Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, June 02, 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: Love Has Left The Room by A Camp
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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Large Hadron Collider to turn on 'data tap'
By Paul Rincon
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Scientists are waiting for the first new data to start flowing from the underground particle smasher, as the LHC begins its first "physics collisions" in two years.
The vast machine will clatter proton beams together at much higher energies than it achieved during its first operational period from 2010-2013.
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Early discoveries could include hitherto unseen "partner" particles to those in the Standard Model that are part of a scheme known as supersymmetry, or SUSY.
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"If you see such a signature at the LHC which can't be explained by Standard Model physics, what that's perhaps telling you is that you're turning normal matter into dark matter. If that's the case, the LHC would be acting as a dark matter factory, which is quite a neat idea," said Dan Tovey.
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FBI behind mysterious surveillance aircraft over US cities
By Jack Gillum, Eileen Sullivan And Eric Tucker
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The AP traced at least 50 aircraft back to the FBI, and identified more than 100 flights in 11 states over a 30-day period since late April, orbiting both major cities and rural areas. At least 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft, were mentioned in a federal budget document from 2009.
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The planes are equipped with technology that can capture video of unrelated criminal activity on the ground that could be handed over to prosecutions. One of the planes, photographed in flight last week by the AP in northern Virginia, bristled with unusual antennas under its fuselage and a camera on its left side.
Some of the aircraft can also be equipped with technology that can identify thousands of people below through the cellphones they carry, even if they're not making a call or in public. Officials said that practice, which mimics cell towers and gets phones to reveal basic subscriber information, is used in only limited situations.
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The FBI asked the AP not to disclose the names of the fake companies it uncovered, saying that would saddle taxpayers with the expense of creating new cover companies to shield the government's involvement, and could endanger the planes and integrity of the surveillance missions. The AP declined the FBI's request because the companies' names—as well as common addresses linked to the Justice Department—are listed on public documents and in government databases.
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Law enforcement officials said Justice Department lawyers approved the decision to create fictitious companies and that the Federal Aviation Administration was aware of the practice. The FBI has been doing this since at least the late 1980s, according to a 1990 report by the then-General Accounting Office.
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Japan and South Korea top list of biggest coal financiers
By Karl Mathiesen
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Japan and South Korea are the world’s biggest financiers of coal through export credit agencies, a new report has found, with coal projects in Australia among the major beneficiaries of their support.
WWF said that the three countries are attempting to derail talks that could cut international coal finance from such agencies, which are state-owned mechanisms that fund or underwrite overseas projects that domestic companies are involved in.
Japan’s export credit agency (ECA) gave more than $20bn (£13bn), with South Korea second on $7bn. The data, compiled by WWF, Oil Change International (OCI) and the Natural Resource Defence Council, reveals more than $73bn of international public finance was given to coal between 2007 and 2014. The group said the money “moved through largely unknown and opaque institutions”.
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Under current OECD rules, ECA finance gives preferable, long-term conditions to all fossil fuel projects, including coal. Godinot said the loans, guarantees, policy lending and technical assistance often act as seed funding, which draws more investment to projects meaning the $73bn is actually responsible for generating much larger investments in the dirtiest fossil fuel.
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First Church of Cannabis wins IRS nonprofit status
By John Tuohy
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"What a GLORIOUS DAY it is folks," the church's founder Bill Levin wrote in a post on Facebook announcing that the IRS had approved making the church a 501 (c) (3) charitable organization. "WE ARE 100 % a LEGAL CHURCH... All say HALLELUJAH and SMILE REAL BIG!... We are OFFICIAL!"
The designation means donors to the church can deduct their gifts on their federal tax returns as charitable and the church would be eligible for a property tax exemption in Indiana. The church has raised $10,905 on a gofundme.com account but has not found a home yet.
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Levin plans his first official church service July 1 — the day RFRA becomes law — where his members will follow blessings by smoking marijuana in what he describes as a religous practice. But some legal experts doubt such an illegal act would be exempted from prosecution by the religious protections offered by RFRA.
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Legal experts had said it was inevitable that someone would test the controversial RFRA law, and Levin has said he was anxious to see if police would arrest him for toking in church.
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International |
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Tobacco firms to pay billions in damages in Canada
By (BBC)
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A Canadian court has ordered three tobacco companies to pay C$15.5bn (£8bn; $12bn) - the largest award for damages in the country's history.
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The class-action lawsuits were filed in 1998, but only recently went to trial in the courts.
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Explaining his ruling, Judge Brian Riordan said: "The companies earned billions of dollars at the expense of the lungs, the throats and the general well-being of their customers.
"If the companies are allowed to walk away unscathed now, what would be the message to other industries that today or tomorrow find themselves in a similar moral conflict?"
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Insurance losses from Australian storms reach A$1.55bn
By (BBC)
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The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) said its members had received almost 120,000 claims after April storms that hit widespread areas of New South Wales, including Sydney.
