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
Central African Republic's Rebels Sign Cease-Fire
Republic of Congo (AP) - Representatives of the Muslim and Christian factions battling in Central African Republic signed a cease-fire agreement on Wednesday in neighboring Republic of Congo.
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The signing on Wednesday comes after heavy pressure from regional mediators and only one day after the Seleka Muslim rebels failed to show up for the second day of talks.
It is not clear if the cease-fire will be respected by the fighters on the ground in Central African Republic. Representing Seleka was Gen. Mohamed Moussa Dhaffane, who parted ways with top Seleka leaders last year.
Thousands have died in sectarian violence between the Seleka rebels and the Christian anti-Balaka group in the past 16 months.
The Seleka rebels seized power in March 2013, overthrowing the president of a decade. Their leader stepped down in January, setting off a series of reprisal attacks by the anti-Balaka militia.
wect
World News
The Boomerang Effect: Sanctions On Russia Hit German Economy Hard
It wasn't that long ago that Kremlin officials could hardly avoid laughing when asked about the economic sanctions imposed on Russia by the West. As long as every NATO member state jealously sought to protect its own business interests, things "weren't all that bad," they gloated.
But since last week, their moods have darkened. For months, the European Union in particular had been reluctant to enact effective penalties against Moscow. Last Wednesday, though, the 28 EU heads of state and government cleared a psychological hurdle: For the first time, they opted go beyond sanctions targeting individual political leaders in Moscow, adding prohibitions against doing business with specific Russian companies that contribute to the destabilization of the situation in Ukraine. A concrete list is to be presented by the end of the month. European development banks have also been banned from providing loans to Russian companies.
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For the companies involved, the penalties are a significant blow. It has become difficult to acquire capital in Russia itself, with both domestic and foreign investors withdrawing their money from the country in recent months. It is hardly surprising, then, that Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev spoke of a return to the Cold War and President Vladimir Putin warned that sanctions "usually have a boomerang effect."
Even prior to the sanctions, the Russian economy had been struggling. Now, though, the Ukraine crisis is beginning to make itself felt in Germany as well. German industry's Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations believes that the crisis could endanger up to 25,000 jobs in Germany. Were a broad recession to befall Russia, German growth could sink by 0.5 percent, according to a Deutsche Bank study.
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By last Thursday, just a day after the US sanctions were announced, the German-Russian Foreign Trade Office in Moscow was besieged by phone calls from concerned German companies who do business with both the US and Russia. The German Chambers of Commerce and Industry estimate that up to a quarter of German companies that do business abroad could be affected. And the risks are significant, with large fines threatening those who violate the American sanctions, whether knowingly or not.
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Gaza Civilian Deaths May Amount To War Crimes, UN Human Rights Chief Says
The killing of Gazan civilians and children in Israeli airstrikes may amount to war crimes, the U.N.’s top human rights official warned Wednesday amid a backdrop of rising casualties and international efforts to forge a cease-fire.
Navi Pillay, the international body’s high commissioner for human rights, told an emergency debate on the crisis that there was “a strong possibility that international law had been violated” during the weeks-long conflict, citing the shelling of homes and hospitals in the coastal enclave. She also condemned the indiscriminate firing of rockets and mortars into Israel by Palestinian fighters. The U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC) later agreed to launch an independent inquiry into allegations that international law had been violated in the course of the Gaza airstrikes.
Israel blasted the UNHRC's call, saying it's decision was a "travesty and should be rejected by decent people everywhere."
“Rather than investigate Hamas, which is committing a double war crime by firing rockets at Israeli civilians while hiding behind Palestinian civilians, the UNHRC calls for an investigation of Israel, which has gone to unprecedented lengths to keep Palestinian civilians out of harm's way," a statement from the Israeli Prime Minister’s office read.
The remarks come a day after Israel received a psychological blow in its ongoing military operation in the shape of a decision by the U.S.’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to ban all American airlines from flying in and out of Israel’s main airport for 24 hours. The move, extended on Wednesday for an additional 24 hours, was prompted by security fears following a Hamas rocket attack near Ben Gurion International Airport on Tuesday. The flight ban has been echoed in Europe, where airlines likewise grounded planes headed to the country.
Mindful of the potential economic impact of the move, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly appealed to the United States to rethink the cancellation of flights.
aljazeera
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More Than 40 Dead In Trans-Asia Plane Crash In Taiwan
More than 40 people were feared dead in a plane crash in Taiwan on Wednesday, officials said, with witnesses and local media reporting the flight came down in a storm after an aborted landing.
Taiwan’s transport minister said 10 bodies had so far been recovered from the wreckage of the domestic flight, which had 58 people on board.
