Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, July 22, 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: Red Red Wine by UB40
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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Earth crushes another temperature record; not getting much love from the stands
By Jim Meyer
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June marked the 352nd consecutive hotter-than-average month, a stretch reaching back to February of 1985, and it doesn’t show any signs of cooling off. So far this year, every month but February has been one of the four hottest on record, and, with an El Niño on deck, 2014 is well on its way to becoming the hottest year in history.
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Arndt said both the June and May records were driven by unusually hot oceans, especially the Pacific and Indian oceans.
Heat records in June broke on every continent but Antarctica, especially in New Zealand, northern South America, Greenland, central Africa and southern Asia.
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All 12 of the world’s monthly heat records have been set after 1997, more than half in the last decade. All the global cold monthly records were set before 1917.
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Unprecedented Spate of Wildfires Incinerates Homes in Pacific Northwest
By Elizabeth Harball and ClimateWire
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Fire crews are making an unheard-of scramble as a huge number of lightning-sparked wildfires continue to burn across drought-parched regions of Oregon and Washington. One fire in north-central Washington has already caused severe damage, destroying an estimated 150 homes.
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"Our resources are stretched thin and fire crews are doing everything possible," Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) said in a statement Sunday that accompanied the announcement of expanded burning restrictions for 20 counties east of the Cascades. "We must take every possible precaution to reduce the risk of additional fires."
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According to Mark Svoboda, a climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center, the dry conditions currently exacerbating the situation have their origins with the infamous high-pressure ridge that blocked precipitation from reaching California this winter, resulting in the current record-breaking drought.
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This level of fire activity is consistent with what the Pacific Northwest may have to contend with more as climate change intensifies. The National Climate Assessment, released this year, stated that warmer and drier conditions have already increased the frequency and intensity of fires in Western forests since the 1970s.
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Study Finds Kids Prefer Healthier Lunches. School Food Lobby Refuses to Believe It.
By Kiera Butler
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From all of the commotion around the new federal school lunch standards, you'd think they were really Draconian. Republican legislators have railed against them. Districts have threatened to opt out. The School Nutrition Association (SNA), the industry group that represents the nation's 55,000 school food employees, has officially opposed some of them—and doubled its lobbying in the months leading up to July 1, when some of the new rules took effect.
Half of those surveyed said that the students "complained about the meals at first," but 70 percent said that the students now like the new lunches.
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SNA's response? To issue a statement declaring that "these reported perceptions about school meals do not reflect reality." The group cites USDA data that participation in school meals has declined by 1.4 million since the new rules went into effect in 2012. But Turner, the Childhood Obesity study's lead author, notes that this is only about a 3 percent drop. She also points to a Government Accountability Office study that found that most of the drop-off was among students who pay full price for lunch.
What makes SNA's stance on the new rules even stranger is that they actually are not all that strict. For example: Foods served must be whole grain rich, but as I learned from my trip to SNA's annual conference last week, that includes whole-grain Pop Tarts, Cheetos, and Rice Krispies Treats. Students are required to take a half cup of a fruit or vegetable—but Italian ice—in flavors like Hip Hoppin' Jelly Bean—are fair game.
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Flight MH17: U.S. Builds Its Case; Plane Wreckage Reportedly Cut Apart
By Bill Chappell
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American analysts say they've verified several pieces of evidence that show pro-Russian separatist rebels shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, according to U.S. intelligence officials who briefed reporters Tuesday.
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Voice analysis confirms that a phone conversation about the shot-down plane was between two well-known separatist leaders. Their conversation was intercepted and publicized by Ukraine shortly after the airliner was shot down Thursday.
The weapon that likely took the plane down – a Russian-made SA-11 anti-aircraft missile – wasn't being used by Ukraine, which the U.S. says has used planes, not missiles, in its fight against the separatists.
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The forensics work could be complicated, given the restricted access investigators had to the crash site for days after the jet was shot down — and given today's reports that some of the plane's wreckage had been cut apart.
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For weeks, U.S. intelligence agencies have been saying that Russia was supplying rebels in Ukraine with weapons. And after today's briefing, Tom reports that analysts now say "Russian equipment, including tanks and armored personnel carriers, are still continuing to roll into Ukraine from Russia."
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International |
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FGM summit: Cameron calls for end 'in this generation'
By (BBC)
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David Cameron has said female genital mutilation (FGM) and childhood forced marriage should be stopped worldwide "within this generation".
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As part of this, parents will face prosecution if they fail to stop their daughters undergoing FGM.
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Hosted by the UK government and children's charity Unicef, the summit is being attended by international politicians, campaigners including the Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai, and women who have undergone FGM.
