Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, July 01, 2014.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: In the End There's Only Love by Ewert and the Two Dragons
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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Forget Me: the real reasons people ask Google to erase their online presences
By Paula Cocozza
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Invasion of privacy accounted for 306 of the 1,106 submissions that Forget Me filed to Google as of Tuesday, with disclosure of home address the largest subcategory (66 submissions). "Negative opinions", "redundancy" and "origin, nationality or ethnic identity" follow. Sexual orientation appears way down the list of privacy-related reasons for removing web pages, below disclosure of income and philosophical belief. Forget Me's sample of just over 1,000 submissions represents a small percentage of the 40,000-plus requests received by Google, but is still large enough to indicate the most pressing concerns.
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"When you fill in Google's form, you need to indicate the pages you want to suppress but you also need to write a text explaining why the pages are 'irrelevant, outdated or otherwise inappropriate'," says Bertrand Girin, the CEO of Reputation VIP. "The text will be judged by Google on certain criteria – whether the information is obsolete, for instance. These are legal terms. What we wanted to do was create texts that people could understand easily. So we wrote 30 different cases. 'I've been fired by my company and that's a problem because I need to find another job,' for instance. We then asked lawyers to write the texts that correspond to these cases." It is too early to know the company's success rate compared to that of other applicants.
. . .
Forget Me's categories of user and their reasons for wanting to assert their right to privacy are interesting. But, of course, they can only reflect the predetermined "cases" that Girin's team devised: the service can protect your privacy, not your individuality. You might be anonymous, but you'll always be data.
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No more annual pelvic exams, physicians group says
By Brooks Hays
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Pelvic exams are painful, anxiety-inducing and embarrassing for many women, especially those that may have been previously sexually abused. They also have no measurable health benefit. With no obvious pros and several emotional cons, the American College of Physicians -- a prominent advocacy group -- says the exam should be nixed from the yearly checkup routine.
"The pelvic examination has held a prominent place in women's health for many decades and has come to be more of a ritual than an evidence-based practice," declared doctors George F. Sawaya and Vanessa Jacoby in an editorial published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
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Though the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has admitted the pelvic examination "lacks data to support a specific time frame or frequency," the group still recommends women above the age of 21 undergo a yearly exam after consultation with their physician.
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Dear fellow zillionaires: they're coming for us with pitchforks
By Cory Doctorow
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Nick Hanauer, a hereditary millionaire who increased the family fortune with some shrewd early dotcom inventions has written an open letter to his fellow "zillionaires" warning that their corruption of the US political system has given rise to an unstable situation of wealth inequality that has turned their potential customers into impoverished pitchfork-wielding revolutionaries who are coming for their heads.
Hanauer wants to salvage capitalism, but he's keenly aware that the reforms that Reagan began and his successors have built upon have created a system that benefits people like him at the expense of the people he sells things to. He fears that a delusional belief in American exceptionalism has made America's plutocrats unrealistically comfortable with this situation, convinced that neither the French Revolution nor the Arab Spring could ever take hold among Americans.
. . .
Hanauer doesn't believe that he's a "job creator." Jobs, he says, come from consumer demand for products and services, and that demand (as arch-conservative Henry Ford believed) can only be fueled by worker affluence. Capitalists want "rich customers and poor employees" but this doesn't work on a national scale: your worker is someone else's customer.
. . .
During the Cold War, the debate over social spending and worker rights always had a thread about the necessity for capitalism to discredit the Soviet project by showing that markets produced a good deal for workers, but no more. Without an external enemy, capitalists have adopted a rhetoric that elevates owning stuff and investing the rents from that stuff to the most important part of the economic story, while the people who make and do stuff are demoted to commodities that can be trivially substituted with someone willing to work at lower wages and under worse conditions.
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Police swoop down on Hong Kong protesters
By (Al Jazeera)
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Waving colonial-era flags and chanting anti-Beijing slogans, protesters demanded democratic reforms, reflecting surging discontent over Beijing's insistence that it vet candidates before a vote in 2017 for the semi-autonomous city's next leader.
The rally came after nearly 800,000 people took part in an informal referendum calling for voters to be allowed a say in the nomination of candidates.
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China has promised to let all Hong Kong residents vote for their next leader in 2017 - currently a 1,200-strong pro-Beijing committee chooses the city's chief executive.
