Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Doctor RJ, rfall, JML9999 and Man Oh Man with guest editors annetteboardman and Chitown Kev. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw.
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 each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Special thanks to JekylinHyde for the OND banner.
The Guardian
Antarctic ice is melting so fast that the stability of the whole continent could be at risk by 2100, scientists have warned.
Widespread collapse of Antarctic ice shelves – floating extensions of land ice projecting into the sea – could pave the way for dramatic rises in sea level.
The new research predicts a doubling of surface melting of the ice shelves by 2050. By the end of the century, the melting rate could surpass the point associated with ice shelf collapse, it is claimed.
The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, was based on satellite observations of ice surface melting and climate simulations up to the year 2100.
BBC
Expanding the search for oil is necessary to pay for the damage caused by climate change, the Governor of Alaska has told the BBC.
The state is suffering significant climate impacts from rising seas forcing the relocation of remote villages.
Governor Bill Walker says that coping with these changes is hugely expensive.
He wants to "urgently" drill in the protected lands of the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge to fund them.
Alaska has been severely hit by the dramatic drop in the price of oil over the past two years.
The state is the only one in the US that doesn't have an income or sales tax, getting 90% of its day-to-day expenditure from levies on the production of oil and gas.
But the halving in the price of crude over the past year has seen Alaska's financial health deteriorate.
The recent decision by Shell to pull out of drilling in the Chukchi sea off the state's north coast has compounded the problem.
Al Jazeera America
This story is the first part of the Internet Project, a series about what the future holds for Internet governance and infrastructure, presented in partnership with the GroundTruth Project.
For two or three days, J. Patrick Brown wasn’t sure if his whole family had made it out of New Orleans safely. They had decided to stay behind when Hurricane Katrina hit, to care for an ailing relative. Stuck inside without television or Internet access, they relied on him to call them from his college in Maine with updates on what was happening in the city.
When the city’s levees broke, he finally persuaded them to get out as quickly as they could. Not long after, the cell towers went down, and they lost contact.
“It really was devastating,” said Brown, 29, who now works as an editor in Boston. “I was just starting my second year of college. We were in the early orientation period, and I was in just a fugue state for three days. I don’t really remember very much.”
Los Angeles Times
Back in 1990, as the debate over climate change was heating up, a dissident shareholder petitioned the board of Exxon, one of the world’s largest oil companies, imploring it to develop a plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from its production plants and facilities.
The board’s response: Exxon had studied the science of global warming and concluded it was too murky to warrant action. The company’s “examination of the issue supports the conclusions that the facts today and the projection of future effects are very unclear.”
Yet in the far northern regions of Canada’s Arctic frontier, researchers and engineers at Exxon and Imperial Oil were quietly incorporating climate change projections into the company’s planning and closely studying how to adapt the company’s Arctic operations to a warming planet.
Ken Croasdale, senior ice researcher for Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, was leading a Calgary-based team of researchers and engineers that was trying to determine how global warming could affect Exxon’s Arctic operations and its bottom line.
AFP
Say goodbye to Miami and New Orleans. No matter what we do to curb global warming, these and other beloved US cities will sink below rising seas, according to a study Monday.
But making extreme carbon cuts and moving to renewable energy could save millions of people living in iconic coastal areas of the United States, said the findings in the October 12 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.
Scientists have already established that if we do nothing to reduce our burning of fossil fuel up to the year 2100, the planet will face sea level rise of 14-32 feet (4.3–9.9 meters), said lead author Ben Strauss, vice president for sea level and climate impacts at Climate Central.
McClatchy DC
The House of Representatives voted Friday to end the 40-year-old ban on exporting American oil to foreign nations, launching a showdown with the Senate and the president in the nation’s latest battle over energy and climate change.
The ban was a response to the 1970s Arab oil embargo, ostensibly to protect Americans from gasoline shortages and price spikes. The oil industry is lobbying furiously to end the ban, calling it outdated in an era of enormous U.S. oil production and saying that exports would spur more drilling.
The industry won a major victory when a bill by Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, to end the ban passed 261-159, with 26 Democrats joining 235 Republicans in favor. Barton argued the bill would lead to the creation of jobs nationwide.
“Those are real people, that’s not Big Oil,” Barton said.
President Barack Obama is threatening to veto the bill, though, and there weren’t enough supportive votes in the House to override a presidential veto.
The Guardian
The US government is deporting undocumented immigrants back to Central America to face the imminent threat of violence, with several individuals being murdered just days or months after their return, a Guardian investigation has found.
The Guardian has confirmed three separate cases of Honduran men who have been gunned down shortly after being deported by the US government. Each was murdered in their hometowns, soon after their return – one just a few days after he was expelled from the US.
Immigration experts believe that the Guardian’s findings represent just the tip of the iceberg. A forthcoming academic study based on local newspaper reports has identified as many as 83 US deportees who have been murdered on their return to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras since January 2014.
The Guardian
City councilman who was arrested on his front lawn says he will address Prairie View police, the same force that arrested Sandra Bland before her death
A Texas city councilman who was shocked with a Taser on his front lawn has promised to take the incident up with officers from the same police force that arrested Sandra Bland before her death in a jail cell this summer.
“It went from me asking questions to me basically being put face down on the ground,” 26-year-old Jonathan Miller told KHOU news after his release from jail on Friday. “I’m curious to have a conversation with those officers.”
He later told the local CBS affiliate: “It shouldn’t have come that far.”
Three videos posted online over the weekend, two from police body cameras and one from a cellphone owned by a friend of Miller, show the incident, during which the Prairie View city councilman was arrested.
The Guardian
ed. note: For those of you who were as addicted to this podcast and I was.
A little over a week ago, a mysterious post cropped up on the still-active Serial subreddit. “Announcement,” it read. “I am releasing all the burial photos on October 13.” The user claimed to have obtained grisly evidence photos that would show the body of Hae Min Lee, the victim in the case that the Serial podcast covered so grippingly last year.
The post, which was quickly deleted by community moderators, could have been made by a troll or a sock puppet. Possibly whoever wrote it never had the pictures at all. But it was just another day in the extensive, labyrinthine post-Serial obsessive universe online, still a surprisingly active and raucous place where people can argue and collaborate with strangers who are still stuck on the story.
It’s been a year since the podcast debuted and became an international obsession. But on Reddit, Facebook and several podcasts, communities of people are still dedicated to getting to the bottom of the story of its first season: the case against Adnan Syed, who was convicted in 2000 of the murder of Lee. The prosecution had successfully argued that Syed killed Lee, a former girlfriend, in a fit of rage. For years, the case had lain dormant. Then, Rabia Chaudry, a family friend to the Syeds, brought it to Sarah Koenig. The rest was viral history.
Reuters
U.S. prices for the world's 20 top-selling medicines are, on average, three times higher than in Britain, according to an analysis carried out for Reuters.
The finding underscores a transatlantic gulf between the price of treatments for a range of diseases and follows demands for lower drug costs in America from industry critics such as Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
The 20 medicines, which together accounted for 15 percent of global pharmaceuticals spending in 2014, are a major source of profits for companies including AbbVie (ABBV.N), AstraZeneca (AZN.L), Merck (MRK.N), Pfizer (PFE.N) and Roche (ROG.VX).
BBC
The US dentist who sparked an international outcry after killing a lion in Zimbabwe will not be prosecuted because he had obtained the legal authority to hunt, officials say.
Walter Palmer admitted to killing Cecil the lion in July but has always denied that he acted illegally.
Zimbabwe's Environment Minister Oppah Muchinguri said he could not be charged as all his "papers were in order".
Mrs Muchinguri said Zimbabwe would now review how it issues hunting licences.
NPR
The political network led by billionaires David and Charles Koch is building what's meant to be a seamless system of grassroots groups, designed to advance the network's conservative and libertarian goals year in and year out, while also helping like-minded politicians.
This strategy could have come straight out of a labor union's handbook, or an Obama campaign memo: community organizing.
"This isn't just about an election cycle," Pete Hegseth, CEO of Concerned Veterans for America, told a group of activists at an August conference. "What makes this network different ... is that we've been in these communities now for three, four years and we're going to be in them in 2017, 2018, 2019."
Concerned Veterans is one of the Koch grassroots groups, and Hegseth was speaking at a session titled "Community Organizing — Life Past November."
The Guardian
A judge has ordered Arkansas to release information about its execution drug supplier to attorneys for death row inmates who are challenging the state’s execution secrecy law.
The order was issued Monday by Pulaski County circuit court judge Wendell Griffen. The judge agreed late on Friday to temporarily halt executions for eight inmates who were scheduled for lethal injections in the next four months.
The Guardian
A man was shot and critically injured during an altercation at a tailgate party in a parking lot outside the stadium where the Dallas Cowboys and New England Patriots played on Sunday, police said.
Arlington police spokesman Christopher Cook said officers were alerted to a fight in a parking lot of the NFL stadium. They heard a gunshot as they arrived and found a man in his early 40s injured. The man was transported to the hospital with life-threatening injuries. He was later flown by helicopter to a hospital in Fort Worth for treatment.
The suspected shooter apparently fell while attempting to flee, was injured and was also taken to the hospital, Cook said. The suspect was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and will be jailed once he is released from the hospital.
The incident happened about 90 minutes after the game had ended but many fans remained and there were numerous witnesses, Cook said.
DW News
European Union foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg on Monday have strongly condemned Russian airstrikes hitting non-"IS" targets in Syria, and urged Moscow to use its influence in the country to help advance a political solution to the conflict.
"Russian military attacks that go beyond Dae'sh [IS] and other UN-designated terrorist groups, as well as on the moderate opposition, are of deep concern, and must cease immediately," the ministers said in a statement.
"This military escalation risks prolonging the conflict, undermining a political process, aggravating the humanitarian situation and increasing radicalization," the foreign ministers said.
The EU has been struggling to develop a united approach to the nearly 5-year civil war in Syria, but reaching a solution has gained urgency after a new influx of refugees made their way to Europe this year.
DW News
DW: The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the International Civil Aviation Organization, the UN's air safety agency, have both issued safety alerts concerning air travel over Iraq, Iran and the Caspian Sea. In your opinion, how safe is it for commercial airlines to fly over the Middle East right now?
Jan-Arwed Richter: We have to look at the different Middle East nations separately. Flying over most of the countries in the region is safe. But there's a higher risk for regular passenger airlines in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and a couple of neighboring areas. Most airlines already avoid this area anyway, though.
Al Jazeera America
Turkish investigators were close to identifying one of the suicide bombers in Turkey's deadliest attacks in years, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Monday, adding that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was the "No. 1 priority" of the investigation.
However, in an interview with private NTV television, Davutoglu said more vaguely that the evidence pointed to a "certain group" which he refused to identify.
"It was definitely a suicide bombing. DNA tests are being conducted. It was determined how the suicide bombers got there. We're close to a name, which points to one group," he said.
The rally on Saturday was organized by Turkish and Kurdish activists to call for increased democracy and an end to the renewed fighting between Turkey's security forces and Kurdish rebels that has killed hundreds since July.
Spiegel Online
Conservative political allies are turning their backs on Chancellor Angela Merkel in the refugee crisis. Now, powerful Bavarian Governor Horst Seehofer has threatened to file a complaint with the Federal Constitutional Court.
Ingolstadt's Stadttheater is typically a place for light entertainment. At the end of the month, for example, the theater will be staging "Tartuffe," Molière's comedy about religion and hypocrisy during the period of French absolutism.
But last Wednesday, the 85 municipal politicians from Bavaria who gathered there were in no mood for fun. They were there for a meeting with Bavarian Governor Horst Seehofer and to report to him about how their communities are handling the many refugees who are currently flowing into Bavaria across the state's border with Austria.
Reuters
President Vladimir Putin's overture to opponents of Russia's bombing campaign in Syria was snubbed on Monday, with Saudi sources saying they had warned the Kremlin leader of dangerous consequences and Europe issuing its strongest criticism yet.
Nearly two weeks since joining the 4-year-old war in Syria, Putin took his biggest step to win over regional opponents, meeting Saudi Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman on the sidelines of a Formula One race in a Russian resort on Sunday.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that those talks, along with discussions with the United States, had yielded progress on the conflict, although Moscow, Washington and Riyadh did not agree in full "as yet".
Reuters
Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, one of the world's most wanted men, is counting on veteran jihadis and former Iraqi army officers who form the core of the militant movement to take over if he is killed.
New questions arose over Islamic State's leadership structure and who might succeed Baghdadi after Iraq's military said on Sunday air strikes had hit a convoy carrying him, though Iraqi security officials later denied this.
Baghdadi, who rarely appears in public and delivers few audio speeches, makes the vast majority of decisions, including which of the group's enemies should be killed.
His approval is needed even for decisions taken by the five-member Shura Council, which runs Islamic State and will elect a new a new leader if Baghdadi is killed, and he rules over a decentralized network of emirs in the field who run the everyday activities of the caliphate he has declared.
BBCEarly voting has risen significantly this year in Canada ahead of the 19 October elections, with nearly 1.6 million people casting ballots so far.
Voting numbers show a 34% increase from advance polling in the 2011 election, according to Elections Canada.
Long lines at polling stations included people dressed up in costumes to make political statements.
Voters are allowed to wear costumes and masks as long as they take an oath and provide identification.
Some voters wore costumes and masks to protest over the proposed Conservative law banning wearing niqabs during citizenship ceremonies.
The Guardian
With just one week to go before the national election, Canada’s Liberal Party is gathering steam, as the country enters the final stretch in what has been the longest election campaign in its modern history.
Polls indicate the Liberal party, which despite election losses spanning the past decade has long considered itself to be Canada’s “natural governing party” , is now within reach of an electoral win.
Greg Lyle, a pollster at Innovative Research, said the traditionally centrist party successfully tapped into many of the voters that had abandoned them over the last three elections. The party is now running neck-and-neck with the incumbent Conservative Party, if not slightly ahead according to some polls.
Reuters
An ascendant Hindu nationalist group wants minority Muslims and Christians to accept that India is a nation of Hindus, and is pushing some of them to convert.
An election in the volatile state of West Bengal has become a prime target in its game plan.
The group's strategy: To spread its Hindu-first ideology to all corners of India by propelling the ruling party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power in as many states as possible. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) provided the foot soldiers in last year’s landslide general election victory by Modi, who joined the movement in his youth.
THE ENVIRONMENT, SCIENCE, HEALTH AND TECHNOLOGY
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Al Jazeera America
Princeton University's Angus Deaton has won the Nobel Prize in economics for "his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said Monday.
Deaton, 69, was born in Edinburgh but now works at Princeton in New Jersey. He holds both U.S. and British citizenship.
The academy said Deaton's research concerns issues of "immense importance for human welfare, not least in poor countries" and has "greatly influenced" practical policymaking as well as the scientific community.
"To design economic policy that promotes welfare and reduces poverty, we must first understand individual consumption choices," the award-giving body said on announcing the $978,000 prize. "More than anyone else, Angus Deaton has enhanced this understanding."
It said Deaton's work revolves around three central questions: How do consumers distribute their spending among different goods; how much of society's income is spent and how much is saved; and how do we best measure and analyze welfare and poverty?
ScienceBlog
Researchers have imaged in unprecedented detail the three-dimensional structure of supercoiled DNA, revealing that its shape is much more dynamic than the well-known double helix.
Various DNA shapes, including figure-8s, were imaged using a powerful microscopy technique by researchers at the Baylor College of Medicine in the US, and then examined using supercomputer simulations run at the University of Leeds.
As reported online today in the journal Nature Communications, the simulations also show the dynamic nature of DNA, which constantly wiggles and morphs into different shapes – a far cry from the commonly held idea of a rigid and static double helix structure.
The Guardian
When Mike Nugent’s field goal clunked in off the left upright on Sunday and clinched victory for the Cincinnati Bengals over the Seattle Seahawks, some thought the kicker had benefited from a dash of luck.
Not so says famed cosmologist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who has ruled that Nugent – and the Bengals – had help from the Earth’s rotation during the play.
Reuters
Computer-maker Dell Inc struck a deal on Monday to buy data storage company EMC Corp for $67 billion, setting a record in the technology industry, as it tries to transform itself into a giant in the fast-growing market for managing and storing corporate data.
The acquisition, the year's third-largest in all sectors, highlights the frenzy of dealmaking sweeping the economy, as big or mature companies take advantage of low interest rates to buy rivals as a way to spur growth.
The deal should help privately held Dell, the world's No. 3 computer maker, diversify from a stagnant consumer PC market and give it greater scale in the more profitable and faster-growing market for cloud-based data services.
NPR
The heart beats rhythmically, and so does a metronome.
So it makes sense that a metronome, typically used by musicians to help keep a steady beat, could help medical professionals restart a heart.
"What we know for sure," says pediatric cardiologist Dianne Atkins, a spokeswoman with the American Heart Association, is that "high-quality CPR improves survival." So anything that improves CPR could save lives.
For CPR to be effective, the rescuer kneels at the side of the person in distress, presses one hand on top of the other in the center of the person's chest and pushes down about 2 inches to force blood through the body before releasing and then compressing again.
The optimal rate for compression is 100 to 120 per minute, which is "fairly fast" says Atkins, and hard to maintain without something to guide you. "When chest compression is too slow or too fast, it decreases the effectiveness of CPR," she says.
NPR
There are more than 87,000 dams in America and, like most infrastructure, they go largely unnoticed — until something goes wrong.
That was the case in and around South Carolina's capital this week, when at least 20 dams collapsed during catastrophic floods.
The number of dam breaches was rare. But to experts who monitor dam safety in America, it wasn't entirely surprising. In its most recent Report Card for America's Infrastructure, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the state of America's dams a "D," in part because about 4,000 dams in the country are in need of repairs — and about half of those deficient dams could cost lives if they were to fail.
AFP
The world's oceans are teeming with life, but rising carbon dioxide emissions could cause a collapse in the marine food chain from the top down, researchers in Australia said Monday.
The first-of-its-kind global analysis of marine responses to climate change forecasts a grim future for fish.
Marine ecologists from the University of Adelaide reviewed more than 600 published studies on coral reefs, kelp forests, open oceans, and tropical and arctic waters.
Their meta-analysis, published in the October 12 edition of the US peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that ocean acidification and warming will cut down on the diversity and numbers of various key species.