Welcome to Overnight News Digest where the usual crew, consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Man Oh Man, side pocket, rfall, and JML9999, alumni editors palantir, Bentliberal, Oke, Interceptor7, jlms qkw, and ScottyUrb, guest editors annetteboardman and Doctor RJ, and current editor-in-chief Neon Vincent, along with anyone else who reads and comments, informs and entertains you with tonight's news. 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.
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From the New York Times: A $150 Million Stairway to Nowhere on the Far West Side
By the look of the renderings officially unveiled on Wednesday morning, New York’s next significant landmark may be the city’s biggest Rorschach test, too.
Big, bold and basket-shaped, the structure, “Vessel,” stands 15 stories, weighs 600 tons and is filled with 2,500 climbable steps. Long under wraps, it is the creation of Thomas Heatherwick, 46, an acclaimed and controversial British designer, and will rise in the mammoth Far West Side development Hudson Yards, anchoring a five-acre plaza and garden that will not open until 2018. Some may see a jungle gym, others a honeycomb.
But Stephen M. Ross, the billionaire founder and chairman of Related Companies, which is developing Hudson Yards with Oxford Properties Group, has his own nickname for “Vessel”: “the social climber.” And the steep price tag Mr. Ross’s privately held company is paying for Mr. Heatherwick’s installation? More than $150 million.
From the Washington Post: Powell emails were leaked on a site linked to the Russian government
Donald Trump is “a national disgrace and an international pariah” who gave voice to a “racist” movement to question President Obama’s citizenship, former secretary of state Colin L. Powell tapped on his keyboard.
Hillary Clinton, he typed in an email to another friend, is a “greedy, not transformational” figure who messes up everything she touches because of her “hubris” and has a husband still, well, entertaining “bimbos” while she is away.
Former vice president Richard B. Cheney and his daughter are “idiots” flacking their new book, and the Iraq War was mishandled from the get-go by the Defense Department’s top officials.
Other than that, the retired general and statesman wrote in one exchange, “alls well with the Powells.”
From Recode: As Uber’s robot cars hit the streets in Pittsburgh, the fears of its human drivers become a reality
It turns out, with all apologies to Philip K. Dick, robot cars have no need to dream of electric sheep and can drive all night long. And this sci-fi-to-reality moment that many Uber drivers have feared was coming is now here:
The ride-hailing juggernaut’s customers can now hail a self-driving Uber in Pittsburgh.
But the debut of robot cars should not come as a surprise either, since Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick predicted in 2014 in an interview at the Code conference that the end of human drivers was eventually nigh.
“And when those bad boys are made, look, the way to think about it, the magic of self-driving vehicles, is that the reason Uber [is] expensive is because you’re not just paying for the car, you’re paying for the other dude in the car,” said Kalanick, in a moment of bare-knuckles candor. “And so, when there’s no other dude in the car the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle ... And of course that means safer rides, that means more environmentally friendly, that means a lot of things.”
From BBC News: Creepy nocturnal clown sightings leave US police baffled
Dozens of reported sightings of lurking creepy clowns have been flooding US police stations this summer.
Children claim the clowns have tried to lure them into the woods using money.
Nocturnal clowns have been spotted in at least six states, most recently in Georgia where two young boys ran in fear of their lives while waiting for the morning school bus.
Police have warned that even if this simply is a prank, criminal charges may still be filed.
"We saw a man with all black on, clown mask, and a red wig," 12-year-old Cameron Frails told WRDW News.
In nearby Aiken County, South Carolina, a radio scanner picked up this bizarre police despatch:
"Subject dressed in a red and yellow suit with a clown mask through the woods. He also had a green laser light shining it through windows."
From The Guardian: Autopilot supplier disowns Tesla for 'pushing the envelope on safety'
Mobileye broke ties with Tesla Motors because the Silicon Valley firm was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety” with the design of its Autopilot driver-assistance system, its chairman has said.
“It is not designed to cover all possible crash situations in a safe manner,” said Amnon Shashua, who is also chief technology officer at the Israel-based maker of collision detection and driver assistance systems.