The summit is also looking at ways to end forced marriage.
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It is estimated that up to 137,000 women and girls living in England and Wales could have undergone FGM.
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Jakarta governor wins Indonesian election
By (Al Jazeera)
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Joko Widodo, who captured the hearts of millions of Indonesians with his common man image, has been declared the winner of the country's presidential election with 53 percent of the vote.
As a grinning Widodo, dressed in a traditional Indonesian patterned shirt, looked on, the election commission announced on Tuesday that he had beaten Prabowo Subianto by more than six percentage points in the fight to lead the world's third-biggest democracy.
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Widodo, a former furniture exporter known to most as "Jokowi," is the first candidate in a direct presidential election with no ties to the former dictator Suharto, who ruled for 30 years before being overthrown in 1998.
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Kerry urges Hamas to accept Gaza truce offer
By (Al Jazeera)
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Secretary of State John Kerry has called on the Palestinian group, Hamas, to accept a ceasefire along the lines of an Egyptian proposal, to end the raging Gaza conflict that has already killed at least 633 Palestinians and 30 Israelis.
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The Palestinian leadership has proposed to Egypt a plan for a ceasefire to be followed by five days of negotiations to stop the fighting, Palestinian official Azzam al-Ahmed told reporters in Cairo on Tuesday.
Kerry's call comes as United Nations chief Ban Ki-moon met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tel Aviv to discuss how to stop the ongoing bloodshed and begin negotiating.
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"The conditions for a ceasefire are ... a full lifting of the blockade and then the release of those recently detained in the West Bank," its leader in Gaza, Ismail Haniya, said on television.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Feds: Police misconduct rampant in Newark, N.J., city OKs monitor
By David Jones
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Federal investigators found police repeatedly violated civil rights in New Jersey's largest city, Newark, and recommended an independent monitor to oversee changes, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Tuesday.
The city has agreed to accept the findings of the DOJ probe, which has been under way since 2011 and suggested ways to stop the "pattern and practice of unconstitutional policing by the Newark Police Department," U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman said in a statement.
Specifically, the report said, police violated rights through stop-and-arrest practices that disproportionately targeted blacks, use of force, stealing property and cracking down on people who lawfully objected to police behavior.
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Vigil, March for Eric Garner, Who Died in Police Custody
By (AP via nbcnewyork.com)
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Demonstrators marched through the streets on Tuesday to demand swift justice for a man who died last week after the NYPD allegedly put him in a chokehold while making an arrest.
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The tactic is banned by the NYPD but has been the subject of more than 1,000 complaints to the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board over the last five years.
Garner's sister, Ellisha Flagg, said at a vigil at Tompkinsville Park that the chokehold likely exacerbated the effects of the 6-foot-3, 350-pound Garner's asthma, a condition he battled since childhood.
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The video of the arrest shows an officer putting his arm around Garner's neck as Garner is taken to the ground and his face is pushed into the sidewalk. Garner, before losing consciousness, is heard yelling repeatedly, "I can't breathe!"
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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:
UB40 are a British reggae/pop band formed in 1978 in Birmingham, England. The band has had more than 50 singles in the UK Singles Chart, and has also achieved considerable international success. . . One of the world's best-selling music artists, UB40 have sold over 70 million records.[2]
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The ethnic makeup of the band's original lineup was diverse, with musicians of English, Scottish, Irish, Yemeni and Jamaican parentage. Campbell left the band in 2008 after 29 years and has since released four reggae-themed solo collections, with Mickey, who left UB40 soon after Ali, joining him on keys. Astro remained with the band until November 2013, when he left to team up again with Ali and Mickey. The new Ali Campbell album Silhouette (with Astro and Mickey) is released October 6th on Cooking Vinyl.
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After great success in the UK, UB40's popularity in the United States was established when they released Labour of Love, an album of cover songs, in 1983. The album reached No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart and No. 8 on the Billboard 200 in the US. The album featured the song "Red Red Wine", a cover version of a Neil Diamond song (in an arrangement similar to that of Tony Tribe's version); it stayed on the charts for over a hundred weeks. . .
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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George Harrison memorial tree falls victim to climate-driven irony
By Jim Meyer
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If you’re wondering what killed the George Harrison memorial tree in L.A.’s Griffith Park, the short answer is irony. . .
The George Harrison Tree was killed by beetles.
So that’s the short answer. The long answer, however, could be climate change. The Harrison tree was a Cayman Islands Pine, and bark beetles love pine and bark beetles love it hot. Fewer cold snaps mean fewer beetle die-offs, but even more frighteningly, warmer temperatures may be speeding up the beetles reproductive cycle, triggering a massive increase in the beetle population. |
Millions alive today would have to die before the paleo diet could take over
By Nathanael Johnson
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The idea of going paleo is attractive to someone like me, who feels he is living in an unhealthy, vapid world of consumerism. The sprawl of modern humanity is clearly unhealthy for earth’s biodiversity and for the stability of our climate. And it makes a lot of sense that our modern lifestyle would prove unhealthy for us: Our bodies were shaped for hundreds of thousands of years to hunt and gather — and yet we insist on sitting down all day while eating things our ancestors would not recognize as food. We keep introducing new things that don’t fit into the natural environment or the environment of our bodies.
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Paleo may look like a food fad, and yet you could argue that it’s really just the reverse. Anatomically modern humans have, after all, been around for about 200,000 years. The genus Homo goes back another two million years or so. On the timescale of evolutionary history, it’s agriculture that’s the fad.
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A new study, just out from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reaffirms that meat production has an outsized impact on climate change, and that beef is the worst offender. It suggests that, if we want to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, it would be more effective to give up red meat than to stop driving cars. This means that, “from an environmental standpoint, paleo’s ‘Let them eat steak’ approach is a disaster,” Kolbert wrote.
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Our bodies have already started tinkering, finding ways to make do in an imperfect environment. My DNA, for example, contains a mutation that allows me to digest milk for my entire life rather than just my infant nursing days. This was a swift adaptation to the partnership between humans and cattle. Another mutation allows the production of an enzyme in saliva that breaks down starches from grains. Our bodies aren’t completely Paleolithic. Another New Yorker contributor, the doctor Jerome Groopman, has written about the wealth of evidence suggesting that, overall, humans have gotten healthier since the advent of agriculture. Yes, we got shorter and sicker immediately after we started farming, but since then we’ve become taller and healthier than ever before. It’s true that that positive trend has stalled out in the U.S. since the 1950s, but it hasn’t stalled uniformly: The rich seem to be taller and longer-lived than ever; it’s the poor who are taking a beating.
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Science and Health |
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Facebook’s Emotion Experiment: Implications for Research Ethics
By Robert Klitzman and Paul S. Appelbaum
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Several aspects of a recently published experiment conducted by Facebook have received wide media attention, but the study also raises issues of significance for the ethical review of research more generally. In 2012, Facebook entered almost 700,000 users ? without their knowledge ? in a study of gmassive-scale emotional contagion.h Researchers manipulated these individualsf newsfeeds by decreasing positive or negative emotional content, and then examined the emotions expressed in posts. Readersf moods were affected by the manipulation. Of the three authors, two worked at Cornell University at the time of the research; all three are social scientists.
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The absence of consent is a major concern. Facebook initially said that the subjects consented to research when signing up for Facebook; but in fact the company altered its data use agreement only four months after the study to include the possibility of research. Even if research had been mentioned, as it is now, it is doubtful that would have met widely accepted standards. This statement now says, gwe may use the information we receive about you . . . for internal operations, including troubleshooting, data analysis, testing, research and service improvement . . .h Not only do most users of online services fail to read such use agreements (perhaps not unreasonably), but mere mention of the possibility of research provides users with no meaningful information about the experimentfs nature.
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Scientific research, which can benefit society in manifold ways, requires public trust. Research that sparks widespread public outcry - as this study has ? can undermine the scientific enterprise as a whole.
Social media companies should follow accepted ethical standards for research. Such adherence does not need to be very burdensome. Companies could simply submit their protocols to a respected independent IRB for assessment. (The objectivity of an in-house IRB, most of whose members are employees, may be questionable.) Facebook should also exclude children and adolescents from experiments that seek to manipulate subjects' moods.
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Technology |
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Transistor Successor Set to Bring on "The Machine" Age Soon
By Wendy M. Grossman
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Today, and for the past 50 years, computers have worked by processing data in fast dynamic memory and pushing it down wires—input/output channels—to slower-speed permanent disk storage. Memristors may combine into a single device the best characteristics of both dynamic memory (the RAM in a desktop computer) and hard drives or flash memory chips, which retain data when the electricity goes off.
The original idea dates back to the late 1990s, when Senior HP Fellow Stan Williams set up Hewlett–Packard's Information and Quantum Systems Laboratory to scope out the next two decades of computing. For 40 years the industry has relied on its ability to manufacture ever-shrinking, ever-cheaper transistors based on Moore’s Law (the observation made by Intel founder Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors that can fit on a chip doubles about every two years).
