of the vote, more than ten points ahead of Francois Hollande's Socialists.
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"Our people demand one type of politics: politics by the French, for the French, with the French. They don't want to be led anymore from outside, to submit to laws," said Miss Le Pen.
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"Tonight is the start of the crisis. The shock in Europe and the world will be very violent if the far-Right comes first in France," said a senior aide.
President Hollande has called a crisis cabinet meeting on Monday morning to discuss his government's response to the biggest political upheaval in a generation.
telegraph
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Metal Thieves Pillage French Wind Turbines
A sophisticated network of metal thieves has targeted some 20 French wind turbines in a new looting trend, scaling the near 40-metre high structures and stealing up to one tonne of metal from a single engine, Le Figaro reported Wednesday.
Citing an anonymous police source, the daily newspaper said the ring stole metal from wind farms in sparsely populated areas, where they had less chance of being caught.
“They cut the power to turn off the engine propeller motor,” the officer said, noting the thieves broke through the doors at the bottom of the turbines, before using the stairs to reach the engine which is located at the top – often as high as 40 metres off the ground. “By using bolt cutters and makeshift tools they then cut and ripped out the whole metal wiring, which is mostly made of copper,” he said.
The officer said a metal raid of a single wind turbine engine could amount to as much as one tonne of loot. One tonne of copper is estimated to be worth around 4,500 euros on the market.
But the officer said the thieves take great risks, since their modus operandi means they’re stuck within the turbines for several minutes during the raids, with no alternative exits to the bottom door.
windwatch
U.S. News
VA Probe Into Wait Times Expands Amid New Calls For Shinseki To Resign
An investigation of medical care at Veterans Affairs facilities has found "systemic" problems and "manipulation" of waiting lists, prompting new calls for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to resign..
"We are finding that inappropriate scheduling practices are a systemic problem nationwide," the VA inspector general said in an interim report Wednesday that disclosed that the investigation has expanded to 42 sites from the previously reported 26.
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Rep. Jeff Miller (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Veterans' Affairs Committee who had resisted fellow Republicans' calls for Shinseki to resign, said Wednesday that it was time for Shinseki to go.
So too did one Democratic senator, Mark Udall of Colorado, who said the systemic problems at the Department of Veterans Affairs are "so entrenched that they require new leadership to be fixed."
Shinseki issued his own response Wednesday, calling the findings "reprehensible to me, to this department, and to veterans" and reiterated that he was taking steps to ensure that veterans receive timely care. He showed no sign of stepping down.
latimes
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Time For Edward Snowden To 'Man Up' And Return To The US: John Kerry
Secretary of State John Kerry on Wednesday called for fugitive former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to "man up" and return to the US to face the legal consequences for his leaks about sweeping US surveillance efforts.
"The bottom line is this is a man who has betrayed his country, who is sitting in Russia, an authoritarian country where he has taken refuge. He should man up and come back to the United States. If he has a complaint about what's wrong with American surveillance, come back here and stand in our system of justice and make his case," Mr Kerry said in an interview on CBS This Morning.
In his first US network television interview, a portion of which was broadcast on Tuesday evening, Mr Snowden told NBC News that he was "trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense" and rejected the notion that he was only a low-level operative. Mr Kerry said there was nothing new in what Mr Snowden was disclosing about his past.
"It's the same disclosure that everybody's known," he said. "You know, he very cleverly wraps it into his language about 'I was a technical person, I didn't go out there and work with humans, with other people, I wasn't working and interacting with human beings.' Basically, he was doing his computer stuff and that's exactly what he said. So he wraps it into this larger language."
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‘America Must Always Lead,’ Obama Tells West Point Graduates
President Obama on Wednesday tried to regain his statesman’s mantle, telling graduating cadets here that the nation they were being commissioned to serve would still lead the world and would not stumble into military misadventures overseas.
Speaking under leaden, chilly skies, Mr. Obama delivered the commencement address at the United States Military Academy.
“America must always lead on the world stage,” he said. “But U.S. military action cannot be the only – or even primary – component of our leadership in every instance. Just because we have the best hammer does not mean that every problem is a nail.”
Under pressure from critics who say the United States has been rudderless amid a cascade of crises, the president said that those who “suggest that America is in decline, or has seen its global leadership slip away – are either misreading history or engaged in partisan politics.”
A day after announcing that the last American soldier would leave Afghanistan at the end of 2016, the president told this latest class of Army officers that the United States faced a new, more diffuse threat in an arc of militancy stretching from the Middle East to the African Sahel.
nyt
Science and Technology
This Silent, Zero-Emissions Electric Plane Could Be The Future Of Sustainable Air Travel
One of the first public demonstrations of energy efficient air travel took to the air last week at the Berlin Air Show, in the form of a fully electric airplane.
