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
Iraq Formally Asks US To Launch Air Strikes Against Rebels
Iraq has formally called on the US to launch air strikes against jihadist militants who have seized several key cities over the past week.
"We have a request from the Iraqi government for air power," confirmed top US military commander Gen Martin Dempsey in front of US senators.
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Government forces are battling to push back ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) and its Sunni Muslim allies in Diyala and Salahuddin provinces, after the militants overran the second city, Mosul, last week.
US President Barack Obama was meeting senior Congress members on Wednesday to discuss the Iraq crisis. Ahead of the briefing Senate leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, said he did not "support in any way" getting American troops involved in the Iraqi "civil war". But Gen Dempsey told a Senate panel that it was in America's "national interest to counter [ISIS] wherever we find them".
bbc
World News
Tepco’s Ice Wall Runs Into Glitch At Fukushima No. 1
Tokyo Electric Power Co. says the refrigerated ice wall being built to slow the movement of water beneath damaged reactors at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant isn’t working as expected.
Tepco said the project, which remains in its early stages, is experiencing a problem with an inner ice wall designed to contain highly radioactive water that is draining from the basements of the wrecked reactors.
“We have yet to form an ice plug because we can’t get the temperature low enough to freeze the water,” a Tepco spokesman said Tuesday.
Trenches are being dug for a huge network of pipes under the plant that will have refrigerant pumped through them. If successful, it would freeze the soil and form a physical barrier, significantly slowing the rate at which uncontaminated groundwater flows into the reactor basements and becomes contaminated.
“We are behind schedule, but have already taken additional measures, including putting in more pipes, so that we can remove contaminated water from the trench starting next month,” a spokesman said.
japantimes
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Saudis Give Apparent Warning To Iran: Don't Meddle In Iraq
Saudi Arabia gave an apparent warning to arch enemy Iran on Wednesday by saying outside powers should not intervene in the conflict in neighboring Iraq.
Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal also said Iraq was facing a full-scale civil war with grave consequences for the wider region.
His remarks coincided with an Iranian warning that Tehran would not hesitate to defend Shi'ite Muslim holy sites in Iraq against "killers and terrorists", following advances by Sunni militants there.
The toughening of rhetoric about Iraq by the Gulf's two top powers suggested that Tehran and Riyadh have put on hold recent plans to explore a possible curbing of their rivalry across the region's Sunni-Shi'ite sectarian divide.
The Sunni-Shia edge to the Saudi-Iran struggle has sharpened in the last few years. The two see themselves as representatives of opposing visions of Islam: the Saudis as guardians of Mecca and conservative Sunni hierarchy, and Shi'ite Iran as the vanguard of an Islamic revolution in support of the downtrodden.
reuters
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ISIL Fighters Seize Large Part Of Iraq’s Biggest Oil Refinery
Sunni fighters battled their way into Iraq’s largest oil refinery on Wednesday, a development that came as Iran raised the prospect of intervening in its neighbor’s spiraling internecine violence by vowing to defend all Shia holy sites.
Armed groups headed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) were said to be in control of three-quarters of the Baiji refinery north of Baghdad. The oil fields represent the biggest source of fuel for domestic consumption in Iraq, and any outright seizure by ISIL would give the armed group a firm grip on energy supply in the north, where the local population has complained of fuel shortages.
The latest offensive comes after almost a year of bombings and reprisals by both Sunni and Shia groups in Iraq, violence that has largely undone the fragile balance of power between Iraq’s major sectarian groups.
In a sign of deepening chaos and lawlessness in the country, 40 Indian construction workers have been kidnapped in Iraq's second-largest city, Mosul, which fell to Sunni insurgents last week, India's Foreign Ministry said Wednesday.
Iraqi officials said the identity, motivation and whereabouts of the kidnappers remain unknown — but ISIL has scooped up dozens of other workers who are foreign nationals in its campaign across northern Iraq, according to Reuters.
No ransom demand has been received, officials said.
aljazeera
U.S. News
Washington Redskins Trademark Canceled By U.S. Patent Office
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has canceled the Washington Redskins trademark registration, a second such decision following decades of complaints that the name disparages Native Americans.
Trademarks that belittle other groups are not permitted under federal law. The ruling Wednesday pertains to six trademarks containing the word “Redskin.”
While the ruling doesn’t preclude the team from using the Redskin name and logo, it opens the door for outside sellers to sell Redskins merchandise without paying royalties to the team or the NFL. Merchandise royalties are shared among NFL teams, except for the Dallas Cowboys, according to ESPN.
Native American groups have fought the football team, its owners and sponsors for decades to change the name. The team has consistently affirmed its refusal to change the name, including owner Daniel Snyder telling USA Today in 2013, “We’ll never change the name. It’s that simple. NEVER — you can use caps.”
Bob Raskopf, the Redskins’ trademark attorney, said Wednesday the team will appeal the 2-to-1 board decision in federal court. The trademark will be maintained during the process.
chitrib
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The FBI Maintains An 83-Page Glossary Of Internet Slang.
And It Is Hilariously, Frighteningly Out Of Touch.
The Internet is full of strange and bewildering neologisms, which anyone but a text-addled teen would struggle to understand. So the fine, taxpayer-funded people of the FBI — apparently not content to trawl Urban Dictionary, like the rest of us — compiled a glossary of Internet slang.
All of these minor gaffes could be forgiven, however, if the glossary itself was actually good. Obviously, FBI operatives and researchers need to understand Internet slang — the Internet is, increasingly, where crime goes down these days. But then we get things like ALOTBSOL (“always look on the bright side of life”) and AMOG (“alpha male of group”) … within the first 10 entries.
ALOTBSOL has, for the record, been tweeted fewer than 500 times in the entire eight-year history of Twitter. AMOG has been tweeted far more often, but usually in Spanish … as a misspelling, it would appear, of “amor” and “amigo.”
Among the other head-scratching terms the FBI considers can’t-miss Internet slang:
1.AYFKMWTS (“are you f—— kidding me with this s—?”) — 990 tweets
2.BFFLTDDUP (“best friends for life until death do us part) — 414 tweets
3.BOGSAT (“bunch of guys sitting around talking”) — 144 tweets
4.BTDTGTTSAWIO (“been there, done that, got the T-shirt and wore it out”) — 47 tweets
5.BTWITIAILWY (“by the way, I think I am in love with you”) — 535 tweets
6.DILLIGAD (“does it look like I give a damn?”) — 289 tweets
7.DITYID (“did I tell you I’m depressed?”) — 69 tweets
8.E2EG (“ear-to-ear grin”) — 125 tweets
9.GIWIST (“gee, I wish I said that”) — 56 tweets
10.HCDAJFU (“he could do a job for us”) — 25 tweets
11.IAWTCSM (“I agree with this comment so much”) — 20 tweets
12.IITYWIMWYBMAD (“if I tell you what it means will you buy me a drink?”) — 250 tweets
13.LLTA (“lots and lots of thunderous applause”) — 855 tweets
14.NIFOC (“naked in front of computer”) — 1,065 tweets, most of them referring to acronym guides like this one.
15.PMYMHMMFSWGAD (“pardon me, you must have mistaken me for someone who gives a damn”) — 128 tweets
16.SOMSW (“someone over my shoulder watching) — 170 tweets
17.WAPCE (“women are pure concentrated evil”) — 233 tweets, few relating to women
18.YKWRGMG (“you know what really grinds my gears?”) — 1,204 tweets
One would hope the people tasked with investigating federal crimes could decipher that kind of thing through context clues … but the Internet is a vast, dizzying place! And both the law and law enforcement, as many, many recent cases have attested, lag painfully behind technology and technology culture — to the detriment of people in those spaces who need help.
wapo
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U.S. Arrests Philadelphia Man Said To Be Guard At Nazi Camp
In what could prove to be the last Nazi case on American soil, federal officials on Tuesday arrested an 89-year-old immigrant in Philadelphia who is accused of having been a Nazi SS guard at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during World War II.
Johann Breyer, a retired tool maker born in Czechoslovakia, is the oldest person ever accused of ties to the Third Reich by United States authorities who for decades have hunted for Nazis who escaped to America after the war. Mr. Breyer is accused of joining the Waffen SS at age 17 and working as a guard at the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
Mr. Breyer is accused of working as an armed guard at Auschwitz and taking part in the murders of “hundreds of thousands” of Jews from Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Germany in 1944. Officials said he had worked at the part of the camp known as “Auschwitz 2,” or Birkenau, a section that was particularly notorious. While the Nazis used other parts of Auschwitz for slave labor, the Birkenau section was used exclusively to kill victims in gas chambers.
Mr. Breyer, who immigrated to the United States in 1952, was arrested at his home in Philadelphia, and on Wednesday he was in Federal District Court there to face charges. Germany is seeking to have him extradited to stand trial under a sealed German indictment made public on Wednesday. Germany is charging him with 158 counts of aiding and abetting Nazi atrocities.
Mr. Breyer was held in detention Tuesday night, and was led into the courtroom late Wednesday morning wearing a purple jail uniform with his hands shackled. Appearing pale and thin, he was stooped over and walked with difficulty with a cane. He looked around frequently and waved to his wife, Shirley, who was also in the courtroom.
He seemed puzzled at times, and his lawyer told Magistrate Judge Timothy R. Rice that he suffered from a number of health issues, including mild dementia.
nyt
Science and Technology
Real-Time Wastewater Analysis Shows What Drugs Are Being Used Where
When people take drugs, they end up in the water, either unchanged or broken down into specific metabolites. Increasingly, water can be tested to gauge how much drug use is going on in an area, and a new study shows that the level of illegal drugs being used in a community can be tested in real time, and potentially applied to help police narcotic use.
Before the advent of this type of testing, dubbed "sewage epidemiology," drug usage was generally estimated by surveys, crime statistics, narcotics seizures and other self-reported information. But by analyzing the amount and type of drugs in wastewater, as done in this study, researchers can more accurately detect usage rates, find hotspots for abuse, and potentially measure the effectiveness of police countermeasures.
In the study, scientists searched for six illicit drugs (and their metabolites) in two wastewater plants, one serving a small and another a slightly larger community near Albany, N.Y. And drugs did they find, after testing the water each day for a week. In fact, the researchers detected cocaine in 93 percent of the untreated water samples. Based on the relative level of cocaine's metabolites, they determined that most of the drug ended up there via human excretion, rather than direct disposal. So it doesn't appear that a lot of people in Albany are flushing coke down the toilet in a panic. Drug levels remained relatively constant throughout the testing.
Surprisingly, at least to me, morphine was found in 100 percent of the untreated water(!). The human body breaks down heroin into morphine and other chemicals, and this may be where the morphine is coming from, although the researchers don't specifically say in the study, published in Environmental Science and Technology. For what it's worth, the average concentrations of morphine found in the water "was 2.7–3.6 times lower than those reported earlier from the USA and the UK, but 3.0 times higher than those reported in Spain," the authors noted.
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Testing for drugs in public water supplies has revealed a slew of interesting findings in the past few years. A study earlier this year found, for example, that in tests of water from a campus in Washington, “amphetamine levels go through the roof during finals,” University of Puget Sound researcher Dan Burgard told Environmental Health News. Other tests have revealed trends in various countries, as the site noted:
•In London, cocaine and ecstasy spike on weekends while methadone is used more consistently.
•In Italy, cocaine use has declined while use of marijuana and amphetamines has increased.
•In Sweden and Finland, people use more amphetamines and methamphetamines and less cocaine than other European cities. Also, in Finland, stimulants were more common in large cities.
•In Zagreb, Croatia, marijuana and heroin were the most commonly found illicit drugs, but cocaine and ecstasy showed up more frequently on weekends.
•In Oregon, cocaine and ecstasy are more common in urban than in rural wastewater according to a 2009 study.
popsci
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Brain Imaging Shows Enhanced Executive Brain Function In People With Musical Training
A controlled study using functional MRI brain imaging reveals a possible biological link between early musical training and improved executive functioning in both children and adults, report researchers at Boston Children's Hospital. The study, appearing online June 17 in the journal PLOS ONE, uses functional MRI of brain areas associated with executive function, adjusting for socioeconomic factors.
Executive functions are the high-level cognitive processes that enable people to quickly process and retain information, regulate their behaviors, make good choices, solve problems, plan and adjust to changing mental demands.
"Since executive functioning is a strong predictor of academic achievement, even more than IQ, we think our findings have strong educational implications," says study senior investigator Nadine Gaab, PhD, of the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Boston Children's. "While many schools are cutting music programs and spending more and more time on test preparation, our findings suggest that musical training may actually help to set up children for a better academic future."
While it's already clear that musical training relates to cognitive abilities, few previous studies have looked at its effects on executive functions specifically. Among these studies, results have been mixed and limited by a lack of objective brain measurements, examination of only a few aspects of executive function, lack of well-defined musical training and control groups, and inadequate adjustment for factors like socioeconomic status.
sciencedaily
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Antarctic Icebergs Decimating Seafloor Life
A decade ago, the sea floor off the coast of the west Antarctic Peninsula (WAP) was a patchwork quilt of different colors and species. But now, icebergs are increasingly scouring the sea floor as they drift close to shore, fundamentally altering that rich ecosystem in the process. That’s the conclusion of a study reported this week in Current Biology. Each winter, the WAP sea surface freezes over, forming a skin of “fast ice” that holds back the bergs. But with climate change, the WAP is experiencing rapid regional warming, with fewer days each year of fast ice—letting the icebergs into the shallows more often, where they carve huge gashes through the habitat of the colorful, tentacled invertebrate animals carpeting the sea floor. The team examined the spatial distribution, diversity, and interactions between and within species from 1997 to 2013, along with scours from the ice each year. What it found was sobering: Most species weren’t able to recover from the increasingly frequent pounding by the ice. Instead, one species—a nondescript white mosslike animal encrusted on the rocks—emerged as an all-conquering winner, edging out the rest by its sheer ability to take a beating. It now has a near-monopoly in the area, the study found—and that could make the whole region more vulnerable to invading species.
sciencemag
Well, that's different...
Government In Action
For panicking drivers headed in an emergency to University Hospital in Tamarac, Florida, ready to turn left into the ER because of bleeding, shortness of breath, etc., the city still requires patiently waiting for the traffic light to turn green -- no matter what -- and has a $158-per violation red-light camera perfectly aimed, according to a WPLG-TV investigation reported in March. The station noted that the traffic magistrate handling appeals serves at the pleasure of the city and so far has not relented on tickets involving even provable emergencies.
newsoftheweird
Bill Moyers and Company:
Too Big to Fail and Getting Bigger
Economist Anat Admati: Our banks are larger than before the 2008 crash and they’re still living dangerously.