Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, March 24, 2015.
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: Shake by The Head and the Heart
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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US to delay troop pullout from Afghanistan
By (Al Jazeera)
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US President Barack Obama has granted Afghan requests to slow the withdrawal of US troops from the country and said he would maintain a force of 9,800 through the end of 2015 while sticking to a 2017 exit plan.
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"The date for us to have completed our drawdown will not change," he said. "Providing this additional timeframe during this fighting season for us to be able to help the Afghan security forces succeed is well worth it."
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Since arriving on Sunday, Ghani has been feted by the Obama administration and is due to address Congress on Wednesday.
The welcome contrasts sharply with frosty relations that developed between Washington and Ghani's predecessor Hamid Karzai.
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US coal sector in 'terminal decline', financial analysts say
By Karl Mathiesen
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The US coal sector is in a “terminal decline” which has sent 26 companies bust in the last three years, according to financial analysts.
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The coal industry has been subject to seven major EPA regulations since 2008. This includes 30% cuts by 2030 to carbon emissions from coal power plants announced by president Barack Obama last year. But mostly the measures target forms of pollution other than carbon. Sussams said the decline of US coal “proves the [stranded assets] concept doesn’t rely on international regulations”.
In order to avoid the increasingly hostile domestic market, Sussams said the industry had banked heavily on a future where US coal exports to China and India grew significantly. But this has been undercut by cheap supply from Indonesia, Australia and South Africa. Additionally, Chinese coal consumption fell 3% last year and India has said it may stop imports of coal within three years.
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“The roof has fallen in on US coal, and alarm bells should be ringing for investors in related sectors around the world. These first tremors are amongst the clearest signs yet of a seismic shift in energy markets, as high carbon fuels are set to be increasingly outperformed by lower carbon alternatives,” he said.
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Scientists call on museums to cut ties with Koch brothers
By Brooks Hays
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A group of scientists penned a public letter to the Smithsonian's Museums of Science and Natural History on Tuesday, calling on the institutions to sever ties with Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch -- collectively known as the Koch brothers.
"We are deeply concerned by the links between museums of science and natural history with those who profit from fossil fuels or fund lobby groups that misrepresent climate science," the letter reads.
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The letter was followed by a petition, which calls for David Koch to be booted from boards of both the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in the nation's capital.
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The letter was signed by a total of 27 scientists, including biologists, physicists, hydrologist, geologists, ecologists and climatologists from the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia.
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International |
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Boko Haram crisis: 'About 500' Nigeria children missing
By (BBC)
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About 500 children aged 11 and under are missing from a Nigerian town recaptured from militants, a former resident of Damasak has told the BBC.
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The senator representing the north of Borno state, Maina Maaji Lawan, told the BBC's Nigeria correspondent, Will Ross, the case in Damasak was typical and many hundreds of children are missing.
He said: "The very young ones they give to madrassas… and male ones between 16 and 25, they conscript them and they indoctrinate them as supply channels for their horrible missions."
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Damasak businessman Malam Ali, whose brother is among those missing, told the BBC Hausa Service that young boys had been put in a madrassa, or Islamic school, by Boko Haram when they took over the town.
Following the recapture of the town, those boys had not been accounted for, he said.
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Shreya Singhal: The student who took on India's internet laws
By (BBC)
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The young law student who instigated the scrapping of a controversial Indian internet law has told the BBC she is "ecstatic" it has been overturned.
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Ms Singhal and her lawyers argued in court that Section 66A was unconstitutional and violated their right to free speech and expression and did not come under reasonable restrictions law.
The government admitted that the law was being misused, but insisted that there was a need for it and that it did come under reasonable restrictions.
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"But governments have political agenda and they change, and an assurance given by one government may not hold for the next one. The laws are made for the citizens and the laws are meant to protect them, but this law wasn't protecting them, it was harming them," Ms Singhal said.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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No, gentrification does not solve the problem of segregation
By Ben Adler
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Racial and economic segregation is a problem in the U.S. as old as the colonies themselves. And so it may come as a surprise to read in The New York Times that gentrification, a process some view as modern colonialism, is leading the way in integration. But that’s what Los Angeles-based journalist Héctor Tobar argues in a Sunday Review column.
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Rent control does not, in fact, prevent displacement of the community — it only slows it. Rent control drives up the price of non-controlled units and discourages development, thus worsening the unaffordability of the rest of the market. It does prevent the displacement of individuals with rent-controlled apartments. But if their kids want to stay in the neighborhood when they grow up, they’re shit out of luck. I know, because I grew up in then-diverse and gentrifying, now fancy and unaffordable, Park Slope, Brooklyn. My parents still live there because they own their house, but I’ve never been able to afford renting my own apartment there. And while the new residents look like me and are just richer, the once-large Latino community has shrunk considerably. Between the 2000 and 2010 Censuses, the Latino population of Park Slope dropped 34 percent and the black population dropped 29 percent.
As their children and friends are forced to move away, the remaining rent-controlled tenants often find themselves surrounded by well-heeled strangers and stores they cannot afford. When they eventually die or move away, the neighborhood loses its remaining economic — and often therefore racial — diversity.
So gentrification has the potential to be good for integration, but only if housing prices are restrained across the neighborhood, including in market-rate units, and not just for current residents. That requires new construction of market-rate housing, which developers will build if land-use regulations like building-height maximums and parking minimums are loosened to allow it, and publicly subsidized, affordable units. Creating co-operative ownership structures with income restrictions, like community land trusts, can ensure that apartments and houses stay affordable even when their ownership changes. The hottest cities for global investors should consider new mechanisms for restraining the rich from driving up housing prices, like a pied-a-terre tax. But they also might need to return to some out-of-fashion big government programs, like public housing.
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California to Insurers: Don’t Use Workers’ Comp Law to Deny Approved Care
By Michael Grabell
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As part of its 2012 reforms, California instituted a new medical review process while restoring some benefits that had been severely cut years earlier. Under the new process, the final arbiters of disputes over medical treatment changed from judges to anonymous outside doctors who never see the injured workers and can only be overruled in limited circumstances.
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Insurers and state regulators say this has provided a check on inappropriate medical care, such as the over-prescription of addictive painkillers. But injured workers and their lawyers say insurance companies have used this provision to seize on minor treatment requests as an excuse to revise agreed-upon treatment plans.
In the case profiled by ProPublica and NPR, warehouse manager Joel Ramirez was paralyzed when a 900-pound crate fell on him in 2009. Travelers Insurance provided 24-hour home health care for several years. But it withdrew the aide last summer, and, according to a judge, asserted that the law allowed it to revisit the treatment and require the new medical review process.
The decision left Ramirez, 48, and his family to fend for themselves. He fell several times trying to transfer to and from his wheelchair and had to wait for hours for a relative to get home to help him clean himself because he was unable to control his bowels. His wife was forced to quit her job to look after him, and his daughter left college to help make up the lost income. After four months, Travelers reinstated the aide under orders from the state Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board.
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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:
. . . They went from singing at open mics in Seattle in 2009 to re-releasing their previously self-released debut album in 2011 on the legendary Sub Pop label. And then they took to the road, touring behind their demo-turned-LP non-stop. All of these wonderful — albeit exhausting — experiences coalesced in the best possible of ways: into a brand-new record, born of the road and the loneliness coming home breeds.
After playing the same songs they recorded three years ago over and over again at shows across the country, the prospect of shaping a new record thrilled the band. The jaunty and stirring folk-pop sounds of The Head and the Heart take on a darker perspective with their sophomore album, Let’s Be Still – of experiences lived, of the toll that three years touring the country took on the group as a group and as individuals.
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Each song is its own animal, and depending on the song, you approach it whatever way feels right. Our focus is just first to write a great song and then to arrange it in such a way that it elevates it beyond — into the best of our abilities and beyond what it started out as.
Russell: In all of that time, everybody in the band had been restricted to playing 10 to 12 songs with the same instruments day after day. By the time we all got to start working on these new songs, everybody was excited and wanted to be a little more adventurous and play something other than what they’ve been playing for the last three years. It’s like you’ve got all these kids that are allowed to run rampant in this studio who have been boxed up in daycare for three fucking years. We don’t have to approach this song like we would’ve approached it three years ago because we have more experience under our belt. People have become better players. We had enough money to spend time to experiment.
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We write about what it is we’re living and I’m glad that [the songs] don’t all come across as super obvious as being “on the road” songs. I don’t think that anyone doubts that that is what we’re supposed to be doing, but it was getting to the point where something needed to change or something needed to break or something needed to give. Even in the midst of doing this thing that we all feel like we’re meant to do and love to do.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Why Is BP Funding America's Most Notorious Climate Change Denier?
By Simon Bowers
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Jim Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma who has tirelessly campaigned against calls for a carbon tax and challenges the overwhelming consensus on climate change, received $10,000 from BP's Political Action Committee.
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While the sums channeled to Inhofe's campaign represent only a small proportion of the BP PAC's election spending and the senator's own campaign funds, they show how unafraid the committee has been to spread its donations to the most controversial candidates. According to the BP PAC website, it financially supports election candidates "whose views and/or voting records reflect the interests of BP employees."
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BP's PAC was more active in the US 2014 election cycle than any other for more than a decade. Despite insisting it is non-partisan, 69 percent of contributions to federal election candidates in recent years have been to Republican politicians. This is a stronger bias than most other corporate PACs, according to the CRP.
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The CRP classifies BP as a "heavy hitter," ranking it among the top 140 biggest overall donors to federal elections since 1988. Its PAC ranks as the sixth largest such body with a sponsor company that is ultimately part of a non-US multinational company.
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California Plastic Bag Referendum Could Spark Environmental Showdown
By Richard Gonzales
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Plastic bags are serious business and seriously divisive. Last year, California passed a law banning stores from giving out plastic bags for free. It was the first statewide ban of its kind in the country. It was set to take effect this July, but the plastic bag industry stopped that from happening. It financed a ballot measure to repeal the ban. Supporters of the ban say the bags contribute to street litter and ocean pollution. As NPR's Richard Gonzales reports, the state is set for a major battle on next year's ballot.
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GONZALES: Phillip Rosenski is director of marketing and sustainability at Novolex, a plastic bag manufacturer based in South Carolina. His industry spent $3 million to collect enough voter signatures to get a referendum on the ballot in November 2016 to repeal the ban. Rosenski says supporters of the ban have misled the public into believing that the dime they pay for a paper bag goes to environmental causes.
ROSENSKI: What we found out in the process of the referendum is most people are really outraged that the 10 cent fee doesn't go to the state, city or county. Rather, it goes to a private corporation.
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MURRAY: These are special interest plastic industry manufacturers based in Texas and South Carolina that are trying to buy their way onto the ballot in California and overturn our state law.
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GONZALES: A poll conducted late last year by the University of Southern California and The LA Times suggests opponents of the plastic bag ban have an uphill fight. It found that California voters would uphold that ban by a margin of 59 to 34 percent. Richard Gonzales, NPR News, San Francisco.
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Science and Health |
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After learning new words, brain sees them as pictures
By (ScienceDaily)
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When we look at a known word, our brain sees it like a picture, not a group of letters needing to be processed. That's the finding from a Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, which shows the brain learns words quickly by tuning neurons to respond to a complete word, not parts of it.
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"We are not recognizing words by quickly spelling them out or identifying parts of words, as some researchers have suggested. Instead, neurons in a small brain area remember how the whole word looks -- using what could be called a visual dictionary," he says.
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In fact, after the team's first groundbreaking study on the visual dictionary was published in Neuron in 2009, Riesenhuber says they were contacted by a number of people who had experienced reading difficulties and teachers helping people with reading difficulties, reporting that learning word as visual objects helped a great deal. That study revealed the existence of a neural representation for whole written real words -- also known as an orthographic lexicon --the current study now shows how novel words can become incorporated after learning in this lexicon.
"The visual word form area does not care how the word sounds, just how the letters of the word look together," he says. "The fact that this kind of learning only happens in one very small part of the brain is a nice example of selective plasticity in the brain."
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30 Heat-Tolerant Beans Identified, Poised to Endure Warming World
By Sarah Lewin
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Black beans, kidney beans, pinto beans, navy beans and pink beans—varieties of what is called the common bean—provide essential protein and vitamins the world over, especially in Latin America and Africa. But according to a recent climate model, increasing temperatures could take those beans off the table for up to 50 percent of their growing areas by 2050, making temperature rise a greater threat to this staple food than even drought or disease.
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Researchers had calculated that beans able to withstand a temperature rise of about 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) would be able to stay in most of today’s bean-growing locations until at least 2050 and potentially expand into other areas where beans currently cannot grow due to the heat. Beebe and his colleagues therefore decided to test 1,000 candidates in Colombia’s Caribbean Coast, a low-altitude area where night temperatures can hit that level, heating up to 23 or 24 degrees Celsius. Many of the selected plants had previously been bred to withstand drought, resist disease and have higher iron content. The ones that thrived when grown in the open air during the experiment were easy to find: although most of the plants tested produced no seed pods at all or generated shriveled seeds, 30 lines managed to produce viable seeds—up to 1000 kg in one trial, Beebe says, when the others yielded nothing. Beebe announced the discovery Tuesday at a conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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Unlike some other crops, such as corn and soybeans, there is little research on genetic engineering in beans. Beans have high variability to start with, so large seed banks and databases of genes—such as one that Gepts’ lab is developing and one that Porch’s group is creating in collaboration with Beebe’s—allow researchers find and develop traits through conventional breeding.
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The next step is to breed the heat-tolerant beans to fit different areas—different sizes, colors and textures are preferred in different places, and any location’s farmers will have different requirements—and to incorporate additional beneficial traits, like disease resistance or extra nutritional value, that researchers have been able to incorporate into other beans.
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Technology |
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RadioShack Selling Customer Data In Bankruptcy Auction
By Matt Novak
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RadioShack's recent bankruptcy filing means that it has to close nearly 2,000 stores and sell off many of its assets. Some of those assets are to be expected, like trademarks and store leases. But other assets might come as a shock to consumers — assets like personal customer information and email addresses.
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Both Texas and Tennessee have joined a lawsuit to stop the sale of the customer information. They apparently took literally the signs in RadioShack that read: "We pride ourselves on not selling our private mailing list." How quaint.
To make things even more complicated, AT&T is objecting to the sale of the consumer data. Their motives, however, are less altruistic. As a former partner of RadioShack, AT&T wants the records destroyed so that their former customer info doesn't fall into the hands of any competitors in the mobile phone market.
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Internet 'Threat-sharing' bill introduced in U.S. House. Promise: security. Reality: surveillance.
By Xeni Jardin
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Today in the U.S. House of Representatives, the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence introduced an internet threat-sharing bill, “The Protecting Cyber Networks Act.”
Like the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), its Senate Select Committee on Intelligence counterpart, The Protecting Cyber Networks Act looks like bad news for internet freedom.
Read the entirety of the bill here (PDF).
The bill contains "stronger privacy protections" than any existing laws, claim Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who introduced the bill. A committee vote is scheduled for this Thursday.
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Although companies would share information with civilian agencies, those agencies could still turn over information to the Pentagon or the NSA, the ACLU and other groups point out.
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Cultural |
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China: 'Square dancers' face official choreography
By (BBC)
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"Public square dancing" is a popular pastime in China, particularly among older women known as damas. But they're considered a nuisance among some local residents, who complain about being disturbed by loud music. As a result, the authorities have stepped in to regulate and choreograph the dancing, the state-run China Daily website reports. Any groups wanting to get their groove on in public will now be limited to 12 government-approved routines, the report says. "Square-dancing represents the collective aspect of Chinese culture, but now it seems that the over-enthusiasm of participants has dealt it a harmful blow, with disputes over noise and venues," says Liu Guoyong from the General Administration of Sport, which is overseeing the regulation along with the culture ministry. "So, we have to guide it with national standards and regulations." |
Angola's de Morais charged over diamond book
By (BBC)
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A renowned Angolan journalist has been put on trial on charges of defaming military generals after he accused them of links to the "blood diamond" trade.
Rafael Marques de Morais accused seven generals of being linked to murder, torture and land grabs in Angola's lucrative diamond fields.
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Speaking after the case was adjourned until 23 April, Mr de Morais said: "I went to court today facing nine charges of criminal defamation. I left slapped with up to 15 additional ones for defamation."
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The unregulated diamond trade fuelled Angola's 27-year civil war, which ended in 2002.
Since the end of the conflict, the country - one of Africa's major oil producers - has witnessed an economic boom, though critics of the elected government say the wealth has only benefited a small elite.
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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. |