As your faithful scribe, I welcome you all to another edition of Overnight News Digest.
I am most pleased to share this platform with jlms qkw, maggiejean, wader, rfall, JLM9999 and side pocket. Additionally, I wish to recognize our alumni editors palantir, Bentliberal, Oke, Interceptor7, and ScottyUrb along with annetteboardman as our guest editor.
Neon Vincent is our editor-in-chief.
Special thanks go to Magnifico for starting this venerable series.
Lead Off Story
Ferry With 470 Passengers Sinks Off Southwest Coast
A 6,825-ton passenger ship sent distress call in waters off Jindo, South Jeolla Province on Wednesday morning.
The ferry left Incheon at around 9:00 p.m. on Tuesday and was heading to the southern resort island of Jeju, carrying over 470 passengers including 325 youngsters on a school trip.
Around two hours after the ship suddenly started to sink at around 8:55 a.m. on Wednesday, 190 passengers had been rescued.
As of 11:00 a.m., the ship was about to go under completely, with most of the passengers believed rescued. The ship has a capacity of some 900 passengers and had enough life jackets.
The Coast Guard has dispatched over 20 patrol boats and aircraft to the scene. The Navy joined the rescue operations by sending a guided-missile patrol killer, six speed boats and a Lynx helicopter.
Why the ship sank is unclear
chosunilbo
Update:
Hundreds Missing After South Korean Ferry Sinks
More than 280 people, most of them students, remained unaccounted for Wednesday night, as coast guard and navy divers searched a ferry that sank hours earlier off the southwestern tip of South Korea.
By midnight, six people were confirmed dead, including three 17-year-old high school students and a member of the ferry’s crew. But fears that the sinking could become one of the worst peacetime disasters in the country increased as rescued passengers told news outlets that they believed many people were trapped below deck. The vessel listed and sank rapidly after a loud noise was heard by people on board.
[...]
The ministry reported that a total of 175 passengers and crew members were known to have been rescued; given the known deaths, that left 281 of the 462 people on the ferry unaccounted for. Earlier in the day, the ministry had issued different figures, including a much lower estimate for the number of missing; it attributed the mistakes to confusing reports from the scene.
nyt
World News
Australian Militants Killed In Drone Strike
At least one of the two Australian suspected Islamic militants killed in a US drone strike in Yemen late last year had spent time in a terrorist training camp.
The Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed on Wednesday that two Australian citizens had been killed in a counterterrorism operation but stressed the Australian government had no involvement in, or forewarning of, the attack.
The department gave no details, but it was reported that the pair were among five suspected al-Qaeda militants killed in a Predator drone strike in November – making them the first Australian deaths under Washington's controversial program.
[...]
They were not the main target of the strike. Rather, the primary target was Abu Habib al-Yemeni, a senior militant who was close to the late al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
It is understood that US authorities informed the Australian government that Australians might have been "collateral damage" in the drone strike. The Australian Federal Police helped confirm the identity of the bodies by comparing DNA samples with samples from the men's families.
smh
.
O---O---O
.
Reputed North Korean Drones Worry Officials In The South
South Korea has long taken unusual pains to keep people from aerially photographing its presidential palace. On a mountainous hiking trail that winds behind the blue-roofed palace, cameras are restricted. The satellite mapping service produced by Naver — Korea’s version of Google — resorts to a Photoshop trick, depicting the Blue House, set just north of Seoul’s downtown, as a bushy forest.
Such covertness is often excused as the duty the of a country technically at war. Decades ago, North Korean commandos tried to raid the palace. Pyongyang could presumably plan worse.
It was with a degree of chagrin, then, that South Korea on Friday announced that the Blue House — and several other sensitive areas in the country — had been photographed by sky-blue drones almost certainly belonging to the rival North. South Korea learned about the incursion only because three such drones crashed-landed, leaving a cache of evidence. Investigators found photos of South Korean apartment blocks, military installations and President Park Geun-hye’s palace.
The drones — about six feet long, made of polycarbonate — are hardly the North’s most imposing weapons. They look like models one might buy at a hobby shop. But the South is taking them seriously. For one, they skated unnoticed past Seoul’s radar system. They're also marked with serial numbers, raising the possibility that many more have not only flown over the South, but also safely returned to the North, information in hand. Some South Korean media have raised alarms that the drones could one day be refitted for chemical or biological weapons attacks — though that would require some major technical leaps.
wapo
.
