Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Man Oh Man, rfall, and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw. The guest editors are Doctor RJ and annetteboardman.
Special thanks to JekyllnHyde for the new OND banner.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Reuters
The case of a Dallas nurse who contracted Ebola while caring for a dying Liberian patient shows that the United States needs to rethink how it addresses infection control as an outbreak of the deadly virus spreads beyond West Africa, a top U.S. health official said on Monday.
Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said health authorities are still investigating how the nurse became infected while caring for Thomas Eric Duncan in an isolation ward at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.
Duncan died last week and the nurse is the first person to contract the virus on U.S. soil, taking concerns about containing its spread to new heights.
The Guardian
An experimental Canadian-made Ebola vaccine that has shown promise in tests on primates is beginning clinical trials on humans in the US.
The vaccine will be tested on healthy individuals Monday to see how well it works, whether there are side effects and what the proper dosage is, Health Minister Rona Ambrose said.
“The Canadian vaccine provides great hope and promise because it has shown to be 100% effective in preventing the spread of the Ebola virus when tested on animals,” she said.
Studies in primates have shown this vaccine works both to prevent infection when given before exposure, and to increase survival chances when given quickly after exposure.
A small US company called NewLink Genetics holds the license for the vaccine and the trials are set to begin in a lab in Maryland. Ambrose said the results are expected in December.
NPR
Newly instituted screening procedures at New York's JFK International Airport identified 91 arriving passengers as having a higher risk of being infected with Ebola based on their recent travel, CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden said Monday. None of the airline passengers had a fever, Frieden said, noting that of five people who were sent for further evaluation, none were determined to have Ebola.
Frieden spoke at a news conference in which he gave an update on the effort to "break the chain of transmission" of Ebola; over the weekend, his agency confirmed that a female health care worker at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas contracted the virus while treating Thomas Eric Duncan, who died last week.
In the wake of the first instance of Ebola being contracted in the U.S., Frieden said the airport screenings at JFK are part of the agency's plan to stop the disease; he said screenings will be instituted at four other airports — in Atlanta; Chicago; Newark, N.J.; and Dulles, Va. — by Thursday.
Raw Story
The head of the National Institute of Health (NIH) is blaming budget cuts for the current Ebola epidemic, claiming that a vaccine would have developed if the NIH’s budget hadn’t been stagnant for the past decade, the Huffington Post reports.
Dr. Francis Collins told the Post that the “NIH has been working on Ebola vaccines since 2001. It’s not like we suddenly woke up and thought, ‘Oh my gosh, we should have something ready here.’”
When asked why his organization didn’t have “something ready,” he replied, “frankly, if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine in time for this that would’ve gone through clinical trials and would have been ready.”
NY Times
GENEVA — The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is “unquestionably the most severe acute public health emergency in modern times,” Dr. Margaret Chan, the director general of the World Health Organization, said Monday.
Dr. Chan, who dealt with the 2009 avian flu pandemic and the SARS outbreaks of 2002-3, said the Ebola outbreak had progressed from a public health crisis to “a crisis for international peace and security.”
“I have never seen a health event threaten the very survival of societies and governments in already very poor countries,” she said in a statement delivered on her behalf to a conference in Manila and released by her office in Geneva. “I have never seen an infectious disease contribute so strongly to potential state failure.”
Reuters
The U.S. Army warned on Monday that mandatory budget cuts due to resume in fiscal 2016 would be devastating to a service that is already facing huge risks as it tries to keep forces ready for battle, replace aging equipment and respond to crises around the world.
"We have to have a national security debate ... because there is too much going on," U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Ray Odierno told reporters at the annual Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA) conference.
Odierno said the Army had agreed to further reduce the size of its active force to 450,000 troops from an earlier goal of 490,000 to comply with mandatory budget cuts known as sequestration, but he questioned if even the original target would allow the Army to respond as needed around the globe.
Al Jazeera America
DEER PARK, Wash. — There is a Ruger pistol, a Smith & Wesson revolver and a Beretta semiautomatic laid out on the coffee table in front of Rich Haines.
The 41-year-old National Rifle Association–certified instructor, during his courses on target shooting and self-defense, takes care to explain each piece of the equipment to his pupils — the cylinder where the bullets are housed in the revolver, the slide on the semiautomatic, the lands and the grooves in the muzzle, the hammer that strikes the firing pin when the trigger is squeezed.
Just don’t go calling them weapons.
“None of these are weapons. We call these what they are. This is a pistol and this is a pistol,” he interjects when he hears the W-word. “We teach what it is. We are not looking for this to be a weapon.”
What may seem like semantics to the uninitiated is a critical distinction for Haines and Doug Rosso, 68, a fellow gun hobbyist administering this particular lesson.
