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
Ebola Epidemic: House-To-House Search In Sierra Leone Reveals 358 New Cases
Door-to-door searches during a three-day curfew in Sierra Leone identified more than 350 suspected new cases of Ebola, according by the top US diplomat in the country.
Charge d’affairs Kathleen Fitzgibbon said teams of volunteers had also discovered 265 corpses, of which 216 have since been been buried, in an email to organisers of the curfew that has been seen by the Guardian.
“The challenges included the late arrival of some materials, a rumor that the soap was infected with Ebola. Some people fled to the bush to avoid the house-to-house [checks] but came back for the last day,” she said, adding that there had also been a “slow response to pick up corpses”.
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“Our team decided the three-day stay-at-home was a ‘watershed moment’ whose momentum must be turned into specific activities to ensure that we can reach our goal of isolating 70% of positive cases to reverse the upward trend of the epidemic,” Fitzgibbon said.
“The public needs to understand that this campaign did not end Ebola but can be the beginning of the end if everyone remains vigilant,” she added.
The email said one of the priorities was to ensure all bodies were buried correctly as funerals have been identified as one of the ways the disease has spread, with relatives touching the bodies of the deceased.
guardian
World News
Jordanian Cleric Abu Qatada Acquitted Of Terror Charges
A Jordanian court has acquitted Salafist cleric Abu Qatada of charges that he provided spiritual and material support for a plot to attack Westerners in Jordan’s capital during New Year celebrations in 2000, judicial sources and Abu Qatada’s lawyer said Wednesday.
Abu Qatada, whose real name is Omar Othman, was accused of involvement in the so-called “millennium bombing” plot to target tourists in Amman. Jordan's state security court ruled on Wednesday that those charges lacked sufficient evidence.
"Abu Qatada has been released from prison and is now on his way home," a judicial source said.
Smiling and dressed in brown prison fatigues, the 51-year-old cleric waved to his family in the courtroom after the verdict was announced, a witness said. Judge Ahmad Qatarneh said the ruling was unanimous.
Abu Qatada was acquitted in June in a separate case on charges of conspiring to commit acts of terrorism against Western diplomatic sites across Amman. That acquittal was also based on a lack of evidence.
aljazeera
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Turkey Hints At Iraq Mosul Hostage Exchange
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has hinted that 49 hostages, mostly Turks, may have been freed by Islamic State (IS) as part of a prisoner swap.
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Mr Erdogan told reporters: "You might have an exchange but it takes some effort to prepare for such a thing."
The Turkish hostages were seized in northern Iraq and held for 101 days.
Turkey is currently struggling to cope with an influx of 138,000 Syrians, most of them Kurds, fleeing an Islamic State offensive in the northern city of Kobane. UN refugee officials have warned that number could surge to 400,000.
The government in Ankara had refused to take part in the air campaign against IS, which has now been extended to Syria as well as Iraq, partly because of fears for the safety of the hostages.
bbc
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Turkey To Expand Scope Of Iraq-Syria Motions
Turkey’s government has announced that it will expand the scope of motions authorizing the army to conduct cross-border operations into Iraq and Syria, amid the threat posed by extremist jihadists that have begun to affect the country’s national security.
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“The threats and risks posed from Iraq and Syria have changed. Therefore the content of the existing motions that will be renewed in October will have to be renewed,” [Prime Minister Ahmet] Davutoğlu said. Parliament will debate the motions on Oct. 2, a day after the beginning of the legislative year.
There are currently two valid motions approved by Parliament authorizing the army: One against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) based in northern Iraq and another against a potential Syrian offensive toward Turkey. Now, the unexpected growth and expansion of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in both Iraq and Syria has changed Ankara’s risk map.
[...].
Asked about the U.S.-led coalition’s operations against ISIL targets in Syria, the prime minister preferred not to give a straight answer as to whether Turkey supported the move.
“Operations that do not envisage a lasting peace and stability in the region will only bring about fresh problems,” he said.
hurriyetdailynews
U.S. News
Obama, at U.N., Vows To Counter ISIS Threat
President Obama on Wednesday charted a muscular new course for the United States in a turbulent world, telling the United Nations General Assembly in a bluntly worded speech that the American military would work with allies to dismantle the Islamic State’s “network of death” and warning Russia that it would pay for its bullying of Ukraine.
Two days after ordering airstrikes on dozens of militant targets in Syria, Mr. Obama issued a fervent call to arms against the Islamic State — the once-reluctant warrior now apparently resolved to waging a twilight struggle against Islamic extremism for the remainder of his presidency.
“Today, I ask the world to join in this effort,” Mr. Obama said, seeking to buttress a global coalition that he said would train and equip troops to fight the group, also known ISIL, starve it of financial resources, and halt the flow of foreign recruits to its ranks.
“Those who have joined ISIL should leave the battlefield while they can,” Mr. Obama said, foreshadowing the blows to come. “For we will not succumb to threats, and we will demonstrate that the future belongs to those who build, not those who destroy.” The brutality of the militants, he said, “forces us to look into the heart of darkness.”
Continue reading the main story Video
nyt
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U.S. Hospitals Unprepared To Handle Ebola Waste
S. hospitals may be unprepared to safely dispose of the infectious waste generated by any Ebola virus disease patient to arrive unannounced in the country, potentially putting the wider community at risk, biosafety experts said..
Waste management companies are refusing to haul away the soiled sheets and virus-spattered protective gear associated with treating the disease, citing federal guidelines that require Ebola-related waste to be handled in special packaging by people with hazardous materials training, infectious disease and biosafety experts told Reuters.
Many U.S. hospitals are unaware of the regulatory snafu, which experts say could threaten their ability to treat any person who develops Ebola in the U.S. after coming from an infected region. It can take as long as 21 days to develop Ebola symptoms after exposure.
The issue created problems for Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, the first institution to care for Ebola patients here. As Emory was treating two U.S. missionaries who were evacuated from West Africa in August, their waste hauler, Stericycle, initially refused to handle it. Stericycle declined comment.
chitrib
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FBI: Mass Shootings In The U.S. Have Nearly Tripled Annually Since 2006
A chilling study released by the FBI on Tuesday says mass shootings in the United States are on the rise, and more often than not are over before authorities have an opportunity to intervene.
According to the FBI, mass shootings as occurring when "an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area," bloody events the Bureau says occurred 160 times between 2000 and 2013.
Rather than decline over that time period, mass shootings spiked sharply. Between 2000 and 2006, there were 6.4 mass shootings per year in the United States, a number that nearly tripled to 16.4 mass shootings annually in the eight years to follow.
Unsurprisingly, the largest number of mass shooting casualties occurred in 2012, the year of the Aurora, Colo. movie theater shooting that claimed 12 lives and Adam Lanza's attack on Sandy Hook Elementary that killed 27 children.
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One of the factors that proves troublesome for law enforcement is their inability to respond to the rapidly unfolding events before the killers achieved their goal. Both the Sandy Hook and Aurora shootings ended in a matter of minutes -- a relative eternity before law enforcement could intervene.
upi
Science and Technology
False Memories Could Be A Side-Effect Of Human Ability To Learn Rules
Our tendency to create false memories could be related to our ability to learn rules according to research from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL).
Errors in memory range from misremembering minor details of events to generating illusory memories of entire episodes. These inaccuracies have wide-ranging implications in crime-witness accounts and in the courtroom but the researchers believe that they could be an inevitable side-effect of our brains' ability to learn trends, and process objects into categories useful for our survival.
The wiring in our brains is generally well-designed to capture the world around us, but the computations it uses have certain quirks as shown in well-known optical illusions. The new research suggests that we could also create false memories for the same reason.
Professor Lars Chittka, from the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, at QMUL and co-author of the paper, said: "Our memory is often surprisingly inaccurate, even though we typically feel that we can recall events as they really occurred. For example, witnesses of a nocturnal street robbery might describe the perpetrator as a hooded teenager, when it later turns out that the assailant was middle-aged and balding."
