Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, March 06, 2014.
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: What Does It Take (To Win Your Love) by Junior Walker & the All Stars
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
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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Chemical plants endanger 134 million Americans. Who gets the worst of it?
By Brentin Mock
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Remember the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas, last August, that claimed the lives of 15 people and injured another 160? We tend to think of such accidents as isolated incidents that won’t happen near us. But there are over 134 million Americans who can’t afford to think that way, according to a new report from the Environmental Justice and Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform that maps out where the facilities handling the most dangerous chemicals are, and who lives near them.
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Climate change threatens to exacerbate these situations by producing more frequent and intense storms. Hurricane Katrina already gave us a taste of what happens when furious storms meet volatile chemicals.
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But since Congress and state governments don’t require companies to even explore safer alternatives, much less use them, the risks persist. The industry now feels entitled to use certain risky materials, even when less-risky versions are available. We saw this during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, where millions of gallons of Corexit dispersant were used to break down oil even though we didn’t know all of the chemical ingredients of it (for proprietary reasons); and of the ingredients we did know, some were banned in Europe due to toxicity. Alternative dispersants were available, and the EPA ordered BP to find and use them. But BP waved the agency off. The EPA had no real enforcement card to play in the matter.
According to the new report, “federal programs almost universally fail to require facilities that store or use highly hazardous chemicals and endanger millions of people (who are disproportionately black, Latino, and poor) to determine whether safer alternatives could be used instead.”
Such racial impacts are neither parenthetical nor accidental, but the result of policies that have forced African Americans, Latino Americans, and people who live in poverty to subsist in the most undesirable places. Government forces use policies to protect whiteness and wealth instead of protecting and serving all Americans.
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Curious about the biggest trade deal in history? Sorry, it’s classified
By Patrick Winn
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What little we know about TPP comes from a few leaked documents. (Thanks, Wikileaks.) As a free-trade deal, its core mission is killing fees for imports and exports between every country involved.
But TPP also appears to push major restrictions on the free flow of internet content, life-saving medicine and much more.
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If the White House gets its way, TPP will give rise to a massive America-led free-trade zone, stretching from tropical Malaysia to the mountains of Peru. It would bring NAFTA-style rules to as many as 14 nations and 40 percent of the world’s economy. The White House has cited estimates that the deal could kick-start “as much as $123.5 billion in additional exports from the United States.”
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TPP is great for America’s embattled film and music industries. They’d gain unprecedented power to punish anyone with digital content violating copyright rules. That would include straight-up rips of a Tupac song. It could also include creative spin offs — say, a parody video of cats dancing to Tupac.
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A range of laws force government agencies to purchase American products. Many police departments, for example, are forbidden from replacing their Ford cruiser fleet with Hondas — even if they’re cheaper. The goal is to keep the tax dollars at home, where they boost employment (and increase the tax base).
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Global war on drugs 'billion dollar failure'
By (Al Jazeera)
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The global "war on drugs" has been a catastrophic failure and world leaders must rethink their approach, a group including five Nobel prize-winning economists, Britain's deputy prime minister and a former US secretary of state has said.
An academic report published on Tuesday by the London School of Economics (LSE) called "Ending the Drug Wars" pointed to violence in Afghanistan, Latin America and other regions as evidence of the need for a new approach.
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The report said "rigorously monitored" experiments with legalisation and a focus on public health, minimising the impact of the illegal drug trade, were key ways of tackling the problem instead.
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"Leaders need to recognise that toeing the line on current drug control strategies comes with extraordinary human and financial costs to their citizens and economies."
Some countries in Latin America have begun to turn away from US-led attempts to stamp out drugs through prohibition.
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International |
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Pakistan to immunise people going abroad against polio
By (BBC)
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The Pakistani government says it will set up mandatory immunisation points at airports and border crossings to help stop its polio outbreak from spreading.
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The virus is transmitted through contaminated food and water, and multiplies in the intestine. It can then invade the nervous system, causing paralysis in one in every 200 infections. It is capable of causing death within hours.
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But senior health official Saira Afzal Tarar told AFP that the health body's recommendations would make life harder for ordinary Pakistanis.
"By recommending travel restrictions on Pakistan, the WHO has strengthened those forces who actually banned polio drops," she said.
Attacks on vaccination campaigns in Pakistan by militants - who see them as a cover for spying - have allowed the virus to spread across its borders.