Local media reported that TransAsia Airways flight GE222 had smashed into two houses near Magong airport on the Penghu islands off the southwest coast after requesting a second attempt to land there.
The twin turboprop plane was flying from the southwestern city of Kaohsiung to the islands and had been delayed due to bad weather as Typhoon Matmo pounded Taiwan, according to the authorities.
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“There were 58 people on board including four crew members, four children and, so far, according to the information we have, 12 were injured and were sent to hospitals while 46 were missing,” Transport Minister Yeh Kuang-shih told reporters.
japantimes
U.S. News
U.S. Religious Leaders Embrace Cause of Immigrant Children
After protesters shouting “Go home” turned back busloads of immigrant mothers and children in Murrieta, Calif., a furious Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, sat down at his notepad and drafted a blog post detailing his shame at the episode, writing, “It was un-American; it was unbiblical; it was inhumane.”
When the governor of Iowa, Terry E. Branstad, said he did not want the migrants in his state, declaring, “We can’t accept every child in the world who has problems,” clergy members in Des Moines held a prayer vigil at a United Methodist Church to demonstrate their desire to make room for the refugees.
The United States’ response to the arrival of tens of thousands of migrant children, many of them fleeing violence and exploitation in Central America, has been symbolized by an angry pushback from citizens and local officials who have channeled their outrage over illegal immigration into opposition to proposed shelter sites. But around the nation, an array of religious leaders are trying to mobilize support for the children, saying the nation can and should welcome them
“We’re talking about whether we’re going to stand at the border and tell children who are fleeing a burning building to go back inside,” said Rabbi Asher Knight of Temple Emanu-El in Dallas, who said leaders of more than 100 faith organizations in his city had met last week to discuss how to help. He said that in his own congregation, some were comparing the flow of immigrant children to the Kindertransport, a rescue mission in the late 1930s that sent Jewish children from Nazi Germany to Britain for safekeeping.
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“This is a crisis, and not simply a political crisis, but a moral one,” said Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. On Tuesday, Mr. Moore led a delegation of Southern Baptist officials to visit refugee children at detention centers in San Antonio and McAllen, Tex. In an interview after the visit, Mr. Moore said that “the anger directed toward vulnerable children is deplorable and disgusting” and added: “The first thing is to make sure we understand these are not issues, these are persons. These children are made in the image of God, and we ought to respond to them with compassion, not with fear.”
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Ten States Join Indiana Appeal Of Rulings Allowing Same-Sex Marriage
Ten states have filed an amicus brief in support of Indiana's challenge of a lower court ruling claiming bans on same-sex marriage are unconstitutional, arguing that states, not federal courts, have legal authority to define marriage, according to court filings.
Attorneys general in Alaska, Alabama, Arizona, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Idaho, Utah and Louisiana were all listed in the July 21 filing in Colorado in support of the Indiana attorney general's office, which filed an appeal in federal court earlier this month after a lower court found the state's ban unconstitutional.
"Regardless of someone’s personal beliefs regarding whether same-sex marriage should be permitted as a matter of policy, doing so is not the role of the judicial branch," the recent filing from Colorado's Solicitor General states. On Wednesday, a federal judge ruled Colorado's gay-marriage ban unconstitutional, but an appeals process is pending.
Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Colorado and Indiana have all seen courts rule their bans on same-sex marriage unconstitutional. Bans remain intact in the other six states that have joined the brief, but each faces a court challenge.
Same-sex marriage is completely legal, and not subject to a pending appeals process, in 18 states, largely throughout the Northeast.
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Major California Reservoirs Below 50% Capacity As Drought Wears On
Most of California's major reservoirs are now less than half-full -- or at what officials call a "seriously low" level -- but that's still nowhere near the historic lows set in 1977, the state's driest year on record..
The latest report released Wednesday by the California Department of Water Resources shows 10 of the state's 12 major reservoirs below 50% of their total capacity, with some nearing just 20%.
"They are not historical levels, but they are seriously low," department spokesman Ted Thomas said.
But when all 12 of the major reservoirs are combined, the average is at 60%, Thomas said. That's puts the state in a far better position than it was 37 years ago, when a crippling drought brought the statewide reservoir average down to 41%.
As of Wednesday, the largest federal reservoir in California at Lake Shasta was only at 36% capacity, which is 4.5 million acre-feet of water, he added.
The Sierra snowpack -- which provides most of California's drinking water -- was at 32% of its average annual depth this winter. And some climatologists say there's a chance that the strong El Nino weather pattern that had been hoped for may not materialize.
latimes
Science and Technology
Oil Spill in Amazon Sickens Villagers, Kills Fish
On the last day of June, Roger Mangía Vega watched an oil slick and a mass of dead fish float past this tiny Kukama Indian community and into the Marañón River, a major tributary of the Amazon.
