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
Storm Brings Halt To AirAsia Search Operation
Gale-force winds and high waves have forced search teams to suspend their work recovering the bodies of AirAsia flight QZ8501 passengers and crew from the Java Sea.
Since Tuesday afternoon, searchers off the coast of Borneo had found the bodies of four men and three women, said Indonesia’s search and rescue chief, Henry Bambang Soelistyo. One was wearing an AirAsia flight attendant uniform.
However, an official clarified an earlier statement he had made that one of the bodies recovered had been wearing a life jacket. “There is no victim that has been found wearing a life jacket,” said Tatang Zaenudin, deputy head of operations at the national search and rescue agency. “We found a body at 8.20am and a life jacket at 10.32am so there was a time difference. This is the latest information we have.”
Divers and sonar-equipped ships were standing by to continue the search once weather conditions improved. Soelistyo said the plane’s fuselage had not yet been found.
However, sonar imaging has established the presence of an object 100-165 feet (30-50 metres) under water, which officials say could be the body of the plane. No survivors have been found, and the plane’s black box flight data and cockpit voice recorder have not been recovered.
guardian
World News
Shanghai New Year Crush 'Kills 35'
A crush at New Year's Eve celebrations in Shanghai has killed 35 people and injured some 42 others, Chinese state media report.
The crush broke out in Chenyi Square in Shanghai's Huangpu district, Xinhua news agency reported.
The Shanghai City government said the situation began at 23:35 local time (15:35 GMT) and that a "working group" had been set up to handle the incident.
The cause of the crush was currently under investigation, it added.
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On social media, users who said they were at the scene described huge crowds at the scene of the crush.
"There were really too many people!" Sina Weibo user iiisay wrote. "Squeezed inside, you could not budge, and could only move with the crowd."
bbc
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Abbas Signs Onto International Criminal Court After U.N. Loss
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed on to 20 international agreements on Wednesday, including the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a day after a bid for independence by 2017 failed at the United Nations Security Council.
The move, which angered Israel and the United States, paves the way for the court to take jurisdiction over crimes committed in Palestinian lands and investigate the conduct of Israeli and Palestinian leaders over more than a decade of bloody conflict.
"They attack us and our land every day, to whom are we to complain? The Security Council let us down -- where are we to go?" Abbas told a gathering of Palestinian leaders in remarks broadcast on official television.
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Israel and Hamas fought a July-August war in which more than 2,100 Palestinians, 67 Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were killed.
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The United States and Australia voted against the bid, while eight countries voted yes and another five abstained. The Palestinians were unable to achieve a hoped-for nine votes which would have forced the U.S. to exercise its veto as one of the council's five permanent members.
reuters
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US Airstrike Kills Al-Shabab Leader, Somalia Says
A U.S. airstrike killed the intelligence chief of Somali armed group Al-Shabab, Somalia's intelligence service said Tuesday.
Abdishakur is the name of the slain leader, who is also known as Tahlil, a statement from the spy agency said, adding that the operation also killed two other Al-Shabab fighters.
The Pentagon said the airstrike took place Monday in the vicinity of Saakow, Somalia. The statement from the Pentagon provided no additional details, other than saying it did not believe the attack caused any civilian or bystander casualties.
A senior defense official said the strike did not target Ahmad Umar, who took over as the top leader of Al-Shabab when its previous leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Somalia on Sept. 1.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss details of the attack by name.
aljazeera
U.S. News
Minimum Wages To Rise In 20 States On New Year’s Day
The minimum wage will rise in almost half of U.S. states Jan. 1 after local governments helped the lowest earners while efforts to approve a nationwide boost languish in Congress.
Twenty states from Hawaii to Connecticut will see increases in minimum hourly pay after voters approved ballot measures and legislatures enacted laws, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In nine of the states, the lowest pay will rise because of indexing to inflation.
“We’ll continue to see more action at the state level and at the local level,” said Ken Jacobs, chairman of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California at Berkeley. “It is a very politically popular measure and so we would expect in 2016 that we should see more minimum-wage ballot initiatives.”
President Barack Obama has urged Congress to raise the federal minimum to $10.10 from $7.25 as the gap between the nation’s rich and poor widens. Republicans in Congress, who have blocked repeated attempts to advance such legislation, will likely stymie the issue when they take control in January.
While states have pressed onward, “it would sure help if Congress went ahead and did it as well,” Obama said in an October speech in Princeton, Indiana. “The states that have raised the minimum wage have had faster job growth than the states that haven’t.”
bloomberg
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Maryland Governor Commutes Death Sentences, Emptying Death Row
Nearly 20 months after Maryland abolished capital punishment, Gov. Martin O’Malley said Wednesday that he would empty the state’s death row by commuting the sentences of four inmates who were awaiting execution.
“In my judgment, leaving these death sentences in place does not serve the public good of the people of Maryland – present or future,” Mr. O’Malley, a Democrat who will leave office in January and may seek the presidency in 2016, said in a statement. “Gubernatorial inaction – at this point in the legal process – would, in my judgment, needlessly and callously subject survivors, and the people of Maryland, to the ordeal of an endless appeals process, with unpredictable twists and turns, and without any hope of finality or closure.”
Under Mr. O’Malley’s order, four men who had been sentenced to death – Heath Burch, Vernon Evans Jr., Anthony Grandison and Jody Lee Miles – will instead be imprisoned for life without the possibility of parole.
Scott D. Shellenberger, the Baltimore County state’s attorney, criticized Mr. O’Malley’s decision, which he described as “not unexpected.”
“I’m very disappointed in the decision,” said Mr. Shellenberger, whose county prosecuted Mr. Evans and Mr. Grandison for the 1983 murders of two people at the Warren House Motel. “These sentences were lawful and remain lawful. They were imposed by a jury. Numerous judges have affirmed these convictions, and it’s interesting that in the last 21 days of the administration, that suddenly he has decided to show mercy on individuals who showed absolutely no mercy to the victims of their crimes.”
nyt
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Quinn Grants Clemency To 102, Including 3 Abolitionists From 1843
Gov. Pat Quinn on Wednesday continued to whittle down the list of those seeking clemency before he leaves office next month, granting clemency to 102 people, including posthumous pardons for three abolitionists convicted of harboring slaves more than a century ago.
Those granted a pardon will be allowed to ask the court to clear their criminal conviction from the record, which often aides in searching for a job.
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But three of those on the list received posthumous clemency for their fight against slavery and involvement in the Underground Railroad.
Richard Eells, of Quincy, and Julius and Samuel Willard, of Jacksonville, had all been convicted for "harboring and secreting a slave" in 1843. While Illinoisans voted to abolish slavery in 1824, state and federal law prohibited harboring or assisting runaway slaves in free states.
Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon led the clemency effort on behalf of the abolitionists after encouragement from state historians.
"These early warriors for freedom put everything on the line to help their fellow man, and their civil disobedience paved the way for civil rights," Quinn said in a statement. "Clearing their criminal records 171 years later shows how far we have come, but reminds us all that we should fight injustice wherever we find it."
chicagotribune
Science and Technology
How To See This Green Comet With The Naked Eye
Terry Lovejoy is one hardworking comet hunter. The amateur astronomer based in Australia has been discovering new comets since 2007, and is perhaps most famous for first spotting the icy body known as C/2011 W3—aka, the Great Christmas Comet of 2011. That comet roared to life as it made a close pass by the sun in late December, becoming almost as bright as the planet Venus and putting on stunning displays for sky-watchers in the Southern Hemisphere.
Now Lovejoy is at it again, and his latest find—formally known as C/2014 Q2—has already been dubbed the New Year's Comet of 2014. (As with his past discoveries, C/2014 Q2 is also being called Comet Lovejoy.)
The New Year's Comet is getting brighter as it moves closer to the sun, because the increased heat is causing its ices to vaporize and release gases and dust, forming a brilliant hazy head and a faint, spiky tail. Astronomers originally predicted that Comet Lovejoy wouldn't get bright enough to be visible to naked eyes. But in a holiday surprise, the comet's glow has been rapidly intensifying, and it is now easily visible with binoculars even from urban areas, where light pollution makes all but the brightest stars difficult to spot.
In rural places where the skies are clear and very dark, viewers should now be able to see Comet Lovejoy without any optical aids—look for a green fuzzball a bit below the "belt" of the constellation Orion. The comet appears green because it is releasing cyanogen gas and a type of carbon gas, which both fluoresce when exposed to sunlight.
smithsonian
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Four Ways Spacefaring Microbes Could Muck Up the Solar System
To prepare the Curiosity rover for its trip to Mars, NASA scrubbed it with alcohol and baked it at 230°F. This is part of the agency’s protocol for “planetary protection,” a policy devised in the 1950s to keep earthly microbes from contaminating other worlds.
But when scientists swabbed Curiosity just before takeoff, they found 56,400 organisms from 377 bacterial strains. Then, in the lab, researchers tried to take them out by other means: ultraviolet blasts, high pH environments, and dehydration. Still, the majority survived at least one trial unscathed.
“Whatever we throw at them, they find a way around it,” says University of Idaho microbiologist Stephanie Smith. Unless scientists can identify the Achilles’ heels of these bugs, missions will keep sending them into space. Here are four ways that could come back to bite us.
1.Contagions: During a long stint in a space colony, astronauts’ immune systems will likely weaken. If a microbe like E. coli—previously found clinging to “clean” spacecraft—contaminates the water or food supply, it could devastate the crew.
2.Invasions: Places with liquid water, such as Europa, might make good bacterial breeding grounds. A hardy species like Geobacillus stearothermophilus, prevalent in Earth’s ocean sediments and soil, could overrun an entire biosphere once it gets a hold.
3.Mysteries: The organisms that survive NASA’s protocols tend to be enigmatic. There are some species, like Tersicoccus phoenicis, that we didn’t even know existed; scientists have found it only in the clean rooms where spacecraft are assembled.
4.Confusion: If we leave Earth bugs in our wake, any life that planetary scientists may someday detect could simply have fallen off a lander. And without a better understanding of the species we bring to space, we might not recognize it as terrestrial.
popsci
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Modern Genetics Confirm Ancient Relationship Between Fins And Hands
aleontologists have documented the evolutionary adaptations necessary for ancient lobe-finned fish to transform pectoral fins used underwater into strong, bony structures, such as those of Tiktaalik roseae. This enabled these emerging tetrapods, animals with limbs, to crawl in shallow water or on land. But evolutionary biologists have wondered why the modern structure called the autopod--comprising wrists and fingers or ankles and toes--has no obvious morphological counterpart in the fins of living fishes.
In the Dec. 22, 2014, issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers argue previous efforts to connect fin and fingers fell short because they focused on the wrong fish. Instead, they found the rudimentary genetic machinery for mammalian autopod assembly in a non-model fish, the spotted gar, whose genome was recently sequenced.
"Fossils show that the wrist and digits clearly have an aquatic origin," said Neil Shubin, PhD, the Robert R. Bensley Professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago and a leader of the team that discovered Tiktaalik in 2004. "But fins and limbs have different purposes. They have evolved in different directions since they diverged. We wanted to explore, and better understand, their connections by adding genetic and molecular data to what we already know from the fossil record."
Initial attempts to confirm the link based on shape comparisons of fin and limb bones were unsuccessful. The autopod differs from most fins. The wrist is composed of a series of small nodular bones, followed by longer thin bones that make up the digits. The bones of living fish fins look much different, with a set of longer bones ending in small circular bones called radials.
The primary genes that shape the bones, known as the HoxD and HoxA clusters, also differ. The researchers first tested the ability of genetic "switches" that control HoxD and HoxA genes from teleosts--bony, ray-finned fish--to shape the limbs of developing transgenic mice. The fish control switches, however, did not trigger any activity in the autopod.
sciencedaily
Well, that's different...
The Entrepreneurial Spirit
"Ethical" fur designer Pamela Paquin debuted the first of her anticipated line of roadkill furs recently -- raccoon neck muffs ("I can literally take two raccoons and put them butt to butt (so they) clasp neck to neck") that will sell for around $1,000. Raccoons yield "luscious" fur, she said, but her favorite pelt is otter. The Massachusetts woman leaves her card with various New England road crews ("Hi, my name is Pamela. Will you call me when you have roadkill?") and does business under the name Petite Mort ("little death" in French, but also, she said, a euphemism for a woman's post-orgasm sensations).
newsoftheweird
Bill Moyers and Company:
American Indians Confront “Savage Anxieties”
Legal expert Robert A. Williams Jr. says stereotypes about American Indians have been codified into laws and government policies, with devastating consequences.