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
Pope Francis Is Credited With A Crucial Role In U.S.-Cuba Agreement
Pope Francis had quite a 78th birthday. The pontiff began Wednesday with prayers and a birthday celebration with tango dancers near St. Peter’s Square. His day ended with a historic diplomatic breakthrough between Cuba and the United States — and the disclosure that the Argentine pope played a key role as broker.
Francis is being credited for helping bridge the divide by first sending letters to President Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba, and then having the Vatican host a diplomatic meeting between the two sides in October.
“The Holy Father wishes to express his warm congratulations for the historic decision,” Francis said in a statement issued Wednesday night by the Vatican.
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For Francis, the breakthrough on Wednesday burnished his efforts to reposition the Vatican as a broker in global diplomacy. He has already waded into Middle East protests, hosting a prayer summit meeting between the Israeli and Palestinian presidents that bore few tangible results. Soon afterward, Israel began its military assault against Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, in Gaza.
But Francis has quickly become one of the world’s leading figures, and his role in the United States-Cuba breakthrough undoubtedly is tied to his status as the first Latin American pope of the Roman Catholic Church.
nytimes
World News
Economic Fears May Push Russia Into Ukraine Deal
The turmoil in the Russian economy appears to be encouraging Moscow to seek compromise in the crisis over Ukraine, although President Vladimir V. Putin has proved so erratic in past months that Western leaders are wary of proclaiming progress, officials and analysts said Wednesday.
On Sunday and again on Tuesday night — after days in which the ruble gyrated wildly, raising the possibility of a broader financial crisis that could saddle Mr. Putin with deeper economic and political problems — the Russian president spoke by phone with his Ukrainian, German and French counterparts. Statements released afterward in all four capitals talked of moving quickly to cement a cease-fire broadly observed since last week in eastern Ukraine.
Mr. Putin may make his intentions clearer at his annual news conference on Thursday. European leaders will meet later Thursday and Friday in Brussels amid growing indications that pro-Russian separatists and Ukrainians could meet Sunday or Monday for talks under European auspices.
One wild card is the threat by the United States to move ahead with a new round of sanctions against Russia.
The White House said Tuesday that President Obama, despite misgivings about falling out of step with European allies and complicating the talks, would sign newly passed legislation expanding the financial sanctions and providing additional military aid to Ukraine.
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On Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said that sanctions “could be lifted in a matter of weeks or days” depending on how Mr. Putin acts.
nytimes
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Israel Finds More Gas – But Will It Be Extracted?
To Israel’s growing family of offshore gas fields, add the Royee field. In a statement to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange Sunday, Ratio Oil and Israel Opportunity Energy Resources announced that a seismic survey of the Royee field indicated that it contained about 3 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas that could be extracted.
However, said economists, the Royee gas may not be extracted in the near future because there is so much gas in the “veteran” Leviathan and Tamar fields.
The survey indicated that Royee has between between 1.9 and 5 tcf, with 3.2 tcf its best estimate. Ratio holds a 70% stake in the field, and Israel Opportunity has 10%. The balance is held by Italian power company Edison. The field is located about 150 kilometers (93 miles’ off Israel’s shores, close to the international maritime border with Cyprus and Egypt.
If those figures pan out, the Royee field would be Israel’s third largest, after the Leviathan field, with 22 tcf, and the Tamar field, at 11 tcf. It should be noted that the estimated size of both fields has been raised several times, as further exploration indicated that there was more gas available than originally predicted.
Given that preparations to extract gas from the much larger Leviathan and Tamar fields are already at an advanced stage, economists speaking on Israel Radio said Sunday said that there was some doubt on when – or even whether – the Royee field would be exploited. According to business daily Globes, Israeli power companies, like the Israel Electric Corporation, have long-term contracts to buy gas from the Tamar field, while Israel is still trying to finish deals for the Leviathan gas that the government has authorized for foreign export.
timesofisrael
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Church Of England Appoints Its First Woman Bishop
The Church of England appointed its first female bishop on Wednesday, overturning centuries of tradition in a Church that has been deeply divided over the issue.
It named Reverend Libby Lane, a 48-year-old married mother of two, as the new Bishop of Stockport in northern England.
Prime Minister David Cameron tweeted: "Congratulations to Revd Libby Lane on becoming the first woman bishop in the Church. An historic appointment and important day for equality."
Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, spiritual head of the Church, said she was a "wonderful choice."