Community leaders called the emergency number for Petroperu, the state-run operator of the 845-kilometer pipeline that pumps crude oil from the Amazon over the Andes Mountains to a port on Peru’s northern coast.
By late afternoon, Mangía and a handful of his neighbors – contracted by the company and wearing only ordinary clothing – were up to their necks in oily water, searching for a leak in the pipe. Villagers, who depend on fish for subsistence and income, estimated that they had seen between two and seven tons of dead fish floating in lagoons and littering the landscape.
“It was the most horrible thing I’ve seen in my life – the amount of oil, the huge number of dead fish and my Kukama brothers working without the necessary protection,” said Ander Ordóñez Mozombite, an environmental monitor for an indigenous community group called Acodecospat who visited the site a few days later.
This rupture of Peru’s 39-year-old northern crude oil pipeline has terrified Kukama villagers along the Marañón River. People’s complaints of nausea and skin rashes are aggravated by nervousness about eating the fish, concerns about their lost income and fear that oil will spread throughout the tropical forest and lakes when seasonal flooding begins in November. Cuninico, a village of wooden, stilt-raised, palm-thatched houses, is home to about 130 families but several hundred families in other communities also fish nearby.
scientificamerican
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World's Largest Aquatic Insect Reportedly Found In China
Gadzooks! The world's largest aquatic insect has reportedly been found in China. This cute/terrifying little creature, which is definitely worth writing home about, was found in the the mountains of Chengdu in Sichuan province, Scientific American reports. It boasts a wingspan of 8.3 inches. That breaks the previous record held by a species of South American helicopter damselfly, with a wingspan of 7.5 inches. (Helicopter damselflies, by the by, feed on spiders, one species of which makes fake spiders in its web, likely to scare the predators away.)
There seems to be some confusion about exactly what this new insect is. Scientific American reports that they have only been identified as being the order Megaloptera, which includes alderflies and Dobsonflies, while CNN quotes a local museum as saying they are giant Dobsonflies (note: these are not mutually exclusive).
The adult insects lay their eggs in water, and larvae grow up in and around sediment at the bottom, and then as adults emerge from the depths to become, basically, flying jaws.
[Impressive photo -- Editor]
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Dog Jealousy: Study Suggests Primordial Origins For The 'Green-Eyed Monster'
This will not surprise most dog owners: Dogs can act jealous, finds a new study from the University of California, San Diego. Darwin thought so, too. But emotion researchers have been arguing for years whether jealousy requires complex cognition. And some scientists have even said that jealousy is an entirely social construct -- not seen in all human cultures and not fundamental or hard-wired in the same ways that fear and anger are.
The current study -- published in PLOS ONE by UC San Diego psychology professor Christine Harris and former honors student Caroline Prouvost -- is the first experimental test of jealous behaviors in dogs. The findings support the view that there may be a more basic form of jealousy, which evolved to protect social bonds from interlopers.
Harris and Prouvost show that dogs exhibit more jealous behaviors, like snapping and pushing at their owner or the rival, when the owner showed affection to what appeared to be another dog (actually a stuffed dog that barked, whined and wagged its tail). Dogs exhibited these behaviors more than if the same affection was showered on a novel object and much more than when the owner's attention was simply diverted by reading a book.
"Our study suggests not only that dogs do engage in what appear to be jealous behaviors but also that they were seeking to break up the connection between the owner and a seeming rival," Harris said. "We can't really speak to the dogs' subjective experiences, of course, but it looks as though they were motivated to protect an important social relationship."
sciencedaily
Well, that's different...
Can't Possibly Be True
-- A Davenport, Iowa, jury convicted terminal-cancer patient Benton Mackenzie, 48, in July on four marijuana-growing felonies, even though his purpose was to harvest cannabis oil to treat his bloody lesions and the grapefruit-sized tumor on his buttocks. The judge had barred Mackenzie and his lawyer from even mentioning the illness in court -- because of a 2005 Iowa precedent (even though the Iowa legislature has subsequently allowed medical marijuana to treat seizures). Mackenzie's wife, his 73-year-old parents, his son and a friend were also charged with assisting Mackenzie's "operation" (though Mackenzie was almost surely the only "customer"). Mackenzie, who testified and was, of course, sworn to tell "the whole truth," said he was "flabbergasted" to learn that "the whole truth" excludes anything about his illness.
newsoftheweird
Bill Moyers and Company:
The Crusade Against Reproductive Rights
With new state laws and Supreme Court rulings, the battle over women’s reproductive rights is being fought more fiercely than ever.
Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards joins Bill in the studio this week.