Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, October 06, 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: Parasito by Molotov
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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China cautiously welcomes Trans-Pacific free trade deal
By (BBC)
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The US-led Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) cuts trade tariffs and sets common standards in member countries including Japan and the US.
China said it was "open to any mechanism" that follows World Trade Organization rules.
But it did not indicate it would join the TPP, which still needs to be ratified by lawmakers in each country.
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The TPP, which covers about 40% of the world economy, was struck on Monday after five days of talks in Atlanta in the US.
Those talks were the culmination of five years of negotiations between member countries led by the US. The deal is seen by some as a counter balance to China's growing economic influence in the Asia Pacific region.
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'Safe harbour' ruling illustrates growing chasm between US and EU
By Charles Arthur
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The Atlantic Ocean just got a little wider. The European Court of Justice’s latest ruling has determined that the US “does not afford an adequate level of protection of personal data”.
The case brought against Facebook over the potential for US government snooping on European citizens’ data, throws the differences in internet culture into stark relief. But those differences have been growing for some time.
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Now the ECJ has ruled again, and once more highlighted the gulf in attitudes either side of the pond. “Safe harbour” ostensibly means that a European citizen’s personal data being processed by a US company on US-based computers is under the same protections as if it were still in Europe on a European-owned system. But the ECJ says it doesn’t protect that data from US government snooping – and so cannot be allowed.
The problem with safe harbour is that the US government now treats any data on computers of US-owned companies anywhere in the world as fair game for examination. Microsoft, in fact, is vigorously appealing a court case won (in the US) by the US government, which asserts that it has the right to access data held in one of the company’s Irish data centres. Safe harbour applied, in theory, to US companies but not to the US government; now the edifice has come crashing down.
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In the longer term, the bigger problem will be the gap that is opening between the US and Europe. Privacy policies with teeth, the “right to be forgotten”, the desire to keep data inside Europe - all are at odds with the US’s treatment of data, which is more cavalier. That has helped the US to leap ahead in its development of systems, but also seen a swelling tide of resentment in the US at the burgeoning amount of individuals’ data collected and traded, and sometimes stolen.
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To save chocolate, big food companies have started collaborating
By Tove Danovich
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Colonel Sanders’ original document for KFC’s secret recipe is reportedly guarded in a safe placed inside a Mission Impossible-style motion-detecting vault. Jay Bush of Bush’s Baked Beans is the only one who knows its signature spice blend other than the family dog, Duke. The recipe for Coca-Cola is tucked inside an Atlanta bank vault accessible to only two top executives. These are billion-dollar secrets, and any major food industry player has something similar.
But now, a few food companies are trying something different. Instead of protecting trade secrets, they are handing the keys over to their competitors. Together, companies are investing in large research projects that would be difficult to fund on their own — then sharing the results with the public.
What would possess a multi-billion dollar company to spend money on private research only to turn around and give it away? In the case of chocolate, there’s a good reason to cooperate: Companies need to keep cacao plants alive to sell more product. It’s a shared goal. Cocoa plants make money for everyone, from the biggest multinational corporations to the 6.5 million farmers who grow them in countries in Africa, South America, and Asia. But the plant has been plagued by pests and disease. Now, climate change also threatens the global chocolate supply. A study of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which produce roughly 50 percent of the world’s chocolate, found that growing areas will “decrease quite seriously” by 2050 due to a rise in temperature. The group that mapped the cocoa genome hopes that making the sequence public will provide researchers with a tool for more efficient research and accelerated breeding of new cultivars. Because if there’s no chocolate for anyone to sell, competition for the best candy bar doesn’t really matter.
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That said, Crean makes it clear that there’s a difference between research that might provide a competitive advantage and research for the good of all. “When we’re researching how to make our products and make them more efficiently,” Crean said, “it’s an area we typically wouldn’t share [with competitors].” Despite Mars’ collaborative efforts, it is still primarily a business.
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International |
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UN drops plan to help move climate-change affected people
By Oliver Milman
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Australia’s opposition to the creation of a body to help people escaping the ravages of climate change appears to have paid off, with the idea dropped from the draft agreement for the crucial UN climate talks in Paris.
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Pacific island leaders have appealed to the international community in increasingly stark terms, with a succession of governments calling for action at a UN gathering in New York last week.
“I speak as an islander who has walked the shores of many atoll islands, where there was once sandy beaches and coconut trees,” Peter Christian, president of Micronesia, told the UN assembly. “Now there are none. I am told this will continue.
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Advocates for displaced people argue that a new international framework needs to be created to help them, given that the UN refugee convention does not cover them because they are not fleeing persecution.
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IMF cuts forecast for global growth
By (BBC)
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The report also warns that the risks of an outcome worse than its forecasts are more pronounced than they were just a few months ago.
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The emerging and developing economies still account for what the IMF calls the lion's share of global growth, but they are slowing, in 2015 for the fifth consecutive year.
One important factor is China's economic transition - from very rapid growth driven by investment and industrial exports to moderate expansion based to a greater extent on Chinese consumer spending increasingly on services.
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There is also the possibility of lower potential growth - that's a wide-ranging term for factors that govern the maximum capacity of an economy to grow if nothing much goes wrong. Weak investment (though not in China) and the effect of longer-term unemployment on workers' skills are examples of forces that could do further damage.
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Still, the IMF's main forecast is for growth to pick up somewhat next year - globally and in the emerging economies. It's just that it is still not all that convincing a recovery.
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Chernobyl Wildlife Make a Comeback Despite Contamination
By Mike Wood, Nick Beresford and The Conversation US
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The abandoned area around the nuclear power plant, known as the Chernobyl exclusion zone, includes about 4750 square kilometres of land in both Ukraine and Belarus. The contamination in the exclusion zone is patchy, as the distribution of radioactive isotopes on the ground was influenced by the weather conditions at the time of the accident and the days following it. The radiation levels have reduced over the nearly 30 years since the accident, but in many parts of the zone they are too high for people to return.
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The team found that the number of elk, roe deer, red deer and wild boar within the Belarussian part of the exclusion zone are similar to those in four uncontaminated nature reserves. Of these, the number of elk and roe deer has increased consistently since 1987, with roe deer numbers increasing by about 10 times by 1996. The wild boar population dropped in 1993-94 but this was traced to a disease outbreak. They also found that the density of wolves is more than seven times higher in the zone than in other comparable areas, which is likely to be, at least in part, down to the fact that nobody is hunting them.
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The results contradict a previous study, also based on tracks in snow, which estimated that the number of animals is decreasing in the area. However, this study failed to appropriately estimate the doses the animals received. The actual dose an animal receives depends not only on the amount of external radiation they receive, but also on the amount of radioactive material that the animals ingest by eating and drinking in the area. The new study has attempted to make more accurate assessments of radiation exposure.
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Advances in photographic and acoustic recording techniques means we are now able to estimate the number of animals by observing them directly rather than looking at their tracks. We have embarked on a project using motion-activated cameras and sound recorders to investigate wildlife in different areas of the exclusion zone. Hopefully, this will provide more definitive conclusions on the relationship between dose rate and animal abundance.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Study confirms the Republican Party is alone in its crazy climate denial
By Katie Herzog
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In comparing climate change policies from the U.S., the U.K., Norway, Sweden, Spain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Germany, the author, Norwegian academic Sondre Båtstrand, found the American conservative party is the only one that denies climate change. Awww, poor GOP! It must be lonely out there on the fringes of modern politics.
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… today’s Republican legislators are more united than at any time in the past century. And it’s clear from the language the Republican Party leaders use that they view climate change not as a scientific or critical risk management issue, but rather as a Democrat issue. Thus, Republican leaders simply can’t accept the need to address climate change, because that would put them on the same side of an issue as Democrats.
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The good news is that there is some evidence that the party is coming around — slowly. Polls show that Republican voters are more in line with reality than Republican politicians. Even more promising, New York Republican member of Congress Chris Gibson and 10 of his Republican colleagues recently introduced a resolution calling for climate action. Eleven of out 247 GOP members of the House? OK, OK, it’s not great. But at least it’s a start.
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California bans paparazzi from flying drones on private property
By (BBC)
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California has put limits on flying drones, in an effort to stop paparazzi photographers from snapping photos of celebrities from afar.
The law expands the state's definition of invasion of privacy to include sending a drone over private property to make a recording or take photos.
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Governor Jerry Brown signed the bill on Tuesday, but has rejected other recently proposed drone regulations.
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Governor Brown vetoed the regulations because they would create new crimes and complicate the legal process.
