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
Militants Sweeping Toward Baghdad
Sunni militants extended their control over parts of northern and western Iraq on Wednesday as Iraqi government forces crumbled in disarray. The militants overran the city of Tikrit, seized facilities in the strategic oil refining town of Baiji, and threatened an important Shiite shrine in Samarra as they moved south toward Baghdad.
The remarkably rapid advance of the Sunni militants, who on Tuesday seized the northern city of Mosul as Iraqi forces fled or surrendered, reflects the spillover of the Sunni insurgency in Syria and the inability of Iraq’s Shiite-led government to pacify the country after American forces departed in 2011 following eight years of war and occupation.
By late Wednesday, witnesses in Samarra, 70 miles north of Baghdad, were reporting that the militants, many of them aligned with the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria or ISIS, were on the outskirts of the city. They said the militants demanded that forces loyal to the government leave the city or a sacred Shiite shrine there would be destroyed. Samarra is known for the shrine, the al-Askari Mosque, which was severely damaged in a 2006 bombing during the height of the American-led occupation. That event touched off sectarian mayhem between the country’s Sunni Arab minority and its Shiite majority.
[...]
Insurgents also were holding 80 Turkish citizens seized in Mosul over the last two days, including the Turkish consul general, other diplomats and at least three children, the Turkish government said. Thirty-one of the Turkish hostages were truck drivers who had been transporting fuel to a power plant in Mosul.
The hostage-taking raised the possibility that Turkey, a NATO ally that borders both Syria and Iraq, would become directly entangled in the fast-moving crisis. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey was holding an emergency meeting with top security officials, and the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, cut short a trip to New York and was returning to Ankara. “No one should try to test the limits of Turkey’s strength,” Mr. Davutoglu said in a statement.
nyt
World News
Kurdish Forces On Alert As Charities Issue Warning Over Mosul Exodus
The exodus of tens of thousands of people from Mosul is "one of the largest and swiftest mass movements of people in the world in recent memory" and will require a rapid humanitarian response from the international community, a leading charity has warned.
As citizens fleeing the insurgent-controlled city jammed the road to Iraqi Kurdistan, Save the Children said that both those still in Mosul and those seeking sanctuary elsewhere faced a growing crisis.
"Massive traffic jams and blocked roads are seriously hindering access and movement of aid, as hundreds of thousands flee from the raging violence and chaos," said Save the Children's acting country director in Iraq, Aram Shakaram. "As an immediate emergency priority, we will distribute water, food and hygiene kits to people fleeing Mosul in coordination with local authorities and organisations responding to the crisis."
Shakaram said the NGO was extremely worried about how the Kurdistan region of Iraq – which is already home to more than 225,000 Syrian refugees – would cope with the huge influx of internally displaced people.
"As terrified families and children flee violence in Mosul, we are witnessing one of the largest and swiftest mass movements of people in the world in recent memory," he said. "Reaching out to them is an immediate priority and we appeal to the international community to step up its funding to this growing crisis."
guardian
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Iraqi Insurgents 'Seize New City'
What's going on?
Deadly clashes erupted in Mosul on 6 June, when militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda, launched an assault on the northern city with allied Sunni Arab tribesmen.
On Monday, the governor of Nineveh province urged residents to "stand firm". But within hours, Atheel al-Nujaifi was forced to flee before the provincial government's headquarters was overrun by hundreds of men armed with rocket-propelled grenades, sniper rifles and machine-guns.
By Tuesday, tens of thousands of residents had left for the nearby Kurdish-controlled region as the militants seized Mosul's airport, army operations centre and other installations. They also set fire to police stations and freed hundreds of detainees. Police and soldiers dropped their weapons and abandoned their posts as the assault became a rout.
[...]
How much of a threat is ISIS to Iraq's stability?
[...]
ISIS has gained strength and momentum from the situation in Syria, from where it has transferred recruits, sophisticated weapons and resources to fight in Iraq since 2012.
