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US coalition strikes in Syria 'killed 250 civilians'
By Al Jazeera
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The US announced the formation of the coalition against ISIL in Syria and Iraq in September 2014 which then included 28 countries. It now includes 65 countries.
Among those killed were 66 children below the age of eight, and 44 children above the age of 18.
At least 3,547 ISIL fighters were killed in air strikes on Hama, Aleppo, Homs, Hasaka, Raqqa and Deir Az Zor.
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"We take all allegations of civilian casualties seriously, and we apply very rigorous standards in our targeting process to avoid or to minimise civilian casualties in the first place," a CENTCOM media officer said.
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When asked about ISIL casualties, CENTCOM said it does not release the number of ISIL fighters killed.
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Fossil fuel companies risk wasting $2tn of investors' money, study says
By (theguardian.com)
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The world’s nations aim to seal a UN deal in Paris in December to keep global warming below the danger limit of 2C. The heavy cuts in carbon emissions needed to achieve this would mean no new coal mines at all are needed and oil demand peaking in 2020, according to the influential thinktank Carbon Tracker. It found $2.2tn of projects at risk of stranding, ie being left valueless as the market for fossil fuels shrinks.
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“Business history is littered with examples of incumbents – like Kodak and Blockbuster – who fail to see a transition coming,” said Anthony Hobley, chief executive of Carbon Tracker. “Our report offers these companies a warning [about] avoiding significant value destruction.”
For coal, the report found “it is the end of the road for expansion of the sector”, with no new coal mines required anywhere in the world if dangerous climate change is to be avoided.
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Spending of $1.3tn on new oil projects and $124bn on existing projects is unneeded, it concluded. For gas, demand in a 2C scenario is significantly lower than companies forecast, with $459bn of new projects and $73bn of existing projects surplus to requirements.
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The report said “meeting [a 2C] target will result inevitably in steep declines in fossil fuel production over the coming decades” but that the “industry has so far generally been locked in defensive mode”. It added: “While most companies recognise the importance of climate change to their businesses, there is little evidence that most are altering their strategic plans.”
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Google can unlock some Android devices remotely, district attorney says
By Samuel Gibbs
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Google and Apple can and will unlock smartphones and tablets when ordered to do so by a court, if the devices are not encrypted, a report from the Manhattan district attorney’s office has said.
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For either company to unlock the device without the owner’s permission the smartphone or tablet must not be encrypted, according to the report. Apple has enabled encryption by default in September 2014 with iOS 8 should a user set a passcode, which meant that the company could no longer unlock a device and access the data on it without knowing the user’s passcode.
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“Apple’s and Google’s decisions to enable full-disk encryption by default on smartphones means that law enforcement officials can no longer access evidence of crimes stored on smartphones, even though the officials have a search warrant issued by a neutral judge,” said the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
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The situation also extends to cloud backup services which these companies offer . Should the phone and backed-up data be encrypted, Google and Apple will be unable to access the data without the user’s password, according to the report.
Google contested the district attorney’s findings. Adrian Ludwig, Google’s security lead said: “Google has no ability to facilitate unlocking any device that has been protected with a pin, password, or fingerprint. This is the case whether or not the device is encrypted, and for all versions of Android.”
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Leaked recording: pollution lobbyists discuss exploiting Syrian refugee crisis
By Cory Doctorow
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A leaked recording made of a conference call posted by the Edison Electric Institute, which lobbies for the power industry, reveals lobbyists for high pollution lobbyists talking about how they can exploit the Syrian refugee crisis to get a rider inserted into a pending bill that would kill the EPA's Waters of the United States rule, which protects America's waterways from pollution.
If congressional leaders attach provisions to the omnibus to block Syrian refugee settlement, the Obama administration may be forced to accept a compromise that allows for other legislative riders to sneak through.
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(That was a test of the OND broadcast system, it was only a test. If that were an actual OND Top News section, it would be followed by differently-coloured sections of similar design.)
Rude Behavior Spreads like a Disease
By Cindi May
Flu season is nearly upon us, and in an effort to limit contagion and spare ourselves misery, many of us will get vaccinated. The work of Jonas Salk and Thomas Francis has helped restrict the spread of the nasty bug for generations, and the influenza vaccine is credited with saving tens of thousands of lives. But before the vaccine could be developed, scientists first had to identify the cause of influenza — and, importantly, recognize that it was contagious.
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Foulk and colleagues again found that prior exposure to rude behavior creates a specific sensitivity to rudeness. Notably, the type of video participants observed did not affect their responses to the neutral or aggressive emails; instead, the nature of those emails drove the response. That is, all participants were more likely to send a hostile response to the aggressive email than to neutral email, regardless of whether they had previously observed a polite or rude employee interaction. However, the type of video participants observed early in the study did affect their interpretation of and response to the rude email. Those who had seen the polite video adopted a benign interpretation of the moderately rude email and delivered a neutral response, while those who had seen the rude video adopted a malevolent interpretation and delivered a hostile response. Thus, observing rude behaviors, even those committed by coworkers or peers, resulted in greater sensitivity and heightened response to rudeness.
Exposure to rude behavior clearly affects our mindset and the way we respond to rudeness, but Foulk’s final study revealed an even more unpleasant side effect of the contagion: watching rude behaviors leads us to be rude to others, and those others may then be rude (or worse) to us.
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Collectively, the data from Foulk and colleagues highlight the dangers of low-intensity negative behaviors, even those that are merely witnessed rather than personally experienced. With negative behaviors, the witness becomes the perpetrator, just as the person who touches a doorknob recently handled by a flu sufferer can themselves get sick and infect others. No conscious intent in necessary, and the contagion may last for days. Unfortunately, unlike the flu, there currently is no known inoculation for this contagion. Where is Jonas Salk when you need him?
