Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, June 30, 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: I've Seen All Good People by Yes
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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'Islamic State cake' prompts apology from Walmart
By (BBC)
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Walmart has apologised after a store in Louisiana in the US made a sheet cake decorated with the Islamic State flag.
Chuck Netzhammer initially requested a cake decorated with a Confederate battle flag and the words "heritage not hate", but the store refused.
Mr Netzhammer then placed an order for a cake topped with the banner of the militant group.
Walmart said the worker who took the order was unfamiliar with the design of the Islamic State (IS) flag.
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"That's an Isis battleflag cake that anybody can go buy at Walmart," Mr Netzhammer said in the video, using another term for the militant group. "But you can't buy a Confederate flag toy."
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International |
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US and Cuba to announce plan to open embassies
By (Al Jazeera)
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The US administration is set to announce that it has reached an agreement with Cuba to reopen embassies and restore diplomatic relations severed more than five decades ago, US officials said.
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The formal unveiling of a deal would fulfil a pledge the former Cold War rivals made little more than six months ago when Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced a historic diplomatic opening.
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Restoration of relations would be the latest phase in a normalisation process, which is expected to move slowly because of lingering problems over issues such as Cuba's human rights record.
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In May, the United States paved the way of rapprochement by taking Cuba off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Havana had vehemently protested its 1982 inclusion on the blacklist, which hampered its access to global markets.
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Building a better future for Chad
By Fergus Walsh
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This landlocked country in central Africa has a harsh climate, suffering both drought and flooding - food shortages are common.
Its people have endured decades of corruption, civil unrest and mass influxes of refugees from neighbouring states like Sudan and Nigeria.
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The immediate priority of health teams here is to target the most severely malnourished children - those whose lives are in immediate danger.
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Unicef has helped fund the expansion as well as paying for the training of health workers and for vaccination programmes, along with aid partners such as the International Rescue Committee.
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One in six children in Chad die before the age of five, the third highest rate globally, behind Sierra Leone and Angola.
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China's Great Wall is quickly disappearing, report says
By Elizabeth Shim
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China's famed Great Wall is disappearing, and tourists, local residents and natural erosion were faulted for the damage, according to Chinese media.
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Lack of maintenance in key areas of the Great Wall has led to confusion over its actual length. Sources in China say it runs anywhere from 5,592 to 13,050 miles.
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Villagers in Lulong County in the northern province of Hebei were reportedly taking out thick, gray bricks from the Great Wall near their homes, and selling the priceless artifacts for $6 to $8.
The introduction of tourists into undeveloped parts of the Great Wall has brought more people into unprotected areas. Carelessness has led to severe damage, according to the Beijing Times.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Justice Alito Defends Lethal Injection Expert Who Did His Research on Drugs.com
By Annie Waldman
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. . . The case, first brought by four condemned Oklahoma inmates, came after several high-profile botched executions in 2014 involving midazolam. The petitioners argued that the use of midazolam presented a “substantial, constitutionally unacceptable risk of pain and suffering.”
As ProPublica has previously detailed, the doctor Oklahoma relied on as its expert witness had never given a patient anesthesia and based much of his research on drugs.com.
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Alito: Dr. Evans relied on multiple sources and his own expertise, and his testimony may not be disqualified simply because one source (drugs.com) warns that it “is not intended for medical advice" (pg 30)
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Sotomayor: [T]here were no statements from drugs.com that supported the critically disputed aspects of Dr. Evans’ opinion. If anything, the Web site supported petitioners’ contentions, as it expressly cautioned that midazolam “[s]hould not be used alone for maintenance of anesthesia." (pg 108)
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Alito: [T]he prisoners failed to identify a known and available alternative method of execution that entails a lesser risk of pain (pg 5)
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IRS finally agrees to do something about its $1.5 trillion nonprofit database
By Cory Doctorow
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Radical archivist Carl Malamud writes, "Since 2008, Public.Resource.Org has been trying to get the IRS to release the database of the annual reports of nonprofits in a better way. The nonprofit sector in the U.S. represents $1.5 trillion in economic activity and over 9% of jobs."
Just like the SEC's EDGAR database does for for-profit, the IRS Form 990 is how our country insists that nonprofit report on their operations annually. By doing so, our markets become more transparent and more efficient.
But, this database has been a mess. . .
