Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, January 20, 2015.
OND is a regular
community feature on Daily Kos, consisting of news stories from around the world, sometimes coupled with a daily theme, original research or commentary. Editors of OND impart their own presentation styles and content choices, typically publishing near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Creation and early water-bearing of the OND concept came from our very own Magnifico - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Potato Knishes by Ratboy Genius
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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Beijing's smog is increasingly toxic for China's politicians
By Dan Gardner
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The smog is back and the threat of another “airpocalypse” hangs heavy over Beijing. Late last week, PM2.5 readings hit 550 micrograms per cubic meter, more than 20 times higher than the World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended limit of 25µg/m³. There’s no mystery to the cause of this soupy, polluted, metallic-tasting concoction that makes up the capital’s air: fossil fuel combustion.
. . .
They’ve also learned that although air pollution may be a necessary byproduct of the country’s growing prosperity, the pollutants exact a particularly high a toll on young children. The respiratory systems of the young are less immune to the assaults of the fine particles. State media reported that during the airpocalpyse more than 9,000 children a day received treatment at Beijing Children’s Hospital for respiratory ailments. In a society where most parents are limited to one child, little matters more than that child’s health.
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In November of this past year, when Beijing hosted the Asian-Pacific Economic Conference (Apec) forum, the government shut down factories, took half of the city’s cars off the streets, and granted special holidays to workers to reduce activity in the capital — and the sky complied, turning blue for the duration of the summit.
While the particular measures taken for Apec may not be workable in the long-term, the return of the airpocalypse could provoke the public — with memories of “Apec blue” still fresh – to demand to know why their government could manage to clear the skies for foreign dignitaries but not for the citizens of the country who have to breathe the air year-in and year-out.
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Americans like stuff that sounds good, polls find
By David Roberts
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The Center for American Progress has released a new survey of public opinion on energy issues, conducted by Hart Research. For a basic rundown of the results, see Emily Atkin, whose headline captures them well: “Voters Want Pretty Much the Opposite of What Congress Is Doing.”
. . .
I would put it a bit differently. Though it may be impolitic to say so, the basic presumption behind almost all issue-specific opinion research or media coverage should be deep public ignorance. Most Americans don’t know much about any of the stuff that obsesses politicos, even down to which party controls Congress or what the three branches of the U.S. government are. How many Americans know what kind of oil the Keystone pipeline will carry, who will build it or profit from it, where it will carry the oil, what the economic or environmental effects will be? I’d wager on the order of 2 percent, optimistically. Never mind long and hard — I doubt most Americans have thought about Keystone at all.
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What lessons should political leaders learn from all this? To me it seems simple: on the issues, it is futile to try to chase what polls well. Shallow public opinion is not a stable foundation for political success. Instead, do what’s right on the substance, strive to tell your own story about it, and don’t worry about sloshing opinion. Because most of the public doesn’t have particularly strong opinions on “issues,” it’s unlikely that any policy issue will have a substantial effect on election results. What decides elections are the fundamentals, not policy disputes, much less cable-news fodder like gaffes and pseudo-scandals.
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It would be nice if the progressive movement fought harder and smarter on the battlefield of big-picture framing. But in the meantime, compromising on specific issues is the worst of both worlds. It capitulates where progressives are strongest, on the issues, and gains nothing in the larger framing battle.
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To his credit, at least since the midterms, Obama seems to get it. He’s acting boldly on climate, immigration, and family leave through executive action and refusing to worry about the clucking it engenders among the chattering class. And it is redounding to his favor. Results are what matter.
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Paralyzed Rats Walk Again with Flexible Spinal Implant
By Josh Fischman
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A rubbery ribbon of silicone, laced with cracked bits of gold that transmit nerve signals, has been spliced into the broken spinal cords of paralyzed rats, restoring their ability to move. The implant may be the first step towards helping paralyzed people in the same way.