“No matter how you spin it, [Autopilot] is not designed for that. It is a driver assistance system and not a driverless system.”
The safety of Autopilot, which helps drivers stay in lanes and steer on highways, was thrust into the public spotlight after a fatal crash involving a Tesla Model S driver using the new technology in May. Tesla said in a blogpost after the accident that “neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied”.
In China, a family is suing Tesla after the driver was killed when a Model S struck a road-weeping truck.
From the Los Angeles Times: Boy, 11, found dead in Echo Park closet weighed just 34 pounds
The boy in the closet weighed 34 pounds.
When police officers removed the mirrored doors behind which Yonatan Daniel Aguilar had died hours earlier, they found a crumpled blanket on the ground, obscuring his emaciated body — pale and stiff, curled in a fetal position, with cuts on his face.
One officer lifted a corner of the blanket and two cockroaches crawled out. The child was so tiny that officers thought maybe he was 6 years old or so. But he was 11.
Details about the condition of Yonatan’s body when it was found last month in his Echo Park home were disclosed in more than 100 pages of heavily-redacted case records and police reports released to The Times by the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services this week.
The records show that Yonatan’s risk of abuse at home had been marked as “high” four times from 2009 to 2012 by a county program intended to guide social workers’ level of intervention.
From Vice: Hunting for Hallucinogenic Honey in Nepal
Every year, for centuries in Nepal, members of the Gurung ethnic group have climbed down the sides of cliffs amid swarms of bees—putting their lives on the line—to collect wild honey. It is not just any honey, of not just any bee: Nepal's Apis dorsata laboriosa is the largest honeybee in the world, and in the Himalayan hills, its nectar boasts hallucinogenic properties. Those effects are documented from 401 BC—when Greek soldiers, traveling through modern day Turkey near the Black Sea, indulged in a similar honey and were debilitated with intoxication—to today. I'd heard some fascinating but vague stories about this custom, and I'd seen amazing photos and videos of past hunts. Intrigued by this ancient culture and the mysterious psychedelic effects of the honey, I joined the Gurung in their excursion last spring.
It took nearly two days for me to get from Katmandu to the village of Talo Chipla in the foothills of the Annapurna Himalayan mountain range, where villagers welcomed me with flower garlands and an orange Buddhist prayer scarf. The Gurung know the honey to be a powerful medicine that alleviates joint pains, and if taken in small doses, to also produce mild highs. In larger doses, ingesting the honey can send you on a toxic, cold-sweat trip of hallucinations, vomiting, and diarrhea that can last for more than 24 hours.
There's a lot of talk these days of the global depopulation of bees, and its implications for the environment have recently become a concern among international conservationists. Data on current populations of these Himalayan bees in Nepal are scarce, but contrary to the last government survey conducted, which showed a slight population decline, men and women in Talo Chipla told me that their bee populations are actually thriving, and so the biannual quests for their honey—once in late fall and once in late spring—continue. The Gurung's honey-hunt tradition plays a central role in the cultural identity of those in this region, and they welcomed me warmly when I arrived.
From Vox: Humans and Neanderthals had sex. But was it for love?
In 1911, Marcellin Boule, a French paleontologist, published the first scientific description of the Neanderthal species. And let’s just say it didn’t have a lot of sex appeal.
The skeleton in Boule’s volume, dubbed the "Old Man of La Chapelle," was a wretched creature: a hunched-over, brutish, dim-witted, primitive man clearly destined to fail in the game of "survival of the fittest."
Since Boule’s analysis, our view of Neanderthals has shifted, from a caricature of a caveman to a remarkably sophisticated species. We’ve learned about how they built tools. That they made jewelry. That they, at times, buried their dead. We learned they were possibly stronger than us, and maybe just as smart.
And Neanderthals just might have been sexy after all. Well, at least, we’ve learned that we had sex with them.
From Slate: New Hampshire’s Union Leader Refuses to Endorse Trump, Ending 100 Years of Republican Support
The New Hampshire Union Leader, an influential conservative stalwart in the home of the critical first presidential primary, broke with the 100-plus-year-old tradition of backing the GOP nominee for president, and announced in a front page editorial Wednesday its endorsement of Libertarian Gary Johnson and his running mate Bill Weld. “They would be worth considering under many circumstances. In today’s dark times, they are a bright light of hope and reason,” the paper’s publisher Joseph W. McQuaid wrote in the signed editorial.
The paper has been highly critical of Trump and Wednesday’s editorial was no different. “The man is a liar, a bully, a buffoon,” the editorial read. “He denigrates any individual or group that displeases him. He has dishonored military veterans and their families, made fun of the physically frail, and changed political views almost as often as he has changed wives.”
From The Atlantic: The Brain Bro
It was 7 p.m. on a Thursday, and Eric Matzner had gathered a group of bio-hackers and futurists in a bright room in San Francisco’s Mission District for an invite-only Meetup. The event promised to school them in “nootropics,” or cognitive-enhancement pills, like the ones he sells through his start-up, Nootroo.
Matzner’s pills come in “gold” and “silver” formulas, which are to be taken on alternating days. Over time, they’re intended to enhance focus, memory, and cognitive function. The pills are what he does for money, but it’s talks like these—the chance to evangelize about nootropics—that really fire him up.
“I’m basically going to cover how they came about and, like, a little bit of their properties,” said Matzner, launching his slide deck. The first slide featured a portrait of Corneliu E. Giurgea, a Romanian scientist regarded as the father of nootropics, and a quote from him: “Man will not wait passively for millions of years before evolution offers him a better brain.” With that, Matzner, who is 28, began rocketing through the history and science of nootropics at a pace typically heard only at debate tournaments.
Nootroo’s gold pill contains noopept, a memory aid developed in Russia, while the silver one delivers an older drug called phenylpiracetam, which is said to have been used to boost cosmonauts’ stamina. Phenylpiracetam is similar to piracetam, which Giurgea and his colleagues discovered by accident in the 1960s while trying to develop new sleeping pills. Finding that piracetam seemed to activate rather than quiet the brain, Giurgea declared that it belonged in a new category of drugs, which he called nootropics, from the Greek word for “mind.”
From Rolling Stone: 'Westworld': Inside the Paranoid-Android Reboot of the Year
Think of Westworld, the 1973 science-fiction thriller about a Old West-themed resort where tourists live out their wildest Billy the Kid fantasies with the help of androids, and you probably picture Yul Brynner's gone-rogue robot gunslinger, and the eerie sight of his face slipping off to reveal a mass of crackling circuitry. Writer-producer Jonathan Nolan remembers that impact of that image; he also recalls seeing the movie as a kid and being freaked the fuck out. "It scared the shit out of me, actually," he says. "But looking back on it, what I realize is that it's the great granddaddy of a lot of sci-fi you see now. There's a ton of its DNA in The Terminator, for example. And when the movie came out, in terms of video games, all you had was Pong; it completely anticipates the idea of 'sandbox' games like Grand Theft Auto."
So when J.J. Abrams approached Jonathan and his wife, Lisa Joy Nolan, about adapting Michael Crichton's film into a TV show a few years ago, they readily agreed — as long as they could make one key change. "Humans are the heroes in the movie," he says. "We wondered, 'What if we flipped it? What if we make the robots the good guys, and people are the ones who are horrible and fucked up?'"
"I'll put it to you this way: Interstellar was, for me, a love song of a human spirit," Jonathan adds, referring to the 2014 movie that he co-wrote with his brother, director Christopher Nolan. "The first season of the show that Lisa and I put together — it's pretty much the exact opposite of that."
From The Hollywood Reporter: Holy Shit, 'South Park' Is 20! Trey Parker, Matt Stone on Censors, Tom Cruise and Scientology's Role in Isaac Hayes Quitting
Back in 1992, two classmates at the University of Colorado took a stack of construction paper, some scissors and an old 8mm camera and pasted together a five-minute stop-motion movie that would launch a cartoon empire. The animation in that first film was primitive, even by Matt Stone and Trey Parker's lenient standards, but the contours ofSouth Park were all there: A bunch of F-bomb-dropping grade-schoolers bring a demonic snowman to life and ask Jesus for help ("Oh my God, Frosty killed Kenny!").
In the years since, Stone, 45, and Parker, 46, have collaborated on many projects, including a smash Broadway hit (Book of Mormon) and a classic cult movie (Team America: World Police). But the two college pals' very first endeavor — a dementedly brilliant twist on Peanuts, in which each week the tiny tykes of South Park, Colo., spout obscenities (in one episode, the word "shit" is uttered 162 times) and commit blasphemy on everyone from the Virgin Mary to Tom Cruise — likely will remain their greatest artistic achievement.
"There was nothing like it on TV," says Doug Herzog, the Comedy Central executive who greenlighted the series and ushered its first episode on the air in August 1997. "In those days, there was no context for it at all." Just The Simpsons — but none of those characters went as Hitler on Halloween (like Cartman) or gave themselves testicular cancer in order to get medical marijuana (like Stan's dad, Randy).
From /Film: ‘Justice League’ Photo Shows Off Batman’s New “Tactical Batsuit”
Yup, he still looks like Batman. However, there are a number of small changes scattered here and there. The most recognizable addition are the goggles, which make the Dark Knight take on a startling resemblance to Nite Owl from Snyder’s own adaptation Watchmen. The second noticeable difference is the material used on the body itself, which looks thicker and heavier and more likely absorb punishment. The main Batsuit employed in Batman v Superman looks like it was designed to allow for maximum mobility in hand-to-hand combat – this one looks like something that Bruce Wayne would put on before he enters a situation where he knows things are going to get a little stick. It’s not quite as bulky as the Frank Miller-inspired armor he wore to his tiff with Superman, but it brings the character’s look more in line with the Nolan films.
Our own Peter Sciretta saw an early version of this costume on his Justice League set visit and had this to say about it:
Alfred and Bruce develop an advanced suit in the “final chapter” of this story to fit the needs of the mission. This suit isn’t going to be used in filming for another two months so we only got to see a very early prototype of it alongside concept art. Described as “the tactical Batsuit,” it looks very much like the classic Batsuit augmented with straps and layers of leather and protective plates. A new cowl allows for flight goggles which he’ll wear when piloting a new vehicle. The straps look more military grade. I don’t love it. The cowl offers more protection in this story. It’s been implied inside the cowl there is a whole sub-membrane that is now expressed outside the cowl. Also, Snyder has embraced non-symmetry, giving Batman extra protection on one arm over another, making the uniform look more individualized and battle-worn like a warrior’s.
From the A.V. Club: Adam Driver likens Episode VIII toEmpire Strikes Back, causes disturbance in the Force
Adam Driver recently sat down with Collider to talk about his upcoming filmPaterson, directed by Jim Jarmusch. Considering the actor is also confirmed as returning for Star Wars: Episode VIII, the inevitable blockbuster came up during the interview. Driver provided some vague information about the sequel, presumably to stop the interviewer from pestering him for specific details aboutEpisode VIII:
[The story is] great. It’s similar to how The Empire Strikes Back has a different tone. For that people always go “oooh, it’s dark” but I don’t know that it necessarily is. It’s just different in tone in a way that I think is great and necessary but also very clear. [Rian Johnson] trusts [that] his audience is ready for nuance and ambiguity. He’s not dumbing anything down for someone and that’s really fun to play.
Although it won’t help the legions of Star Wars fans who already did a spit take all over their monitors, it’s worth pointing out that Driver is talking about theamount of change in tone between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, and not necessarily that Episode VIII would be aiming to recreate the same tone as Episode V. That shift could mean anything, from a nuanced Coruscant noir to an ambiguous Bespin comedy, options which should reassure everybody.