After long and heated debate, the Church of England governing Synod voted in July to allow women to become bishops and formally adopted legislation last month.
reuters
U.S. News
Wall Street Rallies After Fed Statement; S&P Has Best Day This Year
The S&P 500 scored its best day since October 2013 on Wednesday as the Federal Reserve gave an upbeat assessment of the economy and said it would take a patient approach toward lifting interest rates.
The rally, which followed a three-day losing streak, was also driven by a 4.2 percent gain in the S&P energy index .SPNY.
Following a two-day meeting, the U.S. central bank gave a strong signal that it was on track to raise interest rates sometime next year. The Fed statement came against a backdrop of solid domestic economic growth but trouble overseas.
"This is the market saying, 'Ah, I get it,' the Fed does not want to be in the business of disruption, this is a steady monetary policy and the Fed will continue to be supportive of asset prices," said Scott Clemons, chief investment strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman Private Banking in New York.
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The Dow Jones industrial average .DJI rose 288 points, or 1.69 percent, to 17,356.87, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 40.15 points, or 2.04 percent, to 2,012.89 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added 96.48 points, or 2.12 percent, to 4,644.31.
reuters
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14 Charged In Deadly 2012 Meningitis Outbreak
Mold and bacteria were in the air and on workers’ gloved fingertips. Pharmacists used expired ingredients, didn’t properly sterilize them and failed to test drugs for purity before sending them to hospitals and pain clinics. Employees falsified logs to make it look as if the so-called clean rooms had been disinfected.
Federal prosecutors leveled those allegations in bringing charges Wednesday against 14 former owners or employees of a Massachusetts pharmacy in connection with a nationwide meningitis outbreak that killed 64 people.
U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz called it the biggest criminal case ever brought in the U.S. over contaminated medicine.
The 2012 outbreak was traced to tainted drug injections manufactured by the now-closed New England Compounding Pharmacy of Framingham.
Barry Cadden, a co-founder of the business, and Glenn Adam Chin, a supervisory pharmacist, were slapped with the most serious charges, accused in the racketeering indictment of causing the deaths of 25 patients in seven states by acting with “wanton and willful disregard” of the risks.
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Ortiz said NECC was “filthy” and failed to comply with even basic health standards, and employees knew it.
“Production and profit were prioritized over safety,” she said.
wapo
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U.S. Firms Stand To Gain From Cuba Ties
Plans to increase trade and travel between the United States and Cuba should prove a boon to several industries, including Internet service providers, airlines and U.S. banks.
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"The potential market for U.S. exports of goods and services is significant, even though not enormous,'' Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at Peterson Institute for International Economics and co-author of Economic Normalization with Cuba: A Roadmap for US Policymakers, said in an e-mail Wednesday. "At best, Cuba is a small economy.''
If economic relations are fully normalized, a change that Hufbauer notes "is a long way off,'' U.S. merchandise exports to Cuba could reach $4.3 billion a year, and the export of goods from Cuba to the U.S. could total $5.8 billion a year, according to Hufbauer's study.
And while in the U.S., there is currently no recorded trade in services between the two nations, if a financial company can sell mutual funds to Cuban investors, for instance, or Cubans can easily visit family living in Florida, those sales of services could potentially generate hundreds of millions of dollars for each country.
With relations just beginning to thaw, the U.S. industries most likely to initially benefit include travel-oriented businesses such as airlines and resorts, processed food companies, agriculture firms, financial institutions and medical clinics, Hufbauer says.
usatoday
Science and Technology
Why The Leatherback Turtle Has A Skylight In Its Head
Close your eyes, and what do you see? Nothing, of course: The visual representation of your surroundings disappears. But you’re still receiving information from the ambient light passing through your eyelids. You can tell night from day and detect the flickering of shadows. That’s a poor substitute for color binocular vision for a primate, but for other animals, at other times, that kind of information has been crucial to survival, says ophthalmologist Ivan R. Schwab, author of Evolution’s Witness: How Eyes Evolved.
So a few animals retain primitive systems with the sole purpose of measuring ambient light—of which the most unusual is the leatherback sea turtle, one of the world’s largest reptiles. New research shows that the turtle has what British biologist John Davenport calls a “skylight” on the top of its skull, an unusually thin area of bone just beneath a spot of unpigmented skin that allows light to impinge directly on the brain’s pineal gland. With changes in long-wave light, Davenport proposes, the brain computes the “equilux,” the day (close to the equinox, but not necessarily coinciding) when sunset and sunrise are exactly 12 hours apart. More reliably than water temperature or light intensity, that’s the signal for turtles feeding in the North Atlantic to head south each fall.