Injuries that cause paralysis are like cuts in a telephone cable. Signals that start in the brain are supposed to travel down nerves in the spinal cord to muscles, but breaks in the nerves interrupt them. Patching the breaks with new wires, jumping over the cut in the phone line, should restore communication.
. . .
The Swiss group developed a ribbon of silicone that mimics the softness of the actual dura. They embedded it with gold wires to conduct nerve signals from one end to the other. Since the gold was too stiff, they fractured it with microcracks, enabling it to bend along with the silicone. The scientists then compared the performance of the e-dura to that of an implant made with stiffer wires. The different implants were placed in separate groups of rats with similar spinal cord damage. After six weeks, the rats with stiffer implants had more trouble walking and keeping their balance.
To test the therapeutic effects of the e-dura, the scientists implanted it in another group of paralyzed rats and used the implant to stimulate the animals with electrical signals as well as chemicals that improve nerve impulse transmission. Over six weeks, the rats showed they could walk. And because the e-dura delivered the chemicals directly to nerve tissue, scientists could use far less of it then when they tried an injectable form, thus reducing side effects. In fact, Courtine says, any side effects vanished.
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International |
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You should really pay attention to Greece this week
By Paul Ames
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Five years since the country's ruined finances triggered the euro zone debt crisis and sent tremors through the world economy, uncertainty over Sunday's general election has once more made Greece the center of international attention.
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The five-year economic crisis in Europe has thrown up radical political groups that have shaken the establishment across the continent, ranging from re-invigorated right-wing nationalists, such as the United Kingdom Independence Party or France's National Front, to leftists like SYRIZA and their Spanish allies Podemos (We Can).
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Recovery in periphery nations remains tentative. At the core, Germany is slowing, and France and Italy face stagnation. Prices are falling in most euro zone countries. Fears deflation could drag the bloc into a long-term circle of decline are expected to force the European Central Bank to launch a controversial program Thursday reportedly worth €550 billion ($638 billion) to buy up government bonds in an effort to pump fresh money into the economy.
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A SYRIZA victory will have unpredictable consequences. Although the party has toned down its leftist rhetoric, margins for reconciling its election promises with EU financial stability goals are slim.
Left-wing hopes that a Tsipras-led government could spur a Europe-wide swing against the austerity of recent years will run into a firm "nein" from Germany and other governments defending the economic orthodoxy.
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Rocketing vaccine cost warning
By James Gallagher
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The price of life-saving vaccines has skyrocketed leaving some countries struggling to fully immunise children, Medecins Sans Frontieres warns.
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Rohit Malpani, from MSF, said: "The price to fully vaccinate a child is 68 times more expensive than it was just over a decade ago, mainly because a handful of big pharmaceutical companies are overcharging donors and developing countries for vaccines that already earn them billions of dollars in wealthy countries."
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The report also cites one instance of hospitals in Morocco being charged more for a dose of the vaccine than France.
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It will happen to Angola within the next year and the country's vaccine bill is expected to increase by 1,500%.
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Houthis take over Yemen presidential palace
By (Al Jazeera)
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Houthi fighters have taken full control of Yemen's presidential palace in the capital Sanaa after a brief clash with the compound's security guards, witnesses and security sources say.
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Yemen has been wracked by unrest for months. The Houthi fighters seized large parts of Sanaa in September and repeatedly clashed with troops loyal to Hadi, culminating in Tuesday's takeover of the presidential palace.
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Tuesday's developments came a day after some of the fiercest fighting in Sanaa in recent years, with the Houthis engaging in artillery battles with the army near the presidential palace and surrounding the prime minister's residence.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Evaluations that consider school resources could fairly assess teacher performance
By (ScienceDaily)
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The evaluation of public school teachers is a topic addressed regularly by voters and policymakers around the country. Researchers at the University of Missouri have identified a plan to evaluate teachers fairly using a "proportional" system. Cory Koedel, an associate professor of economics and public policy in the MU College of Arts and Science and the Truman School of Public Affairs, says that proportionality would level the playing field among teachers who work with students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
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"Based on evidence from past research in economics, we know that if teachers who teach in disadvantaged districts know that they have little chance of being recognized for their good work, they will be less motivated," Koedel said. "Also, teachers at wealthier schools may also be less motivated if they know that they have a good chance of receiving positive reviews based only on where they work. Giving all teachers an equal opportunity to be recognized as effective or ineffective would increase effort throughout the workforce, which would be a win for students in K-12 schools."
