OND is a 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 pMaybe Some Science on Satuublishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
The OND concept was borne under the keen keyboard of Magnifico - proper respect is due.
Current Contributors are ScottyUrb, Bentliberal, wader,Oke, rfall, JML9999 and Neon Vincent.
War
A Veteran’s Death, the Nation’s Shame
HERE’S a window into a tragedy within the American military: For every soldier killed on the battlefield this year, about 25 veterans are dying by their own hands.
An American soldier dies every day and a half, on average, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans kill themselves at a rate of one every 80 minutes. More than 6,500 veteran suicides are logged every year — more than the total number of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq combined since those wars began.
These unnoticed killing fields are places like New Middletown, Ohio, where Cheryl DeBow raised two sons, Michael and Ryan Yurchison, and saw them depart for Iraq. Michael, then 22, signed up soon after the 9/11 attacks.
Rescuers excavate new site in Siachen: Military
Pakistani troops began excavating a new site in their search for 138 people buried by an avalanche at a high-altitude army camp despite a fresh slide in the area, the military said on Saturday.
A week ago a huge wall of snow crashed into the remote Siachen Glacier base high in the mountains in disputed Kashmir early in the morning, smothering an area of one square kilometre (a third of a square mile).
A fresh slide at the same site created difficulties for troops conducting search operations in low temperatures, intermittent snowfall and blizzards, the military said in a statement, without specifying the date of the new slide.
“The rescuers have commenced excavation at a new site, using plant equipment and infantry troops,” it said.
“The search teams conducted a first level explosion to dig further into a hard mass of snow against the tunnel being attempted to access…”Meanwhile, chief of Pakistani military operations, Major General Ishfaque Nadeem told a press conference in the garrison town of Rawalpindi that specialist high altitude teams from Germany and Switzerland have reached the remote site.
Afghans march in Kabul to demand justice for women
Young Afghans braved fears of violence to join a rare march on parliament to demand justice for the women who have been killed, beaten and abused this year – including one they said was beheaded by her own husband.
No politicians came out to meet them, underlining the group's claim that officials are not serious about tackling the suffering of women, despite a law that aims to end the abuse.
"In the last weeks we have had a lot of cases of violence against women," said 19 year-old student Kamila Ataee. "Just the women are dead, and the men who killed them are alive. We should raise our voices so everyone knows about it."
Around 30 young men and women joined the march, although organisers from Young Women for Change said they had expected a turnout of around 200. Several demonstrators said friends had been ordered to stay home or were afraid to come.
Around the World
Corsican gang wars in spotlight
FRENCH security forces will show ''zero tolerance'' on gun possession in Corsica after a flare-up of violence on the Mediterranean island, Nicolas Sarkozy said.
''I understand the attachment of Corsicans to hunting but there are guns in their possession that are not tolerable,'' the President said after a meeting in Ajaccio with the Interior Minister, Claude Gueant, the Justice Minister, Michel Mercier, and local police. ''There is a level of arms possession in Corsica that doesn't come close to anywhere in France.''
There have been six murders so far this year in Corsica, with a population of 300,000 - including three in the past 16 days - and 22 last year, a homicide rate seven times that of mainland France. The murders have been linked to score-settling among criminal gangs, rather than to the island's separatist movement, according to local newspapers such as Corse-Matin.
Spain slams Argentina amid escalating oil dispute
Spanish officials warned Argentina that the country risks becoming "an international pariah" if it follows through on its threats to wrest control of Spanish-owned energy company Repsol's majority stake in its South American YPF unit.
Tensions are escalating as Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Garcia-Margallo summoned Argentine Ambassador Carlo Antonio Bettini to convey Spain's "concern" over possible nationalization of YPF, which represents 42 percent of Repsol's total reserves, estimated at 2.1 billion barrels of crude.