It has also skilfully exploited the political stand-off between the central government and the minority Sunni Arab community, which complains that Mr Maliki is monopolising power and targeting them by pursuing policies like the mass arrests in the name of fighting terrorism.
bbc
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Interview With UN Peace Envoy Brahimi:
'Syria Will Become Another Somalia'
For almost two years, Lakhdar Brahimi sought to bring peace to Syria. But in May, the United Nations special envoy stepped down. He speaks with SPIEGEL about the stubbornness of Syrian President Assad, the mistakes of the West and the dangers presented by Islamic radicals.
SPIEGEL: Mr. Brahimi, in May, you stepped down as the United Nations special envoy to Syria. When you took the position in 2012, many considered the task of achieving peace in Syria to be a mission impossible. What did you hope to achieve?
Brahimi: The idea was, and still is, for Bashar al-Assad to agree to become the kingmaker instead of staying on as president, an orderly transition with his participation to go to the new Syria. This is what I was and still am dreaming of.
SPIEGEL: Can you point to a particular incident that showed you that it was time to give up?
Brahimi: When I ended the second round of discussions at the so-called Geneva II conference at the beginning of this year, I realized that this process was not going to move forward any time soon.
SPIEGEL: What happened?
Brahimi: Neither Russia nor the US could convince their friends to participate in the negotiations with serious intent.
[...]
SPIEGEL: For the sake of his country, why couldn't President Bashar accept a replacement leader that everybody could live with?
Brahimi: It is his regime. He still has an appetite for power. The regime is built around his person and he still has enough authority over people that having him stay in power is a fundamental part of their vision of the future. The way he puts it is, "The people want me there and I cannot say no." He said, "I am a Syrian national. If I have 50 percent plus one vote at the elections, I'll stay. If I have 50 percent less one vote, I will go." Yesterday he was just re-elected for another seven years! You have a situation where one side says there can be no solution unless Assad stays in power. While the other side says there can be no solution unless Assad goes. Do you know how to square a circle?
SPIEGEL: Is Assad aware of the way the war is being conducted by his army?
Brahimi: One-hundred percent.
[...]
Brahimi: He knows a hell of a lot. Maybe he doesn't know every single detail of what is happening, but I'm sure he is aware that people are being tortured, that people are being killed, that bombs are being thrown, that cities are being destroyed. He cannot ignore the fact that there are 2.5 million refugees. That number is going to be 4 million next year, and there are 6 million people who are internally displaced. He knows that there are 50,000 to 100,000 people in his jails. And that some of them are tortured every day.
speigel
U.S. News
What Went Wrong For Eric Cantor?
Last month in Richmond, Eric Cantor stepped to a microphone in a hotel ballroom full of Republican activists from his home district. He was clearly ticked off.
Cantor’s wife and two of his kids were there. His mother was there. His mother-in-law was there. And right there in front of them all, a little-known professor from a little college had just called Cantor a bad conservative. The normally cool Cantor was about to strike back — showing a pique he has turned on the president but rarely shows in public.
“When I sit here and I listen to Mr. Brat speak,” Cantor started, referring to challenger David Brat, “I hear the inaccuracies . . .”
The crowd cut him off. After all of 24 seconds.
Then the man who expected to inherit the House of Representatives was drowned out by a bunch of booing nobodies.
“Listen,” Cantor said, struggling to be heard. “We are about a country of free speech, so decency is also a part of this.”
wapo
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Two Signs Of GOP Discord Presaged Toppling Of Cantor
There were menacing signs for U.S. House Republican Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Few paid them any mind.
[...]
In March — in Cantor’s home county of Henrico — tea partyers and libertarians, disdainful of the congressman’s more traditional brand of Republicanism, blocked his forces from using a practice known as “slating” to take control of the county delegation to the party’s 7th District convention.
Then, in May, at the district convention a short distance from the outer Richmond subdivision where Cantor lives, the same coalition of grass-roots insurrectionists voted out Cantor’s handpicked district chairman, Linwood Cobb, and replaced him with Fred Gruber, a tea party activist from rural Louisa County.
[...]
In Tuesday’s primary, Cantor was trapped in a crossfire over immigration reform. He attempted to strike a hard line against amnesty, dramatically scuttling a House vote on legislation that would make it easier for illegal immigrants serving in the U.S. military to become citizens.
