Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, September 16, 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.
---
This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Outa-Space by Billy Preston
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.
---------------------------------------
|
|
Top News |
|
NASA announces Boeing and SpaceX will help return “human spaceflight launches to U.S.”
By Xeni Jardin
|
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and other senior officials gathered today at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to announce that NASA will resume human space flight in the United States-- Boeing and SpaceX will be the commercial partners to help transport astronauts to the International Space Station, and they will launch from Cape Canaveral.
The total contracts are valued at $6.8 billion: Boeing gets $4.2 Billion, SpaceX 2.6 billion. Crew will fly on Boeing's CST-100 and SpaceX's Dragon.
. . .
Since the retirement of the Space Shuttle program, NASA had relied on Russia's space program to transport American astronauts to and from the ISS, but that partnership is costly--$70 million per seat!--and now more than ever, politically delicate. Earlier this year, Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted that in response to US sanctions, NASA might want to try using a trampoline to get astronauts to the ISS.
|
Obama to send 3,000 troops to West Africa as Ebola crisis worsens
By (Reuters via globalpost.com)
|
. . .
The US response to the crisis, to be formally unveiled later by President Barack Obama, includes plans to build 17 treatment centers, train thousands of healthcare workers and establish a military control center for coordination, US officials told reporters.
. . .
The World Health Organization (WHO) has said it needs foreign medical teams with 500-600 experts as well as at least 10,000 local health workers. The figures may rise if the number of cases increases, as is widely expected.
So far Cuba and China have said they will send medical staff to Sierra Leone. Cuba will deploy 165 people in October while China is sending a mobile laboratory with 59 staff to speed up testing for the disease. It already has 115 staff and a Chinese-funded hospital there.
. . .
The US plan also focuses on training. A site will be established where military medical personnel will teach some 500 healthcare workers per week for six months or longer how to provide care to Ebola patients, officials said.
The Obama administration has requested an additional $88 million from Congress to fight Ebola, including $58 million to speed production of Mapp Biopharmaceutical Inc's experimental antiviral drug ZMapp and two Ebola vaccine candidates.
|
How to Clean Up the Global Economy to Combat Climate Change
By Lisa Friedman and ClimateWire
|
The global economy will pump $90 trillion into infrastructure development over the next 15 years, sparking a series of investment decisions that will make or break the Earth's climate, a sweeping new study out today finds.
. . .
With input from two Nobel laureates, three former heads of state and dozens of other leading economists, CEOs and finance ministers, the New Climate Economy report is an effort to create an equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report of global warming economics. Launched this morning in New York; Beijing; Johannesburg; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; and Oslo, Norway, the study weighs the fiscal risks and gains to keeping global average temperatures from rising beyond 2 degrees Celsius.
. . .
The report does acknowledge that going green isn't easy and notes that despite projected job creation, some jobs—especially in high-carbon sectors—will be lost. "The human and economic costs of the transition should be managed through support for displaced workers, affected communities and low-income households," it argues.
But, the authors note, fully implementing the recommendations in the report could deliver cuts of 50 to 90 percent of the reductions needed to get on a 2-degree pathway. "All the measures would deliver multiple economic and social benefits, even before considering their benefits to the climate," they write.
. . .
"Vacillation and wobbling is the enemy of investment," he said. "It would be very important if the presidents and prime ministers recognized clearly that you can combine high quality and strong growth with climate responsibility. Too often we've seen this expressed as some kind of artificial horse race between growth on the one hand and climate responsibility on the other. It's very important that the presidents and prime ministers recognize that the challenge is to combine the two."
|
Leading tech investors warn of bubble risk 'unprecedented since 1999'
By Dominic Rushe
|
. . .
Bill Gurley, partner at Silicon Valley-based investor Benchmark, sounded the horn of doom on Monday warning that “Silicon Valley as a whole or that the venture-capital community or startup community is taking on an excessive amount of risk right now.”
. . .
Gurley said that “more humans in Silicon Valley are working for money-losing companies than have been in 15 years”, and they’re burning through huge piles of cash.
. . .
His comments were backed up Tuesday by Fred Wilson, the New York-based co-founder of Union Square Ventures who has backed companies including Twitter, Tumblr and Zynga.
. . .
In August Snapchat, the social messaging service, was valued at $10bn after a new round of funding. The free service’s fans send 500m self-deleting messages a day, but Snapchat has yet to declare how it intends to make money. Among the other big tech valuations in recent months are Uber, the taxi app service, which was valued at $18bn after its last round of funding in June, and Airbnb, the short term rentals service, which was valued at $10bn in April.
. . .
Asked if investors, and the people working for the companies, were distracted by the potential for reward, Gurley said: “Yeah, it’s a whole bunch of things. But you just slowly forget, and half of the entrepreneurs today, or maybe more – 60% or 70% – weren’t around in ‘99, so they have no muscle memory whatsoever.”
|
|
|
|
International |
|
After 47 years, the US is still pretending Israel doesn't have nuclear weapons
By Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith
|
The policy of never publicly confirming what a scholar once called one of the world’s “worst-kept secrets” dates from a political deal between Washington and Israel in the late 1960s. Its consequence has been to help Israel maintain a distinctive military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the scrutiny — and occasional disapprobation — applied to the world’s eight acknowledged nuclear powers.
. . .
While former White House or cabinet-level officers — such as Gates — have gotten away with more candor, the bureaucracy does not take honesty by junior officials lightly. James Doyle, a veteran nuclear analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory who was recently censured, evidently left himself open to punishment by straying minutely from US policy in a February 2013 article published by the British journal Survival.
. . .
Even though three secrecy specialists at the lab concluded the article contained no secrets, more senior officials overruled them and cited an unspecified breach as justification for censuring Doyle and declaring it classified, after its publication. They docked his pay, searched his home computer and, eventually, fired him this summer. The lab has said his firing — as opposed to the censure and search — was not related to the article’s content, but Doyle and his lawyer have said they are convinced it was pure punishment for his skepticism about the tenets of nuclear deterrence.
. . .
Gary Samore, who was President Obama’s top advisor on nuclear nonproliferation from 2009 to 2013, said the United States has long preferred that Israel hold to its policy of amimut, out of concern that other Middle Eastern nations would feel threatened by Israel’s coming out of the nuclear closet.
“For the Israelis to acknowledge and declare it, that would be seen as provocative,” he said. “It could spur some of the Arab states and Iran to produce weapons. So we like calculated ambiguity.” But when asked point-blank if the fact that Israel has nuclear weapons is classified, Samore — who is now at Harvard University — answered: “It doesn’t sound very classified to me — that Israel has nuclear weapons?”
|
OECD: Global firms need new tax rules
By (BBC)
|
Moves to tackle corporate tax avoidance on a global scale have been unveiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The action plan is aimed at multinational companies that shrink their tax bills by shifting their profits from one country to another.
. . .
Under the OECD plan, a country-by-country model would require firms to declare their revenue, profit, staffing and tax paid in each jurisdiction.
. . .
"The big worry for businesses is that different tax authorities will require different information, which could add to the administrative and cost burden for businesses."
Anton Hume, at accountants BDO, said the measures could result in companies moving away from tax havens: "It may mean that a lot of activities are onshored again."
|
Deal reached to rebuild war-ravaged Gaza
By (Al Jazeera)
|
. . .
The UN-sponsored reconstruction agreement could help curb Palestinian economic deterioration in Gaza, which since 2007 has been controlled by Hamas.
. . .
The agreement would provide "security assurances through UN monitoring that these materials will not be diverted from their entirely civilian purpose," Serry added, apparently alluding to Israeli demands that cement and other imports not be used to build Hamas command bunkers or cross-border attack tunnels.
. . .
The World Bank said on Tuesday that the war would contribute to a reversal of seven years of growth in the Palestinian economy, now expected to shrink by nearly four percent this year.
The bank also said the downturn was also a result of restrictions on the flow of goods into Gaza by Israel and neighbouring Egypt, and a drop in foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority.
|
|
|
|
USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
|
Poverty Keeps Getting Worse and Worse for Working-Age Adults
By Kevin Drum
|
The Census Bureau released its annual poverty report today, and the headline number shows that the official poverty rate declined from 15.0 percent to 14.5 percent. This decline was driven entirely by a drop in the number of children living in poverty.
This gives me an excuse to make a point that doesn't get made often enough. You'll often see charts showing that the overall poverty rate has remained roughly the same since the late 60s, and that's true. But this is largely due to more generous Social Security benefits, which have reduced elderly poverty from over 30 percent to under 10 percent.
There's been no such reduction among working age adults. In fact, just the opposite. The low point for working-age poverty was about 9 percent, reached in 1968, and since then it's steadily increased. There are small variations from year to year, but basically it went up to about 10-11 percent in the 80s and then increased to 13.6 percent during the Great Recession. It's stayed there ever since.
|
In the 1960s California had a serious plan to take water from Alaska
By Alissa Walker
|
Forget the Los Angeles Aqueduct's measly 400 miles of water-moving. A proposal called North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) planned to divert water from Alaska south through the Rocky Mountains to Montana, where it would be directed to the headwaters of major river systems like the Colorado River. In addition, some water would be used to refill the Ogallala Reservoir in the Midwest and a fully navigable waterway would connect Western Canada to the Great Lakes. The plan would move 120 million acre-feet of water annually up to 3000 miles away.
. . .
Putting aside the costs—adjusted for inflation, it was estimated to be about the same as the entire Interstate Highway System—it was, in the end, protests from a nascent environmental movement about the extreme devastation that this would have wrought which brought about its demise. The hundreds of dams and power plants needed to complete the system would have basically eradicated the wildlife habitats of most of the rivers in Western Canada, Montana and Idaho, and the act of removing freshwater from Alaska could have had an irrevocable effect on the formation of Arctic ice. So even though this plan was proposed to prevent drought, if the U.S and Canada had indeed gone through with it, it may have exacerbated climate change.
. . .
In recent years, as California nears that date when our current system was supposed to run out of water, it's not surprising that the NAWAPA proposal has been revived. As recently as 2012 a plan called NAWAPA XXI was released which recommends updates to the original idea. Which doesn't actually seem that crazy anymore. China's South-North Water Transfer Project plans to divert 36 million acre-fee of the Yangtze River annually up to 716 miles to the drier northern part of the country. And that's in addition to the desalination plant Beijing is building that should be finished by 2019.
|
|
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:
. . .
Mr. Preston had an extensive career as a sideman, working with musicians from Little Richard to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. His own hits included the Grammy-winning instrumental "Outa-Space" in 1972 and the No. 1 pop singles "Will It Go Round in Circles" (1973) and "Nothing From Nothing" (1974). He also wrote (with Bruce Fisher) the ubiquitous "You Are So Beautiful."
But his best-known performance was the afternoon he spent on a London rooftop with the Beatles in what was their last concert, which was filmed for "Let It Be." In a 2001 interview, he recalled, "They made me feel like a member of the band."
. . . He was a child prodigy who accompanied the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson when he was 10. In 1958, he played the young W. C. Handy in the film biography "St. Louis Blues." Little Richard hired Mr. Preston for a European tour in 1962, and during that tour Mr. Preston met the fledgling Beatles — who were Little Richard's opening act — as well as Sam Cooke, who hired Mr. Preston for his band and signed him to his own label, SAR Records. . .
. . .
The Beatles' 1969 single of "Get Back" is credited to "The Beatles With Billy Preston," the only shared label credit in the Beatles' own career. Mr. Preston appeared at the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh that Mr. Harrison organized, and did studio work on solo projects by Mr. Harrison, John Lennon and Ringo Starr.
. . . He worked in the studio with the Rolling Stones on their 1970's albums, among them "Sticky Fingers" and "Exile on Main Street," and toured with them. He was also a studio musician on Sly and the Family Stone's "There's a Riot Goin' On" and on Bob Dylan's "Blood on the Tracks."
Mr. Preston was the musical guest on the first "Saturday Night Live," broadcast in 1975. . . .
. . .
"When you're doing it you're just trying to do the best you can," Mr. Preston said in 2001. "You don't know if you're doing something important, and whether it will make history has yet to be seen. Just the fact of being able to do it, and striving to do the best you can, was the accomplishment."
Back to what's happening:
|
|
Environment and Greening |
|
Obama delays key power plant rule of signature climate change plan
By Suzanne Goldenberg
|
Barack Obama applied the brakes to the most critical component of his climate change plan on Tuesday, slowing the process of setting new rules cutting carbon pollution from power plants, and casting a shadow over a landmark United Nations’ summit on global warming.
. . .
The EPA official said the snag in the EPA rules would have no effect on the summit. “The message it sends is that we want the best rule possible,” McCabe said. “I think it is clear from that action that have been taking all along at the EPA that we are fully committed to moving this rule through and getting it finalised.”
. . .
The threatened delay in the power plant rules also overshadowed a key environmental initiative at the White House on Tuesday to phase out production and use of a powerful greenhouse gas used in refrigerators and air conditioners by 2020.
. . .
But Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development,said the initiative on HFCs was still a move in the right direction. “The White House has managed to cajole industry into bolder commitments phasing out higher HFCs and greater energy efficiency refrigerators and supermarket chillers that make our food cold,” he said. “This is what the president can do when Congress wil not act. It is a big step.”
|
Preventing climate change and adapting to it are not morally equivalent
By David Roberts
|
. . .
It is no accident that the current position among “reform” conservatives — who have finally become embarrassed by the near-universal climate denial and conspiracy theorizing in the Republican Party — is that the climate is warming, but not that much, and it would be too expensive to prevent it, so we’ll just adapt. I predict that when climate becomes an unavoidable political issue in the U.S., as it inevitably will, this will be an extremely popular position on the right and an alluring one across the center as well.
If you believe, as conservatives do, that market capitalism is meritocratic, that it distributes benefits based on hard work and pluck, then it follows that rich people deserve the advantages they can afford. They earned them. One of the advantages rich people (and cities and countries) can afford is protection from the vicissitudes of climate change. We gotta protect our own. Adaptation will strongly appeal to fearful, nationalistic, revanchist personality types and, in the U.S. at least, most of those folks are conservatives.
. . .
But adaptation isn’t necessarily going to be a let’s-all-work-together thing. Certainly the reaction to climate change that I saw, people weren’t always working together — they were working to save their own asses. And the idea that we’re all going to come together to deal with this is a huge assumption that isn’t much tested.
. . .
Now, as I mentioned before, the outlook is not as bleak as all that. It so happens that lots and lots of mitigation strategies produce present-day co-benefits more than substantial enough to “pay for” the carbon reductions in the short term (remember, carbon reductions won’t pay off for 30 years). For instance, reducing carbon from coal plants also, in practice, reduces particulate pollution and prevents asthma. The Clean Air Act’s benefits have always wildly outweighed its costs and will continue to do so in the wake of carbon regulations, because reducing CO2 means reducing SO2 and NOx, which boosts health and productivity by far more than the cost to industry.
. . .
Both mitigation and adaption are necessary at this point. But for every day mitigation is delayed, the need for adaptation grows, most especially in places that will depend on the ongoing largesse of wealthier nations to pay for it. That’s not a recipe for egalitarian outcomes. In short, mitigation is fighting for attention and dollars against much mightier foes like Indifference and Narrow Self-Interest. It needs all the help it can get.
|
There’s a place in the world that is fighting poverty with solar power
By Tim McDonnell
|
. . .
Tanzanians still get 76 percent of their energy — mostly for heating and cooking — from charcoal, wood, and other biomass. So there’s more at stake than turning on the lights: Indoor air pollution kills more than 4 million people every year, more than AIDS and malaria combined. Increasing access to clean energy is literally a matter of life or death.
. . .
These aren’t the oceanic fields of solar panels some German entrepreneurs have proposed to build in the Sahara, nor the grid-connected rooftop systems that power entire American homes. Instead, these are small kits that come complete with the necessary panels, wiring, power converters, and batteries to power a few lightbulbs, a small appliance, or a cellphone charger.
. . .
It’s more impressive still when you consider the minuscule amount of capital that has gone into African clean tech relative to the developed world. According to the latest analysis from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, all of Africa and the Middle East combined attracted just $9 billion in renewable energy investment in 2013 — that’s just 4 percent of the global total, compared to 26 percent for China and 17 percent for the United States. But again, the story isn’t the raw numbers, but the massive growth: In 2011, when China’s clean-tech investment was comparable to what it is now, Africa and the Middle East’s combined total was at just a third of today’s levels.
. . .
The boom isn’t just turning on the lights, but opening up new economic opportunities. In the midsize Tanzanian town of Katoro, solar shopkeepers like Edward Buta say business is booming. Buta’s store offers an array of products — from tiny solar flashlights to larger rooftop panel systems — for sale amidst chickens, motorcycle parts, textiles, pineapples, and the other more traditional products. Most of his customers come from villages on the outskirts of town, he says.
|
|
|
|
Science and Health |
|
How Smiling Can Backfire
By Daniel A. Yudkin
|
. . .
This idea—that actions affect feelings—runs counter to how we generally think about our emotions. Ask average folks how emotions work—about the causal relationship between feelings and behavior—and they’ll say we smile because we’re happy, we run because we’re afraid. But work by such psychologists as Fritz Strack, Antonio Damasio, Joe LeDoux shows the truth is often the reverse: what we feel is actually the product, not the cause, of what we do. It’s called “somatic feedback.” Only after we act do we deduce, by seeing what we just did, how we feel.
This bodes well, at first blush, for anyone trying to change their emotions for the better. All you’d need to do is act like the kind of person you want to be, and that’s who you’ll become. (Call it the Bobby McFerrin philosophy: “Aren’t happy? Don’t worry. Just smile!”) But new research, published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Aparna Labroo, Anirban Mukhopadhyay, and Ping Dong suggests there may be limits to our ability to proactively manage our own well-being. The team ran a series of studies examining whether more smiling led to more happiness. One asked people how much smiling they had done that day, and how happy they currently felt. Other studies manipulated the amount of smiling people actually did, either by showing them a series of funny pictures or by replicating a version of the pencil-holding experiment. As expected, across these experiments, the researchers found that the more people smiled, the happier they reported being.
. . .
What’s left is this Catch-22 in which extra smiling will help only if you don’t realize it will. To reap the benefits of proactive behavioral strategies, you can’t think too much about them. In the same way you can’t set your alarm clock forward ten minutes to trick yourself into punctuality, artificially forcing a smile isn’t going to do much for your happiness. Too much knowledge and the jig is up.
This points to a more general insight about human wellbeing. Life is full of instances in which trying too hard—to be cool in high school, to enjoy a comedy show, to be admired by coworkers—immediately subverts the goal. Attaining objectives such as these depends upon approaching them at a tangent.
|
New producer of crucial vitamin B12 discovered
By (ScienceDaily)
|
ew research has determined that a single group of micro-organisms may be responsible for much of the world's vitamin B12 production in the oceans, with implications for the global carbon cycle and climate change.
. . .
The availability of vitamin B12 may control how much or how little biological productivity by phytoplankton takes place in the oceans. Phytoplankton remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, much like plants and trees, thus reducing the atmospheric concentration of this greenhouse gas, the largest contributor to global warming.
The research also found that proportions of archaeal B12synthesis genes increased with ocean depth and were more prevalent in winter and polar waters, suggesting that archaeal vitamin B12 may be critical for the survival of other species in both the deep and cold marine environments.
|
|
|
|
Technology |
|
How your smartphone betrays you all day long
By Cory Doctorow
|
Ton Siedsma, a lawyer for the Dutch civil liberties group Bits of Freedom, volunteered to have a week's worth of his phone's metadata collected and analyzed by researchers from Ghent University and by Mike Moolenaar.
The researchers' report shows how exhaustively a cursory metadata analysis reveals intimate details of Siedsma's sex life, family relations, interest, politics, religious affiliation, movements, social graph, and other deeply personal -- and potentially compromising -- matters. It's an excellent counterpoint to the dishonest political narrative from intelligence services around the world -- especially the US, Canada and the UK -- that says that spying on your metadata is somehow harmless.
. . .
But that’s not all. The analysts from the Belgian iMinds compared Ton’s data with a file containing leaked passwords. In early November, Adobe (the company behind the Acrobat PDF reader, Photoshop and Flash Player) announced that a file containing 150 million user names and passwords had been hacked. While the passwords were encrypted, the password hints were not. The analysts could see that some users had the same password as Ton, and their password hints were known to be ‘punk metal’, ‘astrolux’ and ‘another day in paradise’. ‘This quickly led us to Ton Siedsma’s favourite band, Strung Out, and the password “strungout”,’ the analysts write.
. . .
|
#BBCtrending: 'Deadbeat' shaming on Facebook in Kenya
By (BBC)
|
A Facebook group that names and shames parents who are not supporting their children, according to its founder, has gone viral in Kenya.
. . .
Dead Beat Kenya allows parents who believe their child's mother or father has acted irresponsibly to post their name, photograph and phone number, along with a description of the grievance online. The closed group has attracted 155,000 members in little more than a week, most of them eager to comment on the cases rather than create new posts.
. . .
Before the posts appear for others to see, Njeru says his team run a few checks. "We first call the person who is accusing, then we call the accused. From there if the person is not willing to take care of his or her own responsibility, that's when we approve the post," he tells the BBC's Focus on Africa programme. Since its launch, Dead Beat Kenya has been approached by lawyers willing to work on a pro-bono basis, and in six cases couples have reached a settlement as a result of the group, Njeru claims.
. . .
Njeru argues that those making the accusations do not currently have sufficient recourse through the legal system. "Whatever we're doing, it's all because of the justice system," he says. "People are complaining the system is corrupt. They've tried taking their deadbeats there, but they are told to get a lawyer they can't afford."
|
|
|
|
Cultural |
|
Atlantic City: Decline in the US gambling centre
By Nick Bryant
|
Atlantic City used to call itself America's playground. The problem is that not so many Americans are coming here to play.
. . .
A third of the casinos are now shrouded in darkness. Small wonder. Over the past eight years, casino revenues in Atlantic City have plummeted by nearly 50%
. . .
An even bigger body-blow for Atlantic City came the following day with the closure of the Revel casino next door, which cost $2.4bn (£1.5bn) to construct and supposedly pointed toward a brighter future.
. . .
There are too many casinos and not enough gamblers. The regional gambling market has grown by less than 1% since 2001. Over the same period, 14 rival casinos have opened up in nearby states.
In an industry already reeling from the Great Recession, it has been hard to persuade out-of-state gamblers to drive past casinos closer to home, and to beat a path to Atlantic City.
|
The plight of Moldova's orphanage children
By Sarah Cruddas
|
More than 7,000 children have been placed in state-run institutions in Europe's poorest country, Moldova, and only 2% are orphans.
. . .
Widespread poverty and a lack of basic social services are blamed for a situation which aid groups argue violates a child's right to a family, as enshrined in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
. . .
Unemployment in Moldova is high and young adults often head abroad to find work, leaving their children behind to the state.
. . .
There is also the stigma of disability. A three-year-old I visited, who has been helped into a foster family, was abandoned simply because he was born without an arm.
. . .
Placing children in such institutions is simply firefighting an ever-expanding, complex social problem rather than offering a long-term solution for the many children within their walls, says children-in-care specialist Sarah Butterworth.
|
|
Meteor Blades is known to offer an enlightening Evening Open Diary - you might consider checking that out tonight if you haven't already. |