"Breaking the rules comes with a cost, and Argentina could turn itself into an international pariah," said Inigo Mendez de Vigo, Spain's Secretary of State for European Affairs, in an interview aired on the Onda Cero radio network.
Dispute over oil escalates on Sudanese border
The conflict over the oil-producing region of Heglig has deepened on the border between South Sudan and its northern neighbour.
Authorities in the south have accused the Sudanese air force of bombing a marketplace on the weekend, killing five people.
The South Sudanese army seized the disputed area on Tuesday.
A state government spokesman, Gideon Gatfan, says five traders were killed in the attack.
"The bomb fell next to a place where cars are being sold," he said.
"We also found that six people were wounded including one woman and they are now admitted to Bentiu Hospital."
Given the government in Khartoum, I do not see how this can end well.
The nine lives of Mugabe: What's next for Zimbabwe?
Just days before his 32nd year in power, Robert Mugabe has yet again brushed off the latest round of speculation over his future.
But in the aftermath of the sudden death of his close friend, Malawi's Bingu wa Mutharika, and the transition there, even some of Mugabe's allies are beginning to ask: "What will happen if Mugabe dies?"
It is a question Zanu-PF refuses to ask. Its administration secretary, Didymus Mutasa, said on Tuesday it was "unAfrican" to discuss it as long as Mugabe was alive.
It's a problem. What to do when your dictator dies.
Supplies for Assad: German Ship Carrying Weapons Stopped Near Syria
A German-owned freighter loaded with weapons from Iran was stopped on Friday near the Syrian port of Tartus in the Mediterranean Sea, SPIEGEL has learned.
A few days prior, the Atlantic Cruiser, owned by the Emden carrier Bockstiegel, had allegedly picked up heavy military equipment and munitions meant for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's regime from an Iranian freighter at the Djibouti port. The cargo, desperately needed reinforcements for Assad's crackdown on dissidents, was supposed to be unloaded on Friday.
But defectors from inside the Syrian government had learned of the delivery and warned the shipping company. On Friday the Atlantic Cruiser suddenly changed course, heading for the Turkish harbor of Iskenderun instead. Then the ship stopped some 80 kilometers (50 miles) southwest of Tartus, sailing in circles for the next few hours.
Electoral commission bans 10 candidates including Suleiman
The body overseeing Egypt’s presidential election disqualified 10 candidates from the race on Saturday, including the Muslim Brotherhood’s Khairat al-Shater, former spy chief Omar Suleiman and ultra orthodox Salafi sheikh Hazem Salah Abu Ismail.
Farouk Sultan, head of the presidential election commission, told Reuters the disqualified candidates had 48 hours to appeal against its decision. He declined to give details on the reasons for their disqualification.
The disqualification of some of the leading candidates would redraw the electoral map with just weeks to go before the May vote that decides who will replace Hosni Mubarak as head of the Arab world’s most populous country.
A council of military generals has been governing Egypt since Mubarak was swept from power a year ago in a popular uprising against his rule.
Israel to 'thank' fly-in activists in mocking letter
Pro-Palestinian activists arriving Sunday at Ben-Gurion Airport as part of the anti- Israel fly-in dubbed the “flytilla” will be greeted with a sarcastic letter noting that while they could have chosen to protest the brutality in Syria, Iran and Gaza, they opted instead to protest against the “Middle East’s sole democracy.”
“Dear activist,” starts the letter that will be translated into a number of different languages for the participants in an event formally being called “Welcome to Palestine.”
“We appreciate your choosing to make Israel the object of your humanitarian concerns,” the letter continues.
“We know there were many other worthy choices.”
Israel plans to bar entry by some 2,000 activists from at least 15 different countries, mostly in Europe, either by preventing them from boarding their flights or by deporting them once they arrive.
Ocampo drops out from World Bank bid; gives full support to Nigerian candidate
With the board of the World Bank to meet on Monday to pick a new president, Ocampo said he hoped emerging-market nations would rally behind Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala in a race that he said had turned highly political.
Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank managing director, is now the sole candidate from developing nations in a race against US nominee Jim Yong Kim, a Korean-American health expert who appears almost certain to secure the post.
Ocampo, who was nominated by Brazil, said his candidacy had been “handicapped” by a lack of support from his own country. Colombia said last month it was focusing on a bid for the presidency of the International Labour Organization, where it had a greater change of success.
Around the USA
Officials see dim Colorado River water outlook
Water officials say a dry month in the Wyoming, Colorado and Utah mountains that drain snowmelt into the Colorado River could mean less water arriving later this year at the reservoir serving Las Vegas.
Federal snow surveyor Randy Julander that after an unusually warm March, much of the range he covers in Nevada, Utah and California already resembles conditions usually seen in May. That has federal water forecasters slashing river level projections.
"March was simply not kind to us," Julander told the Las Vegas Review-Journal for a Friday report ( http://bit.ly/...).
In places where snow should still be accumulating, there is barren ground and the threat of wildfires, Julander said. And this late in the season, there is little hope of improvement.
It has done nothing but rain and snow since April 1 in Utah, however. Hopefully this will help the water year totals.
Storms damage Creston hospital; 17,000 lack power in central Iowa
Warren Woods, the mayor of the city of Creston, said he has been monitoring local radio reports.
He said there is damage near and at the hospital.
“Most of the city is without power,” he said.
He also heard the roof had been torn off a bank on the south end of town.
Meanwhile, MidAmerican Energy said more than 17,000 Des Moines-area customers had lost electricity.
This story is being updated. While there is power.
Secret Service Fucks Up
(can i say that here?)
Carney insisted the matter was more a distraction for the media than Obama. But Secret Service assistant director Paul Morrissey said in a statement: "We regret any distraction from the Summit of the Americas this situation has caused."
Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, told the AP after he was briefed on the investigation on Saturday that "close to" all 11 of the agents involved had brought women back to their rooms at a hotel separate from where Obama is now staying.
The New York Republican said the women were "presumed to be prostitutes" but investigators were interviewing the agents.
The lawmaker also offered new details about the controversy.
The outstanding feature of this story is that Peter King, wannabe cop, can't keep his mouth shut about anything.
Science
Hope for breakthrough in search for gravitational waves
From a farm gate outside the village of Ruthe, near Hanover, a broad asphalt path stretches in a straight line for 600 metres. On one side, an orchard brims with apple trees which are starting to bud in the warm German spring. On the other, a metre-wide ditch, covered with corrugated stainless steel, runs parallel to the path. Follow it, and you reach a cluster of temporary cabins and tall aerials from which a second steel-covered trench, also 600m long, emerges at right angles to the first, marking out a giant metal L in the field.
It is an odd sight. With its steel-covered trenches, the place could be an experimental sewage farm or a design centre for drainage ditches. In fact, this is the site of one of Europe's most advanced astrophysical laboratories. Scientists here are hunting the universe's most elusive force: gravitational waves. These cosmic emanations are thought to be hurled across space when stars start throwing their weight around – for example when they collapse into black holes or when pairs of super-dense neutron stars start to spin closer and closer to each other. These processes put massive strains on the fabric of space-time, pushing and stretching it so that ripples of gravitational energy radiate across the universe.
At least, that is the theory. To date, no one has actually detected a gravitational wave. The Ruthe laboratory, a joint UK-German project known as Geo600, has been built to overcome this failure and to show these disruptions in space-time do exist, thus proving that Albert Einstein was absolutely right – and utterly wrong – about gravity.
Dinosaur Eggs Discovered in Chechnya
Participants of a geographic expedition in Russia’s North Caucasus Chechen Republic have uncovered a batch of alleged dinosaur egg fossils, the Vesti Respubliki online daily said on Friday.
“We were exploring the site [a pristine area in Chechnya’s Sharoyski District], when one of us stumbled upon regular-shaped spheres lying on the nearby rocks. Proceeding from their form, we supposed that these are egg fossils,” Lifenews online tabloid quoted expedition member Said-Emin Dzhabrailov, who heads Chechen State University’s Landscape Explorations Laboratory, as saying.
“With 90-percent certainty we say that we found dinosaur eggs. We are presently holding a series of tests and will soon make a final conclusion,” Dzhabrailov continued.
River otters rebounding with hospitable habitat
It's wild times in the watershed.
The most happy-go-lucky denizen of Bay Area creeks is back, after a hiatus of at least three decades: the river otter.
"They look like they're having a wonderful time out there. It's really exciting to see," said Steve Bobzien, a wildlife ecologist for the East Bay Regional Park District. "Plus, it's a really good biological indicator of the health of the ecosystem."
From Antioch to Tomales Bay, park visitors have reported otters rolling in mud, gnawing on crayfish, sliding down rocks and generally partying on the creek banks. A Marin group has even created an Otter Spotter website, where the public can log their otter sightings on an interactive map and learn more about the charismatic carnivores.
Oil spill put USF marine science program in the spotlight
If there is some small silver lining in the worst environmental disaster in our nation's history, consider the University of South Florida.
When BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded two years ago, sending hundreds of millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the university's quiet, 100-student marine science program in St. Petersburg was thrust into the spotlight like never before.
Ready with a boat and researchers, it was one of the first entities to venture out and study the spill, cementing the university in the public consciousness as the go-to expert in the disaster's wake.
Faculty members appeared on TV stations and in newspaper headlines everywhere from here to Kathmandu. They traveled to Capitol Hill to testify before Congress. They raked in millions in new grants to continue studying the disaster's implications. Graduate student applications surged.
Physicists continue work to abolish time as fourth dimension of space
Light clocks A and B moving horizontally through space. According to length contraction, clock A should tick faster than clock B. In a new study, scientists argue that there is no length contraction, and both clocks should tick at the same rate in accordance with special relativity.
Philosophers have debated the nature of time long before Einstein and modern physics. But in the 106 years since Einstein, the prevailing view in physics has been that time serves as the fourth dimension of space, an arena represented mathematically as 4D Minkowski spacetime. However, some scientists, including Amrit Sorli and Davide Fiscaletti, founders of the Space Life Institute in Slovenia, argue that time exists completely independent from space. In a new study, Sorli and Fiscaletti have shown that two phenomena of special relativity - time dilation and length contraction - can be better described within the framework of a 3D space with time as the quantity used to measure change (i.e., photon motion) in this space.
The scientists have published their article in a recent issue of Physics Essays. The work builds on their previous articles, in which they have investigated the definition of time as a “numerical order of material change.”
The main concepts of special relativity - that the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames, and that there is no absolute reference frame - are traditionally formulated within the framework of Minkowski spacetime. In this framework, the three spatial dimensions are intuitively visualized, while the time dimension is mathematically represented by an imaginary coordinate, and cannot be visualized in a concrete way.
In their paper, Sorli and Fiscaletti argue that, while the concepts of special relativity are sound, the introduction of 4D Minkowski spacetime has created a century-long misunderstanding of time as the fourth dimension of space that lacks any experimental support. They argue that well-known time dilation experiments, such as those demonstrating that clocks do in fact run slower in high-speed airplanes than at rest, support special relativity and time dilation but not necessarily Minkowski spacetime or length contraction. According to the conventional view, clocks run slower at high speeds due to the nature of Minkowski spacetime itself as a result of both time dilation and length contraction. But Sorli and Fiscaletti argue that the slow clocks can better be described by the relative velocity between the two reference frames, which the clocks measure, not which the clocks are apart of. In this view, space and time are two separate entities.
Links & Other Stuff
Syria: The art of war
American Library Association releases list of top banned books of 2011
Quilt of the Month