Al Jazeera America
Monday marks Columbus Day in the United States, and while federal employees and much of the rest of the country are enjoying a three-day holiday, not everyone is celebrating.
A growing number of cities across the country are revisiting the meaning of Columbus Day, saying Christopher Columbus couldn’t have discovered America, since it was already inhabited when he arrived. They want Indigenous Peoples Day or Native Americans Day either to supplement Columbus Day or to replace it.
The Seattle City Council has already adopted Indigenous Peoples Day, after a unanimous vote, as has the school board of Portland, Oregon. Minneapolis made the same decision in April, and Berkeley, California, did the same much earlier, in 1992.
Christopher Columbus arrived on the island of Hispaniola, which is today split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, in 1492. His journals describe the mass enslavement and extermination of the Taino population there.
The Guardian
Frustration and anger among young black Americans at an older generation’s apparent failure to adequately respond to the killing of Michael Brown by a white police officer in Ferguson upended a key event at a weekend of mass protest on Sunday.
The showdown exposed a generational divide over how best to confront police racism, brutality and use of excessive force as organisers of the “weekend of resistance”, which has drawn activists from across the US, plan to stage mass civil disobedience across St Louis on Monday.
While older civil rights leaders hark back to the more peaceful methods of half a century ago, some younger people question their effectiveness today and are pressing for more confrontational tactics.
The fuse was lit when hundreds of people who came to hear the intellectual and activist Cornel West speak were subjected to speeches by a succession of preachers from the major religions offering essentially the same message about loving one’s fellow man and standing up against injustice. The meeting was billed as being “in the tradition of the civil rights movement” but the tone was in part governed by the venue for the meeting, St Louis University, a Catholic institution.
NPR
In recent years, social scientists have tried to find out whether important decisions are shaped by subtle biases. They've studied recruiters as they decide whom to hire. They've studied teachers, deciding which students to help at school. And they've studied doctors, figuring out what treatments to give patients. Now, researchers have trained their attention on a new group of influential people — state legislators.
...
There was a difference, and the difference had a partisan tinge to it. Democrats responded about the same to both names, but Republicans were more likely to respond to the man with Anglo name rather than the Latino name. ...
Grose told me that he and Mendez decided to look a little bit deeper at the data and they found something very interesting. In many ways, the difference was less between Republicans and Democrats and more between some Republicans and other Republicans.
NY Times
FERGUSON, Mo. — Protesters, including religious leaders, were arrested on Monday as they stepped forward into a line of officers in riot gear outside this city’s police department, a day when organizers here have promised numerous organized demonstrations of civil disobedience around the St. Louis region over questions about police conduct.
About a dozen people were taken into custody by midday, and more protesters, arms linked, were waiting in the rain....
USA Today
Severe storms ripped through the South and Midwest throughout the day Monday. At least one person was killed in Arkansas and homes and property were damaged in several states, all the way from Illinois to Florida.
As of early evening Monday, a tornado watch – meaning conditions are favorable for tornadoes to develop – remained in place in several states.
A tornado was reported Monday afternoon in Bawcomville, La., near Monroe. At least 38,000 people were without power in northeastern Louisiana.
Other tornadoes were spotted in Illinois and Florida, the Storm Prediction Center reported.
The Guardian
Last week, Sayreville, New Jersey became a call sign for a set of behaviors known as “hazing”. There, varsity football players are alleged to have sexually assaulted freshman players. It’s just the latest location to find potentially criminal initiation rites.
For years, organisations as different as theatre clubs and ivy league fraternities have been found to haze new recruits, some with fatal results. Still, researchers say the phenomenon remains under researched, underreported and rampant.
What little is known about the prevalence of hazing comes from two large surveys – one performed by Alfred University in New York in 2000, another by the University of Maine in 2008.
It asked students if they’d been tied up, subjected to harsh weather, beaten or forced into sex acts to join a group. Both found that nearly half of high school students experience hazing behaviors. One study suggests as many as 800,000 student-athletes per year are hazed, and Hank Nuwer has identified 183 people who’ve died of hazing since 1838, most of whom died after 1970. All but around 10 are believed to have been male.
Reuters
Hundreds of people, some wearing surgical masks and armed with crowbars and cutting tools, tore down protest barriers in the heart of Hong Kong's business district on Monday, scuffling with protesters who have occupied the streets for two weeks.
Angry taxi drivers opposed to the protests, which have seriously affected their business, also rallied at one barricaded road with a row of 12 taxis, demanding an end to the protest.
"Open the roads," chanted a crowd, which included taxi and truck drivers. Taxi drivers have given protesters a deadline of Wednesday evening for all barricades to be lifted.
A truck with a crane on top attempted to remove barricades from one area until police eventually stopped it, but protesters complained that police did not act quickly enough.