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Morgan Stanley profit rises despite 'choppy market'
By (BBC)
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US banking giant Morgan Stanley has seen net income more than double after lighter legal fees relating to mortgage-backed securities.
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However, the bank said overall performance had been affected by "choppy market conditions" in the quarter.
The bank's legal fees are associated with residential mortgage and credit crisis-era issues.
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However, revenue from the bank's wealth management business rose 2.4% to $3.8bn.
Morgan Stanley also increased pay in the fourth quarter, with its pay bill rising to $5.1bn from $4bn a year ago, after it brought forward some bonus awards.
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Welcome to the "Hump Point" of this OND.
News can be sobering and engrossing - at this point in the diary, an offering of brief escapism:
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Random notes related to this video:
Potato Knishes is the name of a bizarre CG animated music video that portrays a strange looking crown-adorned mouse-like creature and his love for the namesake pastry.
Origin:
The video was uploaded on YouTube on May 23, 2013 by user ratboygenius as part of an internet series, named Ratboy Genius Dreams Minecraft. It has around 700,000 views. The video is known for being crude and disturbing to some for its low-quality animation, mainly due to the way the character is animated. The character, named Little King John according to the description, seems to float around rather than walk and has a penchant for stretching his limbs. He never blinks and has a blank, fixated stare and has the voice of a robot. The video has a Minecraft-like style and vibe.
The sketch originally came from “Ratboy Genius Dreams Minecraft – Ep02,” uploaded on April 8th, 2013, and was part of the episode. In the episode, a girl named Summer Solstice Baby is being followed by the Little King John. Summer Solstice Baby wants him to leave her alone, but Little King John insists that he means well to her, and once she gets to know him, she will change her mind. He then leaves and proceeds to sing his song.
The standalone song was then uploaded to his channel later that year. The video gained notoriety due to its crude animation style, disturbing character, and eerie sounding song.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Climate Hawks Aren't Impressed With Obama's Methane Plan
By Ben Adler
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. . .
Some green groups dropped the diplomacy altogether and expressed outright disappointment. "We cannot afford to wait," said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune. "EPA and BLM must act quickly to reduce methane emissions from all new and existing sources of methane pollution in the oil and gas sector, including the transmission and distribution of natural gas." Greenpeace, Public Citizen, and Friends of the Earth issued a joint press release declaring, "The Obama administration must reconsider their strategy on methane and put out a much stronger proposed rule than they suggest today."
These enviros specifically criticize the slow pace of the administration's effort, which threatens to leave the job unfinished when Obama's successor—possibly a climate science-denying Republican—takes office. "We hoped at this point they would propose a rule itself," said Kate DeAngelis, climate and energy campaigner for Friends of the Earth. The administration had previously said it would introduce regulations last fall.
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The most charitable interpretation of the administration's tentativeness is that they are trying to be realistic. "My sense is they feel they would be biting off more than they can chew in the remaining time in the administration to get new- and existing-source regulations through the whole [review] process," said Joanne Spaulding, a senior managing attorney with the Sierra Club. "We've been saying this is achievable, but they're making a decision about their own resources to get the job done."
They may also be trying to avoid an industry backlash. "The industry has been lobbying and saying, 'We don't need regulations, we can do this on a voluntary basis,'" said Spaulding. The American Petroleum Institute attacked the plan on Wednesday. "Onerous new regulations could threaten the shale energy revolution, America's role as a global energy superpower, and the dramatic reductions in CO2 emissions made possible by an abundant and affordable domestic supply of clean-burning natural gas," said API President Jack Gerard. Since methane leakage can wipe out the benefit of those reductions in CO2, Gerard's statement is nonsensical and misleading. As Spaulding says, "Industry will not be happy being regulated at all, so you might as well do the whole thing."