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According to Professor Chittka:
"On the surface creating false memories would seem to be bad for our survival, but historical research suggests that false memories are often those that fall in with previously learned rules and cultural norms which can be useful.
"Our research suggests that individuals who are particularly good at learning rules and classifying objects by common properties are also particularly prone to false memory illusions. So, like optical illusions, it might be that false memories are a by-product of the clever ways our brains monitor the world around us."
sciencedaily
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Unleashing An Epidemic To Kill The Tumbleweeds
Dana Berner wants to start an epidemic among tumbleweeds. Berner is a pathologist with the U.S. Agricultural Research Service who studies the diseases that afflict plants. One of his projects has been a search for something that's able to infect and kill the iconic, spiny, rolling weed of the American West.
After about a decade of research—plus more work, done by predecessors—he thinks he's got an answer: Two fungi species that hail from the Eurasian steppes to which tumbleweed is native. He and his colleagues have submitted applications to release these exotic fungi on willing U.S. farmers' lands. Now they're just waiting for an answer.
"I'm very optimistic on its ability to control tumbleweed. We just need to get it released," Berner tells Popular Science. "We have lots of evidence on it that it's safe and effective."
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The safety tests included inoculating plants of species related to the Salsola tragus tumbleweed that C. salsolae and U. salsolae target. The plant researchers wanted to make sure that if released, the fungi wouldn't kill native plants. Those tests were performed in a biosafety level 3 greenhouse, a precaution that was meant to protect not the human researchers, who aren't susceptible to the diseases studied in the greenhouse, but all of the plants outside of it. Scientists have to shower before leaving the greenhouse.
Not every plant species gets a greenhouse test, however. Some species are difficult to find or cultivate. So Berner and his colleagues ran a mathematical model on all of their species that estimates the extent to which a species is susceptible to certain pathogens, based on its genetics. The model is a widely used one for checking what species a "biological control agent"—a living thing meant to kill weeds or pests—will affect.
popsci
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U.S. Asks Universities To Flag Risky Pathogen Experiments
Academic scientists with federal funding who work with any of 15 dangerous microbes or toxins will soon have to flag specific studies that could potentially be used to cause harm and work with their institutions to reduce risks, according to new U.S. government rules released today.
The long-awaited final rule is similar to a February 2013 draft and is “about what we expected,” says Carrie Wolinetz, a deputy director of federal relations at the Association of American Universities (AAU) in Washington, D.C., which represents more than 60 major research universities. Those schools see the rules as replicating other federal security and safety rules, Wolinetz says, but will adjust to them.
But some observers have concerns, such as that the rules do not apply to other risky biological agents. In a conference call with reporters today, a White House official said the government is open to a “broader discussion” about whether it should expand the list of 15 regulated agents.
The rules are the latest in a flurry of regulations that grew out of the 2001 anthrax attacks and govern experiments that could potentially be used as bioterrorism weapons. Experts identified seven types of experiments that represent so-called dual use research of concern (DURC)—such as making an agent more transmissible or resistant to drugs. In March 2012, federal agencies announced that they would give special scrutiny to such DURC experiments with 15 dangerous agents or toxins; the 15 agents are part of a broader federal list of regulated “select agents” that pose particular risks to public health.
sciencemag
Well, that's different...
Of Course!
Jonathan Thomas, 50, was charged with DUI and disorderly conduct in Washington Township, Indiana, in August after driving through two backyards one Friday evening and getting his vehicle stuck in the second. Police reported that Thomas "show(ed) his teeth to officers" and later "growled" at hospital security staff. Thomas' day job is director of the Porter County Animal Shelter.
newsoftheweird
Bill Moyers and Company:
Climate Change: The Next Generation
Kelsey Juliana, an 18-year-old activist, is fighting climate change in the courts and walking across the country to spread the word on global warming.