[...]
Further, Cantor — a self-styled Young Gun, who along with Paul Ryan, the 2012 vice presidential nominee, was a symbol of Yuppie Republicanism — became a distant figure to many of his Virginia constituents, seen only on Sunday talk shows and in the pages of national newspapers.
richmondtimesdispatch
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With Eric Cantor’s Loss, Another Voice Of Reason Fades
Soon to be ex-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) was and is a conservative. That’s no crime. In fact, in his party, it’s a requirement. But he’s also a reasonable guy who recognizes that doing the nation’s business requires talking to the other side and negotiating and making compromises. That’s no crime either, unless your party has been invaded by extremists.
So a handful of tea party activists mustered their vote in a 7th congressional district primary that didn’t get much turnout from the vast majority of moderate Republicans in Virginia. They prevailed, and now the GOP ticket will sway to the extreme right, just as it did in Texas with Ted Cruz’s Senate victory.
Does that mean the nation is going all tea party on us? No. It just means that the GOP can’t seem to mobilize its moderate voters to go to the polls. The tea party wins by default. The more extreme the GOP becomes, the more tempted moderate Republicans will be to vote Democratic. I’m sure they find that notion equally abhorrent.
There are also times when the Democratic Party’s candidates are so far to the left, they frighten their own voters away from the polls. The extremes are mobilizing the vote while the moderates are being shouted down and discouraged (by the lousy options) from going to the polls.
The two-party system isn’t working under this situation. There needs to be a third, centrist party that unites conservative Democrats and non-extremist Republicans. It would be a party that believes in limited government and fiscal responsibility but also believes that, yes, we do need government and, yes, the government needs to collect taxpayer money and spend it for important, useful purposes. Simply being mean-spirited and saying no to everything isn’t the answer.
dallasmorningnews
Science and Technology
Map Of Universe Questioned: Dwarf Galaxies Don't Fit Standard Model
Dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies defy the accepted model of galaxy formation, and recent attempts to wedge them into the model are flawed, reports an international team of astrophysicists.
David Merritt, professor of astrophysics at Rochester Institute of Technology, co-authored "Co-orbiting satellite galaxy structures are still in conflict with the distribution of primordial dwarf galaxies," to be published in an upcoming issue of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The study pokes holes in the current understanding of galaxy formation and questions the accepted model of the origin and evolution of the universe. According to the standard paradigm, 23 percent of the mass of the universe is shaped by invisible particles known as dark matter.
"The model predicts that dwarf galaxies should form inside of small clumps of dark matter and that these clumps should be distributed randomly about their parent galaxy," Merritt said. "But what is observed is very different. The dwarf galaxies belonging to the Milky Way and Andromeda are seen to be orbiting in huge, thin disk-like structures."
[...]
"Our conclusion tends to favor an alternate, and much older, model: that the satellites were pulled out from another galaxy when it interacted with the Local Group galaxies in the distant past," he said. "This 'tidal' model can naturally explain why the observed satellites are orbiting in thin disks."
sciencedaily
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Extreme Weather To Occur More Often Around Indian Ocean Rim
A double whammy of weird ocean behavior washed over the world in 1997. The Pacific Ocean had already succumbed to an exceptionally strong El Niño, and then the Indian Ocean was hit fiercely by El Niño’s close cousin: the so-called Indian Ocean Dipole. Surface waters off the coast of Indonesia cooled and the ocean’s predominant westerly winds reversed, leading to catastrophic weather. Fires raged across a drought-stricken Indonesia, and floods across east African nations killed thousands.
Climate change could make years like 1997 come more often, according to a new study of the Indian Ocean Dipole cycle, which alternates between two opposite extremes, positive and negative, just as El Niño does with La Niña. The study suggests that rising greenhouse gases will cause extreme positive dipole events—like the one that struck the Indian Ocean in 1997—to occur three times as often this century as they did in the 20th century, or about once every 6 years, as opposed to once every 17 years.