But it says candidates must be approved by a nomination committee, which democracy advocates fear will mean only pro-Beijing figures are allowed to stand.
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International |
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Only the radical left can save Greece – and Europe – from disaster
By Antony Loewenstein
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The story from an Athens hospital beggared belief. In May a 54 year old man needed immediate heart surgery. He was unemployed and uninsured, a common reality for many Greek citizens since the economic crisis hit in 2008. The hospital initially refused to admit him, fearing they would never get paid, but the man said he would submit the required welfare document when he received it. His doctor convinced the facility that the patient was in jeopardy and must be operated on immediately.
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Such issues are increasingly common here in Greece. According to Transparency International, Greece has the most corrupt public service in Europe. The Institute of Economic Affairs found that Greece’s shadow economy in 2012 was equivalent to 24% of GDP.
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This left is undoubtedly growing. During a public event last week in Athens with writer Christos Tsiolkas and me, talking about the concept of nation in a fractured, patriotic world, organiser Eugenia Tzirtzilaki encouraged the audience to challenge popular and simplistic notions of identity and find a more inclusive European perspective.
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“I worry that they accept the EU framework”, he said. “Leader Alexis Tsipras thinks you can reform the EU terms on which Greece implements measures against austerity.” With a majority of Greeks now having a “negative opinion” of the EU, Kampagiannis argued that Greece should leave it. In the transition away from Brussels, he told me, “we can have a policy where the working class interests are protected and capital should pay”.
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Belgium Might Not Be a Country by the Next World Cup
By Sam Brodey
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Belgium was an invention of the 19th century: culturally and linguistically, it's divided cleanly between the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south. Brussels, the capital of both Belgium and the European Union, is right in the middle. Recently, politicians in Flanders—which became wealthier than industrial, coal-mining Wallonia in postwar Europe—have pushed for independence, leading to serious strife between the country's two largest political parties.
Those parties, the Dutch-speaking New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) and the French-speaking Christian Democrats, failed to form a government last week when Flemish leaders walked away from coalition talks. The last time Belgium couldn't form a government was in 2010; it took the parties 18 months to finally do it. The N-VA is a separatist party whose support has skyrocketed in Flanders; in Wallonia, right-wing politicians are asserting ties to France, and French National Front leader Marine Le Pen—who has compared Muslim immigration to Nazi occupation—said her country would welcome the Walloons "with pleasure."
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New Panama President Varela offers gangs one-month amnesty
By (BBC)
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The new president of Panama, Juan Carlos Varela, has offered an amnesty until 1 August to "more than 200 criminal gangs" operating in the country.
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He urged them to "sever links with organised crime and join civic life".
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Mr Varela, 50, has promised to tackle corruption in the Central American nation in the next five years.
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Mr Varela faces the challenge of maintaining buoyant growth while dealing with economic inequality. A quarter of the Panamanian population lives in poverty.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Nearly 80 percent of US deaths in first three decades of life are due to unintentional injury or violence
By (ScienceDaily)
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According to the report, by CDC researchers from Atlanta, USA, more Americans between the ages of one and 30 die from injury than from any other cause. Every year, nearly 180,000 people in the USA die from preventable causes such as automobile crashes, drowning, firearm-related injuries, falls, assault, and drug overdoses; equivalent to one injury death every 3 minutes.
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In 2010, the 31.2 million unintentional and violence-related nonfatal injuries had an estimated cost of over US$500 billion dollars in medical care and lost productivity. According to the report, that figure "does not include the costs associated with non-medically treated injuries, legal costs or indirect costs from other health problems associated with or exacerbated by violence and injuries."
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"The scientific evidence to support prevention of injury and violence is strong. We know the factors that place people at risk and it is possible to intervene with cost effective interventions. Child safety seats, seatbelt laws, and drink driving laws are good examples of interventions that have been proven effective at reducing the number of deaths due to injury, as well as reducing costs. Other interventions, such as in-home visitation by nurses and therapeutic foster care as an alternative to juvenile incarceration, and universal school-based violence prevention programs have proven effective, and expanding these programs could reduce the numbers of injuries even further."
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GM recalls 8.4 million more cars due to ignition defect
By (BBC)
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They are mostly vehicles manufactured between 1997 and 2014 and are being recalled for ignition switch defects.