The E-Fan, engineered by Airbus Group, is propelled by two 30-kilowatt electric motors, themselves powered by a series of lithium-ion batteries fitted into the plane’s wings (a 6 kW electric motor in the main wheel gives it some extra thrust on the ground). ”It’s a very different way of flying,” said Jean Botti, chief technical and innovation officer at Airbus Group, told ClimateWire, “absolutely no noise, no emissions.”
While commercial, emissions-free air travel is still a very long ways off, the successful launch of this tiny two-seater marks a major first step toward that very goal, ClimateWire reports:
Airbus Group’s ultimate goal is to make a 70- to 80-person hybrid-electric commuter jet with three hours of range in the 2050 time frame. Initial designs of the E-Thrust aircraft show the plane with six electric-powered fans that will be powered by a gas-fueled energy storage unit during the ascent and cruise phase and then glide using electric power alone while descending.
In the next step toward achieving this, Airbus will make a next-generation two-seater electric plane, set for launch in 2017, and a four-seater electric plane with a gas-powered range extender, set for launch in 2019.
These advances are steppingstones toward realizing Flight Path 2050, the European Union’s aggressive goal to reduce the aviation sector’s nitrous oxide emissions by 90 percent, noise pollution by 65 percent and carbon dioxide emissions by 75 percent by 2050.
salon
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Google’s Next Phase in Driverless Cars: No Brakes or Steering Wheel
Humans might be the one problem Google can’t solve.
For the past four years, Google has been working on self-driving cars with a mechanism to return control of the steering wheel to the driver in case of emergency. But Google’s brightest minds now say they can’t make that handoff work anytime soon.
Their answer? Take the driver completely out of the driving.
The company has begun building a fleet of 100 experimental electric-powered vehicles that will dispense with all the standard controls found in modern automobiles. The two-seat vehicle looks a bit like the ultracompact Fiat 500 or the Mercedes-Benz Smart car if you take out the steering wheel, gas pedal, brake and gear shift. The only things the driver controls is a red “e-stop” button for panic stops and a separate start button.
The car would be summoned with a smartphone application. It would pick up a passenger and automatically drive to a destination selected on a smartphone app without any human intervention.
nyt
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Ask Anything: Could You Build A Spaceship Out Of Wood?
“In terms of strength, wood is pretty good,” says Mike Gruntman, professor of astronautics at the University of Southern California. Early airplanes were built with wood, all the way into the early 1930s. (There were also wooden submarines.) Gruntman thinks it may be possible to build a wooden spacecraft that could survive the stress of a rocket launch.
Once your timber ship made it into space, however, you’d have a lot of problems. For starters, the organic matter would contain a fair amount of water. In a vacuum, that water would leak out and evaporate, which could affect the structure—especially in places where screws and brackets were attached. Even if this process unfolded over many weeks or months, the integrity of the spacecraft might be compromised.
That’s not all. “A spacecraft’s structure doesn’t only serve to hold everything together,” Gruntman explains. It also performs two other key roles. First, it provides thermal conductivity, so that heat can dissipate across the entire surface of the vessel. That becomes significant when one side of a spaceship is exposed to direct sunlight while the other is in darkness, or when thrusters fire at one end. If a spacecraft’s hull were not sufficiently conductive—which would be the case if it were made from spruce or hickory instead of, say, aluminum—then intense heat in certain parts of the craft could damage batteries and other crucial components.
Second, the structure should provide electrical conductivity, since this allows for grounding of the spacecraft and protects against built-up charge. If a wooden satellite were orbiting in space 300 miles up, this excess charge might simply dissipate into the surrounding plasma. But up in higher orbits, the poor conductivity of wood could be a disaster. Wood would also give off gases as it aged, which might damage delicate sensors or other equipment. And finally, wood is flammable. “If I were designing a manned spacecraft,” says Gruntman, “I would make it out of things that do not burn.”
popsci
Well, that's different...
Can't Possibly Be True
As of late March, the Sainsbury's supermarket in Basford, England, still had an operational ATM on an outside wall even though its screen and controls were only 15 inches off the ground, forcing customers to bend over or kneel down to get cash. A Sainsbury's spokesman, shown a photo by a reporter of a user squatting "incredibly uncomfortabl(y)," said no one had complained, but that the store would look into moving the machine. The only explanation offered for the placement was that the store is located on a hill.
newsoftheweird
Bill Moyers and Company:
Facing the Truth: The Case for Reparations
This week Bill speaks with Ta-Nehisi Coates, a senior editor for The Atlantic about his cover story on why America needs to reconcile with its racist past.