O---O---O
.
Separatists Take Armored Vehicles, Humiliating Ukraine Forces
Separatists flew the Russian flag on armored vehicles taken from the Ukrainian army on Wednesday, humiliating a Kiev government operation to recapture eastern towns controlled by pro-Moscow partisans.
Six armored personnel carriers were driven into the rebel-held town of Slaviansk to waves and shouts of "Russia! Russia!". It was not immediately clear whether they had been captured by rebels or handed over to them by Ukrainian deserters.
Another 15 armored troop carriers full of paratroops were surrounded and halted by a pro-Russian crowd at a town near an airbase. They were allowed to retreat only after the soldiers handed the firing pins from their rifles to a rebel commander.
The military setback leaves Kiev looking weak on the eve of a peace conference on Thursday, when its foreign minister will meet his Russian, U.S. and European counterparts in Geneva.
Moscow has responded to the overthrow of its ally Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich in February by announcing its right to intervene militarily to protect Russian speakers across the former Soviet Union, a new doctrine that has overturned decades of post-Cold War diplomacy.
reuters
U.S. News
Vermont Senate votes 26-2 for GMO labeling
The Senate gave a decisive 26-2 vote Tuesday for a bill that would require labeling of foods that contain genetically modified ingredients, a strong indication that Vermont could become the first state in the nation to enact such a law.
“We are saying people have a right to know what’s in their food,” said Senate President Pro Tempore John Campbell, D-Windsor.
Campbell and other supporters argued that they believe they have written a bill that is legally defensible. They nonetheless created a fund in the legislation to help pay the state’s legal bills, as many assume that food manufacturers will sue.
The bill would require food sold in Vermont stores that contain genetically modified ingredients to be labeled starting July 2016. The legislation is up for another vote in the Senate Wednesday before it goes back to the House, which passed a slightly different version last year. Gov. Peter Shumlin has indicated he’s likely to sign the bill.
[...]
Sen. David Zuckerman, P/D-Chittenden, noted as he introduced the bill on the Senate floor Tuesday that questions remain about the safety of the genetically modified foods because the U.S. Food and Drug Administration relies on testing done by the food producers rather than independent sources.
burlingtonfreepress
.
O---O---O
.
Freight Train Industry To Miss Safety Deadline
The freight railroad industry says only one-fifth of its track will be equipped with mandatory safety technology to prevent most collisions and derailments by the deadline set by Congress.
The Association of American Railroads said in a report Wednesday that about 20 percent of the approximately 60,000 miles of track being equipped with the technology will meet the deadline of Dec. 31, 2015. Previously, the association had estimated 40 percent would meet the deadline.
The association blamed the Federal Communications Commission, saying the FCC is holding up the installation of 22,000 antennas on track wayside that are necessary to complete installation of the technology, known as positive train control.
The commission is requiring railroads to ensure that each antenna will not disturb sites of importance to Native Americans.
stlouispostdispatch
Science and Technology
Preventing Heat From Going to Waste
Fossil fuels power modern society by generating heat, but much of that heat is wasted. Researchers have tried to reclaim some of it with semiconductor devices called thermoelectrics, which convert the heat into power. But they remain too inefficient and expensive to be useful beyond a handful of niche applications.
Now, scientists in Illinois report that they have used a cheap, well-known material to create the most heat-hungry thermoelectric so far. In the process, the researchers say, they learned valuable lessons that could push the materials to the efficiencies needed for widespread applications. If that happens, thermoelectrics could one day power cars and scavenge energy from myriad engines, boilers, and electrical plants.
Thermoelectrics are slabs of semiconductor with a strange and useful property: heating them on one side generates an electric voltage that can be used to drive a current and power devices. To obtain that voltage, thermoelectrics must be good electrical conductors but poor conductors of heat, which saps the effect. Unfortunately, because a material's electrical and heat conductivity tend to go hand in hand, it has proven difficult to create materials that have high thermoelectric efficiency—a property scientists represent with the symbol ZT.
Several years ago, researchers led by Mercouri Kanatzidis, a chemist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, discovered an impressive new thermoelectric material called lead telluride (PbTe), which had a ZT value of 2.2. That was reasonably close to the ZT of 3 that most researchers consider the minimum for widespread applications.
Intrigued, Kanatzidis and his colleagues started testing PbTe’s chemical cousins. One was a shiny silver material called tin selenide (SnSe). Decades earlier, researchers had found that it was too poor an electrical conductor to be worth trying as a thermoelectric. But tin and lead belong to the same group in the periodic table, and tellurium and selenium both are members of another group. “It was a curiosity that we wanted to explore,” Kanatzidis says
sciencemag
.
O---O---O
.
Japan Company To Give Maglev Tech To U.S. For Free
The Japanese rail operator JR Tokai said it would not charge the US to license its proprietary "maglev" technology, which allows trains to hover about 4 inches (10 centimeters) above tracks and travel at speeds of 310 mph (500 kph), according to Nikkei. It is hoping the US will use its train for a proposed high-speed rail line between Washington D.C. and Baltimore.
The magnetic-levitation technology works by creating magnetic fields with onboard superconducting magnets, which interact with ground coils in the rail, allowing the whole train to "float" just above the ground. And go really fast.
On Saturday (April 12), Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy took a ride on a maglev train in Yamanashi Prefecture, according to the Japan Times. "The government is making arrangements so that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can offer the technological assistance when he meets with U.S. President Barack Obama in Tokyo on April 24," the Times added.
[...]
This doesn't have the best chance of happening in the near future, given (in part) the difficulty of funding rail projects in the US. But perhaps Japan's offer will change things. As Nikkei reported, "the Japanese government intends to finance half of the estimated construction cost of 1 trillion yen ($9.75 billion) through the Japan Bank for International Cooperation."
popsci
.
O---O---O
.
Eavesdropping On Brain Cell Chatter
Everything we do -- all of our movements, thoughts and feelings -- are the result of neurons talking with one another, and recent studies have suggested that some of the conversations might not be all that private. Brain cells known as astrocytes may be listening in on, or even participating in, some of those discussions. But a new mouse study suggests that astrocytes might only be tuning in part of the time -- specifically, when the neurons get really excited about something. This research, published in Neuron, was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health.
For a long time, researchers thought that the star-shaped astrocytes (the name comes from the Greek word for star) were simply support cells for the neurons.
It turns out that these cells have a number of important jobs, including providing nutrients and signaling molecules to neurons, regulating blood flow, and removing brain chemicals called neurotransmitters from the synapse. The synapse is the point of information transfer between two neurons. At this connection point, neurotransmitters are released from one neuron to affect the electrical properties of the other. Long arms of astrocytes are located next to synapses, where they can keep tabs on the conversations going on between neurons.
In recent years, it has been shown that astrocytes may also play a role in neuronal communication. When neurons release neurotransmitters, levels of calcium change within astrocytes. Calcium is critical for many processes, including release of molecules from the cell, and activation of a host of proteins within the cell. The role of this astrocytic calcium signaling for brain function remains a mystery.
[...]
"We found that astrocytes in the mossy fiber pathway do not listen to the constant, millisecond by millisecond synaptic chatter that neurons engage in. Instead, they listen when neurons get excessively excited during bursts of activation," said Dr. [Baljit S. Khakh, Ph.D. from the University of California].
sciencedaily
Society and Culture
Iran Considers Ban On Vasectomies In Drive To Boost Birthrate
Iran's parliament is seeking a ban on vasectomies and a tightening of abortion rules as the country moves away from its progressive laws on family planning in an attempt to increase the birthrate.
Two decades after Iran initiated an effective birth control programme, including subsidised male sterilisation surgeries and free condom distribution, the country is to make a U-turn.
Last year the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, criticised existing policy on contraception, describing it as an imitation of western lifestyle.
The 74-year-old has urged the government to tackle what he believes to be an ageing population and to double the number of people in Iran from 77 million to at least 150 million.
This week Tehran's conservative-dominated parliament, the Majlis, voted to discuss banning vasectomies and introducing punishments for those involved in encouraging contraceptive services and abortions, local agencies reported.
guardian
.
O---O---O
.
Iranian Killer's Execution Halted At Last Minute By Victim's Parents
When he felt the noose around his neck, Balal must have thought he was about to take his last breath. Minutes earlier, crowds had watched as guards pushed him towards the gallows for what was meant to be yet another public execution in the Islamic republic of Iran.
Seven years ago Balal, who is in his 20s, stabbed 18-year-old Abdollah Hosseinzadeh during a street brawl in the small town of Royan, in the northern province of Mazandaran. In a literal application of qisas, the sharia law of retribution, the victim's family were to participate in Balal's punishment by pushing the chair on which he stood.
But what happened next marked a rarity in public executions in Iran, which puts more people to death than any other country apart from China. The victim's mother approached, slapped the convict in the face and then decided to forgive her son's killer. The victim's father removed the noose and Balal's life was spared
guardian
.
O---O---O
.
While Election Commission Cannot Sanitise Election Speeches,
It Must Check Extreme Instances Of Hate Speech
India is a vigorous and rambunctious democracy. All kinds of passions are boiling over this election season. As insults and invective fly, it's to be expected that election speeches do not follow the decorum of drawing room conversations. The Election Commission (EC), tasked with enforcing the model code of conduct for all parties, must afford a great deal of latitude in this respect. Otherwise it will have more on its hands than it can possibly handle. However it does need to crack down on extreme instances of hate speech, when what seems at stake is not just insult to a candidate but active incitement to violence.
Thus an Imran Masood who threatens to chop the BJP's prime ministerial candidate into pieces has to face a criminal charge - regardless of his self-serving defence by the Congress high command. The same should apply to Heeralal Regar, a BJP leader in Rajasthan who is alleged to have said, while addressing an election rally in Tonk constituency, that the Congress president and vice-president should be stripped and sent back to Italy. But if a Sharad Pawar raises questions about the mental balance of Narendra Modi, or if Modi questions Sonia Gandhi's patriotism and insinuates that she had something to with arrested Italian marines being allowed to leave for Italy, that should be treated as normal thrust-and-parry of public discourse during an election season even if they amount to hitting below the belt. Parties, therefore, shouldn't waste EC's time by complaining to it about such remarks.
The Supreme Court was right to point out that existing legislation can take care of offenders on the hate speech issue. What, however, is truly remarkable about the SC's ruling is what the judges had to say when they dismissed a PIL seeking its intervention to curtail hate speech. Each citizen, according to the honourable judges, is free to accept or reject the view of others - provided that this does not involve intimidation and violence.
The latter alone should be compelled to undergo tough, legal scrutiny. The apex court has asked EC to frame guidelines to determine the nature of hate speech. This should be done as narrowly and tightly as possible, to have a realistic chance of success.
timesofindia
Well, that's different...
Yo No Quiero:
The Phoenix, Ariz., suburb of Maryvale was “overrun,” according to February reports, with several “packs” of up to 15 Chihuahuas each, roaming neighborhoods, frightening schoolchildren. Coincidentally, two months earlier, in Hobart, Australia, the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals announced that it was overwhelmed by massive recent donations of Chihuahuas, most from one couple. Said a spokesman, “We were up to our knees in little Chihuahuas."
weirduniverse
Bill Moyers and Company:
The Surprising Truth Behind Tax Day: Where Your Taxes Go
If you groan about tax day, you’re certainly not alone.
But what if tax day was something we could be proud of as members of a democracy? Would you feel differently about paying taxes if you knew they were going to support public services that you, your family and your community rely on — such as public safety, roads and bridges, schools, health care, social services and national parks?
Millions of Americans file their federal income tax returns on April 15 each year with no idea what the government actually does with all that money.
This is surprising, considering that individuals are our nation’s primary bill payers. Income taxes paid by individuals account for 46 percent of all federal tax revenues, which are projected to be $3.34 trillion in 2015. Other tax revenue comes from payroll taxes paid jointly by workers and employers, accounting for 32 percent and corporate income taxes paid by businesses, which make up 13.5 percent.
Given how much taxpayers collectively contribute to our nation’s revenue stream, it goes without saying that we should be able to influence how the government spends that money. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. The federal government doesn’t make it easy to find out where your tax money goes.
That’s why the National Priorities Project (NPP) has done the work for you.
billmoyers.com