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Other storms hit south-east Queensland and northern NSW during April and May.
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Since November 2014 insurance claims for so-called ICA-declared catastrophes - including Cyclone Marcia, bushfires in South Australia and a hailstorm in Brisbane - had come to more than A$3.45bn.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Walmart spews a huge amount of climate pollution with its shipping, but doesn’t report any of it
By Stacy Mitchell and Walter Wuthmann
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No company moves as much stuff across the world’s oceans as Walmart does. The climate consequences are immense. Ferrying all those cheap TVs, T-shirts, toasters, and toys from Asian factories to ports in the U.S. and elsewhere releases huge amounts of greenhouse pollutants into the atmosphere, including both carbon dioxide (CO2) and black carbon, a kind of soot whose climate impacts are less well-understood that those of CO2, but almost certainly just as menacing.
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That could change on Friday. Shareholders will consider a resolution that would require the company’s management to report greenhouse gas emissions from shipping and take concrete steps to reduce them, as other larger retailers have done. The resolution was proposed by Mary Pat Tifft, a member of Our Walmart, a growing organization of Walmart employees that has won significant improvements in the company’s labor practices and is increasingly focusing on its environmental impact.
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Obama honours overlooked WWI heroes, 100 years on
By (BBC)
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President Barack Obama has awarded two deceased World War I army heroes, one black and one Jewish, with the Medal of Honor.
The ceremony at the White House took place nearly 100 years after the two were denied their medals, possibly because of discrimination.
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Johnson, who was serving in an all-black regiment known as the "Harlem Hellfighters", rescued an injured comrade and fought off a German attack by himself.
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When a collection of military records became available online, including a communique from WWI General John Pershing describing Johnson's actions that night of the German attack, his case gained steam.
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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:
A Camp — Cardigans chanteuse Nina Persson with husband (and Shudder To Thinker) Nathan Larson and fellow Swede Niklas Frisk — are set to release a second album Colonia, following 2001’s eponymous debut. . .
The song depicts lost love as something that literally gets lost or slips the mind … disappears. You also sing about embers, after a flame dies out. Embers take a long time to extinguish. That said, how much of a trace lingers after love leaves? In the context of the song (or according to your own life belief), is it ever truly entirely gone?
Well, I really think that a lot of traces remain after love has left the room, and the song is about a love that left without a really clear ending, so that’s probably even worse! No closure … sucks. But in my experience, love can certainly also disappear completely. . .
When love finally does leave the room, where does it go?
It goes to the sky bar at the Mondrian in LA and fucks with someone else.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Report Challenges Environmental Friendliness Of Europe's Pellet Industry
By (All Things Considered)
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CORNISH: Talk more about the controversy and this new report. What are the findings that indicate that wood pellets are not necessarily as environmentally sound as it's been described to all of us?
WARRICK: Well, biomass - just to explain a little bit - is any kind of vegetative matter, biological matter, that's used to make energy. The thing is about biomass is you can release carbon dioxide when you burn it, but eventually you can absorb carbon dioxide back because you grow new crops and they use carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The problem is time scales. If you're cutting down a tree to use it for fuel, it's going to take a very long time to re-grow that tree. It can be decades. And so this study is highlighting the fact that for the short-term or medium-term, we're not going to get that carbon back. It's actually going to be released in the atmosphere even to a greater extent in some cases then if you were burning coal to start with.
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WARRICK: It's a tricky problem for the Europeans and this is particularly true for the British, and they happen to be very big customers of wood pellets. There's a mandate in many of these countries to reduce the use of fossil fuels, particularly coal, and these wood pellets have become a very good option for them because they can burn these wood pellets right in their power plants. And there aren't many other good options. You can put in solar power, you can put in wind power, but those are very slow-growing industries and in the meantime there's a big demand for electricity that has to be filled.
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Bhutan breaks Guinness record for tree planting
By Vikas Pandey
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A team of 100 volunteers in Bhutan has set a new world record by planting 49,672 trees in one hour.
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The Buddhist nation of just over 700,000 people is sandwiched between India and China. It has tried hard to protect itself from the influence of the outside world, only permitting television and the internet just over a decade ago.
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Mr Tshering said that he and other volunteers planned the event in part because former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck loves the environment and "we respect him for that".
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The health of Bhutan's environment is one of the key indicators of the country's famed Gross National Happiness index.
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Mr Tshering says he is confident the saplings will be looked after well because the volunteers have promised to look after them until they become bigger. Species planted include indigenous ones such as Blue Pine and Cypress.
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Science and Health |
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It takes a village: Why do consumers participate in wind energy programs?
By (ScienceDaily)
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Why do people participate in programs that benefit the environment, even when there seems to be no direct personal benefit in taking part? More specifically, why would consumers pay good money for wind energy when it is not at all clear that they are benefiting from that energy? The answer may lie in a psychological sense of community with other wind-energy customers, according to a new study in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing.
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As the authors discovered, participants in the program constituted, through their consumer choices, a principle-based community, unified by a belief in the interdependence of human beings when it came to protecting the natural environment. Participants saw themselves as different from those whom they regarded as less environmentally conscious. Participants also felt a shared emotional connection with each other, and they believe that they are having an influence in the world. As one man reported, after he ripped out his lawn and replaced it with drought-resistant plants, one of his neighbors soon did the same.
DeVincenzo and Scammon's study reveals that the choices people make as consumers may be guided by community-based principles. That insight can be used by policy makers, environmental activists, and marketers to promote behaviors in individuals that benefit society as a whole. Policy makers might provide public recycling containers, for example, as a communal talking point and to increase feelings of community when neighbors see others participating.
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Researchers develop method to grow artificial limbs
By Stephen Feller
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Researchers at Mass. General Hospital used limbs from deceased rats, stripping cells from the vascular and nerve matrix, and regrew muscles, veins and arteries. Electrical stimulation of muscle fibers caused them to contract with 80 percent of the strength a newborn animal would have, and blood flowed through the limb successfully when it was transplanted to a live animal.
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To turn the limb of a dead rat into one potentially transplantable into another living rat, the limb was put in a bioreactor and a detergent solution perfused through the vascular system to strip the limb of all cells. Once that process was complete, which took a week, researchers injected vascular cells into the main artery to begin regenerating arteries and veins while muscle progenitors are injected into matrix sheaths that define the position of each muscle.
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While a baboon forearm also was stripped of its cells using the same process as the rat limb, Ott said the next step will be to do a successful graft of a bioengineered limb and, taking note of successful hand transplants, see that nerves can also be regrown for full function.
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Technology |
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Google's New Diversity Stats Are Only Slightly Less Embarrassing Than They Were Last Year
By Josh Harkinson
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Around this time last year, Google shocked Silicon Valley by voluntarily releasing statistics on the diversity of its workforce. The move helped shame other large tech companies into doing the same, and the picture that emerged wasn't pretty: In most cases, only 10 percent of the companies' overall employees were black or Latino, compared to 27 percent in the US workforce as a whole. For its own part, Google admitted that "we're miles from where we want to be," and pledged to do more to cultivate minority and female tech talent.
Now Google has an update: Its 2015 diversity stats, released yesterday, show that it has moved inches, not miles, toward a workforce that reflects America. . .
"While every company cannot match Intel's ambitious plan, they can set concrete, measurable goals, targets, and timetables," said a statement from the Reverend Jesse Jackson, who last year played a key role in convincing Google and other companies to disclose their diversity stats. "If they don't measure it, they don't mean it." |
'Ransomware-as-a-service' discovered on the darknet
By Alex Hern
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Branded as “Tox”, the tool lets anyone, regardless of technical ability, automatically create ransomware: software which encrypts a victim’s hard drive and demands payment before decrypting it.
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Tox threatens to revive the problem. But unlike Cryptolocker, which had the hallmarks of a co-ordinated criminal operation, Tox lets would-be criminals roll their own ransomware. Any user can register on the darknet site and choose to create their own cryptolocker-style software. They get the option to set the ransom amount, in US dollars, as well as add a personal note.
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Tox shows how the hidden side of the tech industry follows the same trends as the surface side. The trend of “software-as-a-service” – charging on a regular basis for programmes, rather than one fee upfront – has grown to the point that Microsoft’s next version of Windows – Windows 10 – will be sold in that way.
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Cultural |
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Canada accused of 'cultural genocide'
By (Al Jazeera)
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Across Canada, for more than 100 years, children of the indigenous population, or First Nation as they are known here, were taken away as part of the policy of "aggressive assimilation", or as one survivor put it, "they tried to beat the Indian out of us".
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Finally, the survivors as they called themselves realised they had been the victims of abuse.
They banded together and took the government to court and won. They received a settlement, the largest of its kind in the world. But they also won the right to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission where they could tell their stories.
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Justice Murray Sinclair - himself from the First Nations - chaired the Commission. As he stood and acknowledged Canada was guilty of cultural genocide, those in the room rose with a roar.
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The Commission has made 94 recommendations. This, it believes, will help redress the problems the residential school problems have caused, will begin to make amends for past evils, and aid the reconciliation so desperately needed.
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Jennifer Lopez Moroccan concert sparks calls for minister's resignation
By (BBC)
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A concert by the pop star Jennifer Lopez in Morocco has led to calls for the country's communication minister to resign, according to local media.
Prominent members of the ruling Justice and Development Party said the singer's performance at the Mawazine Festival in Rabat was "a breach of public decency".
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"What was broadcast is unacceptable and goes against broadcasting law," he added.
Singer and producer Pharrell Williams also performed at the festival over the weekend, with Usher, Placebo and Maroon 5 also scheduled to take to the stage over the coming days.
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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. |