Among the recalled vehicles, GM says it is aware of seven crashes, eight injuries and three fatalities.
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Kenneth Feinberg - the man GM appointed to deal with compensating those affected by the recalls - has said that the carmaker will not put a cap on the amount it will pay to victims.
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
Random notes related to this video:
. . .
With or without fire-breathing colleagues, this Estonian foursome has just published a new album: "Good Man Down." The title alone brings us back into the general realm of Man Bites Dog, even without any (forced and unfunny) bestial quips. The military register of that three-word phrase leads us to expects tales of decent folk, unfair destiny... and heroic endurance. Be they ironic or serious, songs of perseverance are evidently on the bill.
. . . Ewert and the Two Dragons were awarded Skype’s “Go Change the World” Award. It would seem that tales of staying-power are sought widely. With bodhran-like drumming and the liberal use of twee, twinkling glockenspiels, these songs acquire a folky sense of timelessness - with rare notes of childish hope, come what may. . .
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A brief interview of this year focused upon the fact that Ewert Sundja and his colleagues see their work as "a way of communicating and telling a story... It's a way of learning and growing." The discrete units of individual songs take second place to an ongoing tale of maturation. Singing becomes synonymous with continuation - and superior social bonds.
. . .
And that leads us once more to the title track - and an accusatory question embedded in the lyrics: "How could you shoot a good man down/ And leave without mourning/ Brokenhearted on the ground?" It's a question already or implicitly answered by the album's opening composition - in terms that are almost laughably simple, yet tragically ignored: "In the end there's only love." With that kind of heartfelt directness, the appeal of Ewert and the Two Dragons is more than understandable.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Net-zero energy test house exceeds goal; ends year with energy to spare
By (ScienceDaily)
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Despite five months of below-average temperatures and twice the normal amount of snowfall, NIST's Net-Zero Energy Residential Test Facility (NZERTF) ended its one-year test run with 491 kilowatt hours of extra energy. Instead of paying almost $4,400 for electricity -- the estimated average annual bill for a comparable modern home in Maryland -- the virtual family of four residing in the all-electric test house actually earned a credit by exporting the surplus energy to the local utility.
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"The most important difference between this home and a Maryland code-compliant home is the improvement in the thermal envelope -- the insulation and air barrier," says NIST mechanical engineer Mark Davis. By nearly eliminating the unintended air infiltration and doubling the insulation level in the walls and roof, the heating and cooling load was decreased dramatically.
. . .
Planned measurement-related research at the NZERTF will yield knowledge and tools to help trim this cost difference. Results also will be helpful in identifying affordable measures that will be most effective in reducing energy consumption. And research will further the development of tests and standards that are reliable benchmarks of energy efficiency and environmental performance overall, providing information useful to builders, home buyers, regulators and others.
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Greenpeace urges Lego to end Shell partnership
By Adam Vaughan
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Lego is putting sales above its commitment to the environment by partnering with Shell, according to Greenpeace, which is launching a global campaign to force the world’s biggest toymaker to end a deal that puts the oil company’s logo on the famous bricks.
. . .
Lego has trumpeted its environmental credentials, recycling 90% of its waste and making its operations nearly one-third more energy efficient over five years. It has pledged to produce more renewable energy than the energy it uses by 2020, and is exploring an alternative raw material – currently crude oil – for its bricks.
Asked if its partnership with Shell was at odds with its CEO’s promise to leave a positive impact on the planet, a spokesman said: “We expect and are confident that Shell lives up to the legislation wherever they operate, including the Arctic, but we can only refer to Shell for comments on where and how Shell operates. We consider our biggest contribution in leaving a positive impact to be through inspiring and developing children as they experience the joy and learning opportunity that creative play provides.”
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Cool roofs offer a salve for hot cities — and the climate, too
By Benjamin Mandel
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. . . “cool” roofs, which are lighter in color than traditional black slabs and therefore reflect more of the sun’s heat. Cool roofs save money by keeping indoor temperatures more comfortable in warm weather and reducing the need for air conditioning. And since smog forms more rapidly at higher temperatures, reducing excess urban heat can also make city air safer to breathe. To top it off, cooler temperatures can make heat waves less hazardous to city-dwellers.