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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:
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RANDY - The band started in Mexico City around September of 1995. It started out like a getaway from other projects (bands) that everybody else had. We kind of got together to have fun. There was a contest, like a battle of the bands national contest. (We) decided to get into it. That's when we thought of the name Molotov. We needed a name for the contest. And we ended up winning it. The thing was, (we) made this deal, if we won the contest, we would have to leave all the other projects and dedicate all our time to Molotov. . .
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4. Has being a Bilingual group helped your career?
RANDY - It's always been an advantage. It's come natural to have English and Spanish in the songs, since there is an American in the band and the rest of the band is from Mexico City. If we had somebody from France, then the group would have French lyrics in the songs. We've done it (using English and Spanish) for the longest of times, before all these other Spanish groups started rapping and singing in English.
5. What was the controversy surrounding the song "Gimme tha Power"?
RANDY - That's forbidden. You can't play that song in the radio in Mexico. There was a letter written from the government that said if that song was played on the radio, the radio would lose its license. Everybody (radio DJ's) started doing different versions of the song. There was this one radio station that played "Gimme tha Quarter Pounder" instead of Power.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Protesters block award ceremony over Exxon's 'climate change denial funding'
By Emma Howard
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A major oil and gas conference in central London was blockaded by a protest against a top industry award given to the head of ExxonMobil, the oil company that is reported to have funded climate change denial.
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Financial records and correspondence emerged in July that show the firm funnelled more than £1.5m to US politicians and lobby groups that deny climate change and block efforts to tackle it – despite having formerly committed not to. Greenpeace estimates that ExxonMobil have spent almost £20m funding researchers and thinktanks that promote misinformation on climate change.
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“When they should be putting their heads together to tackle the biggest threat to human civilisation that has ever existed, instead they are giving awards to people who have been sitting on knowledge about climate change and aggressively funding denialism.”
Tillerson was chosen for the award by industry peers for his “highly successful leadership of ExxonMobil, where he has further enhanced the company’s widely respected reputation for strong operational performance, financial discipline, project execution and technological innovation,” according to Thomas Wallin, vice president of research company Energy Intelligence, which convened the conference in co-operation with the New York Times.
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Hazardous haze chokes Southeast Asia
By (Al Jazeera)
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Indonesia's disaster chief has rejected criticism his country is not doing enough to fight forest fires blanketing Southeast Asia in smog.
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The blazes flare up annually during the dry season as fires are illegally set to clear land for cultivation. But an El Nino weather system has made conditions drier, with this year's haze on track to be the worst on record.
Pollution in Singapore and Malaysia has risen beyond hazardous levels since the haze outbreak began last month, while levels more than five times that limit have been recorded on the Indonesian part of Borneo island. Borneo is shared between Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.
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Indonesia said more than 200 companies, most of them from Southeast Asia, were being investigated on suspicion of causing fires.
Schools in many parts of Malaysia were closed for a second straight day on Tuesday, part of a two-day shutdown announced at the weekend as pollution levels soared. Air quality readings were unhealthy along parts of country's west coast facing Sumatra.
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Science and Health |
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Understanding others' thoughts enables young kids to lie
By (ScienceDaily)
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The findings indicate that developing "theory of mind" (ToM) -- a cognitive ability critical to many social interactions -- may enable children to engage in the sophisticated thinking necessary for intentionally deceiving another person.
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Research suggests that children begin to tell lies somewhere around ages 2 and 3, and studies have shown a correlation between children's theory of mind and their tendency to lie. Psychological scientists Genyue Fu of Hangzhou Normal University in China, Kang Lee of the University of Toronto in Canada, and colleagues wanted to see if they could find causal evidence for a link between the two.
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"By increasing their sensitivity to mental states and engaging them in reasoning about false beliefs, we enabled young children not only to quickly apply their newly acquired knowledge to solve a problem in a social situation but also to continue to do so more than a month later," Lee and colleagues write. "Taken together, these two findings also suggest that children were not just mechanically memorizing what they were taught in the ToM training sessions; rather, they were able to consolidate the knowledge and use it adaptively to solve a social problem they were facing."
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Making an Example of Martin Shkreli
By Nicole Dubowitz
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Last month, the New York Times reported that the price of a 62-year old little-known drug, Daraprim (pyrimethamine), rose overnight from $18 to $750 a pill. About 100 pills are needed to treat toxoplasmosis, a disease caused by a parasite that lives inside a third of humans but can cause life-threatening infestations in people with AIDS, cancer, or other conditions that compromise the immune system. The eye-popping price increase followed Daraprim's acquisition in August by Turing Pharmaceuticals, a small drug company founded and led by 32-year old Martin Shkreli, a former hedge fund manager. Shkreli handled the newfound press attention less than gracefully, and quickly became the face of cold-hearted greed in the pharmaceutical industry.
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The reasons, or lack thereof, for price increases of Daraprim and other drugs are the same, and they go back to the lack of regulation of drug prices in the United States. As Marcia Angell explained in the Washington Post, companies raise prices simply because they can.
Drug companies cite many reasons for the increases. A popular one, deployed by Shkreli, is that higher prices cover the cost of innovation, or research and development. In fact, drug companies spend at least three times as much on marketing as they do on research. Angell also points out that many drug discoveries come out of university labs with public funding from National Institutes of Health, with little real innovation coming from drug companies.
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The pharmaceutical lobby is still incredibly powerful, so we are not optimistic about a policy change. But if the Daraprim incident raises Americans' understanding about the Wild West of prescription drug pricing, that is a major step.
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Technology |
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Waterstones to stop selling Kindle as book sales surge
By Nicola Slawson
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The UK’s largest book retailer is removing Amazon’s Kindle ebooks from its stores nationwide and replacing them with print books due to “pitiful sales”.
Waterstones, which teamed up with Amazon in 2012 to sell the electronic reader in its stores, will use the display space for physical paperbacks and hardbacks instead.
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It appears this trend is not unique to Waterstones. Figures released by Nielsen Bookscan show sales of print books for the first 36 weeks of 2015 rose by 4.6% (worth £739.5m) when compared to the same period in 2014.
This is the first time the print market has seen year-on-year growth at this stage of the calendar year since 2007.
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Meet the US's First Autonomous Buses
By Alissa Walker
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The shuttles, which are designed by a company called EasyMile, will zip through Bishop Ranch in San Ramon, a 500-acre office park that’s home to the headquarters of companies like AT&T and General Electric. The shuttles will travel at very slow speeds along dedicated routes, and the pilot program will start with only two buses.
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Of course there are plenty of Google’s driverless cars roaming the streets already, but they’re not available for the public to ride (and they also have “drivers” sitting in them). These shuttles also might have drivers in them at first (some in China do) but that’s purely for the psychological benefit of other humans.
Besides the novelty factor—The robot cars are here!—there could be some serious real-world impact if these things work out. Right now dozens of drivers who shuttle technology company workers from San Francisco to Silicon Valley are threatening to walk off the job due to very long shifts and extremely low pay. Whizzing employees around an office park is a little different than barreling passengers down the 101 Freeway, but this is an important start. Let the robot drivers take over the more geographically grueling routes and help the human drivers get better jobs that allow them to be closer to home.
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Cultural |
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Silicon Valley Is Even Whiter Than You Thought
By Edwin Rios
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The funders behind Silicon Valley's hottest companies tend to look a lot like the people they invest in: white and male.
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Ninety-two percent of top venture capital executives are men. According to the report, that's "way worse" than the gender disparity in tech companies, where 77 percent of leadership roles are occupied by men.
The striking numbers reinforce the narrative surrounding Silicon Valley's diversity problems, as companies and civic leaders alike push to improve the racial and gender balance of the companies that make the gadgets and apps we consume. Not all VCs are doing poorly—the 15-person senior investment team at Y Combinator*, the well-known startup accelerator firm, has "four Asian men, a black man, three white women, and an Asian woman," according to the report. Yet the report found that a quarter of firms have an all-white management crew.
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"The VC world is cloistered and often afraid of change—the type of change that would serve the world better," Palihapitiya wrote. "An industry that wields the power to change lives is failing to do just that. Ultimately, fund investors will wake up to this bleak reality. We must change before this happens."
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South Korea: Office workers head to relaxation parlours
By (BBC)
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According to the Chosun Ilbo daily, the establishments are increasing in popularity in the city's business areas, and allow people to relax or take power naps. . .
South Koreans work some of the longest hours in the developed world, and work-related stress is a major concern in the country. A survey by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) this year found that South Koreans work an average of 2,163 hours every year, compared with 1,388 hours worked in Germany. In its own survey, government-run Statistics Korea found that over 80% of workers feel tired, especially in the 20-40 age group. Speaking to Chosun Ilbo, academic Lee Eun-hee said: "The fact that young people, who should be the most active, are desperate for rest demonstrates just how much fatigue Korean society is experiencing."
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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. |