Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, December 06, 2011.
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: Got My Mojo Working by Muddy Waters
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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Global Temperature News
By (group)
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There are two interesting pieces of news on the global temperature evolution.
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They find – pretty much in line with the Foster and Rahmstorf analysis – that La Niña conditions have made 2011 a relatively cool year – relatively, because they predict it will still rank amongst the 10 hottest years on record. They further predict it will be the warmest La Niña year on record (those are the blue years in the bar graph above).
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Battle Cry: Occupy's Messaging Tactics Catch On
By Carrie Kahn
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Many people who've joined the Occupy Wall Street movement say the months-long communal living has been the experience of a lifetime. One of the movement's hallmarks — the "people's mic" — has come to represent the movement's collective spirit.
In New York's Zuccotti Park, protesters couldn't use amplified sound, so the large crowds took to repeating what a speaker said out of necessity. But the technique moved quickly across the country, even to cities like Oakland, Calif., where protesters had some powerful microphones.
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This is how it works: Someone screams "mic-check" to grab everyone's attention and get the people's mic started. The speaker will then say something, for instance, "Thank you for your patience tonight," which the crowd repeats. This goes on until the speaker is finished.
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But Occupiers weren't the first to use these techniques. Consensus-building and the people's mic were heard during the anti-nuclear rallies of the 1980s and later on at the anti-globalization protests in the 1990s.
The Occupy movement, however, has given the tactics wider visibility.
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China cracks down on microblogging rumours that are 'worse than cocaine'
By Tania Branigan
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Online rumours are drugs that damage users and harm society, the Chinese state media have claimed, as officials step up attempts to rein in the country's hugely popular microblogs.
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China has 300 million registered microblog users and while services are censored – blocking prevents sensitive terms from being posted, and other material is often deleted – authorities are increasingly concerned at the speed at which information can spread.
Microblogs have spread news of protests, exposed scandals and became the locus of public outrage at the high-speed rail crash in Wenzhou this summer.
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Bandurski added: "At its base, this is about news control. That's what creates an atmosphere where nothing is believable and nothing is believed, and the government just has to say something for people to believe it's not true."
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Sow seeds, not greed: Farmers gather on Wall Street
By Kerry Trueman
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t's been a long time since farmers congregated in downtown Manhattan -- around 350 years, to be exact. The folks who populate Wall Street and rural America don't cross paths much these days. It's easy to forget that Wall Street used to be rural America; in 1644, the area contained so many cows that the Dutch colonists had to erect a cattle guard to keep them from straying. Livestock farmers literally established the boundaries of Wall Street.
Today, the bronze bull -- that icon of the OWS movement -- is the lone farm animal you'll find in the financial district. And the barricades are back, but only to keep Zuccotti Park's mic checkers in check. That surprisingly fertile concrete plaza has yielded a bumper crop of grassroots activists, to the discomfort of (most of) the 1% and the shills who bill them. But the voices of farmers -- a.k.a. the 1% that grows the food that 100% of us eat -- have been largely missing from this movement to reclaim our democracy, despite the fact that food has become a commodity that enriches a few at the expense of the many.
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Those of us who are running farms in different parts of the region are having to compete with the drillers and are then surrounded by the tanks and the effluent and the pipelines and the huge rigs of trucks, the millions of gallons of contaminated, radioactive water that are pumped out of these wells and the fumes that are in the wind and when you're trying to grow gorgeous produce it's not so wonderful.
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The rally culminated in a seed swap with farmers and gardeners exchanging packets of heirloom, open-pollinated seeds, including some donated by the Hudson Valley Seed Library founders, who've done so much to revitalize New York's regional seed trade and inspired similar endeavors around the country.
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UC Astronomers Discover Two Largest Black Holes Ever Found
By Tiffany Kaiser
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Researchers from the University of California – Berkeley have found the two largest supermassive black holes to date, which are approximately 330 million light-years away.
University of California astronomers Michele Capellari, Nicholas McConnell, and Chung-Pei Ma found the monstrous black holes via the Keck II and Gemini North observatories, along with the McDonald Observatory in Texas and the Hubble Space Telescope. They measured the speed of stars moving around the black holes, where the faster the stars move, the more gravity is needed to keep them from flying away. The research team used these velocities to calculate the mass of each black hole.