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Malaysian politician's video leads to sedition charge
By (BBC)
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The video, called "Onederful Malaysia", was released in January and depicts Ms Kok as a talk show host with three guests.
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Some Muslim groups reacted angrily, saying the video insulted the country's leaders and Islam.
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Ms Kok said her prosecution - and charges against other politicians - were an orchestrated attack on the opposition following good results in last year's general election.
Last month, the opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, was sentenced to five years in prison after his acquittal on sodomy charges was overturned.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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National Park Service bans drones in Yosemite
By David Schloss
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More bad news for photographers looking to use unmanned aircraft for photography - at least those hoping to use drones in Yosemite National Park. The National Park Service has issued a statement that makes it clear these devices are not permitted.
As of May 2nd this year, the National Park Service's website says the Code of Federal Regulations specifically prohibits the use of drones in the park under any circumstances. . .
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The Park Service also notes that drones are especially problematic for the nesting peregrine falcons on cliff walls and can hamper emergency rescues.
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Oh, Good: More Sports Teams Asking Taxpayers to Pay for Their Stadiums
By Matt Connolly
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While many voters will go to the polls Tuesday to vote in congressional primaries, Cleveland residents have another decision to make: whether to extend the city's notably regressive sin tax, which bumps up the price of cigarettes and alcoholic beverages by a few cents. If it passes, the sin tax extension will bring the amount of public money Cleveland has spent on the stadiums, which are publicly owned, up to $1.2 billion since 1990. (The city's mayor and council president have argued that the investment pays for itself, though such claims are often exaggerated.)
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Teams aren't just tossing in cash to make sure taxpayers help foot the bill for new scoreboards. The Indians instructed ushers to wear pro-sin-tax stickers on Opening Day, according to an employee instruction sheet a former usher gave to Cleveland.com. While the Indians had told reporters that the stickers were purely voluntary, the handout reads, "An Issue 7 Keep Cleveland Strong sticker is part of your uniform. Place it chest high on your outermost layer." The former usher, Edward Loomis, said he was fired by the team after refusing to wear the sticker. When opponents proposed adding a $3.25 ticket fee to help pay for the renovations, Keep Cleveland Strong claimed that it would punish local families and innocent sports fans.
Cleveland teams certainly aren't the only ones asking for public money to help their facilities. The Minnesota Vikings secured hundreds of millions of dollars for their new stadium after pleading that they "only have $975 million in the budget," while the Atlanta Braves announced a new stadium that will cost suburban Cobb County, Georgia, $300 million. The absolute nadir of public financing for stadiums came two years with the construction of Marlins Park in Miami, which will end up costing city and county taxpayers $3 billion.
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Obama administration proves why we need someone to leak CIA Torture Report
By Trevor Timm
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Sadly, it was quite predictable that the White House and CIA would delay the release of a report, which is reportedly devestating in its criticism of the CIA, and will remind the public that the Obama administration refused to hold anyone at the CIA accountable for its crimes. Disturbingly, the CIA itself—the same agency the report accuses of years of prisoner abuse and systematic lying—is in charge of the redaction process for the report, despite the fact that it has already dragged its feet for over a year, has been accused of misleading the Senate Intelligence Committee, and even allegedly spied on its staffers all in an apparent attempt to prevent the report from seeing light.
The UN Special Rappateur on Torture, Juan Mendez—himself a survivor of torture—recently wrote that the CIA’s role in the process “a preposterous conflict of interest,” lamenting that “[o]nce again, the torturers will have the opportunity to censor what the public can know.”
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Unfortunately, in recent years the Justice Department has prosecuted a record number of news sources, and Sen. Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has led the charge for more. Worse, Sen. Feinstein—despite advocating for the release of the torture report—has said she’s already referred a leak related to an article by McClatchy about the torture report's findings to the Justice Department.
The government’s crackdown against leaks is one reason why Freedom of the Press Foundation has helped news organizations install SecureDrop, an open-source whistleblower submission system that helps sources get documents to journalists in a much more anonymous and secure way than email. Currently, journalists at five major news organizations in the United States use SecureDrop. . .
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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:
I had a limousine," says Wilson "Mustang Sally" Pickett. "I put 200,000 miles on it, sold it, and it was still running like a sewing machine. Because we keep the cars up." Crisscrossing the country in their highway schooners between endless one-nighters, Pickett and his band members could rack up more than 100,000 miles a year. Pickett knew that that sweet ride was his pride, his livelihood and, many times, his sanctuary. He figures the reason you hear so many of his fifty-plus contemporaries wax poetic about their cars is that they had more primal, hands-on relationships with them. A man's reputation was enhanced by how deeply he understood his pretty pink Fleetwood. "Nobody was a better mechanic than [Motown's] Junior Walker," Pickett says. "Nobody."
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Environmental researchers call for ban on cigarette filters
By Brooks Hays
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Cigarettes and cigarette butts contain toxins, nicotine, pesticides and carcinogens. And when they're tossed away on streets and sidewalk, and in backyards, they can easily find their way into the surrounding environment -- their toxic ingredients contaminating water sources, poisoning aquatic micro-organisms and fish.
And it's not just the chemical ingredients, but the physical materials, that do harm. Dead whales, washed ashore, have been found with stomachs filled with cigarette filters. In addition to clogging the intestines of sea mammals, the non-biodegradable filters can leach chemicals into the ocean for up to ten years.
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"Tobacco waste products are ubiquitous, environmentally hazardous and a significant community nuisance," said Novotny. "With two-thirds of all smoked cigarettes, numbering in the trillions globally, being discarded into the environment each year, it is critical to consider the potential toxicity and remediation of these waste products."
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Ecuador rejects vote on Amazon oil drilling in Yasuni park
By (BBC)
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Ecuador has rejected a petition for a referendum on whether the Yasuni National Park in the Amazon should be opened to further oil exploration.
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Activists from the group Yasunidos, who had gathered the signatures, accused the council of "fraud".
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The park supports a huge variety of wildlife, including unique species of birds, monkeys and amphibians.
It is also home to the Huaorani and other indigenous people who had virtually no contact with the outside world until recent decades.
Yasuni oilfields hold an estimated 846 million barrels of crude, 20% of Ecuador's reserves.
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Science and Health |
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Inflammation Reduced with Behavioral Training
By Heidi Ledford and Nature magazine
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In 2010, as a graduate student, Kox was exploring how the nervous system influences immune responses. That's when he first learned that Hof had said that he could regulate not only his own body temperature, but also his immune system. “We thought, ‘Alright, let’s give him a chance’,” says Kox. “But we thought it would be a negative result.”
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On average, recruits who underwent training by Hof reported fewer flu-like symptoms than those who did not. Trained recruits also produced lower amounts of several proteins associated with inflammation, and higher levels of an inflammation-fighting protein called interleukin-10.
Kox suspects that the breathing techniques were the biggest contributor to suppressing inflammatory responses. Thirty minutes after starting the breathing exercises — but before the toxin had been injected — trained participants began to produce more adrenaline, a hormone involved in stress and immune responses.
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But the current study should help explicate the link between the nervous system and immune responses, says Kevin Tracey, a physician and the president of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhassett, New York. “You can’t understand immunity without understanding its neural regulation,” he says. “And they have found one such regulatory circuit that can be modulated.”
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Half of U.S. adults with disabilities get no aerobic physical activity
By Alex Cukan
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A Vital Signs report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found 82 percent of U.S. adults ages 18-64 with disabilities were more likely to be physically active if their doctor recommended it, but only about 44 who saw a doctor in the past year were advised to increase physical activity.
Adults with disabilities who do not get any aerobic physical activity are 50 percent more likely than their more active peers to have chronic diseases such as cancer, diabetes, stroke, or heart disease.
“Unfortunately, many adults with disabilities don’t get regular physical activity. That can change if doctors and other healthcare providers take a more active role helping their patients with disabilities develop a physical fitness plan that’s right for them.”
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Technology |
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Privacy Tools: Encrypt What You Can
By Julia Angwin
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Ever since Edward Snowden revealed the inner secrets of the NSA, he has been urging Americans to use encryption to protect themselves from rampant spying.
"Encryption does work," Snowden said, via a remote connection at the SXSW tech conference. "It is a defense against the dark arts for the digital realm."
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Encrypt the data you store. This protects your data from being read by people with access to your computer.
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Encrypt the data you transmit. The Snowden revelations have revealed that U.S. and British spy agencies are grabbing as much unencrypted data as they can find as it passes over the Internet. Encrypting your data in transit can protect it against spy agencies, as well as commercial data gatherers.
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1923 Comic Predicts a Time When Humans Dine on Electric Vibrations
By Matt Novak
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Kids are mostly sexually solicited online by classmates, peers, teens
By Cory Doctorow
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The respected Crimes Against Children Research Center reports that one in seven children is sexually exploited online. This figure is both credible and alarming. But the context is vital: as danah boyd writes, the average predator isn't a twisted older man trawling for kids; rather, "most children are sexually solicited by their classmates, peers, or young adults just a few years older than they are."
Now, it's absolutely possible for a child to sexually exploit another child, so this isn't to minimize the potential harm to kids. But for so long as we model the threat to kids as being weird, strange grownups, rather than the young people they know and see every day, we will fail to prepare them to comport themselves wisely and safely.
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What makes our national obsession with sexual predation destructive is that it is used to justify systematically excluding young people from public life, both online and off. Stopping children from connecting to strangers is seen as critical for their own protection, even though learning to navigate strangers is a key part of growing up. Youth are discouraged from lingering in public parks or navigating malls without parental supervision. They don’t learn how to respectfully and conscientiously navigate new people because they are taught to fear all who are unknown.
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SCiO and the rise of hardware start-ups at TechCrunch
By Kim Gittleson
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A project three years in the making, the tiny device is a SCiO, which Mr Sharon claims is the world's first cheap, accessible molecular spectrometer. Costing $199 (£117), it can scan anything from food to jewellery and instantly reveal the chemical make-up of the object.
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The SCiO, which was just unveiled last week, has already raised more than $900,000 on the crowd-founding platform Kickstarter - more than quadruple the firm's initial goal of $200,000 - with 40 more days to go.
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Mr Wertz says the rise of 3-D printing, the ubiquity of smartphones, which can be used as controllers, and better manufacturing processes have all contributed to making it easier for many hardware entrepreneurs to get their products made quickly, without putting too much money on the line.
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Mr Sharon says in the first few days that the SCiO was live on Kickstarter, he slept just two hours - in his car, outside the office.
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However, some entrepreneurs have found themselves unprepared for success, with delays and disappointment. Just last week, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed what is believed to be the first consumer-protection lawsuit involving crowd-funding.
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Cultural |
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Fish rain down on Sri Lanka village
By (BBC)
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Villagers in west Sri Lanka have said they have been surprised and delighted by an unusual rainfall of small fish.
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Scientists say that "fish rain" usually occurs when swirling whirlwinds over relatively shallow water develops into waterspouts and sucks in almost anything in the water including fish, eels and even frogs.
The marine life can be carried long distances by buffeting clouds even when the waterspout stops spinning.
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In addition to the reported "prawn rain" of 2012 in the south, there was yellow and red "meteor rain" the same year - a weather development that is reportedly still being investigated by US and British scientists.
Fish is a valued commodity in Sri Lanka.
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How China used the US bombing of its Belgrade embassy to win a PR victory
By James Griffiths
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Fifteen years ago, on the night of May 7, 1999, B-2 stealth bombers took off from the Whiteman Air Force base in Missouri bound for Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Five US JDAM guided missiles hit the Chinese embassy. The bombs struck their target almost simultaneously, killing three, injuring 20 others and reducing much of the building to rubble.
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In crisis there is opportunity, and Party officials appeared eager to stoke tensions to their benefit. Beijing was accused of bussing protesters to the US embassy. When President Clinton and representatives of the US State Department formally apologized for the bombings, the news was not broadcast by Chinese state-run media for several days, during which the demonstrations became angrier.
According to Sam Crane, professor of political science at Williams College and author of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Dao: Ancient Chinese Thought in Modern American Life," the bombing, accidental or not, was a propaganda coup for the Communist Party, which had been working hard through its patriotic education campaign to foster anti-American nationalism in the years after the pro-democracy protests of 1989.
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The bombing, though it may not have cast a pall on American popular culture or interpersonal relationships, has led to a degree of cynicism about the country’s political system. “I think there’s less of a certain kind of idealization of the US than there was in earlier times,” said Wasserstrom.
"I think the bombing reinforced the perceptions of those who were already suspicious of US intentions towards China's growth," added Taryn Shepperd, author of "Sino-US Relations and the Role of Emotion in State Action." "[The bombing] added an element of doubt to those who viewed the US in a positive light, and more generally, fueled a general sense of mistrust about the nature and intentions of the ‘other.'"
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Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |