Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, April 21, 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: 100 Years Ago by Inyang Bassey and Binky Griptite
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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Earth Day: leading scientists say 75% of known fossil fuels must stay in ground
By Adam Vaughan
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Three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be kept in the ground if humanity is to avoid the worst effects of climate change, a group of leading scientists and economists have said in a statement timed to coincide with Earth Day.
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“It’s so frustrating, because it’s the choice of moving down a business-as-usual route with devastating outcomes for humanity and, at the same time, we have this almost unprecedented opportunity, we can transform the world economy to a fossil fuel-free one and moreover do it in a way that is security and health-wise more attractive.”
The statement says that failure by the world to act on climate change would bring is a one in 10 chance of temperatures rising by more than 6C by 2100, a level of risk that would be comparable with accepting 10,000 plane crashes daily worldwide.
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The statement called for developed countries to help scale up financial aid for developing countries to deal with climate change, and for Paris to agree the beginnings of a strategy to make countries more resilient to the extreme weather a warming world is expected to bring.
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Likely cause of 2013-14 earthquakes: Combination of gas field fluid injection and removal
By (ScienceDaily)
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A seismology team led by Southern Methodist University (SMU), Dallas, finds that high volumes of wastewater injection combined with saltwater (brine) extraction from natural gas wells is the most likely cause of earthquakes occurring near Azle, Texas, from late 2013 through spring 2014.
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Conclusions from the modeling study integrate a broad-range of estimates for uncertain subsurface conditions. Ultimately, better information on fluid volumes, flow parameters, and subsurface pressures in the region will provide more accurate estimates of the fluid pressure along this fault.
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The area of study addressed in the report is in the Newark East Gas Field (NEGF), north and east of Azle. In this field, hydraulic fracturing is applied to loosen and extract gas trapped in the Barnett Shale, a sedimentary rock formation formed approximately 350 million years ago. The report explains that along with natural gas, production wells in the Azle area of the NEGF can also bring to the surface significant volumes of water from the highly permeable Ellenburger Formation -- both naturally occurring brine as well as fluids that were introduced during the fracking process.
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"The fluid pressure in the pores and fractures of the rocks is called the 'pore pressure.' The pore pressure acts against the weight of the rock and the forces holding the rock together (stresses due to tectonic forces). If the pore pressures are low (especially compared to the forces holding the rock together), then only the imbalance of natural in situ earth stresses will cause an occasional earthquake. If, however, pore pressures increase, then it would take less of an imbalance of in situ stresses to cause an earthquake, thus accelerating earthquake activity. This type of failure...is called shear failure. Injecting fluids into the subsurface is one way of increasing the pore pressure and causing faults and fractures to "fail" more easily, thus inducing an earthquake. Thus, induced seismicity can be caused by injecting fluid into the subsurface or by extracting fluids at a rate that causes subsidence and/or slippage along planes of weakness in the earth."
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Large-Scale Study Confirms: Still No Link Between MMR Vaccine and Autism
By Robbie Gonzalez
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The study, the results of which are published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, involved a cohort of nearly 100,000 children, and is the latest in a long line of research that shows no link between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism spectrum disorders.
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In this large sample of privately insured children with older siblings, receipt of the MMR vaccine was not associated with increased risk of ASD, regardless of whether older siblings had ASD. These findings indicate no harmful association between MMR vaccine receipt and ASD even among children already at higher risk for ASD.
“Even for children who are high-risk, the vaccine does not play a role,” lead author Dr. Anjali Jain of healthcare consulting firm The Lewin Group in Falls Church, Virginia told Reuters Health. “We don’t know what does unfortunately, but it’s not the MMR vaccine.” |
New York City buses must show 'killing Jews' ad, judge rules
By (BBC)
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A judge has ruled that New York City's buses must display a controversial ad that refers to Muslims killing Jews.
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Judge Koeltl said that although he was sensitive to security concerns, the MTA had underestimated the tolerance of New Yorkers and overestimated the potential impact of the ad.
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MTA spokesman Adam Lisberg said they were "disappointed in the ruling and are reviewing our options".
The American Freedom Defense Initiative is run by controversial blogger and activist Pamela Geller. It is listed as an anti-Muslim group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group.
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International |
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New Document Cache Shows the Real Roots of ISIS Are as Much Secular as Religious
By Kevin Drum
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. . . According to Christopher Reuter, a recently discovered cache of documents shows that the founding architect of ISIS was actually Haji Bakr, the pseudonym of Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi, a former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein's air defense force. Bakr, who lost his job and his power in 2003 when Paul Bremer made the decision to disband the Iraqi army, was the real mastermind behind ISIS. In dozens of detailed pages written in 2012, he laid out an organizational plan for the kind of pervasive, brutally efficient spy state he knew best:
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....There is a simple reason why there is no mention in Bakr's writings of prophecies relating to the establishment of an Islamic State allegedly ordained by God: He believed that fanatical religious convictions alone were not enough to achieve victory. But he did believe that the faith of others could be exploited. In 2010, Bakr and a small group of former Iraqi intelligence officers made Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the emir and later "caliph," the official leader of the Islamic State. They reasoned that Baghdadi, an educated cleric, would give the group a religious face.
So the roots of ISIS are purely pragmatic: Bakr wanted to build an organization that could retake Iraq, and he calculated that this could best be done by combining the secular mechanisms of Saddam Hussein with the religious fanaticism of an Al Qaeda. The whole piece is well worth a read. |
UK trader in fraud arrest over US 'flash crash'
By (BBC)
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The US Department of Justice wants to extradite Navinder Singh Sarao, 36, on charges of wire fraud, commodities fraud and market manipulation.
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The infamous flash crash saw US markets plunge rapidly, only to then rebound just as quickly. Regulators blamed high-frequency traders placing multiple sell orders.
High-speed trading is where share dealers create computer algorithms to buy and sell stocks in milliseconds.
The Justice Department said in a statement that "Sarao's alleged manipulation earned him significant profits and contributed to a major drop in the US stock market on May 6, 2010".
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"Today's actions make clear that the CFTC, working with its partners on the criminal side, will find and prosecute manipulators of US futures markets wherever they may be."
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Americans don't trust government, but widely use its data – Pew study
By Sam Thielman
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A Pew study released on Tuesday found Americans still don’t trust the government but they do like the data it produces, even when they don’t know they are using it.
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Faith in government split along party lines – 31% of Democrats said they trusted the government, compared with 15% of Republicans (the survey did not share data of the 11% of respondents who identified as other than either party).
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And when it came to using information federal and local governments provide publicly, especially through proxies, Americans had nearly all used the data in one way or another – 84% had used weather apps, 81% had used map apps, and 66% had used a map to gather information about a nearby store, bar or restaurant, all of which use information posted on the web by government authorities.
Frequently, people didn’t realize they were using government data, and nearly half of respondents were OK with apps that shared their location so long as they were provided with better services in exchange. The number dipped sharply when the question explicitly described the information as going to the government.
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US court to hear case on chimpanzees' right to freedom
By (Al Jazeera)
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New York state's Supreme Court has granted a hearing to an animal rights group that seeks to prove that captivating chimpanzees equals to unlawful imprisonment of humans because they are intelligent creatures.
The Nonhuman Rights Project group requested the hearing in order to secure freedom for two chimps - Hercules and Leo - held by the State University of New York at Stony Brook on Long Island.
The court order issued on Monday by Barbara Jaffe, a New York state Supreme Court justice in Manhattan, requires that the university defend its right in court to keep the primates.
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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:
Random notes related to this video:
You hear Inyang Bassey's soulfulness before she speaks yet alone sings. Born in Brooklyn to Nigerian father and a Jamaican mother Inyang Bassey has been making her presence felt on stages internationally.
. . . The accidental musician was discovered by her roommate whilst singing ballads in the shower. Her roommate encouraged her to audition for a school production and the rest unfolded like a buttery fairytale.
Through word of mouth, Inyang was introduced to American musician Moby. After a series of meetings Inyang was invited to tour internationally. It was on international stages, the musician realised music was her truest calling. Bassey's journey continues as she works on her solo project in collaboration with Binky Griptite and continues touring with Moby . . .
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Palm Oil Plantations Are Blamed For Many Evils. But Change Is Coming
By Anthony Kuhn
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In the past year, many big palm oil producers have made pledges of sustainability. One of them is the Minnesota-based multinational Cargill. John Hartmann is the Singapore-based CEO of Cargill Tropical Palm.
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The changes in palm oil production are squeezing smallholders. As the government protects more forests from being cleared to plant palm oil, the only way farmers can be profitable is to increase productivity. That requires investments of capital and technology.
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On a hillside in Sumatra's Aceh province, activist Rudi Putra and his team are bringing down an illegal palm oil plantation, one tree at a time. Putra sued two of the plantation's owners for clearing land without a permit from the government and won.
He says he'll give some of the land back to local communities. As for the rest, he says nature will heal itself. The forest will grow back, and in a couple of years, he says, Sumatran tigers, orangutans and elephants will return.
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Money spent cleaning up BP’s mess skipped those who needed it most
By Brentin Mock
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When reporting on the BP oil disaster five years ago, I discovered that people of color and humble income were often left out of the frenzy of economic activity generated by the emergency response and recovery efforts.
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The BP disaster is no aberration. For Hurricane Katrina, less than 8 percent of contracts went to small disadvantaged businesses. And it’s not just the Gulf Coast where people of color are getting the short end. The U.S. government has spent over $2.1 billion in procurement for Hurricane Sandy. Only about 8 percent of those contracts have gone to small disadvantaged business, and only 3.5 percent for women-owned businesses.
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A lot of small boaters, fishers, and oil workers were put to work in the emergency phase of the oil clean-up. Employed through the Vessels of Opportunity program, these workers used their own boats, many of them their own gear, and their native expertise and knowledge of working Gulf waters to help get the oil out. But once the Vessels program closed down after the worst of it was sopped up, many of those workers had to rely on the thorny, tangled up claims and litigation process to recuperate their losses.
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The company also rejected a petition of close to 120,000 signatures from people irked with the company’s efforts to seek tax write-offs for the funds it has spent on the recovery. The Gulf Restoration Network says that as much of 80 percent of BP’s expenditures are tax eligible, which, if true, means that the government is essentially helping to subsidize the company’s penalties. Translation: BP gets to recover, while those most devastated by its disaster remain economically damaged.
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Why The Data On California's Biggest Water Hogs Isn't Public
By Alissa Walker
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Utility-regulated water consumption is only part of the data picture. The rest is actually hidden from view—it’s underground. Of far greater concern at the moment is groundwater use information, since the state’s aquifers are being depleted due to surface water scarcity. And if someone’s wasting or stealing water, it’s harder to see and report.
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The problem in California specifically is that we don’t know who is taking that water out. Up until last year, groundwater was not regulated by the state, and the laws which were passed last summer will take a few years to be fully in effect. Some communities are reporting record-high numbers of requests for new wells to be drilled—shouldn’t we be able to know who’s making them? And wouldn’t it be important to know how much groundwater that, say, oil companies are extracting?
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“CVWD fought this lawsuit because we believe it is important to protect private customer data, whether that customer is a homeowner, a business or a private pumper,” board president John Powell Jr. said in a statement.
So we’re back to the same issue of open data being “protected,” while some customers are almost certainly silently sucking the state dry. |
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Science and Health |
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Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Interacting With Invisible Objects
By A. Madipakkam, K. Ludwig, M. Rothkirch and G. Hesselmann
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There are some people who cannot see even with their eyes open. Although these people are blind, there is nothing wrong with the eyes themselves. Instead, there has been an injury to the part of the brain that helps them see: the visual cortex (this and all other words printed in bold font are explained in the Section “Glossary” at the end of this text). What is fascinating is that even though they cannot see, some of these people can reach out and grasp for an object correctly more often than if they were just guessing where the object was. Even more fascinating is an experiment showing that a person with this type of blindness can find his way down a long corridor and correctly avoid the obstacles placed along the path without using any help like a cane. It seems as if these people are able to sense the objects that are invisible to them. Medically, this phenomenon is called “blindsight”.
This means that some people with an impaired sense of vision can sometimes “act” as if they were actually seeing the things around them, like a sighted person. How is that possible? The accepted theory is that the brain of these blind people has found ways to process information about objects even though these objects are invisible to the person. This remarkable ability of the human brain has led scientists to question whether healthy people with normal vision can also react to and “interact” with objects that they cannot see, i.e., that they are not aware of.
The important question is how do we make things invisible to people who have normal eyesight? Normally, our left and right eyes see almost the same thing (as long as we have both eyes open of course). Our two eyes take in the same image, send this information to the brain, and the brain processes the information so that we can see the image. But we can also separate what the two eyes see and make them see different things, for example, by using special glasses which are shown in Figure 1. What do you think would happen if you saw a dog with your left eye and an ice cream with your right eye? Well, you may think that we see a mixture of the two, i.e., half ice cream and half dog. Surprisingly, we do not! What we do see is the image of the ice cream and dog switching back and forth. This is called binocular rivalry because the two (“bi”) different inputs to the eyes (“ocular”) compete (or, “rival”) for dominance (to be the image we finally see).
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Study: Online discussion forums promote well-being
By (UPI)
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According to a new study by researchers at the University of Exeter, Internet users who participate in online forums reported satisfaction with their online experiences. Researchers even found participation in online forums to be correlated with offline engagement and participation related to issues raised in forums.
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"Often we browse forums just hoping to find answers to our questions," Louise Pendry, a psychologist and researcher at Exeter, explained in a press release. "In fact, as well as finding answers, our study showed users often discover that forums are a source of great support, especially those seeking information about more stigmatizing conditions."
The study also found that the more involved online forum users became, the more likely they were to get positive benefits out of their experience.
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Yogurt isn't the boon to health nutritionists claim it is
By Brooks Hays
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It's got calcium, protein and probiotics. What's not to love? Yogurt has been prominently featured in a variety of nutritional guidelines and dietary recommendations, as well as prescribed as a natural antidote to a number of health problems.
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"In comparison with people that did not eat yogurt, those who ate this dairy product regularly did not display any significant improvement in their score on the physical component of quality of life, and although there was a slight improvement mentally, this was not statistically significant," Lopez-Garcia added.
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A number of a previous studies have confirmed the importance of bacteria in the human gut in dictating positive health, both mental and physical. But the science remains murky on exactly which micro-organisms are helpful -- and whether or not foods like yogurt can deliver those good micro-organisms.
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Technology |
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Google's New Search Algorithm Stokes Fears Of 'Mobilegeddon'
By Sam Sanders
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Google spokeswoman Krisztina Radosavljevic-Szilagyi elaborated on the changes in a statement e-mailed to NPR. "As people increasingly search on their mobile devices," she said, "we want to make sure they can find content that's not only relevant and timely, but also easy to read and interact with on smaller mobile screens." Google said it has offered tools to help make pages Web-friendly. There's even a Google website that allows you to test any site's mobile-readiness.
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Google did tell NPR that as soon as Web pages are made mobile friendly, they'll start to show up better in mobile searches. And, Google said mobile friendliness is just one part of an algorithm that takes a lot of factors into consideration. "While the mobile-friendly change is important, we still use a variety of signals to rank search results," Radosavljevic-Szilagyi said. "The intent of the search query is still a very strong signal — so if a page with high quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank high if it has great content for the query. The ranking update will not make it rank below lower quality pages that are mobile friendly."
Lurie says Google's definition of mobile-readiness and the changes to its algorithm seem reasonable. But he's still worried. "Google is very scary at this point as a controller of Web content," Lurie said. "It is a little scary to see them do this, because they're using their opinion of what a mobile ready website is, and that can mean a lot of different things. Right now, their definition of a mobile ready website seems to just plain make sense. It's a site that changes shape and size and remains readable on a smaller format device. But they could change that."
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Homeland Security Secretary Begs Silicon Valley to Stop the Encryption
By Annalee Newitz
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Today at massive security tech conference RSA in San Francisco, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson told a packed audience that DHS would be forging alliances with Silicon Valley. He described plans to build an office here, in order to work directly with tech companies on key issues for the DHS.
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The current course we are on, toward deeper and deeper encryption in response to the demands of the marketplace, is one that presents real challenges for those in law enforcement and national security.
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We need your help to find the solution.
Let’s hope that the solution is not to encourage backdoors and key escrow so that DHS can decrypt whatever it wants. |
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Cultural |
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Armenian tragedy still raw in Turkey 100 years on
By Mark Lowen
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The 24th April is the date on which Armenians commemorate the darkest moment in their history: when - 100 years ago this week - they began to be rounded up in a crumbling Ottoman Empire and were deported or killed.
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Hundreds of thousands of Armenians died in 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, whose empire was disintegrating
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On the shores of the Bosphorus, the far-right MHP party is campaigning for the election, repeating its unrepentant line on Armenia.
"There was no genocide," says Hakan Aslan, the party's regional head.
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Meanwhile at the heart of Istanbul's Armenian cemetery lies the grave of Sevag Balikci. A marble slab bears his name, picture and the date: 24 April 2011.
But among the surrounding graves, not a single one dates from 1915.
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Tajikistan: Dushanbe bans 'un-Tajik' black clothes
By (BBC)
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The mayor of Tajikistan's capital city has ordered shops to stop selling black clothing for women, in the latest move against Islamic cultural influences in the country.
The mayor of Dushanbe, Mahmadsaid Ubaydulloyev, wants existing stock to be removed from the shelves because he says it doesn't fit with Tajikistan's culture and traditions, the privately-owned Asia-Plus news agency reports. He has also told officials to prevent women's garments from being imported if they're black. The move is being seen as part of a broader government campaign against the adoption of Islamic cultural practices in Tajik society, including women wearing black headscarves.
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It's not just black clothing on officials' minds, though. The justice ministry wants to amend the law to force parents into giving their children traditionally Tajik names. "If the amendments get approved, our offices would refuse to register babies with names that are Arabic or foreign to our culture," ministry official Jaloliddin Rahimov tells the Radio Free Europe website.
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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. |