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These black hole’s huge realms of gravity could eat up 10 of our solar systems, and outweigh the former leader of the black holes, which was located in the elliptical galaxy Messier 87 and weighed 6.3 billion solar masses.
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Hillary Clinton declares 'gay rights are human rights'
By (BBC)
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The US has publicly declared it will fight discrimination against gays and lesbians abroad by using foreign aid and diplomacy to encourage reform.
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told an audience of diplomats in Geneva that "gay rights are human rights".
A memo from the Obama administration directs US government agencies to consider gay rights when making aid and asylum decisions.
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The announcement, cited by the White House as the "first US government strategy to combat human rights abuses against gays and lesbians abroad", is also being seen as part of the Obama administration's outreach to gays and lesbians ahead of the 2012 election.
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International |
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Spanish students to limit toilet paper use
By (UPI)
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Students must limit their use of toilet paper at schools in Spain as part of recent austerity cuts enacted by the country's ministry of education.
The northeast Catalonia region of the country was ordered to rein in its "excessive consumption" of toilet paper, limiting students to about 82 feet each month, The Daily Telegraph of London reported Tuesday.
The move comes amid widespread cuts to education budgets across the country -- Spanish teachers have held regular protests in the streets, the newspaper reported.
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Fukushima Fallout
By Julia Whitty
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There's been a flurry of troubling news from Fukushima's crippled nuclear power plant. Here's a recap:
The Tokyo Electric Power Company estimates that of 45 tons of radioactive wastewater that leaked from the plant . . .
The Japanese milk-powder company Meiji, whose factory lies within 200 miles (320 kilometers) of the Fukushima plant, recalled 400,000 cans of baby formula after discovering 30.8 becquerels of radioactive cesium per kilo in the product . . .
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Another new paper (open access) in PNAS reports on the distribution of Cesium-137. With its half-life of 30.1 years—meaning it will lose only half its radioactivity in the next three decades—cesium-137 is the most dangerous of all fallout for livestock and hence human life in the area for decades to come. The researchers found Cesium-137 strongly contaminated soils in large areas of eastern and northeastern Japan . . .
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AG to Netanyahu: Bills targeting rights groups' funds are unconstitutional
By Tomer Zarchin and Jonathan Lis
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Proposed legislation to restrict foreign governments' donations to nongovernmental organizations is unconstitutional, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein warned this week, and if it passes the Knesset, he will not be prepared to defend it in the High Court of Justice.
"The attorney general's policy is to refrain as much as possible from declaring laws unconstitutional, out of respect for the legislative work of the cabinet and Knesset," Weinstein wrote in a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu this weekend explaining his unusual decision. "But in light of the blatancy of the case before us, deviating from this policy is justified. What this means is that if these bills become law, I won't be able to defend them against the petitions that will be submitted to the High Court. That is what I intend to tell the Knesset, and afterward the Supreme Court."
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In international forums, he noted, Israeli representatives boast of the country's active civil society and human rights organizations, as these are essential elements of a democratic state. "It's true that these organizations' activities don't always accord with the Israeli government's positions. But they are an important voice that shouldn't be silenced."
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After the Bonn conference, what next for Afghanistan's women?
By Zohra Moosa
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In a survey of 1,000 Afghan women earlier this year, nine out of 10 respondents expressed concern about a possible return to Taliban-style government. It is not surprising, therefore, that women's rights advocates – from Ghaffar and AWN to members of the UK's "No women, no peace" campaign – have been so vocal about what they expected to see in the Bonn conference outcome document. They called for women to be involved in all parts of the peace and transition processes, not least at decision-making tables, where agendas for conferences like the one in Bonn are set; for the establishment of women's rights as a red line in any political settlement, with any and all players; and for the holding to account of anyone guilty of violating women's rights in an effort to curb existing cultures of impunity.
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Thanks to the efforts of Ghaffar and other women's rights activists, the final outcome document of the Bonn conference specifically states that the international community expects the peace and reconciliation process to respect the Afghan constitution and its provisions for the rights of women. Unfortunately, the document takes a less definitive approach to women's participation in the peace process, merely calling for it to be "inclusive … regardless of gender".
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During the Bonn conference, Canadian, European and Indian government representatives all made strong statements about the need to support women's rights as part of the transition and peace processes in Afghanistan. William Hague, Britain's foreign secretary, has similarly tweeted his intention to prioritise women's rights in his approach to Afghanistan. But with what confidence can we approach these statements, given the last-minute reduction of the number of women in the Afghan government's delegation to Bonn and the ongoing questions about Gulnaz's case? Against the backdrop of an outcome document that could have been much more ambitious, both moves suggest women's rights remain a negotiable for decision makers.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Alabama's Attorney General Says Immigration Law Needs To Change
By Eyder Peralta
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Alabama's attorney general is calling for changes in the state's tough immigration law. The letter from Luther Strange comes weeks after a Mercedes-Benz executive was jailed, after he left his passport and license at his hotel. The incident embarrassed lawmakers and put the immigration law back in the national spotlight.
Today, Strange recommended that lawmakers repeal a few parts of the law including one section that requires immigrants carry documentation with them.
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The Montgomery Advertiser reports that the AG also recommending the section of the law that allowed citizens to sue the government for failing to enforce the law and recommended rephrasing the part of the law that barred illegal immigrants from enrolling in universities.
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Vermont is the healthiest state; Miss. the least
By (UPI)
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For the fifth year in a row, Vermont is the nation's healthiest state and for the 10th year Mississippi is the least healthy, a ranking of all states shows.
The America's Health Rankings, published jointly by United Health Foundation, American Public Health Association and Partnership for Prevention, said Vermont, the first state in the nation to offer single payer healthcare or basically, Medicare for all, has a low rate of uninsured and accessible preventive care.
The state ranks No. 1 for all health determinants combined and it ranks in the top 10 states for high school graduation, a low violent crime rate, a low rate of infectious disease, a high usage of early prenatal care, high per capita public health funding and ready availability of primary care physicians.
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More mammograms, less cancer death risk
By (UPI)
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Women who have had at least three screening mammograms cut their chances of dying of breast cancer in half, Dutch researchers found.
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Among the breast cancer cases, 29.8 percent were detected at screening, 34.3 percent were detected between screenings and 35.9 percent had never been screened, the study found.
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The greatest reduction was seen in women ages 70-75, where the reduction in mortality was 84 percent. Among women age 50-69, the reduction was smaller, at 39 percent, but still statistically significant, Otto added.
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Huntsman bows to right wing, reverses position on climate science
By Brad Johnson
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At an oil-sponsored event at the Heritage Foundation, presidential candidate Jon Huntsman reversed his prior defense of climate science. Huntsman, who famously mocked his fellow candidates for questioning global warming in August, was asked by NewsBusters blogger Lachlan Markey if humans contribute to climate change. Huntsman said that the "scientific community owes us more":
I don't know, I'm not a scientist, nor am I a physicist, but I would defer to science ... The scientific community owes us more in terms of a better description or explanation about what might lie beneath all of this. But there's not information right now to formulate policies in terms of addressing it overall, primarily because it's a global issue.
When TalkingPointsMemo reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro asked if Huntsman had changed his postion, he replied that there is "debate" in the scientific community . . .
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Texas mother shoots kids, kills self after being denied food stamps
By Freya Petersen
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A Texas mother who barricaded herself in a state welfare office for seven hours before shooting her two children and killing herself had reportedly been denied food stamps for months.
The children, a 10-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, remained in critical condition at a San Antonio hospital on Tuesday, the LA Times reported, quoting Joe Baeza, a Laredo Police Department investigator.
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According to a 2010 report by Fox News, Texas' food stamp program ranked nearly the worst in the country.
The report said the state food assistance program was so backed up 40,000 applications were past due.
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Record settlement for West Virginia mine explosion
By (BBC)
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A coal company is to pay $210m (£135m) in damages for one of the worst US mining tragedies in decades, which killed 29 men in April last year.
The mine's new owner will compensate victims' families, pay fines and upgrade safety features.
It is the biggest settlement ever reached in a US mine disaster.
Officials say the accident at the Upper Big Branch pit in West Virginia was caused by methane gas, coal dust and faulty machinery.
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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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Muddy's sound was basically Delta blues electrified, but his use of microtones, in both his vocals and slide playing, made it extremely difficult to duplicate and follow correctly.[citation needed] "When I play on the stage with my band, I have to get in there with my guitar and try to bring the sound down to me. But no sooner than I quit playing, it goes back to another, different sound. My blues look so simple, so easy to do, but it's not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play."
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His influence is tremendous, over a variety of music genres: blues, rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, hard rock, folk, jazz, and country. He also helped Chuck Berry get his first record contract.
His 1958 tour of England marked possibly the first time amplified, modern urban blues was heard there, although on his first tour he was the only one amplified. His backing was provided by Englishman Chris Barber's trad jazz group. (One critic retreated to the toilets to write his review because he found the band so loud).
The Rolling Stones named themselves after his 1950 song "Rollin' Stone", (also known as "Catfish Blues", which Jimi Hendrix covered as well). Hendrix recalled "the first guitar player I was aware of was Muddy Waters. I first heard him as a little boy and it scared me to death". . .
"Got My Mojo Working" is a 1956 song written by Preston Foster and first recorded by Ann Cole, but popularized by Muddy Waters in 1957. Waters' rendition of the song was featured on the Rolling Stone magazine's list of 500 Greatest Songs of All Time at #359[1] and was inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2000. It was also included in the list of Songs of the Century, by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Global Carbon Project Annual Emissions Summary
By (ScienceDaily)
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Global carbon dioxide emissions increased by a record 5.9 per cent in 2010 following the dampening effect of the 2008-2009 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), according to scientists working with the Global Carbon Project.
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Contributions to global emissions growth in 2010 were largest from China, USA, India, the Russian Federation, and the European Union, with a continuously growing global share from emerging economies. Coal burning was at the heart of the growth in fossil fuel and cement emissions accounting for 52% of the total growth.
Coal burning was at the heart of the growth in fossil fuel and cement emissions accounting for 52% of the total growth.
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Calif. Takes Big Step Toward Greenhouse Gas Limits
By Christopher Joyce
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California is about to try a radical experiment. A little over a year from now, the state will limit the greenhouse gas emissions from factories and power plants, and, eventually, emissions from vehicles.
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Paying a price for emissions has many Californians worried about what they'll have to pay for electricity and fuel and everything that takes energy to make. But the state's argument is that this will be good for the economy.
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Mary Nichols, who runs the Air Resources Board, says capping emissions forces companies to adapt. "Putting that cap on top of that whole system would be the best way to unleash the power of private capital to really get the most out of not just research and development, but actual deployment of green technologies," she says.
One businessman who believes that is Matt Horton, CEO of Propel Fuels. The company installs seals, gaskets, hoses, underground tanks and pumps that can handle new biofuels that are required by the emissions laws. . .
"We did start out in Seattle as a company, [then] we moved down here to California because it's a great market, a lot more consumers that are interested in renewable fuels," he explains. Horton says the climate laws create business. "We would not be here in the state if it were not for the favorable policies that the state enacted."
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Chinese suspect Beijing's air more polluted than reported
By Tom Lasseter
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On state television and much of Chinese-language media, the darker days of Beijing frequently are explained by one word: fog. While at times that may be true, there's no question that the capital — crammed with cars and a population that's reportedly grown beyond 19 million — is choking on pollution.
The distance between the official line on Beijing's bad air and a reality that's as obvious as the sky above is proving to be a challenge for the Chinese government. As with several other high-profile cases this year, the Internet in China, though constrained by censorship, has made traditional propaganda approaches more difficult.
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From last Friday through Monday, the Xinhua state news service carried reports of "fairly good" to various levels of "slightly polluted" conditions in Beijing. As the air worsened, sometimes seeming to acquire an odor, there was reference to "medium" levels of pollution.
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A monitoring system at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, which reports smaller and more dangerous particles of pollution than the Chinese government does, recorded conditions between "very unhealthy" and "hazardous" during the same four-day period Xinhua reported. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defines the latter category as needing "health warnings of emergency conditions."
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Public support for tackling climate change declines dramatically
By Randeep Ramesh
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There has been dramatic decline over the past decade in the public's support for tackling climate change in Britain. Backing for higher green taxes and charges has waned and scepticism about the seriousness of the threat to the environment has increased.
The British Social Attitudes survey shows that in 2000 43% of the population would pay "much higher prices" for "the sake of the environment". Last summer support fell to just 26%, with the poorest sections of society most reluctant to save the planet with their cash.
Over the same period the public has become much more sceptical about the science behind climate change. In 2010 37% said many claims about environmental threats were "exaggerated", up from 24% in 2000.
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Green giants: Seattle gets even greener, starting with its biggest buildings
By Greg Hanscom
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Seattle, a.k.a. the Emerald City, looms Oz-like in the imaginations of eco-minded architects and designers. Its reputation for being uber green drew architect Brian Geller to the city from New York a few years ago. Now, he looks at the skyline rising above Elliott Bay and sees how much greener the place could be.
More than 70 percent of the electricity generated in this country goes to heating, cooling, lighting, and otherwise powering our homes, offices, and other buildings. This accounts for a whopping 38 percent of our globe-warming carbon dioxide emissions. Tighten up those buildings by adding insulation, getting smart about heating and cooling systems, etc., and you can slash the energy use by 20 to 50 percent, making a good-sized dent in your ecological footprint.
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The 2030 District has been quick to take off. What started as an idea two and a half years ago has grown into a full-time job for Geller, who left a position at a local architecture firm this spring to run the effort, now a nonprofit. Geller says local property owners have been very enthusiastic about the challenge. Both the city and the county signed on as founding members. And in April, the Environmental Protection Agency granted Seattle a $454,000 Climate Showcase Community Grant, which was matched with $225,000 in in-kind contributions from local firms.
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French Alpine glaciers in retreat
By Jonathan Amos
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Glaciers in the French Alps have lost a quarter of their area in the past 40 years, according to new research.
In the late 1960s/early 1970s, the ice fields slipping down Mont Blanc and the surrounding mountains of the European range covered some 375 sq km.
By the late 2000s, this area had fallen to about 275 sq km.
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It mirrors some findings of retreat occurring in other sectors of the Alps which sit across the borders of several nations, but predominantly Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, France, and Italy.
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Science and Health |
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New Tick-Borne Disease Discovered in Sweden
By (ScienceDaily)
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Researchers at the University of Gothenburg's Sahlgrenska Academy have discovered a brand new tick-borne infection. Since the discovery, eight cases have been described around the world, three of them in the Gothenburg area, Sweden.
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All three of the Gothenburg cases involved patients with an impaired immune system, all of whom became ill during the summer months when ticks are most active.
"The nasty thing about this infection is that it causes DVT, at least in people with an impaired immune system," says Wennerås. "This can be life-threatening. Fortunately, the infection can be treated successfully with antibiotics.
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Rocks show history of oxygen on Earth
By (UPI)
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The creation of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere was a long process of starts and stops, not a single continuous event, U.S. researchers say.
Geoscientists say the evidence comes from rock cores from a deep drilling project in northwest Russia in 2007. The Far Deep project drilled a series of 2-inch diameter cores and created a record of the chemistry of stone deposited during the Proterozoic Eon -- 2,500 million to 542 million years ago -- a release Tuesday from the National Science Foundation, which funded the research, said.
An analysis of the cores supports the conclusion that the Great Oxidation Event, the appearance of free oxygen in Earth's atmosphere, played out over hundreds of millions of years.
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Ravens seen to communicate with gestures
By (UPI)
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Ravens may be even smarter that previously thought, using gestures to communicate among themselves, a European study suggests.
The birds commonly use gestures such as showing and offering objects to each other including moss, stones and twigs, which puts them in rare company as the only non-primate confirmed as using deictic, or contextual, gestures to communicate, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany said.
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"We think they learned from other ravens who I was and they'd react aggressively to me. That, to me, was a pretty obvious sign that I was dealing with a really smart animal," she told the Fairbanks News-Miner.
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Smoking May Make Your Nipples Fall Off
By Jesus Diaz
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According to plastic surgeon Anthony Youn, "smokers who undergo breast lifts are at great risk of losing their nipples." This is not just a theory. Their nipples may "turn black and fall off." . . .
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He had that problem with one of his patients, who ignored his warnings. The nipples started to turn black, full of venous blood. Venous blood doesn't have oxygen and it is full of toxins. If it accumulates in any area of the body, it makes impossible for the cells to survive after a long period of time. This causes necrosis: the tissue dies making nipple fall off.
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SETI resumes at Allen Telescope Array
By David Pescovitz
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The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has resumed at the Allen Telescope Array in northern California. The ATA was in hibernation for months due to a lack of funding. But new cash came in from the public (yay, public support of science!) and also the US Air Force "as part of a formal assessment of the instrument’s utility for Space Situational Awareness." Exoplanet candidates found via NASA's Kepler space telescope will be one focus of the resumed effort. From the SETI Institute:
“This is a superb opportunity for SETI observations,” said Jill Tarter, the Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute. “For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars, and know that those stars actually host planetary systems – including at least one that begins to approximate an Earth analog in the habitable zone around its host star. That’s the type of world that might be home to a civilization capable of building radio transmitters…"
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Vaccine developed against Ebola
By Jennifer Carpenter
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Scientists have developed a vaccine that protects mice against a deadly form of the Ebola virus.
First identified in 1976, Ebola fever kills more than 90% of the people it infects.
The researchers say that this is the first Ebola vaccine to remain viable long-term and can therefore be successfully stockpiled.
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Technology |
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The Cyber Security Industrial Complex
By David Talbot
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A claim by Wikileaks that documents it released last week provide evidence of a "secret new industry" of mass surveillance was as breathless as previous pronouncements from Julian Assange's organization. But the material does provide a stark reminder that our online activities are easily snooped upon, and suggests that governments or police around the world can easily go shopping for tools to capture whatever information they want from us.
The take-home for ordinary computer users is that the privacy and security safeguards they use—including passwords and even encryption tools—present only minor obstacles to what one researcher calls the "cyber security industrial complex."
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The 287 documents released by Wikileaks come from 160 companies in 25 countries. They detail various commercial products and services offered to governments and law enforcement officials interested in intercepting online communications or eavesdropping on computer use. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange described the documents as unmasking a "international mass surveillance industry." In fact, many of the companies named have been discussed in public before, for example, Blue Coat, a U.S. company whose corporate network filters have been used by the Syrian regime to censor the Internet inside the nation's borders and spy on dissidents. However, the Wikileaks release was still noteworthy because of its breadth and level of detail.
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Manjoo: Making Facebook Private Is 'Oxymoronic'
By (Talk of the Nation)
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CONAN: And you argue Facebook users - you and me and four billion others - basically share the blame. We complain about the privacy programs, and very, very few of us actually go through with our threats to get off the service.
MANJOO: Oh, yeah. I mean, every year, for the past two, three years at least, you know, there's this huge privacy dustup over Facebook. They release some new feature that, you know, people justifiably get upset about, and then many people threatened to leave if Facebook doesn't shape up. Mark Zuckerberg issues an apology on the site, changes a few things but doesn't really retreat in any way. And then we all just kind of go back to using Facebook again.
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MANJOO: Yeah. It's difficult to erase something on the Internet, you know? So soon Facebook will unveil this tool, this new profile tool called Timeline, which is really well designed, and it's kind of a good way to curate your own profile. And as part of this, they say they're going to have a way for you to delete anything you've ever posted on Facebook. So even if it's something you've posted, you know, four years ago, you're looking through your Timeline and you discover that, you know, you don't want it up there anymore. It'll be easier for you to take that photo, offending photo, or blog post or whatever down.
But, you know, one of your friends could have copied that photo and put it on his Facebook page or put it on his own personal blog. Or it could, you know, been indexed by a search engine. It - anything you post on the Internet might be copied by any number of people and be sort of everywhere else. So that's the other thing. If you post something, taking it down is very difficult.
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How will .xxx affect online porn?
By Charles Arthur
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In case you hadn't heard (and why should you have), as of Tuesday you can buy a website with the suffix ".xxx", the intended home of pornography. YThe idea is that porn sites will set up on .xxx, and so all of the porn will be gathered in one place on the web, which means there won't be any left elsewhere. As the press release puts it, "the new .xxx domain functions as a responsible alternative for sites that offer adult entertainment content and related services".
The sites will be "appropriately labelled" and scanned for, ahem, infections. And this, says ICM Registry, the company which gets the money whenever someone registers a .xxx site, "means internet users can surf the internet with more confidence".
You may be able to see the flaw in ICM Registry's logic. Why would porn sites which rely on being easily found in search engines want to be corralled off into a virtual red-light district that web filters are guaranteed to block?
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Judge Leaks Apple's Admission That Samsung Won't Steal Its Customers
By Jason Mick
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An erroneous upload [source] exposed some redacted details from court filings denying Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) request for a preliminary injunction (PI) banning Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd.'s (KS:005930) U.S. smartphone and tablet sales.
Most notably Judge Lucy H. Koh of the Northern District Californian federal court reveals that Apple itself admitted that its research shows that most of Samsung's customers are either new smartphone users who weren't interested in iPhones or, most commonly, are current Android users who are switching from another device maker.
The admission is a significant one for Apple, because even if it can establish that infringement has occurred, it has essentially admitted that it has seen no really harm from it, at least not in direct sales loss. That could reduce licensing/settlement costs for Samsung, if it's found to be in infringement of Apple's IP.
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Cultural |
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Music world puts on 'thank you' gig in solidarity with Occupy London
By Shiv Malik
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Music stars put on a gig in the basement of a London bank to raise money for the worldwide Occupy movement.
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With an invited audience of 100, the gig was a "thank you" from musicians to the movement, said its organisers.
The complex was taken over by the Occupy London movement three weeks ago and transformed into the Bank of Ideas; it is being used by up to 30 groups who have faced cuts to their services.
Organisers added that the concert was recorded and would be put on an album and soon be available on a "pay what you want" basis from the Occupation Records label.
Money would be distributed to the UK Occupy movement and to encampments around the world.
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What We Want to See On TV: Handsome Politicians
By (ScienceDaily)
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he better the looks of United States Congresspersons, the more television coverage they receive, shows a new study from the University of Haifa recently published in the journal Political Communication. The reason behind this? Television journalists think their viewers prefer to see physically attractive people. "Physical appearance ranked third in the criteria for gaining television coverage, and ranked higher than seniority, position in Congress and legislative activity in this respect," noted the authors of the study.
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The authors defined media coverage as an article or item that appeared during 2007 in which a particular Member of Congress speaks or is quoted. Television coverage was surveyed from the national television networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC and PBS). The radio coverage measure was comprised of all NPR news radio programs, while the newspaper measure includes all articles that appeared in USA Today, front to back.
The study shows that physical attractiveness has an effect on television exposure: the better looking the politician, the more TV coverage he or she gains. Yet no significant effect was found for radio or printed news coverage. Following congresspersons' congressional activity and their state's size, physical attractiveness is the third strongest predictor of TV coverage, scoring slightly higher than chamber of Congress, gender, tenure in office, bills sponsored and political standing. After weighting the various factors playing into media exposure, the study found that for every additional score on the 'physical attractiveness index' (a scale of 1 to 10), the politician's television exposure rises by 11.6%.
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Russia's Real Reindeer Culture
By Claire O'Neill
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For a lot of folks, reindeer are magical sled-pulling creatures that make a common appearance on sweaters and coffee mugs this time of year. For others, reindeer are a way of life. In the Sakha Republic of eastern Siberia, for example, there are five groups who still make a living as reindeer herders, according to photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva.
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Every year, Even reindeer herders have a celebration called "Meeting of the Sun." It happens in the end of February. ... When the first bright orange disc of the sun starts to show itself after a long polar night, they gather in a village for celebration. This is one of the rare opportunities for nomads to meet friends and relatives, as they migrate all year long far away from each other.
Imagine one day the village is filled with reindeer sleds and people in native Even clothing. They sing, dance, put their tipis on the lake, constructing a magical tipi town. Men organize reindeer racing, women show their best embroidery and sewing. These kinds of memories I have from that time.
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Faux Native American fashion
By David Pescovitz
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A few months ago, Urban Outfitters launched a "Navajo" line of clothing (including, er, Navjoa Hipster Panties). The Navajo Nation sent a C&D, claiming that the company violated the Federal Trade Commission Act and Federal Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 stating that "It is illegal to offer or display for sale, or sell any art or craft product in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced, an Indian product, or the product of a particular Indian or Indian Tribe or Indian arts and crafts organization, resident within the United States.” Urban Outfitters removed the Navajo name but the trend continues in the retail world. Up until a few weeks ago at least, Forever 21 was selling a "Navajo" skirt and their own "Navajo & Lace Hipster" panties. . . |
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