The myth about l-trypophan in turkey
By ScienceDaily
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"Turkey doesn't make you sleepy; eating very large quantities of turkey, stuffing, potatoes and pie makes you sleepy," says Kim Sasso, a registered and licensed dietitian at Loyola University Health System. "Turkey does contain tryptophan, but so do yogurt, eggs, fish, cheese and other meats."
Soybeans, she says, actually contain more tryptophan than turkey. "Because of transport and breakdown, not enough tryptophan will reach the brain to cause sleepiness after a holiday meal," says Sasso of the popular myth. "Likely, the stressful hustle and bustle of the holiday, travel schedules, alcohol indulgence and cooking tasks will contribute more to fatigue than a few slices of turkey."
L-tryptophan is an essential amino acid, a protein building block. The body does not produce amino acids, and therefore it is obtained from food.
Purina Pet Food Is So Much More Disgusting Than We Even Knew
By Samantha Michaels
On Monday, Nestlé admitted that it had found indications of forced labor, human trafficking, and child labor in its supply chain in Thailand, where the Switzerland-based company sources some of the seafood that it sells in supermarkets around the world, including in the United States. The findings came after an internal investigation that was launched by Nestlé in December last year, following reports by media and NGOs that linked the company's shrimp, prawns, and Purina brand pet foods with abusive working conditions.
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But Nestlé isn't the only one with a tainted supply chain: The mistreatment of migrants is systematic in Thailand's fishing sector, Verité found, meaning that other American and European companies that buy seafood from the country are likely complicit in similar labor abuses. These abuses have been highlighted by the US State Department, which last year downgraded Thailand to the lowest level in its annual report on human trafficking, and they underpin several lawsuits that have been filed recently against retailers including Nestlé and Costco Wholesale Corp. Steve Berman, managing partner of the law firm Hagens Berman, which in August filed a class-action lawsuit against Nestlé, told the New York Times that the company's report on Monday was "a step in the right direction," but added that "our litigation will go forward because Nestlé Purina still fails to disclose on its products, as is required by law, that slave labor was used in its making."
Here’s the story of the farmworkers behind your sweet potato pie
By Kate Yoder
Looks like the secret ingredient in your Thanksgiving sweet potato dish might be perspiration. Harvesting those orange tubers is exhausting work. . .
“When you first get here, your waist, your hands, and your feet can’t take it,” [Nabor] Segundo says. “It’s really hard the first time, because you don’t know how to carry the bucket, how to lift it to your shoulders. It’s really hard to learn.”
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Half the country’s sweet potatoes are grown in North Carolina (I bet you can guess what the state vegetable is). Workers get paid about 50 cents for each 30-pound bucket, according to NPR — which adds up to $200 to $250 a day for hauling six to seven tons of sweet potatoes by hand.
Biologists Coax Worms Into Growing New Kinds of Heads
By Maddie Stone
The animal in question is Girardia dorotocephala, better known as planaria. You might remember this little flatworm from any number of diabolical high school science experiments. Gifted with the ability to grow an entirely new body from a small fragment of itself, the planaria is something of a poster child for biological regeneration. As such, countless of the spade-headed worms have been minced to pieces in the name of teaching and learning.
. . . Levin and his colleagues tinkered with the worms’ gap junctions—protein channels that cells use to communicate with each other. The result? “By modulating the connectivity of cells via electrical synapses, we were able to derive head morphology and brain patterning belonging to a completely different species from an animal with a normal genome,” Levin said in a statement. In other words, holy gee, we turned this worm’s head into another head.
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In another fascinating twist, the anatomical changes weren’t permanent. Weeks after growing a new head, the head’s features began reverting their natural morphology (and I can’t stop picturing a lumpy-faced Harry Potter muttering curses as the effects of Polyjuice Potion wear off). More work is needed to figure out why, but the results so far highlight cell communication as a promising field of research for developmental biologists.
Pacific islands want a bigger share of fishing income
By Tim McDonald
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Effectively, eight Pacific countries including Kiribati, formed a cartel, banding together to wield their market power to negotiate a better deal, and it's working.
Their revenues from fishing rights have increased from $100m (£65m) to $430m over the past five years, according to the Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency.
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Every nation's exclusive economic zone spreads roughly 370 kilometres (230 miles) from its shores in every direction. So a country of widely-scattered, tiny atolls can have massive fishing grounds, even if it doesn't have much land.
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"All we're saying is we would reduce our contribution of vessel days to the US treaty. If the US boats want to fish in our waters, they can buy direct from us," he says.
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But the small Pacific states can scarcely be accused of predatory trade practices given how much fishing wealth flows out of the region.
Beethoven disrupts anti-migrant rally in Germany
By (BBC)
About 300 people gathered over the weekend near the theatre in the south-western city to protest against the government's "chaotic" asylum policy.
But speakers were interrupted by the theatre staff singing "All people will be brothers" from the symphony.
Police say the right to free assembly is guaranteed by the constitution.
They argue that it is therefore a criminal offence to disrupt such events.
Tanzania's Magufuli scraps independence day celebration
By (BBC)
It would be "shameful" to spend huge sums of money on the celebrations when "our people are dying of cholera", he said, state television reported.
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This will be the first time in 54 years Tanzania will not hold celebrations to mark independence from the UK.
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Many people were caught by surprise by Mr Magufuli's announcement but have welcomed the move, the BBC's Sammy Awami reports from the main city, Dar es Salaam.
They feel it shows his commitment to ending lavish spending and tackling the cholera outbreak which has caused widespread concern, he says.
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Mr Magufuli has announced a range of cost-cutting measures since he took office, including a ban on unnecessary foreign travel by government officials.