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
With Weeks To Go, Miles Apart In Iranian Negotiations
The interim nuclear accord negotiated between Iran and six world powers almost a year ago de-escalated a standoff that once seemed headed for a military confrontation: Seeking sanctions relief, Iran has eliminated the stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium that could more rapidly be converted to bomb materiel, and has stopped enrichment to that grade; it has trimmed its supply of low-enriched uranium and has accepted more intrusive international inspections.
Meetings between U.S. and Iranian officials have become more commonplace, and the two sides have even tacitly cooperated in helping the Iraqi government fend off the threat of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant movement. But that interim agreement expires on Nov. 24, and as U.S. and Iranian negotiators who reconvened in Vienna on Tuesday face a number of major obstacles in their six-week race to conclude a final agreement.
Secretary of State John Kerry meets his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif on Wednesday, along with European Union foreign policy head Catherine Ashton. That meeting will be followed later in the week by a gathering of representatives from the so-called P5+1 group — the United States, France, Germany, China, Russia and the United Kingdom — which has been negotiating with Iran.
Last November’s deal had actually set a July deadline for a final agreement, but that was postponed for four months when the two sides expressed confidence in being able to reach a deal if given further time. But while Iranian and U.S. officials remain publicly optimistic, serious gaps remain between the demands of the two sides, and many officials and analysts question whether a permanent accord can be reach by the deadline.
“It is almost certain that a full-fledged agreement by Nov. 24 is no longer in the cards,” said Ali Vaez, a senior Iran analyst with the International Crisis Group, in an email. “What is still possible is a breakthrough that could justify adding more time to the diplomatic clock.”
aljazeera
World News
Radioactivity Spikes In No. 1 Reactor Well Water
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said there has been a sharp spike in the radioactivity of water samples taken from an observation well built by the sea at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.
The samples, collected from the well on Monday, contained a record 251,000 becquerels of radioactive cesium per liter — 3.7 times the amount recorded in a sample collected last Thursday.
The observation well, located to the east of the damaged No. 2 reactor, is one of several installed close to the seawall in the plant’s port. Monday’s reading was the highest recorded in water samples from any of the wells.
The samples also contained 7.8 million becquerels per liter of radioactive beta particle-emitting substances, such as strontium-90, an almost fourfold increase from Thursday’s level.
The amount of gamma ray-emitting substances, such as cobalt-60 and manganese-54, included in the samples was also at a record high.
japantimes
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No Civilians Remain In Kobane, Turkish Deputy PM Says
Nearly 1,000 people in the Syrian town of Kobane are fighting in clashes with Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihadists, but no civilians are left in the town, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç has said.
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He claimed that there are people who are fleeing Democratic Union Party (PYD) fighters and want to take shelter in Turkey, and also suggested that Kobane had "not received the support it expected from other Kurdish groups."
The outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has been avoiding fighting in Kobane because it does not have such a capability, he claimed.
“They can only fight in the mountains and against soldiers, police, teachers and judges … It’s easy to kidnap people, but they could not and cannot fight in Kobane. We could say more, but they would be embarrassed,” Arınç said.
The issue is not about Kobane, but launching an "uprising for which they very much have yearned,” the deputy prime minister also said, referring to the recent violent protests across Turkey.
hurriyetdailynews
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Clashes As Hong Kong Police Crack Down On Protesters
Hundreds of police clashed with protesters in Hong Kong early on Wednesday, amid one of the toughest crackdowns since the early days of the pro-democracy demonstrations that have crippled parts of the city centre for more than two weeks.
As their operation to reopen blocked roads continued into their third straight day, police said they arrested 45 protesters, using pepper spray on those who resisted, as they cleared barricades from a major harbour-front road near the offices of Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying.
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The Chinese government made its highest-level denunciation yet of the protesters, accusing them of pursuing a conspiracy to challenge Beijing's power over the city.
Zhang Xiaoming, the head of the central government's Liaison Office in Hong Kong, said the movement had engaged in "radical" forms of street confrontations and "provoked" the Chinese government. China's central leadership was "paying very close attention to the current developments," Mr Zhang said, according to state news agency China News Service.
The Communist Party has so far resolutely backed Mr Leung in public. A front-page editorial carried in the party's flagship newspaper, The People's Daily, on Wednesday praised his handling of the protests and said calls for his dismissal were part of a plot to force the government into unacceptable concessions.
sydneymorningherald
Excerpt From People's Daily:
After one unreasonable demand after another, after every new incident of tedious political wrangling provoked by pan-democratic camps like the Civil Party, Hong Kong - a district which once surpassed the mainland in efficiency and ranked among the strongest in the world - is losing ground. Now beginning to blatantly break the law and defy public order, the Occupy Central movement has tuned into an unprecedented defiance against both central government and the local Hong Kong government. Every new move increases the price that Hong Kong will have to pay for this political chaos.
U.S. News
Frontier Jet That Carried Ebola Patient Made Five More Flights
The Frontier Airlines jet that carried a Dallas healthcare worker diagnosed with Ebola made five additional flights after her trip before it was taken out of service, according to a flight-monitoring website..
Denver-based Frontier said in a statement that it grounded the plane immediately after the carrier was notified late Tuesday night by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the Ebola patient.
Flight 1143, on which the woman flew from Cleveland to Dallas/Fort Worth, was the last trip of the day Monday for the Airbus A320. But Tuesday morning the plane was flown back to Cleveland and then to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., back to Cleveland and then to Atlanta and finally back to Cleveland again, according to Daniel Baker, chief executive of the flight-monitoring site Flightaware.com.
He said his data did not include any passenger manifests, so he could not tell how many total passengers flew on the plane Tuesday.
The airline said it was working with the CDC to contact all 132 passengers on the Monday flight that carried the Ebola patient.
latimes
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Texas Ebola Patient Headed To Emory
Frontier Airlines reported in a statement this afternoon that a plane carrying a Texas nurse infected with the deadly Ebola virus received a thorough cleaning after landing in Dallas before resuming service, contrary to some earlier reports.
Airline workers followed normal cleaning procedures that are consistent with guidelines from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the statement. The plane was cleaned in Dallas and again in Cleveland last night, Frontier stated.
The nurse, one of two Texas healthcare workers recently infected with Ebola, will be transported to Emory University in Atlanta for treatment on Wednesday, according to CDC officials.
The patient headed to Emory is the second nurse to apparently be infected with Ebola while caring for a Liberian man who died of the disease at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, CDC Director Tom Frieden told reporters during a press conference Wednesday afternoon.
“We also are talking with all the specialized hospitals about their ability to take patients if needed,” U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Sylvia Burwell said, in the joint conference call with Frieden.
atlantajounalconstitution
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Nurses At Presbyterian Dallas Describe Confused Response To Ebola Case
Nurses at the Dallas hospital where a Liberian man died of Ebola described a confused and chaotic response to his arrival in the emergency room, alleging in a statement Tuesday that he languished for hours in a room with other patients and that hospital authorities resisted isolating him.
In addition, they said, the nurses tending him had flimsy protective gear and no proper training from hospital administrators.
The allegations, made under unusual circumstances, provided the first detailed portrait of Thomas Eric Duncan’s second trip to the emergency room, where he arrived by ambulance days after doctors had sent him home with a fever, a headache, abdominal pain and a prescription for antibiotics.
Tuesday’s claims came during a conference call with reporters in which none of the nurses from Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital spoke or was identified to reporters. A statement outlining a litany of damning assertions was read by Deborah Burger, co-president of National Nurses United. The Oakland group does not represent the Dallas nurses, who are nonunionized, but has been vocal about what it says are hospitals’ failures to prepare for Ebola.
The Dallas nurses asked National Nurses United to read their statement so they could air complaints anonymously and without fear of losing their jobs, National Nurses United executive director RoseAnn DeMoro said from Oakland, Calif. DeMoro refused to say how many nurses signed off on the letter or how many were on the media call, but she said all of them worked at Presbyterian and had been involved in Duncan’s care or had direct knowledge of what had occurred after he arrived by ambulance.
dallasnews
Science and Technology
U.S. Fusion Plan Draws Blistering Critique
Many U.S. fusion scientists are blasting a report that seeks to map out a 10-year strategic plan for their field, calling it “flawed,” “unsatisfactory,” and the product of a rushed process rife with potential conflicts of interest. One result: Last week, most members of a 23-person government advisory panel had to recuse themselves from voting on the report as a result of potential conflicts.
“The whole process was unsatisfactory,” says Martin Greenwald of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT’s) Plasma Science and Fusion Center in Cambridge.
Achieving fusion—nuclear reactions that have the potential to produce copious, clean energy—requires heating hydrogen fuel to more than 100 million degrees Celsius, causing it to become an ionized gas or plasma. Huge and expensive reactors are needed to contain the superhot plasma long enough for reactions to start. The largest current fusion effort is the ITER tokamak, a machine under construction in France with support from the United States and international partners. But no fusion reactor has yet produced more energy than it consumes.
This past spring, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) commissioned its Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC) to produce a report examining potential paths forward. The request came as the U.S. program was struggling to maintain a viable research program amid stagnant budgets and the growing financial commitment to ITER, which is consuming an increasingly large share of U.S. fusion funding. FESAC set up a subcommittee that, at DOE’s request, did not include any members from the major existing U.S. fusion labs. The subcommittee had only a few months to consult the community and draft a report. In addition, its recommendations had to fit within four 10-year budget scenarios that called for relatively little or no growth in spending.
The report proposes reshuffling U.S. plasma research, in particular doing less basic plasma physics and more technology development for future power reactors. That would mean a new emphasis on controlling unruly plasma, understanding plasma’s interactions with the solid surfaces of the reactor, and improved modeling and simulation. The report proposes creating a new facility on the site of an existing spallation neutron source to test neutron-resistant materials for future reactors. At the end of the 10-year period, it recommends that the United States be ready to build a new reactor: the Fusion Nuclear Science Facility (FNSF).
sciencemagazine
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Hydraulic Fracturing Linked To Earthquakes In Ohio
ydraulic fracturing triggered a series of small earthquakes in 2013 on a previously unmapped fault in Harrison County, Ohio, according to a study published in the journal Seismological Research Letters (SRL).
Nearly 400 small earthquakes occurred between Oct. 1 and Dec. 13, 2013, including 10 "positive" magnitude earthquake, none of which were reported felt by the public. The 10 positive magnitude earthquakes, which ranged from magnitude 1.7 to 2.2, occurred between Oct. 2 and 19, coinciding with hydraulic fracturing operations at nearby wells.
This series of earthquakes is the first known instance of seismicity in the area.
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"Hydraulic fracturing has the potential to trigger earthquakes, and in this case, small ones that could not be felt, however the earthquakes were three orders of magnitude larger than normally expected," said Paul Friberg, a seismologist with Instrumental Software Technologies, Inc. (ISTI) and a co-author of the study.
The earthquakes revealed an east-west trending fault that lies in the basement formation at approximately two miles deep and directly below the three horizontal gas wells. The EarthScope Transportable Array Network Facility identified the first earthquakes on Oct. 2, 2013, locating them south of Clendening Lake near the town of Uhrichsville, Ohio. A subsequent analysis identified 190 earthquakes during a 39-hour period on Oct. 1 and 2, just hours after hydraulic fracturing began on one of the wells.
sciencedaily
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Scientists Want To Try Electrical Stimulation In More Paralyzed Patients
More than 30 people who have been paralyzed by spinal-cord injuries could soon get an experimental treatment that involves sending electric currents to their spines. The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation is raising funds to add volunteers to an ongoing study of the treatment.
The treatment took a strong step forward recently, when the study's scientists published a paper showing that electrically stimulating the spinal cord, alongside intense physical therapy, helped four completely paralyzed young men to move again. Whenever the men visited the lab and had their electrode implants turned on, they were able to move their legs, knees, ankles, and toes on their own. The men also reported they had improved bladder and sexual function after starting the electrical stimulation therapy — important components to their quality of life.
Researchers are now seeking to expand the study to 36 additional volunteers, whom they'll follow for five years. The scientists "need to test more patients that will be a little more diverse to get a better idea of who will be responsive," lead researcher Reggie Edgerton of UCLA wrote to Popular Science in an email. The current participants are active men in their early 30s or younger. Edgerton and his team want to test study participants who are older, as well as women. The team remains focused on people who have a complete paralysis diagnosis and have been paralyzed for a year or more.
popsci
Well, that's different...
Not Ready for Prime Time:
Police in West Valley City, Utah, searched for an exceptionally unintimidating man in August after reports that the man tried to rob a Subway sandwich shop and a Family Dollar. In each episode, an employee told the man to wait while the employee went to a back room, but then simply failed to return, leading the "robber," eventually, to walk away empty-handed.
newsoftheweird
Bill Moyers and Company:
Restoring an America That Has Lost Its Way
Reporter Bob Herbert on his new book, Losing Our Way, an intimate and heartrending portrait of America in economic despair.