DW
Turkish sources on Monday denied reports that Ankara had given permission to Washington to use its air bases, particularly that of Inchirlik in southern Turkey, to launch strikes on the extremist group "Islamic State" (IS).
"There is no new agreement with the United States about Incirlik," a Turkish government official told AFP news agency.
The official added that negotiations were continuing. Sources from the Turkish prime minister's office also denied any agreement with Washington over the use of bases.
Pressure on Turkey to join in US-led efforts to push back IS militants has intensified as fighting comes to within just hundreds of meters (yards) of the Turkish border.
Al Jazeera
In a dramatic shift in tone, a Vatican document said that homosexuals had "gifts and qualities to offer" and asked if Catholicism could accept gays and recognise positive aspects of same-sex couples.
Roman Catholic gay rights groups around the world hailed Monday's paper as a breakthrough, but Church conservatives called it a betrayal of traditional family values.
The document, prepared after a week of discussions at an assembly of 200 bishops on the family, said the Church should challenge itself to find "a fraternal space" for homosexuals without compromising Catholic doctrine on family and matrimony.
Der Spiegel Editorial
After the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the US sacrificed its values and betrayed its civil rights. With a new Islamist threat brewing, Germany must avoid avoid making the same mistakes. Its democracy is strong enough to withstand the threat.
The world of Islamism has long since reached Germany. Salafists are battling Kurds in our city centers; they walk with their Niqab-draped wives in Berlin's Humboldthain park; they collect money for their fellow believers fighting in Syria. They badmouth the country that provides for them but which doesn't make them happy. They dream of a better world: Islamic paradise. Now they know where it is, too. Paradise lies just across the Turkish border. It calls itself Islamic State.
NPR
Saying that he "clarified how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the Nobel Prize in economic sciences to Jean Tirole, who teaches at the Toulouse School of Economics. He studies oligopolies, markets that are controlled by a handful of powerful (and interdependent) companies.
"I was very surprised, I was incredibly surprised," Tirole said shortly after he received the phone call informing him of the win. "The honor... it took me half an hour to recoup from the call. I still haven't recouped yet."
The Nobel committee said Tirole is "one of the most influential economists of our time," describing how he helped to reshape regulators' approach with his idea that the same policy rules have different effects — both good and bad — in different industries. In particular, he applied those theories to burgeoning sectors such as telecommunications and banks.
Al Jazeera
The Iraqi army has withdrawn from its last base in the city of Hit in Anbar province following weeks of fighting with the ISIL, leaving the group in full control, security sources have said.
Hundreds of troops were pulled out of the base and relocated to help protect the Asad air base, the AFP news agency quoted a police colonel in the provincial capital of Ramadi as saying.
"Our military leaders argued that instead of leaving those forces exposed to attacks by ISIL, they would be best used to shore up the defence of Asad air base," he said.
"Hit is now 100 percent under ISIL control."
Asad, northwest of Hit, is one of the last still under government control in the western province. It is surrounded by desert and a tougher target for ISIL fighters.
Other security officials said military aircraft picked up senior officers from the Hit base, and the rest of the force drove in a convoy to Asad.
Reuters
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said on Monday a nuclear deal with the West was bound to happen and he believed it could be achieved by a November 24 deadline.
"We have reached consensus on generalities and there are only the fine details to be worked out: whether we would reach an agreement within the next 40 days, if the time will be extended, etc.," the president told his people in a late evening address broadcast live on television.
"Of course details are important too, but what's important is that the nuclear issue is irreversible. I think a final settlement can be achieved in these remaining 40 days. We will not return to the situation a year ago. The world is tired and wants it to end, resolved through negotiations," he said.
The Guardian
After more than six weeks of global speculation, the people of North Korea can at last relax: their beloved leader has finally been seen in public once more. State media reported early on Tuesday local time that Kim Jong-un visited a newly built residential district and the Natural Energy Institute of the State Academy of Sciences. “Our scientists are patriots who are devoting all their lives to building a rich and powerful nation,” he was quoted as saying.
It was Kim’s first public appearance since 3 September, when he attended a concert with his wife. The report did not say on which day the visits took place.
Al Jazeera
Motion adopted 274-2 by House of Commons urges government to "recognise state of Palestine alongside state of Israel".
British MPs have voted in favour of recognising Palestine as a state in a move which will not alter the government's stance on the issue, but which carries symbolic value for Palestinians in their pursuit of international recognition.
The UK does not classify Palestine as a state, but says it could do so at any time if it believed it would help peace efforts between the Palestinians and Israel.
David Cameron, UK prime minister, abstained from the vote, which was called by an opposition MP, and Cameron's spokesman earlier said that foreign policy would not be affected whatever the outcome.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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The Guardian
Global warming is changing the way the US trains for and goes to war – affecting war games, weapons systems, training exercises, and military installations – according to the Pentagon.
