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 publishing each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
OND Editors include founder Magnifico and regular editors jlms qkw, Bentliberal, wader, Oke, rfall, and JML9999, alumni editors palantir and ScottyUrb, guest editors maggiejean and annetteboardman, and current editor-in-chief Neon Vincent, along with anyone else who reads and comments, informs and entertains.
h/t for photo: Interceptor7
US NEWS
Poll: Most oppose blocking Obama health care law
By David Jackson, USA TODAY
A new poll shows that most Americans -- 56% -- want to see critics of President Obama's health care law drop efforts to block it and move on to other national issues.
The survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation also reflects continued partisan divisions over the law in the days after a divided Supreme Court found it constitutional.
"Democrats overwhelmingly say opponents should move on to other issues (82%), as do half (51%) of independents and a quarter (26%) of Republicans," Kaiser reports.
"But," it adds, "seven in 10 Republicans (69%) say they want to see efforts to stop the law continue, a view shared by 41% of independents and 14% of Democrats."
Here's a Map of the Countries That Provide Universal Health Care (America's Still Not on It)
The Atlantic by Max Fisher
As excited as American liberals and proponents of expanding access to health care might be about the Supreme Court's decision to largely uphold the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. still stands out from much of the developed world in state efforts to make medical care available to the public. If universal health care in the U.S. is your goal, then today was a big step forward, but maybe also a reminder of how far behind America still lags.
Tea Party activists: Romney best hope to end "Obamacare"
(CBS News) Columbus, OH -- Some Tea Party activists at a state convention here are less than enthused about their presumptive presidential nominee, but are looking to him as their best hope to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.
"I believe that I am being forced to vote for the lesser of the two evils, which would be Mitt Romney," Kelly Sanders, a registered nurse from Fairfield County, said at a "We the People" Tea Party Convention here over the weekend. "I am not excited about Mitt, but I do like some of the things he has proposed."
"He was not my original choice," said retiree Edward Vincent of Suffield Township. "He was a career politician and some of his stuff that he did in the past was not conservative enough."
At the top of that list is the Massachusetts health law that Romney signed in 2006 when he was governor. President Obama and others have called it the model for the new federal health law which, to the dismay of conservatives, the Supreme Court upheld last week as constitutional.
UPDATE 4-GlaxoSmithKline settles healthcare fraud case for $3 bln
WASHINGTON, July 2 (Reuters) - GlaxoSmithKline Plc agreed to plead guilty to misdemeanor criminal charges and pay $3 billion to settle what government officials on Monday described as the largest case of healthcare fraud in U.S. history.
The agreement, which still needs court approval, would resolve allegations that the British drugmaker broke U.S. laws in the marketing and development of pharmaceuticals.
GSK targeted the antidepressant Paxil to patients under age 18 when it was approved for adults only, and it pushed the drug Wellbutrin for uses it was not approved for, including weight loss and treatment of sexual dysfunction, according to an investigation led by the U.S. Justice Department.
The company went to extreme lengths to promote the drugs, such as distributing a misleading medical journal article and providing doctors with meals and spa treatments that amounted to illegal kickbacks, prosecutors said.
Washington sweats and tempers fray as power outage continues
The Guardian UK
It may be the heart of American political power, and bristling with military and intelligence assets, but for three days now much of Washington DC and its suburbs have been disabled – essentially by trees falling on power lines.
Nearly 440,000 households – or about one in four in the greater Washington area – remained without power again on Monday morning, following violent storms on Friday night.
The prolonged outage in the mist of a sweltering heat wave has provoked widespread frustration. The local power utility, Pepco, has said it will take a week before power is fully restored.
There was little sign of any upheaval in official Washington: the centre of the city has power, and Congress is on holiday this week, making for an easier than anticipated anticipated morning commute.
Colorado wildfire destruction 'unreal' for residents touring neighbourhoods
The Guardian UK
Cars were burned to nothing but charred metal and only concrete remained of many homes in the neighborhoods most damaged by the worst wildfire in Colorado history.
But for residents allowed Sunday to temporarily return to the area for the first time since they fled encroaching flames last week, the fact that other things were left untouched was equally jarring.
"Good Lord! I've never seen anything like this," said CJ Moore upon her return to her two-story home, now reduced to ashes and one of nearly 350 houses that were damaged or destroyed in the Waldo Canyon fire that left two people dead.
While searching for her great-grandmother's cast-iron skillets, Moore marveled at the juxtaposition of what burned and what hadn't. "To find my mail in my mailbox, unscathed. It's just unreal," she told the Associated Press by phone. "Bird baths are fine. Some of the foliage is fine."