“The Indian Ocean Dipole affects a lot of poor countries,” says lead author Wenju Cai, a climate modeler at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Aspendale, Australia, who published the study with his colleagues online today in Nature. “We really need to build our capacity to deal with these kinds of events.” In January, Cai led a study that found that extreme El Niño events—a warming of tropical waters off the coast of Peru—were likely to double in frequency this century.
[...]
Cai and his colleagues examined 31 global climate models and found that 23 were able to model the rainfall conditions in the Indian Ocean that they used to define an extreme positive dipole event. As a control, they ran the models from 1900 to 1999 to see how well they reproduced extreme events in 1961, 1994, and 1997. Then they ran the models forward from 2000 to 2099 under the “business-as-usual” projections for rising greenhouse gases. Out of the 23 cases, only two did not show a rise in extreme dipole events. “We have a very strong intermodel agreement,” Cai says. Climate change, he says, causes the waters of the western Indian Ocean to warm more than other parts of the ocean, and this preconditions the area to more extreme dipole events.
sciencemag
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Last Straw: How The Fortunes Of Las Vegas Will Rise Or Fall With Lake Mead
The bathtub ring can be seen for miles. The 120-foot-high band of rock, bleached nearly white by mineral-rich water, circles the shoreline of Lake Mead. Water levels have dropped by almost 100 feet in the past decade, and the ring has emerged as a stark reminder of the drought enveloping the American Southwest. It also represents a looming crisis for the largest drinking-water reservoir in the U.S., one that has prompted the most ambitious water-construction project in recent history.
Right now, 600 feet beneath the lake’s glassy blue surface, a massive custom-built tunnel-boring machine—almost as long as two football fields and heavier than four 747s—is plowing inch by tedious inch through wet, fractured bedrock. Spanning nearly 24 feet in diameter, its rock-gnawing face is alive with the movement of 44 disc cutters and 23 knives. The Big Gulp–style tunnel it is boring will eventually intersect with a concrete-and-steel riser installed in the bottom of the lake, like a drain. Two intake pipes already carry water from Lake Mead to Las Vegas, about 25 miles to the west. Known as the Third Straw, Intake No. 3 will reach 200 feet deeper into the lake—and keep water flowing for as long as there’s water to pump.
Lake Mead is more than half empty. If the water drops another 50 feet, the first intake pipe will start sucking air.
“It basically drought-proofs our existing intakes,” says Erika Moonin, the project’s manager and a 17-year veteran of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “There’s a high chance we could lose Intake No. 1 if the drought continues to worsen, and the projections right now don’t look too good for the next two years.” I meet Moonin, who’s paired a silky turquoise blouse with her steel-toed boots and hard hat, at a construction site several hundred yards from the reservoir. She talks me through a map that shows how the new three-mile-long intake tunnel will link to an existing pumping station through a connector tunnel half a mile long. “Barring no real drastic changes,” she says, “we think we can finish before Intake 1 goes dry.”
The current 14-year drought is the most severe since recordkeeping for the Colorado River began, in 1906, and Lake Mead is now more than half empty. On the day of my visit in early February, the water’s surface elevation was 1,108 feet above sea level (the Third Straw will meet the lake bed at 860 feet). If the water drops another 50 feet, the first intake pipe will start sucking air. That’s a problem for Las Vegas, which gets 90 percent of its water from the pipes. But it’s also alarming for everyone to the south. The Hoover Dam, just around the corner from the construction site, releases water downstream to a series of smaller reservoirs and canals that deliver water to communities throughout the Southwest, including my Los Angeles neighborhood.
popsci
Well, that's different...
Fair Enough
In the mid-1980s, convicted South Carolina murderer Michael Godwin won his appeal to avoid the electric chair and serve only life imprisonment. In March (1989), while sitting naked on a metal prison toilet, attempting to fix a TV set, the 28-year-old Godwin bit into a wire and was electrocuted.
newsoftheweird
Bill Moyers and Company:
How Tax Reform Can Save the Middle Class
In part two of his interview, economist Joseph E. Stiglitz says corporate tax abuse
has helped make America unequal and undemocratic.