Hi, I'm Chitown Kev and I am substituting for side pocket this evening for the Overnight News Digest.
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.
While tonight's stories are quite varied, there is an overarching theme of "old skool" in a majority of the stories.
If the Urban Dictionary definition seems unclear, I guess that "old skool" is better defined by seeing or hearing it. Can't get much more Old Skool (for me, anyway) than a classic like the Gap Band's 1983 #1 R&B Song, Outstanding.
Associated Press: Official: Russian jet broke up at high altitude over Egypt by Brian Rohan and Vladimir Isachenkov
SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (AP) — The Russian jetliner that crashed shortly after takeoff from an Egyptian resort city broke up at high altitude, scattering fragments of wreckage over a wide area in the Sinai Peninsula, Russia's top aviation official said Sunday as search teams raced to recover the bodies of the 224 people who died.
Meanwhile in Russia, an outpouring of grief gripped the historic city of St. Petersburg, home of many of the victims. President Vladimir Putin declared a nationwide day of mourning, and flags flew at half-staff.
Aviation experts joined the searchers in a remote part of the Sinai, seeking any clues to what caused the Metrojet Airbus A321-200 to plummet abruptly from 31,000 feet just 23 minutes after it departed from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh bound for St. Petersburg.
Aviation experts and the search teams were combing an area of 16 square kilometers (more than 6 square miles) to find bodies and pieces of the jet.
By midday, 163 bodies had been recovered, according to the Egyptian government. Some of the dead were expected to be flown to Russia later Sunday.
In St. Petersburg, hundreds of mourners brought flowers, pictures of the victims, stuffed animals and paper planes to the city's airport. Others went to churches and lit candles in memory of the dead.
Elena Vikhareva had no relatives aboard the flight, but she went with her son to lay flowers, saying that pain was "piercing" her heart.
Vladimir Povarov and a friend did the same, explaining that they couldn't "remain indifferent."
The large area over which fragments were found indicates the jet disintegrated while flying high, said Alexander Neradko, head of Russia's federal aviation agency. He would not comment on any possible reason for the crash, citing the ongoing investigation.
Chicago Tribune:
Gus Savage, controversial former congressman, dies at 90 by Rick Pearson and Gregory Pratt
Augustus "Gus" Savage, a civil rights activist who spent six tumultuous terms in Congress from the South Side before a scandal ended his political career, died Saturday, family members said. His death came a day after his 90th birthday.
Savage represented Illinois' 2nd Congressional District, one of the most politically tortured boundaries in the nation, amid a state known for corruption.
Savage lost his congressional seat in 1992 when he was defeated in the Democratic primary amid accusations he made improper sexual advances to a female Peace Corps volunteer during a trip to Africa. His successor, Mel Reynolds, was convicted of bank fraud and criminal sexual abuse. Reynolds' successor was Jesse Jackson Jr., who in June completed serving a prison sentence for corruption.
Savage, who was born in Detroit, moved with his family to Chicago at the age of 5 and attended city public schools and entered the Army in 1943. The segregation of the armed forces during that time further fueled his militant approach to ending racial inequality.
After his tour in the military, Savage changed careers from seeking a law degree to journalism and served as editor and publisher of the Citizen Newspapers, the largest chain of African-American owned weeklies in the nation.
Savage used the newspapers to push for civil rights. He printed pictures of the body of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago who was killed in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
Savage used his printing press to express his belief that then-Mayor Richard J. Daley was repressing blacks, and the publisher fought what he viewed as a white power structure that controlled the city.
Gus Savage (1925-2015)
Al Jazeera America:
Seattle voters to take aim at big money in politics by Amadou Diallo
Running for re-election, Seattle City Council Member Mike O’Brien knows firsthand that the campaign chase for donors is often at odds with the hunt for votes. “Most candidates spend about 10-15 hours a week on the phone dialing for dollars,” he estimates. “You start by looking up the people who can write the big checks. Often they aren’t even in your district and can’t even vote for you but they have the capacity to finance your election.”
In the 2013 election two-thirds of all of the money raised by Seattle candidates came from just 0.3 percent of the city’s residents, according to a report by the Sightline Institute, a nonprofit think tank. This makes for heavy competition as dozens of candidates try to appeal to a very narrow slice of the electorate. “Of course everyone else is calling those same people so you’re fighting with other candidates whether they’re in your race or not, to convince the donors that you’re their guy and they should write you a check,” O’Brien said.
On Nov. 3, Seattle voters have an opportunity to radically change how candidates raise money. Ballot initiative I-122, if passed, would create a public financing model in which every Seattle resident would receive vouchers worth $100 to give to the candidate(s) of their choice. The initiative’s backers say the measure would bring more diversity to the city’s pool of candidates, allowing those without access to big-money donors to compete. And by turning registered voters into sought-after donors, proponents say candidates will spend more time listening to the voices and concerns of ordinary citizens.
Chicago Defender:
Can Bernie Sanders Gain Support in Black Chicago? by Robert T. Starks
Hillary Clinton is a native of Illinois, and the former First Lady of a president that was popular amongst Black voters. While she was defeated in the 2008, Democratic Presidential Primary, by Barack Obama, she is still considered by pollsters and election experts as leading amongst Black voters. Thus, Bernie Sanders is not considered able to come close to threatening her lead in the Black community.
However, there is a small but determined group of Black veteran political activists who are determined to bolster Bernie Sanders’ standing in the Black community. Since August, these activists have joined with Sean Niewoehner, Illinois Ballot Access Organizer for the Sanders Campaign to get Sanders on the Illinois ballot. Their first task is gaining ballot access. This effort was led by Mr. Bruce Crosby and his brother Will Crosby. They began in the 1st Congressional District with plans to do the same in the 2nd and the 7th. Unfortunately, Bruce Crosby made his transition this past Thursday morning. His death has set back this effort temporarily. However, Will Crosby will no doubt pick up the mantle and continue the effort.
“We have to win Illinois for Bernie – and that’s going to take our concerted effort to build an effective structure here. Further, we will be able to organize for state and local elections, and much more effectively promote a progressive agenda,” says the Crosby brother. He believe that the push for Bernie is seen as a catalyst for the promotion of progressive politics and policies in Chicago and throughout the state. Bernie’s ‘message’, they say, is powerful and reaches people, but, to accomplish these goals in the long-term, he needs us. It’s going to take a form of people-powered-politics we’ve never experienced before. It’s going to take good neighbors, strong communities, and a huge concerted citizen’s movement in all wards and communities to do this.”
Reuters:
How a small White House agency stalls life-saving regulations by Scot J. Paltrow
COLUMBUS, Ohio – But for a small, little-known White House agency, Melissa Helcher might not have killed Clark Biddle in a Columbus, Ohio, parking lot on a cold February day this year.
The 24-year-old Helcher had just eaten lunch with her two children at an O’Charley’s restaurant and was backing her 2012 Ford Fusion sedan out of a tight space. Biddle and his wife, Betty, both 88 and a couple since ninth grade, were making their way across the lot toward a high-school reunion lunch.
Helcher, looking over her right shoulder and through the rear windshield, didn’t see the Biddles coming from the other direction as she eased her car out. Clark Biddle had just enough time to push Betty out of the way before Helcher’s car knocked him over.
Thirty-six hours later, Clark Biddle was dead from the brain injuries he received when he hit the pavement.
Biddle’s death, Helcher said, “is something I live with every day.” The only thing that could have prevented the accident, in her opinion, would have been a rearview camera in her car.
Helcher’s car and many others made in 2012 probably would have come from the manufacturer with rearview cameras as standard equipment if a law signed by President George W. Bush in February 2008 had been implemented, as the law specified, in 2011.
It wasn’t. The reason rests with the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). This White House agency was established in 1980 and given broad powers by executive order during the anti-regulation fervor of President Ronald Reagan’s first term. Its job is to vet proposed regulations to be enforced by the executive branch. With a staff of about 45 people, it has the power to delay, weaken or even kill any such rule.
As Reuters found, OIRA sometimes exercises that power, with potentially lethal consequences.
Associated Press:
AP: Hundreds of officers lose licenses over sex misconduct by Matt Sedensky and Norman Merchant
In a yearlong investigation of sexual misconduct by U.S. law enforcement, The Associated Press uncovered about 1,000 officers who lost their badges in a six-year period for rape, sodomy and other sexual assault; sex crimes that included possession of child pornography; or sexual misconduct such as propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse.
The number is unquestionably an undercount because it represents only those officers whose licenses to work in law enforcement were revoked, and not all states take such action. California and New York — with several of the nation's largest law enforcement agencies — offered no records because they have no statewide system to decertify officers for misconduct. And even among states that provided records, some reported no officers removed for sexual misdeeds even though cases were identified via news stories or court records.
"It's happening probably in every law enforcement agency across the country," said Chief Bernadette DiPino of the Sarasota Police Department in Florida, who helped study the problem for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "It's so underreported and people are scared that if they call and complain about a police officer, they think every other police officer is going to be then out to get them."
Even as cases around the country have sparked a national conversation about excessive force by police, sexual misconduct by officers has largely escaped widespread notice due to a patchwork of laws, piecemeal reporting and victims frequently reluctant to come forward because of their vulnerabilities — they often are young, poor, struggling with addiction or plagued by their own checkered pasts.
As a former writer for my high school and university newspapers, I enjoy featuring links to a story in one of the many college/university papers. Tonight's featured link comes from the student newspaper at The University of California at Berkeley.
TheDailyCalifornian: Underrepresented-minority voters brought to polls by face time, not Facebook, study says by Maxwell Jenkins-Goetz
Researchers studying how to best bring underrepresented-minority voters to the polls have found that new technologies such as texting and social media are not as effective as more personal forms of outreach.
A study published earlier this month, led by professor Lisa Garcia Bedolla of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education, examined the attempts of nonpartisan organizations across the state to mobilize underrepresented-minority voters in the 2014 elections through traditional methods — such as door-to-door canvassing and phone calls — as well as new technologies, such as text messages and Facebook ads.
According to the study, social media was ineffective at bringing underrepresented minorities and youth to the polls, while texting — which has seen some success mobilizing those who already vote with greater frequency — was inconsistent. Instead, personal contact on the phone or at the door remained the most effective way to turn out California underrepresented-minority voters.
Bedolla conducted this study in part, she said, because “these are the voters that, generally speaking, campaigns don’t mobilize.” She sees the low turnout rate of underrepresented minorities not as a primarily partisan issue, but as a concern for democratic society as a whole.
“I believe our electorate needs to represent the population,” said Bedolla, whose study noted that turnout rates among eligible black, Hispanic, and Asian voters were between 20 and 30 percent during the 2014 election.
Associated Press:
Milan security chief to sub for ousted mayor of Rome by Frances D'Emilio
ROME (AP) — Milan's top security official has been tapped to run Rome after the mayor was forced to step down by fellow party leaders worried he couldn't turn around the city, plagued by corruption and inadequate public services.
The interior ministry on Saturday said Milan Prefect Francesco Paolo Tronca will be in charge until elections for a new mayor of the Italian capital are held, likely in the spring. Tronca, a native Sicilian, helped ensure security during Milan's Expo world's fair, which ended Saturday after drawing millions of visitors this year.
Tronca takes Rome's helm a few weeks before the first of as many as 30 million pilgrims arrive for the Holy Year declared by Pope Francis.
Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said Tronca was chosen "because the Holy Year must work like Expo worked."
"We succeeded in pulling off a Mafia-free Expo" by keeping at bay more than 100 businesses that could have had connections with mobsters, Alfano told an Italian radio station.
When elected mayor in 2013, Ignazio Marino inherited an administration where corruption in awarding public works contracts and political patronage in dishing out jobs in the transport and sanitation agencies had been rife for decades.
Marino called an anti-Mafia prosecutor to Rome to help ensure legality. That official, Alfonso Sabella, said Saturday that for years many public works contracts were awarded without bidding, and that Marino stopped that practice.
Tonight's musical interlude features an artist and a song that holds an important place in the soundtrack of my life: Transformation by the absolutely still fabulous Nona Hendryx.
AlJazeera: Nona Hendryx talks to Randall Pinkston
Randall Pinkston: Your exhibition, "Transformation: The Beautiful Cruelty of Time and Distance" — what does it mean?
Nona Hendryx: Well, "transformation" has been a word that's been associated with me for a long time. From the first being "Transformation," the recording that I made, a single. And I performed it over the years, and it's also just been a part of my life because I've constantly been transforming myself. And it is a transformation where I'm going back to visual art, from music. But also integrating music into the visual art as well as painting and assemblage. And it fits what I'm doing. The "beautiful cruelty of time and distance" is that that is what it takes for transformation to happen.
LiveScience:
What Really Killed Notorious English Leader Oliver Cromwell? by Megan Gannon
The last weeks of Oliver Cromwell's life were marked by a roller coaster of illness. From the beginning of August 1658, the man who (briefly) abolished the British monarchy complained of sharp bowel and back pains. He suffered from insomnia, cold and hot fits, sore throat, cough, confusion, diarrhea and vomiting. He would get worse and then seem like he was recovering, but by the end of the month, his fever gave his attendants "the sadde apprehension of danger." He died suddenly in London at age 59.
Cromwell's doctors at the time were unable to come up with a precise cause of death. Of course, that hasn't stopped other people from coming up with their own diagnoses in the intervening centuries. Suspicions have ranged from the mundane — infected kidney stones — to the conspiratorial — poisoning by a closeted Royalist doctor.
Now, one doctor has a new theory for what killed one of Britain's most controversial figures: a lethal combination of malaria and typhoid fever caused by a Salmonella infection.
The death mask of Oliver Cromwell (~1658)
In These Times:
The Black Panther Party and the “Undying Love for the People” by Flint Taylor
Starting with a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, Stanley Nelson, Laurens Grant, Aljernon Tunsil, and Firelight Media’s made-for-PBS documentary on the history of the Black Panther Party has been touring the country. The feature length film—named, not without a touch of irony, The Black Panthers, Vanguard of the Revolution—has attracted large audiences, much acclaim, and some criticism, most notably from former Black Panther leader Elaine Brown, who called it “a two-dimensional palliative for white people and Negroes who are comfortable in America’s oppressive status quo.”
Nelson, Grant and Tunsil are African-American documentary filmmakers of note, having to their collective credit documentaries on Emmet Till, Freedom Summer, Jesse Owens and the Freedom Riders. In his director’s statement, Nelson describes his mission in making the film:
Seven years ago, I set out to tell the story of the rise and fall of the Black Panther Party, a little known history that hadn’t been told in its entirety. In particular, I wanted to offer a unique and engaging opportunity to examine a very complex moment in time that challenges the cold, oversimplified narrative of a Panther who is prone to violence and consumed with anger. Thoroughly examining the history of the Black Panther Party allowed me to sift through the fragmented perceptions and find the core driver of the movement: the Black Panther Party emerged out of a love for their people and a devotion to empowering them. This powerful display of the human spirit, rooted in heart, is what compelled me to communicate this story accurately.
Several powerful documentaries paved the way for Firelight’s film. In 1969, radical filmmakers Mike Gray and Howard Alk made a black-and-white 16 millimeter film called American Revolution II, which chronicled the Chicago Black Panther Party’s efforts in forging a Rainbow Coalition among white, Puerto Rican and African-American organizations.
Guardian:
Slaughterhouse review - an honest portrayal of Iran's drug problem by Seterah Sabety
Koshtargah (‘slaughterhouse’) is one of those short films that stay with you. Its 24 minutes flow like a poem, as four boys in the town of Sayin Qala, in the Iranian province of Western Azerbaijan, plan to sell heroin and become rich. Made by the Kurdish-Iranian director, Behzad Azadi, Koshtargah was one of only 18 films out of nearly 5,000 entries by young filmmakers from around the globe chosen for a Cinefondation screening at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival. It will be competing in November at Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland.
Koshtargah is the apt name of the poor neighbourhood where the story unravels. Lingering shots from a hand-held camera draw us into the intimate circle of the protagonists. From the opening scene where three teenage boys play in a bucolic green creek to the last shot at a dusty bus station, the camera is a gentle witness to the sad and slightly suffocating atmosphere of the boys’ lives.
Movie poster for Koshtatrgah, a movie about th drug problem in Iran.
The story begins with the boys horsing around, dancing and smoking a joint, we learn of heir plan to deal heroin. The older brother of one of the boys, Shahu, is the architect of the plan. With a moustache, a motorcycle and street connections, Shahu has the boys’ respect.
He is a familiar character in the narrative tradition of older boys leading younger ones astray. Shahu has a firm control over the excited posse who follow him in the hope of becoming “one of the biggest drug dealing gangs of the town”. Only, the plan doesn’t go their way.
Archaeology:
The Acropolis of Athens: The decades-long project to restore the site to its iconic past by Jarrett A. Lobell
It’s much easier to build a new building,” says Vassiliki Eleftheriou, “than to rebuild an ancient one.” Eleftheriou, an architect by training, is director of the Acropolis Restoration Service, where she oversees what could be considered the most daunting project in the history of archaeological conservation.
For thousands of years the monuments of the Athenian Acropolis have been regarded not only as examples of extraordinary skill and beauty, but also as potent symbols of religious devotion and civic and national identity. “Although there were many important sanctuaries and public spaces in Athens and across Attica,” says classical art historian Jeffrey Hurwit of the University of Oregon, “the Acropolis stands as what might be called the central repository of Athenians’ conceptions of themselves. These monuments and sculptures presented images of the gods and goddesses—Athena herself above all—and also of the Athenians and their heroes.” The intention, says Hurwit, was to represent Athens as the greatest of Greek cities and the Athenians as the greatest of Greeks. “To walk through the classical Acropolis was to traverse a marble paean to Athens itself,” he says.
The Acropolis rises nearly 500 feet above the Ilissos Valley, measures about 360 feet north to south and 820 feet east to west, and has a surface area of about seven and a half acres. The site was leveled with artificial fill, in places as much as 55 feet thick, to create a surface upon which to build. Atop it sit the four major standing structures dating to the city’s massive building program of the fifth century B.C., initiated after the destruction of earlier monuments in 480 B.C. by the Persians: the Propylaia, Temple of Athena Nike, Erechtheion, and Parthenon. Over the millennia the deterioration of these monuments as a result of the passage of time, and the damage to them from myriad other causes including wars, improper or overly intrusive excavations, new construction, earthquakes, previous restoration efforts, the vast number of visitors to the site, and, most recently, the ravages of pollution and acid rain, have been almost incalculable. In 1975, the Greek government began a large-scale, multidisciplinary project to address the declining condition of these structures, as well as of a lesser-known building called the Arrephorion, the defensive walls encircling the Acropolis, and the so-called “scattered members,” the thousands of complete, nearly complete, and fragmentary pieces of stone and marble that lie all over the surface of the Acropolis.
Quanta:
Theorists Draw Closer to Perfect Coloring by Natalie Wolchover
Four years ago, the mathematician Maria Chudnovsky faced an all-too-common predicament: how to seat 120 wedding guests, some of whom did not get along, at a dozen or so conflict-free tables. Luckily, the problem fell squarely in her realm of expertise. She conceived of the guests as nodes in a network, with links between incompatible nodes. Her task was to color in the nodes using a spectrum of colors representing the different tables. As long as connected nodes never had the same color, there would be no drama at the reception.
As a master of this pursuit, known as “graph coloring,” Chudnovsky did the whole thing in her head and finished the seating chart in no time. “My husband was very impressed,” she said.
Networks of related objects, be they nodes or wedding guests, are known to mathematicians as “graphs,” and graph coloring is the much-studied act of partitioning these objects into conflict-free sets. Most graphs, with their tangle of interconnections, are impossible to color with a limited palette. The larger they are, the more colors you need. Moving from node to node, alternating between colors, you inevitably get into traffic jams that force you to pull new hues out of the box. Likewise, in the real world, seating charts, meeting schedules and delivery routes can seldom be made optimal. But since the 1960s, mathematicians have escaped these coloring frustrations by working with so-called perfect graphs, which “behave very nicely with respect to coloring,” said Chudnovsky, a 38-year-old math professor at Princeton University.
Reuters:
Film-maker Polanski relieved after court rejects U.S. extradition request in child sex case by Wojciech Zurawski
Oscar-winning film-maker Roman Polanski said on Friday he was grateful and relieved after a Polish court rejected a U.S. request for his extradition over a 1977 child sex conviction.
The case of the Polish-born Polanski, now 82, remains an international cause celebre nearly four decades after the crime, with some demanding harsh punishment and others urging that extradition efforts be dropped.
A judge in a Polish court in the southern city of Krakow ruled against the extradition, saying the U.S. judiciary had violated Polanski's rights in the past and that he would be subject to infringements if handed over now.
"The extradition is inadmissible", judge Dariusz Mazur said.
"The case is over, at least in Poland, I hope. I can sigh with relief. It's difficult to describe how much time, energy and effort this costs, how much suffering it brought on my family," Polanski told a news conference in Krakow.
"It's simple. I pleaded guilty, I went to prison. I served my punishment. It's over," he said.
Polanski pleaded guilty in 1977 to having sex with a 13-year-old girl during a photo shoot in Los Angeles. He served 42 days in jail after a plea bargain but later fled the United States fearing a lengthy jail time if the deal was overruled.
Associated Press:
Virginia Tech coach Beamer to retire after 2015 season
by Ralph D. Russo
Frank Beamer has decided this will be his last season as Virginia Tech's coach, ending a 29-year run in Blacksburg, Virginia, that made Beamer Ball synonymous with winning.
Beamer announced Sunday he would retire after this season.
"I have always said that I want what is best for Virginia Tech," Beamer said in a statement. "Because of my love and passion for this great university, this program and our tremendous fans, I have decided after 29 years that it's time."
The 69-year-old is the winningest active major college football coach with 277 victories. He is 235-120-2 since taking over at Virginia Tech in 1987.
While Beamer gave no public indication he was planning to step down midseason, the news comes as no surprise. The Hokies have slipped in recent seasons and are 4-5 this year after beating Boston College on Saturday.
Beamer said he informed athletic director Whit Babcock and university president Timothy Sands on Sunday that he was stepping down.
"I was going to wait until the end of the season to make this announcement, but I've always believed in being open and honest with my players and coaches," Beamer said.
The Hokies won at least 10 games each season from 2004-11, but have lost at least five games each year since. Virginia Tech beat Boston College 26-10 on Saturday.
Beamer led the Hokies to seven conference titles, four in the Atlantic Coast Conference and three in the Big East. His greatest season was 1999, when Michael Vick and the Hokies played Florida State for the BCS national championship in the Sugar Bowl.