More than a week after it sparked on June 23, the Waldo Canyon fire was still being attacked by some 1,500 personnel. Crews working grueling shifts through the hot weekend made progress against the 28-square-mile fire, and authorities said they were confident they had built good fire lines in many areas to stop the spread of the flames.
The blaze is now 55% contained.
Marine veteran's family files $21m lawsuit in fatal police shooting
The Guardian UK
The family of a 68-year-old marine veteran fatally gunned down in his home has filed a $21m lawsuit against the police officers responsible for his death.
Kenneth Chamberlain's son, also Kenneth, appeared with his attorneys outside Manhattan's federal courthouse to announce a federal civil rights suit against the eight White Plains police officers involved in the shooting, as well as the city itself and the housing authority responsible for the building where the elder Chamberlain died.
Earlier this year a Westchester grand jury declined to indict Anthony Carelli, the police officer who shot Chamberlain twice in November. The shooting has resulted in an ongoing federal civil rights investigation.
Authorities have claimed Chamberlain was acting irrationally the morning he was killed and threatened police officers with knives. His family maintains that he was an elderly man with severe health problems, who died because police – responding to a medical call – refused to leave the scene after he asked them to and further escalated the encounter with taunting and racial slurs.
The shooting has inflamed criticism of the department as racially biased. Chamberlain was African American, while Carelli, who is white, has faced separate allegations of racially motivated violence.
Gingrich Speaks At Rally In France For Iranian ‘Terror’ Group
TPM Muckraker
At a rally in Paris last Sunday, former Republican presidential candidate and House Speaker Newt Gingrich expressed his support for the MEK, an Iranian opposition group considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department.
“…This is a massive, world-wide movement for liberty in Iran,” Gingrich said, in a short speech posted on YouTube. “And not anything like the State Department’s descriptions. And I think what you did yesterday was historic and extraordinary, and needs to be driven home, so that everybody who makes foreign policy decisions in the United States understands just how big this movement is getting, how wide-spread it is, and how bipartisan the American support for it is.”
American Indians organize largest Get Out the Vote campaign in history. You can help make it happen
Daily Kos
A million American Indians aren't registered to vote. A million! American Indians who are registered have the worst turn-out at the polls of any ethnic group. This is simultaneously sad and infuriating. It's also problematic for progressives because the Indian vote can make the difference, has made the difference in some cases, on who sits on county commissions, in state legislatures and, occasionally, in Congress. Indians overwhelmingly vote Democratic.
Jefferson Keel (Chickasaw), the president of the National Congress of American Indians, is pushing voter registration for American Indians in a way never seen before. He wants the largest-ever Native turnout this year at the polls and has joined with Rock the Vote to make that happen. One key element of the campaign is to get the federal government to establish voter registration at Indian Health Service facilities under the provisions of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Among other things, the act requires state governments to allow people to register to vote when they renew their driver's licenses or apply for social services.
California lawmakers pass historic foreclosure protections
LA Times
SACRAMENTO — California lawmakers have passed historic legislation that would provide homeowners with some of the nation's strongest protections from foreclosure and aggressive bank practices, such as when a lender tries to seize a home even as the resident negotiates to lower mortgage payments.
After years of housing and mortgage market distress during which lenders seized nearly a million California houses, legislators on Monday sent a pair of Assembly and Senate bills to the governor designed to help financially distressed borrowers stay in their homes.
The legislation would make California the first state to prohibit "dual tracking," when lenders pursue foreclosures and simultaneously negotiate with clients to modify their mortgages so that payments become more affordable. Homeowners complain that they often wind up being evicted even though they had been working with the bank to modify their loans in order to avoid foreclosure.
WORLD NEWS
Syria strikes Damascus suburb; U.N. decries arms flow
(Reuters) - Syrian helicopters bombarded a Damascus suburb on Monday and Turkey scrambled warplanes near the border in the north, as the U.N. human rights chief warned that arms supplies to both the government and rebels were deepening the 16-month conflict.
Fighting has come to the gates of the capital in recent weeks and is also raging throughout the country as the battle to unseat President Bashar al-Assad increasingly takes on the character of an all-out civil war, fuelled by sectarian hate.
Syrian government forces have launched an assault on Douma, a city on the edge of Damascus where they stormed a rebel stronghold two days ago, leaving bodies rotting in the streets of the nearly abandoned town.
Arab League, Syrian Opposition Discuss Syrian Crisis
Voice of America
CAIRO — Syrian opposition leaders and Arab diplomats began a two-day conference in Cairo Monday under the auspices of the Arab League to consider measures to step up pressure against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
While urging opposition figures to unite, Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby blasted Mr. Assad for flouting written agreements and resorting to military might rather than political means. He said it is impossible to ignore the heavy-handed tactics that the regime has employed against its people.
Veteran Palestinian diplomat Nasser El-Kidwa, who is the U.N. and Arab League's deputy special envoy to Syria, insisted that the international community is working to put an end to violence and broker a political process.
He said last week's gathering of the five permanent U.N. Security Council nations in Geneva vowed to work diligently to end violence and start an interim political process that will fulfill the aspirations of the Syrian people and lead to a democratic future.
Pena Nieto set to become Mexico's president
Al Jazeera English
The first official results have been released in Mexico's elections, and Enrique Pena Nieto of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is set to become the next president.
With more than 92 per cent of the votes counted from Sunday's elections, the country's federal election institute on Monday put Pena Nieto in the lead, winning 38 per cent of the vote.
Leftist candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) gained 30 per cent of the vote and ruling party candidate Josefina Vasquez Mota conceded defeat after trailing with 25 per cent.
Many polls predicted that Pena Nieto, 45, would win by at least a 10 percentage point.
"We're a new generation. There is no return to the past," Pena Nieto said in his victory speech.
"It's time to move on from the country we are to the Mexico we deserve and that we can be ... where every Mexican writes his own success story."
Barack Obama, the US president, phoned Pena Nieto to congratulate him on his victory, promising his commitment to working in partnership with Mexico.
Al Jazeera's Adam Raney, reporting from Ciudad Juárez , said the people he had spoken to "have high hopes for big change".
"But I do not know how much they see this as a new dawn," he added.
Kosovo to gain full sovereignty
AlJazeera English
Kosovo will finally gain full soverignty in September, almost four years after breaking away from Serbia, the International Steering Group [ISG] overseeing its independence has announced.
"The international supervision ends as of today," said Michael Spindelegger, Austrian foreign minister, who hosted the event in the Austrian capital, Vienna.
In January, the 25-nation ISG that includes several EU states besides Austria as well as Turkey and the US, had announced that the Balkan territory had made such progress that "supervised independence" could be lifted by the end of the year.
The ISG congratulated Kosovo for fulfilling the conditions required by the so-called Comprehensive Settlement Proposal (CSP), "including (passing) laws on cultural and religious heritage, community rights and decentralisation."
Hashim Thaci, the Kosovo prime minister, who attended the meeting, said it was an "historic day" and a "new step for Kosovo" but Serbia warned that the decision could pose a risk for ethnic Serbs.
Monday's decision effectively means the end of international administration and supervision of Kosovo, which unilaterally declared independence in 2008, but a NATO-led KFOR (the Kosovo Force) peacekeeping force or European rule of law mission EULEX will likely remain in place.
Libya releases detained ICC staff
AlJazeera English
Libya has released four workers from the International Criminal Court who were detained after visiting Seif al-Islam, son of slain leader Muammar Gaddafi last month, a brigade commander said.
"The four members (of the ICC team) were released," Ajmi al-Atiri, commander of a brigade holding Seif al-Islam Gaddafi told journalists in Zintan, a hilltop town southwest of Tripoli, on Monday.
The four, including Australian lawyer Melinda Taylor, have been held in Zintan since June 7 after travelling there to help prepare Seif's defence.
Australian lawyer Melinda Taylor and Lebanese-born interpreter Helene Assaf were accused of smuggling documents and hidden recording devices to Seif's prison cell.
Two male ICC staff who were travelling with Taylor and Assaf stayed with them.
Signs grow that Pakistan may reopen Nato supply line to Afghanistan
The Guardian UK
US and Pakistani officials have expressed optimism that Islamabad is close to reopening its Afghan border to Nato troop supplies after a seven-month blockade, a move that could significantly reduce tension between the two countries.
The row over the supply line, which Pakistan closed in November in retaliation for US air strikes that killed 24 of its troops, has driven the bilateral relationship to new lows, threatening US prospects in Afghanistan.
The two sides have been in deadlock for months because of disagreements over transit payments and Washington's refusal to apologise for the deadly attack, which it says was an accident.
The Pakistani government has also been worried about the inevitable political backlash from reopening the route, given the high levels of anti-American sentiment in the country.
While the exact details of a deal remain unclear, signs are growing that a breakthrough could be imminent.
Victorious Spain football team welcomed by thousands
BBC
Tens of thousands have turned out in the streets of the Spanish capital Madrid to welcome the national football team after their victory at Euro 2012.
King Juan Carlos received the team at Madrid's Zarzuela Palace before they began a parade in an open-top bus.
The parade ended in a victory rally in the central Plaza de Cibeles.
The squad's 4-0 victory over Italy in Kiev on Sunday made them the first-ever team to win three successive major international tournaments.
The crowd at the rally, most of them wearing the team's red and yellow kit, were entertained by musicians who joined the players on a stage.
"Each of you is a good player, but as a team you are formidable," King Juan Carlos told them.
"You know how to play together, how to combine your own skills with those of your teammates," he added.
Coach Vicente del Bosque hailed Spain's "great generation of footballers".
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
How the Discovery of the Higgs Boson Could Break Physics
Wired Science
As physicists at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider prepare to present their latest update in the hunt for the Higgs boson — the strange particle that exists everywhere in space and interacts with all other elementary particles, giving them their mass — other physicists are preparing for disappointment.
That’s because scientists have been secretly hoping all along that, when they finally found the Higgs, it would be an interesting particle with unexpected behaviors — even somewhat unruly. A perfectly well-behaved Higgs leaves less room for new, exciting physics — the kind that theorists have been wishing would show up at the LHC.
The current situation has some physicists starting to worry and, if coming years fail to turn up interesting results, the field could be headed for a crisis.
OS 6 vs. Jelly Bean: Which New Mobile OS Reigns Supreme?
Wired
June has been a huge month for mobile OSes. The major players, Apple and Google, have both demonstrated and released betas of their latest smartphone/tablet operating systems.
But which OS deserves the King of the Mobile World title? We tossed each new system build into a Thunderdome-style ring to determine which one lives, and which gets tossed into the badlands while Tina Turner sings an epic ballad.
Before we start, a few caveats: Apple’s NDA prohibits Gadget Lab from writing about unannounced features in iOS 6. So, if iOS 6 has a remarkable feature that doesn’t appear in the list, it’s because we respected the developer embargo. Also, neither OS is completely locked down and final, so features can be updated, changed or even removed before the final build. Finally, we’re only comparing new features that directly go head-to-head. For example, Android has much more robust data-management features, but because iOS doesn’t even really try in this area, we didn’t include data management as a mini-battle in this article.
Apple Finally Shutters Long-Suffering MobileMe — It’s All iCloud Now
Wired
MobileMe, Apple’s subscription-based online storage suite, has officially closed its doors. Users who want an Apple-flavored cloud storage option will have to turn to iCloud now.
Apple announced it would eventually be shuttering MobileMe and rolling some of its services into iCloud last summer. iCloud contains many of the same features as MobileMe (like mail, contacts and calendar syncing), but eliminates some of the less popular features like iDisk, MobileMe Gallery and iWeb publishing. If you haven’t yet transitioned data stored on MobileMe to another service, you can still download Gallery and iDisk files from me.com for a limited time.
Apple put up an informational website to help ease the pain of MobileMe’s shutdown, including links to longer articles for people looking to transition from iDisk. And for people who aren’t interested in any type of Apple cloud storage solution, there’s a host of alternatives available.
Review: How Andrew Garfield Spins Amazing Spider-Man Forward
Wired
The Amazing Spider-Man zips viewers through plenty of vertigo-inducing action and conjures a fearsome 9-foot freak straight out of a ’60s Japanese horror flick, but all that expensive spectacle would matter little if we didn’t care about the guy inside the Spidey suit.
Luckily, that guy is Andrew Garfield. Lanky, limber and funny, the ace British actor and director Marc Webb clearly understand a fundamental truth about superhero wish fulfillment: Before the costumed crime-fighter takes flight with spectacular feats of heroism, you’ve got to get viewers on board with a character that seems to have at least one clumsy foot planted in the real world.
For this hero’s journey, the road to Spider-Man’s death-defying acrobatics is deftly paved with the geeky charms of his socially awkward alter ego Peter Parker, a tormented teen science geek who’s able to leap complicated equations with a single bound long before a lab accident leaves him with sticky appendages and an uncanny spider-sense.
(Spoiler alert: Minor plot points follow.)
3D-printed sugar network to help grow artificial liver
BBC
Researchers have moved a step closer to creating a synthetic liver, after a US team created a template for blood vessels to grow into, using sugar.
Scientists have long been experimenting with the 3D printing of cells and blood vessels, building up tissue structure layer by layer with artificial cells.
But the synthetically engineered cells often die before the tissue is formed.
The technology, in which a 3D printer uses sugar as its building material, could one day be used for transplants.
The study appears in the journal Nature Materials.