In most vertebrates, humans included, the pineal regulates sleep and other cyclical activities in response to ambient light. A few species, mostly reptiles and amphibians, actually have a third eye on the top of their head to measure daylight, complete with a lens and retina—similar, but not identical, to the forward-facing eyes. Only leatherbacks, as far as we know, have the skylight.
Interestingly, there is a long philosophical and spiritual tradition of treating the pineal as a kind of parasensory organ, the mystical “third eye.” Descartes regarded it as the seat of the soul, because it had no symmetrical counterpart. Evolution has in fact equipped disparate parts of the body to respond to light, says Schwab; even humans have “photoreceptors in places you wouldn’t believe.”
smithsonian
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Ocean Acidification A Culprit In Commercial Shellfish Hatcheries' Failures
The mortality of larval Pacific oysters in Northwest hatcheries has been linked to ocean acidification. Yet the rate of increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the decrease of pH in near-shore waters have been questioned as being severe enough to cause the die-offs.
Now, a new study of Pacific oyster and Mediterranean mussel larvae found that the earliest larval stages are sensitive to saturation state, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) or pH (acidity) per se.
Saturation state is a measure of how corrosive seawater is to the calcium carbonate shells made by bivalve larvae, and how easy it is for larvae to produce their shells. A lower saturation rate is associated with more corrosive seawater.
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"Biological oceanographers have speculated that early life stages of marine organisms might be particularly sensitive to ocean acidification, but the underlying mechanisms remain unknown for most species," says David Garrison, program director in NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the research through an ocean acidification competition.
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"Bivalves have been around for a long time and have survived different geologic periods of high carbon dioxide levels in marine environments," says George Waldbusser, an Oregon State University (OSU) marine ecologist and biogeochemist and lead author of the paper.
"The difference is that in the past, alkalinity (the opposite of acidity) levels buffered increases in CO2, which kept the saturation state higher relative to pH. In the present ocean, the processes that contribute buffering to the ocean cannot keep pace with the rate of CO2 increase."
nationalsciencefoundation
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Thumbs-Up For Mind-Controlled Robotic Arm
A paralysed woman who controlled a robotic arm using just her thoughts has taken another step towards restoring her natural movements by controlling the arm with a range of complex hand movements.
Thanks to researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Jan Scheuermann, who has longstanding quadriplegia and has been taking part in the study for over two years, has gone from giving "high fives" to the "thumbs-up" after increasing the manoeuvrability of the robotic arm from seven dimensions (7D) to 10 dimensions (10D).
The extra dimensions come from four hand movements--finger abduction, a scoop, thumb extension and a pinch--and have enabled Jan to pick up, grasp and move a range of objects much more precisely than with the previous 7D control.
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Jan Scheuermann, 55, from Pittsburgh, PA had been paralysed from the neck down since 2003 due to a neurodegenerative condition. After her eligibility for a research study was confirmed in 2012, Jan underwent surgery to be fitted with two quarter-inch electrode grids, each fitted with 96 tiny contact points, in the regions of Jan's brain that were responsible for right arm and hand movements. After the electrode grids in Jan's brain were connected to a computer, creating a brain-machine interface (BMI), the 96 individual contact points picked up pulses of electricity that were fired between the neurons in Jan's brain.
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By simply thinking of controlling her arm movements, Jan was then able to make the robotic arm reach out to objects, as well as move it in a number of directions and flex and rotate the wrist. It also enabled Jan to "high five" the researchers and feed herself dark chocolate.
sciencedaily
Well, that's different...
Can't Possibly Be True
The Food and Veterinary Administration of Denmark shut down the food supplier Nordic Ingredients in November after learning that it used an ordinary cement mixer to prepare gelatin products for nursing home and hospital patients unable to swallow whole food. An FVA official told a reporter: "It was an orange cement mixer just like bricklayers use. There were layers (of crusty remains) from previous uses." As many as 12 facilities, including three hospitals, had food on hand from Nordic Ingredients.
newsoftheweird
Bill Moyers and Company:
Democrats Bow Down to Wall Street
John R. MacArthur of Harper’s Magazine says that Republicans and Democrats alike are abandoning the republic in pursuit of big bucks.