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The industry has several goals in making the shift. Memristors can vastly improve energy efficiency of electronic components, and are better able to cope with the floods of data expected from the Internet of Things, which monitor or control equipment or systems in factories, office buildings or homes. Essential to their development is a continuation of the exponential growth in computing power and storage density that has seen prices plunge over the past 40 years. For similar reasons, IBM has just announced it will spend $3 billion to pursue experimental "post-silicon" architectures and chips, predicting a fundamental revamping of existing systems in 10 years.
These changes will produce a fundamental overhaul of computer operating systems to accommodate hardware that no longer differentiates between dynamic memory and long-term storage. Bresniker sees the change as an opportunity to jettison layers of cumbersome operating system code that was previously adopted to accommodate the limitations of older hardware.
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How to Get Your Sex Tape Off the Internet
By Kate Knibbs
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I talked to the RedTube support team to find out what one needs to do to scrub the site of their video. Even if you didn't post the video, if you put in a takedown request, they'll honor it. "We ask for the users full name along with photo proof that they are the person in the video. We usually ask for a photo of the person visibly holding up a piece of ID," a friendly support staffer named Franca told me.
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This is great news if you're in a revenge porn situation. "Revenge porn" is the term used to describe what happens when someone acts like a monumental dirtbag and posts explicit videos or photos of their ex without their permission. So if someone you used to trust has betrayed you and put your sex tape online, you can fight to get it taken down. There's a growing movement to outlaw revenge porn, and the team at End Revenge Porn are a good resource.
. . . Holly Jacobs, the founder of End Revenge Porn, refers people to a service called DMCA Defender. They offer free services to underage revenge porn victims, and discounts to adults in similar situations. They can guarantee removal from certain sites, like myex.com, and often remove videos from multiple sites in a matter of hours.
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If someone else has posted your video without your consent, you can try the "American Way." That is, sue them.
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YouTube star Michelle Phan sued over copyright breach
By (BBC)
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A leading YouTube entrepreneur is facing legal action for alleged copyright infringement in her videos.
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Kaskade, whose work features most prominently in the record label's complaint, said: "Copyright law is a dinosaur, ill-suited for the landscape of today's media."
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Michelle Phan found success posting make-up tutorial videos, attracting more than six million subscribers to her channel since she started it in 2007. She is a member of a group of YouTube stars whose popularity rivals that of many mainstream pop stars.
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The publishing arm has also demanded an injunction, claiming that it has "sustained and will continue to sustain substantial, immediate and irreparable injury" as a result of Ms Phan's use of its copyrighted material.
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"Michelle's intention has always been to promote other artists, creating a platform for their work to be showcased to an international audience. Kaskade, whose music has been featured in Michelle's videos, has publicly defended Michelle against Ultra's claims and acknowledges the success he's gained from her support."
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Cultural |
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A Brutal Loss, but an Enduring Conviction
By Nikole Hannah-Jones
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On June 21, 1964, at the launch of Freedom Summer, three civil rights workers went missing in Neshoba County, Mississippi. Forty-four days later, federal agents searching an earthen dam confirmed what many had already suspected: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had been murdered, and in time the Klan would be found responsible. While her husband and his fellow civil rights workers became martyrs, Rita Schwerner, then 22, became a widow.
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For the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, we contacted Bender. She was reluctant to speak with us, repeating a concern that she has voiced continuously through the years — that too much focus has been paid to the white Northerners who came down that summer, and that the embrace of that narrative has slighted all the black Mississippians who had fought for civil rights before, during and after Freedom Summer. But after learning that hers would one of a diverse group of voices in ProPublica’s occasional series, “Dispatches from Freedom Summer,” Bender agreed to talk about the impact of that summer and how far our nation has come since.
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We have yet as a nation to come to terms with the fact that this is a country that was built on racism and continues to an appalling degree to thrive on racism.
What was the significance of Freedom Summer in and of itself? Not that much. Taken in context of the larger history and understanding what it did, it got the Justice Department involved in voting rights issues in ways it had not been before. It was possible the Voting Rights Act would not have been passed without the activities of that summer, but it’s hard to say.
I think what’s scary about it is thinking about how long does it take for all this change to happen and all the people who get ground up waiting? We are still a work in process. I use process instead of progress because I am not sure about the progress.
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Brooklyn Bridge 'white flags' stump police
By (BBC)
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Authorities in New York are investigating who raised two large white flags on the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge early on Tuesday.
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Around 03:30, a light illuminating the American flag on the Brooklyn side of the bridge appeared to go out. The same occurred on the Manhattan side of the bridge around 03:42.
At 05:30, construction workers on the bridge noticed the American flags had been replaced with the white flags.
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But, he added, the incident appeared to have "no practical nexus to terrorism or even politics".
Authorities removed the white flags and are now searching social media for clues.
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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. |