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The court victory was nice, but it was a win under the Freedom of Information Act, which means we had to ask for specific returns. And, it took Tom Burke, my lawyer, two years (and $217,000 in billable hours, which his firm donated to me pro bono) to get to that point. But, we don't want just 9 returns, we want the whole database released. Last week, we started a campaign to get lots of organizations to submit FOIA requests for e-file data, the hope being the IRS would see that they were going to be deluged with individual requests and it would be way easier just to release the database.
Today, the IRS released a statement saying they're going to do what we've been hoping for, saying they are going to release e-file data and this is a "priority for the IRS". Congratulations to the IRS on taking this important step! This was nice to see.
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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:
Chris Squire, bassist for '70s British prog-rock band Yes, sort of owes it all to a bad acid trip.
His contoured bass tone and spidery playing style couldn't be more integral to the group's sprawling '70s tunes, such as "Roundabout" and "Long Distance Runaround." And Squire developed his signature sound while recouping from a '60s LSD bummer.
"I'd had lots of good acid trips prior to that," said Squire, 65. He's in a 12th floor Las Vegas hotel room when reached via phone. "But I made the mistake of trying some acid some friends of mine had home-made. [Laughs.] And also I think I had the flu or something at the time, so it was a combination of my buddies' homemade acid and also being under the weather anyway.
"That knocked me back there for quite a while, and I did sort of hibernate in an apartment in Kensington in London and spent quite a few months, maybe as much as a year, just playing bass. I don't think I even had it plugged into an amplifier. So that was a big learning curve for me. In a way it's weird, how a bad trip turned out to be a good thing for me in the long run for me."
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. . . Since 1971's "The Yes Album" is about 42 minutes long, 1972's "Close to the Edge" around 38 minutes and 1977's "Going for the One" close to 39 minutes, does the band take breaks between performances of each LP?
"Well, the funny thing is sometimes we do and sometimes we don't," Squire says, speaking in a molasses-y English drawl. "It depends on various things like if the promoters want to have a break so they can sell more T-shirts and booze, then they ask if we can do an interval. I personally prefer not to do that. Once you get onstage, I like to stay there."
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The Yes track "I've Seen All Good People" appears on the soundtrack to the 2001 film "Almost Famous." Did you think that movie was an accurate portrayal of the '70s rock scene?
Well, you know, all movies when they're about the music business tend to have a bit of a wide latitude in terms of how things really were. [Laughs.]
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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How buying in bulk actually wastes food
By Eric Holthaus
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As big of a problem as it is, food waste rarely makes the news. There was some buzz a while back about France’s ban on grocery stores throwing out edible food, but the numbers show that this is only a small part of the problem. Americans vastly underestimate their own food waste, which turns out to be driven mostly by a desire to avoid getting sick — even though saving money is also a top priority. That means we end up stocking our shelves with more than we need to ensure we’ll always have something fresh when we want it.
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The bulk stores know this — their whole business model is to trick us into buying more than we need, and all the better if the food seems healthy and good for the planet. During a green push several years ago, Walmart became the biggest grocery store chain in the country. In May, Costco — that wonderland of nine-pound cases of bison jerky and terrier-sized tubs of licorice — became the leading purveyor of organic grocery items, dethroning Whole Foods. Walmart’s Sam’s Club stores, which operate on a similar membership-based, it-takes-two-people-to-push-a-cart style of warehouse retail, is reportedly moving in a similar direction and greatly expanding its organic offerings. Organic food is becoming big business, at least partly because stores are able to charge higher markups.
Which brings us back to food waste. As much as 40 percent of America’s food supply gets thrown away every day, with perishable items like dairy, breads, meats, fruits, and vegetables leading the way. The total annual bill of food waste for consumers is a whopping $162 billion, which works out to about $1,300 to $2,300 per family per year. Clearly, that much food could feed a lot of people who otherwise go hungry.
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“When you’re talking about food, feeling really plays a big role. Things like predicting how hungry you are, your appetite, and what you’re in the mood for — in the future — turn out to be very challenging,” Ligon says. “If you’re shopping more frequently, you can purchase food that is meant to be eaten in a shorter time frame.”
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After all, you can’t waste what you don’t buy in the first place.
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Brazil announces massive reforestation and renewable energy plan with US
By Suzanne Goldenberg, Dan Roberts and agencies
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Brazil also committed to restoring up to 12m hectares of forest – an area about the size of England or Pennsylvania – in another attempt to reduce the carbon pollution that causes climate change.
The White House said the initiatives were part of a new US-Brazil climate partnership, loosely modelled on the historic US-China agreement reached during Obama’s visit to Beijing last November, intended to build momentum for a global deal to fight climate change in Paris at the end of the year.
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And in the electricity sector, the US and Brazil jointly announced intentions to increase their share of renewable, non-hydropower sources to 20% by 2030. Deese said boosting renewables that high in the US would be dependent on controversial power plant emission limits that the Obama administration has proposed.
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The US has already announced its full commitment to the climate treaty: a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions of up to 28% by 2025, compared with 2005 levels. But a key sticking point in the climate treaty has been whether developing countries like Brazil will be willing to make substantial contributions. Poorer nations have balked, arguing that industrialised nations that have polluted more historically bear more of the responsibility for curbing climate change.
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Science and Health |
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Step Aside, Freud: Josef Breuer Is the True Father of Modern Psychotherapy
By Pavi Sandhu
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The Viennese physician Josef Breuer (1842-1925) has a unique and prominent place in the history of psychotherapy. From 1880-82, while treating a patient known as Anna O., Breuer developed the cathartic method, or talking cure, for treating nervous disorders. As a result of that treatment, he formulated many of the key concepts that laid the foundation for modern psychotherapy. This month marked the 90th anniversary of Breuer’s death, offering an opportunity to reflect on the value of his contributions.
Breuer is best known for his collaboration with Sigmund Freud and for introducing Freud to the case of Anna O. (whose real name was Bertha Pappenheim). The ideas emerging from that case so fascinated Freud that he devoted the rest of his career to developing them, in the form of psychoanalysis. The two men co-authored Studies on Hysteria, published in 1895, which is considered the founding text of psychoanalysis. However, the significance of Breuer’s contributions goes well beyond his role as Freud’s mentor and collaborator. In fact, Breuer laid the groundwork for modern talk therapy by, for example, considering all aspects of his patients's life and personality and focusing on emotional expression as opposed to the Freudian emphasis on insight and interpretation.
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Setting aside personal details, the key question is whose ideas were more valid, and in that regard history is squarely on the side of Breuer. Freud’s emphasis on sexuality as the dominant factor shaping human development and causing psychopathology is no longer taken seriously today. Instead, the role of dissociation due to trauma is increasingly recognized as more fundamental. Also, most therapists today realize the importance of helping clients access and integrate painful emotions due to past trauma, which is the essence of Breuer’s cathartic method.
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The key to Breuer’s greatness was that he had the intelligence and openness of mind to recognize that his patient had much to teach him, and the humility to value her experience over his authority as a physician. Ninety years after his death, Breuer’s ideas inform and enrich my work with clients every day, reminding me to learn from their perspective, respect the role of trauma and value emotional experience over insight.
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Does radiation from X-rays and CT scans really cause cancer?
By (ScienceDaily)
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In recent years, there has been widespread media coverage of studies purporting to show that radiation from X-rays, CT scans and other medical imaging causes cancer.
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Studies purporting to find a cancer link to medical imaging radiation have other flaws besides the questionable LNT model. For example, two recent studies suggested possible increased cancer risks from low-radiation doses associated with pediatric CT scans. But these cancers likely are due to the medical conditions that prompted the CT scans, and have nothing to do with the radiation exposure, Drs. Welsh and Siegel write.
While many people focus on the purported risks of radiation in medical imaging, "the more significant and actual risks associated with not undergoing an imaging procedure or undergoing a more invasive exploratory surgery are generally being ignored in both the scientific literature and the popular media," Drs. Welsh and Siegel write.
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Technology |
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Mark Zuckerberg Finally Weighed in on Facebook’s “Real Name” Problem
By Adam Clark Estes
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The problem is very straightforward: Facebook won’t let anyone use adopted names. This puts certain LGBT users at risk of harassment or violence, especially drag queens. Native Americans and survivors of domestic violence have also spoken out against Facebook’s real name policy.
Real name does not mean your legal name. Your real name is whatever you go by and what your friends call you. If your friends all call you by a nickname and you want to use that name on Facebook, you should be able to do that. In this way, we should be able to support everyone using their own real names, including everyone in the transgender community. We are working on better and more ways for people to show us what their real name is so we can both keep this policy which protects so many people in our community while also serving the transgender community.
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The policy is so confusing that even Zuck’s own coworkers are speaking out about the issue. . .
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Facebook needs to do better than this.
Seems like it. As the social network hosted celebrations for civil rights around the world, some groups protested Facebook’s sponsoring San Francisco’s Pride festival while refusing to change the real name policy. One of the protest’s organizer explained very clearly, “This policy directly harms LGBTQ people, especially transgender and queer people around the world who face daily discrimination, and use social media like Facebook to find support, build community, and express their authentic selves.”/td> |
The shrinking of the big data promise
By Cory Doctorow
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Remember when Xynga’s “social games” like Farmville seemed to colonise the limbic systems of everyone you knew, stealing away their hours with a fiendishly addictive game-mechanic? In short order, most of Xynga’s players grew inured to the game’s temptations, leaving behind a rump of especially susceptible players who were not enough to sustain the game, nor its makers’ high-flying share price.
Likewise, the “surveillance business model” of building up detailed electronic dossiers on internet users in order to predict what they want to buy and how to sell it to them produced some genuinely impressive results in its early years. The serendipity of seeing an ad for something you had been thinking about proved very powerful in the early days of Facebook and the first generation of “retargeting” services.
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The Big Data success stories for predicting human behavior over long terms don’t bear scrutiny. It’s not a triumph of big data to predict that someone searching for “used cars” might respond to an ad for used cars. Neither is it sorcery to predict that a woman who buys folic acid is pregnant. It’s not big data to get paid when someone clicks on a loan application or installs a game.
Markets don’t solve all our problems, but they do not have much patience for an irrational, ideological commitment to techniques that don’t deliver. Facebook doubtless has internal fiefdoms that will be threatened by the company backing off its surveillance commitment, but it is also growing non-surveillance-oriented tendrils as fast as it can.
Unfortunately, spy agencies aren’t subject to this kind of discipline. The fact that the billions spent spying on everyone, always, has spectacularly failed to catch any terrorists is taken as proof that they’re not doing enough surveillance – not that untargeted, mass surveillance without particularised suspicion is a waste of money.
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Cultural |
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The Guy Who Made the ISIS-Dildo Flag Just Told Off CNN
By James West
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CNN anchor Suzanne Malveaux crossed from the US studios to international assignment editor Lucy Pawle in London, who claimed to have spotted an ISIS banner amongst the rainbow-adorned floats at London's annual LGBT pride parade. . .
The only problem? The banner Pawle spotted was a satirical flag adorned not with ISIS's logo in Arabic, but with butt-plugs and dildos.
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"The Pride festival is a pure celebration of the finest aspects of humanity: of tolerance, togetherness, acceptance and liberation, the polar opposite of what Isis stands for," he continues. "If there was anywhere where my flag had a voice, it was there."
Coombs also writes, "CNN correspondent Lucy Pawle described my flag as a 'very bad mimicry' but the only bad mimicry I could see was CNN's impression of a reputable news organization. What does this say about every other report that they broadcast? And why have they not mentioned it since?"
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Misty Copeland Promotion Part of A New Era at American Ballet Theatre
By Pia Catton
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Misty Copeland made history Tuesday, becoming the first African-American woman to reach the top rank of principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre.
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Along with Ms. Copeland’s ascendance, the company’s other, less-heralded promotions announced Tuesday suggest a new era at Ballet Theatre—one with a stronger emphasis on promoting dancers who have made a commitment to the company, especially in the early stages of their training.
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“The opportunities I have gotten to go mainstream are so important,” Ms. Copeland told The Wall Street Journal in 2013. “That’s where these kids are seeing me. They’re not seeing me at the Metropolitan Opera House. They’re saying there’s that one brown girl, I can relate to her.”
The mainstream attention has only grown since then. In April, Ms. Copeland made the cover of Time magazine. In May, “60 Minutes” interviewed her, walking through the motel where her family once lived. In June, she was a celebrity presenter at the 2015 Tony Awards.
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What Ms. Copeland’s success means for diversity in ballet, though, is a matter of some skepticism for longtime participants and observers of dance, who see the milestone as one marker on a long road that the industry needs to travel.
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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. |