The defence secretary, Chuck Hagel, will tell a high-level meeting of military leaders on Monday that the Pentagon is undertaking sweeping changes to operation systems and installations to keep up with a growing threat of rising seas, droughts, and natural disasters caused by climate change.
“A changing climate will have real impacts on our military and the way it executes its missions,” Hagel wrote in his introduction to a Pentagon report out today. “We are considering the impacts of climate change in our war games and defence planning scenarios.”
The Pentagon’s strategic planners have for years viewed climate change as a “threat multiplier”– worsening old conflicts and potentially provoking new clashes over migration and shortages of food and water in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, and opening up new military challenges in a melting Arctic.
NPR
When the news broke Tuesday that three scientists whose discoveries made practical household LED lighting possible had won the Nobel Prize in physics, most Americans probably thought of the LED screen in their TV, or perhaps about whether they might finally consider shifting to energy-efficient LED lighting in their homes. (The LED, or light-emitting diode, makes use of treated or coated semiconductors to produce light. Blue LED lighting — the Nobelists' invention — was the missing ingredient that allowed the creation of LED lamps.)
Less familiar is the illumination revolution LED bulbs have helped set off in the developing world. For a growing proportion of the more than a billion people who live without reliable sources of electricity, LED lights, in tandem with solar panels, have been a godsend.
NPR
Army veteran Randy Michaud had to make a 200-mile trip to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Aroostook County, Maine, near the Canadian border, every time he had a medical appointment.
Michaud, who was medically retired after a jeep accident in Germany 25 years ago, moved home to Maine in 1991. He was eligible for VA medical care, but the long drive was a problem.
He's one of millions of veterans living in rural America who must travel hundreds of miles round-trip for care.
"If I get an appointment in the winter, I'll cancel that sucker and I'll live with the pain until spring time," he says.
C/NET
Heather Parker is a technically savvy businesswoman. She has her own Heather Parker Photography Web site, she knows about social media and search-engine optimization, she publishes examples of her work on Yelp.
But she didn't know about one of the biggest changes happening right now: a massive expansion of Internet address domains beyond the well-known .com, .net, and .org. If she wanted, she could move her Web site to heatherparker.photography today.
"I didn't know .photography was something I could register for until now," Parker said. She's not going to, because clients likely wouldn't know what it meant if they saw it on a business card, she added.
That lack of awareness is one challenge facing domain-name expansion and the non-profit organization behind it, the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. Another is a rat's nest of global trademark complications as companies try to protect their brands on hundreds of new Internet domains.
C/NET
Apple has the chance on Thursday to provide a few compelling reasons for consumers to upgrade or buy a new iPad.
The company's second event in just two months won't have the flash from the previous affair, which saw the debut of two larger iPhones and a glimpse at the Apple Watch. Instead, the company is expected to show off a new iPad (or two), unveil new Macs and talk more about its OS X Yosemite operating system for its desktop. The presentation, which kicks off at 10 a.m. PT, is a lower-key affair held at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.
While the iPhone remains Apple's dominant revenue engine -- contributing to more than half of its sales -- the company is eager to bolster its other businesses. Front and center will be a new version of the iPad, which faces questions over whether its declining shipments are a temporary hiccup or a troubling trend. The question for the tablet has continued to shift from "What nifty new feature will be on the new iPad?" to "Do I really need to replace my aging -- but still functional -- iPad?"
Temperature anomalies (in degrees Celsius) of various regions around the world in August 2014.
Climate Central
Like August before it, September 2014 was the warmest September on record, according to newly updated NASA data. The warm month makes it even more likely that 2014 will become the warmest year on record.
This September was about 1.4°F above the 1951-1980 average temperature for the month, data from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) showed. That makes it the warmest September in GISS records, edging out the previous September record set in 2005. GISS records extend back to 1880.
September followed what both NASA and the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) rated as the warmest August on record, and what NASA ranked as the fourth warmest summer on record globally. NCDC’s temperature data for September will be released later this week.
ScienceBlog
More than $100 trillion in public and private spending could be saved between now and 2050 if the world expands public transportation, walking and cycling in cities, according to a new report released by the University of California, Davis, and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. Additionally, reductions in carbon dioxide emissions reaching 1,700 megatons per year in 2050 could be achieved if this shift occurs.
Further, an estimated 1.4 million early deaths associated with exposure to vehicle tailpipe emissions could be avoided annually by 2050 if governments require the strongest vehicle pollution controls and ultralow-sulfur fuels, according to a related analysis by the International Council on Clean Transportation included in the report. Doubling motor vehicle fuel economy could reduce CO2 emissions by an additional 700 megatons in 2050.