On a larger scale, the impact can be even greater. A global campaign to brighten cities could cancel out some of the warming caused by greenhouse gases. This is because reducing energy absorption at Earth’s surface decreases the amount of heat these gases can trap in the atmosphere. Of this planetary conversion, Rosenfeld says “it’s like taking half of the world’s cars off the road for 20 years.”
. . .
In 2011, around the time the White Roof Project was getting off the ground, the Big Apple passed a roofing requirement similar to California’s. Chicago had already joined the cool roof club in 2008. And the Los Angeles city council recently approved the most stringent reforms yet, requiring cool roofs not just for commercial buildings, but for new homes and major home renovations as well. The rules were spurred by a study projecting that the region’s temperature would rise by up to 7 degrees by 2050, prompting concerns over air quality, energy use, power reliability, and public health. Homeowners can get a rebate of up to 30 cents per square foot when they purchase a cool roof product.
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Rosenfeld agrees that insulation can be a good way to make buildings more energy efficient, but he says that it has none of ancillary benefits of reflective roofs. “It’s surely a lot cheaper to make a city’s roofs white when they need to be replaced anyway than to bring all their insulation up to code,” Rosenfeld says. Besides, as he points out, “Insulation can’t make the air cooler during a heat wave.”
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Science and Health |
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Triceratops horn took one million years to fully develop
By (UPI)
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For fifteen years, paleontologists from Montana State University have returned annually to the Hell Creek Formation in the northwestern portion of the state looking for additional Triceratops specimens. Slowly but steadily, the researchers amassed enough fossils to reveal an interesting reality -- the now famous "three-horned face" of the stout rhino-like dinosaur had not always been as we know it today.
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Scientists had previously realized that the facial structure of the well-armored Triceratops -- which grew up to thirty feet in length and weighed upwards of 16,000 pounds -- changed as the dino matured. But this new study, analyzing the skulls of some 50 Triceratops, reveals how the species' face evolved over many, many lifetimes.
Such a revelations wouldn't have been possible if not for the fact that so many Triceratops are preserved in the Hell Creek Formation -- an outcropping of Upper Cretaceous and some lower Paleocene rocks named for Hell Creek, near Jordan, Montana, but which includes exposures in Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.
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Painkiller prescription rates vary greatly among U.S. states
By Brooks Hays
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A new study from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows people in some states swallow quite a few more pain pills than others.
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States in the Southeast occupied most of the top ten spots on the list of places with the highest painkiller prescription rates. High rates were also measured in some states farther to the north, including West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana and Michigan.
Where high rates of painkiller prescriptions are found, addiction and overdose problems usually follow. Every day, the CDC says, 46 people in the U.S. die from painkiller overdoses.
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One state in the Southeast has helped reverse overdose rates by enacting stricter prescription monitoring regulations -- Florida. In 2012, the Sunshine State passed a law to rein in "pill mills" and subsequently cut overdose deaths by some 17 percent. New York passed a similar law the same year, requiring doctors to check a database of past prescriptions before giving a patient more drugs. According to the CDC, a 75 percent drop in patients "doctor shopping" followed.
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Ebola: WHO calls emergency talks on outbreak
By Tulip Mazumdar
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Health ministers from 11 African countries are meeting in Accra, Ghana, in an attempt to "get a grip" on the deadly and worsening Ebola outbreak.
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But it has since spread to Liberia and Sierra Leone and is now the biggest and most deadly Ebola outbreak the world has seen, say officials.
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The way to stop an outbreak is to isolate those who have it and ensure no-one else is exposed. Medical staff are following up on hundreds of people who have had contact with infected patients. They have to be closely monitored for 21 days before they can be given the all clear.
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The medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) is working with the World Health Organization and the Guinea Ministry of Health. It has four isolation facilities in Guinea and more than 300 international and local staff.
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Technology |
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Emotions Can Be Contagious on Online Social Networks
By Tanya Lewis and LiveScience
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When Facebook removed positive posts from the news feeds of more than 680,000 users, those users made fewer positive posts and more negative ones. Similarly, when negative posts were removed, the opposite occurred.
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The idea that emotional states can spread among people without their awareness, known as emotional contagion, has been shown before in laboratory experiments. One study found that lasting moods such as depression and happiness can be transferred via a real-world social network, but the findings have been controversial because it was based on correlational evidence and could not rule out other potential variables.