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Villains behind W.Va. toxic spill are back spilling again
By Sam Bliss
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Freedom Industries, the company that leaked a toxic chemical into the Elk River, declared bankruptcy just days after the spill. But some of the villains behind that environmental disaster formed a new company called Lexycon, which has been cited for environmental violations by state regulators eight times since September, according to the Associated Press.
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Little did I know that even as I wrote those words, Lexycon was already busy racking up infractions “for pouring chemicals without a permit, lacking proper ‘last-resort’ walls to contain spills, and hosting tanker-trailers full of unknown chemicals, among other infractions.”
Even crazier, government inspectors found the same nasty “coal-cleaning” chemical that Freedom spilled last year, 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, even though Lexycon’s president had sworn to a federal judge that his company would not touch it. But the hammer has still yet to come down on these irresponsible handlers of super-dangerous substances. From the AP story:
So far, the strongest action the state has taken against Lexycon came in September, when regulators ordered the company to stop storing certain chemicals until it obtained a permit, which it eventually did.
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Science and Health |
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New amazing metal is so hydrophobic it makes water bounce like magic
By Jesus Diaz
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Scientists at the University of Rochester have created a metal that is so extremely hydrophobic that the water bounces on it as if it were repelled by a magic force field. Instead of using chemical coatings they used lasers to etch a nanostructure on the metal itself. It will not wear off, like current less effective methods.
The applications can be revolutionary: From the construction of airplane surfaces—which will avoid water freezing of the fuselage—to non-stick pans to phones to computers to TVs to cars to whatever you can imagine made of metal. They are also thinking of applying the technique to create 100-percent efficient water recollection systems in underdeveloped countries and the creation of latrines in areas where water is not abundant enough to allow for effective cleaning.
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Why animals eat psychoactive plants
By Johann Hari
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Professor Siegel’s story of buzzing cows and tripping bees is, he believes, a story about us. We are an animal species. As soon as plants began to be eaten by animals for the first time — way back in prehistory, before the first human took his first steps — the plants evolved chemicals to protect themselves from being devoured and destroyed. But these chemicals could, it soon turned out, produce strange effects. In some cases, instead of poisoning the plant’s predators, they — quite by accident — altered their consciousness. This is when the pleasure of getting wasted enters history. All human children experience the impulse early on: it’s why when you were little you would spin around and around, or hold your breath to get a head rush. You knew it would make you sick, but your desire to change your consciousness a little — to experience a new and unfamiliar rush — outweighed your aversion to nausea.
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When Sigmund Freud first suggested that everybody has elaborate sexual fantasies, that it is as natural as breathing, he was dismissed as a pervert and lunatic. People wanted to believe that sexual fantasy was something that happened in other people – filthy people, dirty people. They took the parts of their subconscious that generated these wet dreams and daydreams and projected them onto somebody else, the depraved people Over There, who had to be stopped. Stuart Walton and the philosopher Terence McKenna both write that we are at this stage with our equally universal desire to seek out altered mental states. McKenna explains: “We are discovering that human beings are creatures of chemical habit with the same horrified disbelief as when the Victorians discovered that humans are creatures of sexual fantasy and obsession.”
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After twenty-five years of watching stoned mice, drunken elephants, and tripping mongooses, Ronald K. Siegel tells me he suspects he has learned something about this. “We’re not so different from the other animal life-forms on this planet,” he says.
When he sees people raging against all drug use, he is puzzled. “They’re denying their own chemistry,” he says. “The brain produces endorphins. When does it produce endorphins? In stress, and in pain. What are endorphins? They are morphine-like compounds. It’s a natural occurrence in the brain that makes them feel good . . . People feel euphoric sometimes. These are chemical changes – the same kind of chemical changes, with the same molecular structures, that these plants [we use to make our drugs] are producing . . . We’re all producing the same stuff.”
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Drugs in dirt: Scientists appeal for help
By Michelle Roberts
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US scientists are asking the public to join them in their quest to mine the Earth's soil for compounds that could be turned into vital new drugs.
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Researcher Dr Sean Brady told the BBC: "We are not after hundreds of thousands of samples. What we really want is a couple of thousand from some really unique places that could contain some really interesting stuff. So it's not really your garden soil we are after, although that will have plenty of bacteria in it too."
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Many of the drugs we use today came out of dirt - the antibiotics penicillin and vancomycin to name just two.
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"The unbelievable diversity we found is a first step towards our dream of building a world map of chemicals produced by microbes - similar to Google Earth's and others' maps of the world's geography," says Dr Brady.
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Technology |
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Tech firms support computing lessons
By Sean Coughlan
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Technology giants such as Google and O2 are to support a £3.6m drive to teach computing skills in primary schools in England, Education Secretary Nicky Morgan is to announce.
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Schools should be better connected to technology firms, says Mrs Morgan.
"A significant number of jobs will be in the tech industry," she will tell the BETT educational technology show.
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The projects announced by Mrs Morgan will include a university consortium, including Queen Mary University London and Hertford College, Oxford, which will work with Google to produce training materials for teachers to develop "computing-related thinking skills".
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China: Apology over WeChat American flag 'glitch'
By (BBC)
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The Chinese technology company Tencent has apologised after a feature on its mobile messaging app flooded users' screens with American flags when the words "civil rights" were used.
WeChat, the Chinese equivalent of WhatsApp, sends icons cascading down the screen in response to certain key terms, so "Happy Birthday" prompts a flurry of cakes. But Chinese users of the app who discussed civil rights were surprised to see the stars and stripes appear, the Global Times website reports. Officials from one Communist Youth League committee pointed out the app doesn't have any special icons when users type "China" or "National Day". . .
The story has divided opinion on social media, but some users on the Weibo social networking site are angry at the - apparently unintended - implication that civil rights are associated with the US, and not China. "Doesn't this country have civil rights?" asks one user.
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Cultural |
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Tunisian blogger sentenced for defaming army
By (Al Jazeera)
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A Tunisian military court has sentenced blogger Yassine Ayari to a year in prison for defaming the military, in a case that has been criticised by human rights groups.
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It said that during the session, when defence lawyers complained that journalists were not allowed to be present at the re-trial, the court's president, who is a civil judge, responded by saying: "This not a court, this is a [military] barracks."
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Ayari was also an activist during the rule of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the long-serving president who was overthrown in a 2011 uprising that spurred the Arab Spring revolts.
In recent months, he had published blogs critical of the Nidaa Tounes party, which won Tunisia's first-post revolution parliamentary elections in October.
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Is the Sun's scrapping of Page 3 topless models a victory for women?
By Deborah Orr, Stella Creasy, Julie Bindel, Clare Short, Laura Bates, Bidisha, Polly Toynbee, Homa Khaleeli, Katharine Whitehorn, Katherine Sladden
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. . . It's not breasts that are the problem
Of course one ought to be grateful, like a good girl. But replacing topless women with women in bras only illustrates that the Sun doesn't understand what's wrong with its general approach to women and why so many people object to it. It's not breasts that are the problem with Page 3. It's the attitudes to women that are promoted by presenting young women as sex objects in a current affairs publication. Yes, I know – it's just a bit of fun. Women in the Sun are still just a bit of fun. Charming.
. . . A small victory, but a seismic one, nonetheless
. . . The Sun's retreat is a straw in the wind
. . . It has inspired a generation of feminists
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No More Page 3 took on an institution and made a change – it is a remarkable victory. But to me the bigger victory here is a generation of woman growing up learning that they have the power to make change in the world. That's a pretty good thing – and I think even David Dinsmore, the Sun's editor, would have to agree.
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |