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
UN Expert Calls For Prosecution Of CIA Officers And Other US Government Officials
GENEVA (9 December 2014) – Statement by United Nations Special Rapporteur on counter terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, concerning the publication of the summary of the Feinstein report on crimes committed by the Bush-era CIA:
"I welcome the belated publication of the summary report by the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence into the crimes of torture and enforced disappearance of terrorist suspects by the Bush-era CIA. It has taken four years since the report was finalised to reach this point. The Administration is to be commended for resisting domestic pressure to suppress these important findings.
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The identities of the perpetrators, and many other details, have been redacted in the published summary report but are known to the Select Committee and to those who provided the Committee with information on the programme.
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As a matter of international law, the US is legally obliged to bring those responsible to justice. The UN Convention Against Torture and the UN Convention on Enforced Disappearances require States to prosecute acts of torture and enforced disappearance where there is sufficient evidence to provide a reasonable prospect of conviction. States are not free to maintain or permit impunity for these grave crimes.
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However, the heaviest penalties should be reserved for those most seriously implicated in the planning and purported authorisation of these crimes. Former Bush Administration officials who have admitted their involvement in the programme should also face criminal prosecution for their acts."
Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
h/t ericlewis0
World News
Palestinian Minister Dies After Confrontation With Israeli Soldiers
A Palestinian minister has died after clashes with Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank. The circumstances of Ziad Abu Ein's death have yet to be officially confirmed, but sources told Al Jazeera that it occurred after he inhaled large amounts of tear gas and was struck by security forces.
Abu Ein, who was head of the Anti-Wall and Settlement Commission, died in Ramallah Hospital on Wednesday following a protest against the separation barrier near the village of Turmusayya, northeast of Ramallah.
Activists said they were planting olive trees by the illegal settlement of Adei Ad when the soldiers attacked them and fired large amounts of tear gas at the group.
The 55-year-old is thought to have been hit in the chest by Israeli soldiers at the demonstration, according to an Israeli journalist and a Reuters photographer who were at the scene. Other witnesses said he was headbutted and then collapsed.
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The European Union called for an immediate, independent investigation into Abu Ein's death. "Reports of excessive use of force by Israeli security forces are extremely worrying," said EU High Representative Federica Mogherini, in a statement. "This is a dramatic reminder for the entire international community of the deteriorating situation on the ground."
aljazeera
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State Secrecy Law Takes Effect Amid Protests, Concerns Over Press Freedom
Japan’s controversial state secrets law came into effect Wednesday as hundreds of demonstrators took to the streets, saying the measure undermines the public’s right to know and demanding that it be scrapped.
More than 300 protesters, including roughly 100 journalists, gathered in front of the prime minister’s office in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward, chanting slogans like “We oppose the secrecy law for going to war” and “Information belongs to citizens.”
“We’ve seen more and more pressure on media organizations that are critical of the administration,” said Seigo Arasaki, who heads the Japan Federation of Newspaper Workers Unions, known as Shimbun Roren. “We will monitor how the law will be applied, and raise questions,.”
Under the law that cleared the Diet in December 2013, the heads of 19 government ministries and agencies can now designate as state secrets information deemed to be sensitive in the areas of diplomacy, defense, counterterrorism and counterespionage.
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State secrets are defined in 55 categories, including information about the development of submarines, aircraft, weapons and ammunition. Intelligence and images obtained via radio waves and satellites and provided by foreign governments and international organizations could be withheld from the public.
japantimes
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David Hicks Heckles Attorney-General George Brandis
At Human Rights Awards Ceremony
Former Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks has heckled Federal Attorney-General George Brandis at an awards ceremony in Sydney.
"Hey, my name is David Hicks!" he shouted, as Senator Brandis wrapped up his address at a human rights awards function on Wednesday evening.
"I was tortured for five-and-a-half years in Guantanamo Bay in the full knowledge of your party! What do you have to say?"
As Senator Brandis walked off the stage at the Museum of Contemporary Arts, Mr Hicks told reporters he was a "coward" for not answering his question.
source
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Mr Hicks was held in the US-run jail in Cuba until 2007, when he pleaded guilty to providing material support for terrorism and was sent to Adelaide's Yatala Prison to serve the rest of his seven-year sentence. He was released under a control order later that year.
He claims he was beaten, sexually abused and drugged while in Guantanamo Bay, and that he was convicted on a statement of facts for which he never received any evidence.
sydneymorningherald
U.S. News
Bush White House Was Worried Colin Powell
Would ‘Blow His Stack’ If Briefed On Torture
The Bush White House didn’t brief then-Secretary of State Colin Powell about the specifics of the CIA's interrogation program until September 2003 because it was worried Powell would “blow his stack” if he found out what was going on, according to the report released Tuesday by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
According to a July 2003 email, the official reason the National Security Council didn’t have a full briefing on the program at that time was to “avoid press disclosures.” But unofficially, the email said, "it is clear to us from some of the runup meetings we had with [White House] counsel that the [White House] is extremely concerned [Secretary of State] Powell would blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what’s been going on."
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice decided later that Powell, along with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, should in fact be briefed on the program. Both were briefed for 25 minutes on Sept. 16, 2003. The CIA started using what it called “enhanced interrogation” tactics in 2002.
According to the report, the CIA provided “extensive amounts of inaccurate and incomplete information” about its operations and their effectiveness during several briefings and statements to Congress, the public and in response to questions from the White House.
The report also revealed that President George W. Bush was briefed by “no CIA officer, up to and including CIA Directors George Tenet and Porter Goss … before April 2006,” two and a half years after Powell and Rumsfeld.
bloomberg
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$1.1 Trillion Spending Pact Angers Campaign Finance Watchdogs
The $1.1 trillion spending agreement reached by House and Senate negotiators on Tuesday night would vastly expand the amount of money that donors can give political parties, bolstering party leaders’ ability to tap into the wallets of their largest contributors and reclaiming some clout from the outside groups that can accept unlimited dollars.
Depending on how the new law is interpreted by election officials, the provision could expand the amount that any one person can give to national party committees to more than $777,000 each year from what is now a maximum of $97,200. In a two-year cycle, that could add up to more than $1.5 million. Under the new rules, the extra money could be used only to pay for specific expenses, including the presidential nomination conventions, legal fees, and real estate purchases or office renovations.
Neither party’s leaders in Congress would claim responsibility for inserting the new provision, which was tucked into the final pages of the more than 1,600-page spending bill on Tuesday evening.
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Republicans also flexed their muscles on funding decisions, especially on the military. Many of Mr. Obama’s efforts to trim military spending were reversed. Appropriators added four F-35 Joint Strike Fighters that the Pentagon had not requested. The defense procurement program will cost an additional $479 million. Communities around military bases will get $32 million more than Congress had intended to give just months ago in lieu of property taxes.
Still, Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill said they held their ground on the most fundamental issues. The bill does nothing to limit the carrying out of the Affordable Care Act. Funding increases secured last year for Mr. Obama’s early childhood education push were maintained. The president’s proposed funding to fight the Ebola outbreak survived. And Democrats secured funding increases for the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to police Wall Street regulations in the Dodd-Frank law.
nyt
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Indexes End Down More Than 1 pct As Energy Falls Further
U.S. stocks lost more than 1 percent on Wednesday in the S&P 500's biggest decline since Oct. 13 as another big drop in oil prices hammered energy shares.
The S&P 500 has lost 2.4 percent this week so far, reversing a recent trend. The Dow and S&P 500 had capped a seventh straight week of gains on Friday.
Selling accelerated in afternoon trading, and by day's end, NYSE declining issues outnumbered advancers by a ratio of 4.66 to 1 ratio. In a sign of rising investor caution, the CBOE Volatility index .VIX rose 24.5 percent, its biggest daily percentage gain since July 31.
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Falling oil prices have added to worries about global demand and raised concerns about earnings for energy companies, with year-end tax selling putting additional pressure on the group. The S&P energy sector is now down 14.7 percent for 2014, the worst performing of the 10 major S&P sectors.
"It's a sea of red, a uniform purge that is related to concerns about global demand," said Mark Luschini, chief investment strategist at Janney Montgomery Scott in Philadelphia. "We've had this oil issue lingering over the market, and OPEC trimming their forecast is weighing on equity investors, who had precipitated the concerns about global demand way back in September."
reuters
Science and Technology
Stretchy Artificial Skin Lets Prosthetic Hand Sense Heat, Humidity, and Pressure
Prosthetic limbs that can be controlled by an amputee’s thoughts or muscle movements already exist. But what if they could also sense the environment and then send that information back to the amputee’s nervous system?
In order to create prosthetics that can function more like real body parts, scientists are designing artificial skins that pick up on tactile information. So far, these skins have gotten very good at sensing pressure—in fact, a skin designed by Stanford engineers is 1,000 times more sensitive than human skin. Another is self-healing.
But a new skin built by researchers in South Korea may be the smartest artificial skin yet. It’s stretchy, like real skin, and it can sense pressure, temperature, and humidity. It even has a built-in heater so it feels like living tissue. The researchers tested the artificial skin on a prosthetic hand, and they hope that some day, it will interface with a patient’s nerves so amputees can feel everything the fake skin feels.
“The prosthetic hand and laminated electronic skin could encounter many complex operations such as hand shaking, keyboard tapping, ball grasping, holding a cup of hot or cold drink, touching dry or wet surfaces and human to human contact,” they write in the paper, which was published today in Nature Communications.
The bulk of the new skin is composed of a flexible, transparent silicone material called polydimethylsiloxane -- or PDMS. Embedded within it are silicon nanoribbons that generate electricity when they're squished or stretched, providing a source of tactile feedback. They can also sense whether an object is hot or cold.
popsci
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Warmer Pacific Ocean Could Release Millions Of Tons Of Seafloor Methane
Off the West Coast of the United States, methane gas is trapped in frozen layers below the seafloor. New research from the University of Washington shows that water at intermediate depths is warming enough to cause these carbon deposits to melt, releasing methane into the sediments and surrounding water.
Researchers found that water off the coast of Washington is gradually warming at a depth of 500 meters, about a third of a mile down. That is the same depth where methane transforms from a solid to a gas. The research suggests that ocean warming could be triggering the release of a powerful greenhouse gas.
"We calculate that methane equivalent in volume to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill is released every year off the Washington coast," said Evan Solomon, a UW assistant professor of oceanography. He is co-author of a paper to appear in Geophysical Research Letters.
While scientists believe that global warming will release methane from gas hydrates worldwide, most of the current focus has been on deposits in the Arctic. This paper estimates that from 1970 to 2013, some 4 million metric tons of methane has been released from hydrate decomposition off Washington. That's an amount each year equal to the methane from natural gas released in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon blowout off the coast of Louisiana, and 500 times the rate at which methane is naturally released from the seafloor.
"Methane hydrates are a very large and fragile reservoir of carbon that can be released if temperatures change," Solomon said. "I was skeptical at first, but when we looked at the amounts, it's significant."
sciencedaily
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Turning Shipping Containers Into Urban Farms
At any given time, there are upwards of 700,000 unused shipping containers in the United States. Some clever architects have hacked these 40-foot steel compartments into skate parks, libraries, emergency shelters and surprisingly beautiful homes.
But Daniel Kuenzi has a new one. The Washington, D.C.-based entrepreneur is turning derelict shipping containers into urban farms.
A self-described "hobbyist gardener," Kuenzi grew up in Redmond, Washington—home to Microsoft—during the tech boom of the 1990s. "At a young age I saw the impact a dedicated group of entrepreneurs could have on the world," he says. He studied business at the University of Southern California and worked for an early-stage investment group that fostered promising startups in Los Angeles, before moving east to enroll in Georgetown University’s MBA program. He co-founded Local Roots Farms in 2013.
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Let's start with the problem. What problem are you trying to fix?
On the East Coast, lettuce travels over 3,000 miles, on average, before hitting our shelves. Regardless of how it tastes at harvest, the 10 days spent in transit degrades both shelf life and quality while driving up costs. Many of us have experienced the disappointment of bringing home produce only to find it has spoiled in less than 48 hours, or that it tastes as bland as crunchy water.
Moreover, millions of Americans live in urban food deserts—areas of our cities where retailers find it unprofitable to build stores that sell fresh produce. How can we expect to eat healthily when good food is either too expensive or nonexistent?
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You cultivate crops in 40-foot refurbished shipping containers. What gave you this idea?
Shipping containers are durable, easy to modify, stackable and can be shipped anywhere. Additionally, there is an abundant surplus of unused shipping containers in the United States that can be recycled and refurbished at low cost. This allows us the flexibility to have a farm on the ground and growing for our customers within weeks, rather than the months or even years required for traditional greenhouse construction. We hope to one day use these containers for temporary food production in remote locations, including frontline military operations and rapid-response aid relief in foreign countries.
Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without using soil. But what does your farming system actually look like?
Each farm uses next-generation indoor agriculture techniques to grow the equivalent yield of five acres of conventional outdoor farming each year. The process uses 80 percent less water with no harmful run-off and prevents exposure to pests and diseases. This process, called "Controlled Environment Agriculture," allows us to grow 365 days per year in any city by taking the same plants that grow outside and putting them in perfect growing conditions. Whether it’s snowing, raining or 100 degrees outside, the “weather” inside is just right for growing healthy plants. Unfortunately, we are still in the process of patenting our system, so we cannot share any more details.
smithsonian
Well, that's different...
The Continuing Crisis
A German woman who identifies herself only as "Anna Konda" described to Vice Media in October her Female Fight Club in Berlin, now three years old, for women to test themselves in all-out wrestling matches. While some are fetish-motivated dominants, others display no particular sexuality -- like Anna herself, who, she admits, simply likes to "crush" men's and women's skulls between her massive thighs. Anna says she is a product of East Germany's cliched development of tough, muscular female athletes.
newsoftheweird
Bill Moyers and Company:
The United States of Ferguson
In an encore broadcast, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about the nation’s legacy of slavery and white supremacy.