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What's more, nonverbal behavior, or body language, doesn't appear to be necessary for emotions to spread, the study showed. Text alone was enough to have an effect.
Interestingly, the findings also challenge the idea that seeing the positive posts of others may have a negative impact on people by making them compare themselves against their friends. Instead, the researchers found that seeing positive posts in their feed prompted people to make more positive posts themselves.
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Samsung finds labour violations at dozens of its Chinese suppliers
By Charles Arthur
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Samsung says that an external audit found labour violations at dozens of its suppliers in China, including failure to provide safety gear and excessive working hours, but that none involved child workers.
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The report is part of growing pressure on the world's two biggest smartphone suppliers, Apple and Samsung, which rely on Chinese labour to produce millions of phones every quarter. Apple was the focus of intense scrutiny from 2010 over labour practices at Foxconn, its principal supplier in China.
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The audit, covering the period to the end of December 2013, also found that 59 suppliers in China didn't provide sufficient protective goggles, masks and other safety equipment to workers, while 48 let minors (employees aged 16-18) handle chemicals. Most of the audited factories did not comply with legally permitted overtime hours.
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Why Countdown Clocks for Pedestrians Actually Cause More Car Crashes
By Sarah Zhang
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As a frequent traveler by foot, I love countdowns at crosswalks. They tell me whether I should wait out 2 seconds or leisurely walk across in 15. And indeed, these countdowns do make pedestrians safer. But it turns out that countdowns actually cause more crashes between cars. Here's why.
The answer is, weirdly enough, too much information. We all know how drivers who like to speed up at a yellow light. Countdown clock are meant for pedestrians, but they also inadvertently tell drivers about upcoming red lights—with even more detail and more lead time than yellows. While we should, in theory, act rationally with that extra information, drivers actually just tailgate more aggressively to race through before the light changes.
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That presents a dilemma: how do we make intersections safer for pedestrians without making them more dangerous for cars? The study's authors propose an idea based on how officials might deal with terrorism. If you announce a bomb in a building, you're likely to get a mass stampede toward the exists. But a code phrase could alert the guards to get people out with less panic.
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Cultural |
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What do you do with millions of extra graduates?
By Yojana Sharma
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Both India and China have experienced a higher education revolution in the past decade, with the number of young people completing university degrees rising from a few hundred thousand a year to many millions.
Dramatic expansion of university education should have provided new graduates with opportunities unheard of in their parents' generation.
Instead, with an alarming rise in the number of unemployed and under-employed graduates, a large group of educated young people are becoming alienated, unable to become part of the growing middle class.
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The "ant tribe" refers to the army of under-employed or underpaid graduates unable to fulfil their ambitions, according to sociologist Lian Si, whose book The Ant Tribe was published in 2010.
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Instead experts now talk of a "gargantuan national crisis", a ticking time-bomb of unemployed and under-employed youth unable to contribute to the economy.
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From a house of hate, an outburst of violence
By Tara McKelvey
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Miller, 73, has been charged with murder following the deaths of three people in Johnson County, Kansas, in April. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for November.
Two of the victims, William Lewis Corporon, a 69-year-old physician, and his grandson, Reat Underwood, 14, were killed at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City, which is about 180 miles away from Miller's house. Reat, who belonged to the Church of the Resurrection, was there for a singing audition.
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"We're paying all our attention to Islamic terrorism," said David Neiwert, author of Death on the Fourth of July, a book about hate crimes. "And not enough to the biggest problem - the neighbour next door."
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The problem is not confined to the region. Around the world about 25% of people hold anti-Semitic views, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Some people say white supremacists and other extremists are given too much freedom to hate.
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Miller lived in a house with dark-green shutters. Two railroad ties are lying in the yard, and on a recent afternoon a black dog ran through tall grass. Miller looked like "an old retired farmer", said DeLay. He seemed harmless - and despite his extremist views was hardly shunned.
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Anti-Semitism and extremist ideology seem to play a role in the violence, but Bresson and other officials say that knowing when a white supremacist - or anyone - will explode is beyond their purview. In the end the authorities and others are faced with a sad reality, described by Sheriff DeLay:
"It's just a messed-up world."
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |