Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, July 14, 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: Rocket Man by Elton John
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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Thank Kennedy For Getting Us To Pluto
By James West
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This morning's historic, high-tech NASA flyby of Pluto has already taken place, and now we Earth-bound humans must wait for a signal that the New Horizons spacecraft has successfully danced its intricate dance near the dwarf planet and its moon, Charon. This mission has literally taken years: it launched over nine years ago. But in a bigger sense, it's been more than five decades in the making.
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But the president's speech didn't just call for putting man on the moon. He also wanted more money to fund America's research into nuclear rockets and unmanned missions, which he said would provide "a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself." Obviously, Kennedy could not fathom the technology that would send the the New Horizons craft to Pluto. It's being powered by an electrical unit known as a "radioisotope thermoelectric generator" which converts the heat of 24 pounds of plutonium into a amazingly tiny amount of wattage. The craft's thrust through space was mainly provided by the sheer propulsive energy of its actual launch (with a little help from Jupiter as a slingshot along the way.) Nevertheless, Kennedy's words feel especially prescient today, as we wait to experience the final frontier of our vast solar system, by plunging at last through the Kuiper Belt.
Kennedy was right about another thing, too: "Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share."
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States Cut Power Plant Pollution Ahead of New EPA Rule
By Bobby Magill and Climate Central
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Next month, the Obama administration is set to finalize its climate ultimatum to states: Control carbon dioxide emissions from electric power plants or the federal government will do it for you.
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Coal-fired power plants are the largest source of the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, but their dominance has begun to wane as federal emissions standards have forced some coal plants to shut down and the U.S. shale gas boom has brought natural gas prices down. In April, natural gas, which releases roughly half the carbon dioxide as burning coal, surpassed coal as the dominant fuel for electric power generation in the U.S. for the first time in history.
Nationwide, carbon dioxide emissions rates from electric power plants were 14 percent higher than 1990 levels, but declined 12 percent between 2008 and 2013. Among the nation’s largest utilities, coal accounts for nearly four-fifths of their carbon emissions. Natural gas accounts for just one-fifth, according to the report.
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The five states with the lowest carbon emissions rates are all heavily dependent on hydropower, including Vermont, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Maine.
Generally, utilities with the highest carbon emissions rates are heavily dependent on coal, while those with the lowest rates depend on nuclear, natural gas and renewables.
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Marijuana foe uses racketeering law to shut down legal retailers in Colorado
By Mark Frauenfelder
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In 2012 Coloradans voted to legalize retail sales of recreational marijuana to adults. But a Marijuana prohibition organization in Washington DC, run by a Reagan/Bush-era "Just Say No" wacko named James Wootton, is abusing a Federal racketeering act to sue Colorado cannabis retailers out of business.
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The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) was created to put a financial squeeze on organized crime by allowing victims to sue for triple damages. Interestingly, when Wootton was President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for Legal Reform, he spearheaded an "ongoing fight against frivolous litigation in the nation's civil justice system." Now he is using the RICO act to frivolously litigate against businesses that are breaking no state laws. . .
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Asian shares mostly higher on Greece deal
By (BBC)
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Most Asian stock markets have risen following the news of a deal between Greece and its creditors.
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The news lifted stock markets in Europe and the US on Monday, while in Japan on Tuesday the benchmark Nikkei 225 closed up 1.5% at 20,385.33.
Evan Lucas, market strategist at trading firm IG, said that although the deal reduced the risk of a Greek exit from the eurozone right now, the bloc still faced significant issues in the medium term.
"Greek politics could collapse under the strain of this new deal and the subsequent elections that may transpire," he said in a note.
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International |
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Banks face new legal action over forex manipulation
By Kamal Ahmed
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After fines totalling many billions of pounds from UK and US regulators, a new threat is about to hit the major banks found guilty of manipulating the foreign exchange market.
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The targets include HSBC, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Barclays and US banks JP Morgan and Citigroup.
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Groups of traders from different banks with exotic names such as "the Three Musketeers" and "the A team" deliberately massaged rates at which they bought and sold currencies to major businesses so that the banks would make higher profits, and the traders higher bonuses.
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"And because the [foreign exchange] market is so large, the banks and traders did not need to bludgeon somebody over their head to steal their money.
"They just needed to make small paper cuts and bleed people very slowly - because each of those cuts in a market this large ultimately leads to a very large pot of money. The customers had no idea they were being defrauded."
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Greece debt crisis: IMF attacks EU over bailout
By (BBC)
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The International Monetary Fund has attacked the bailout deal offered by eurozone leaders to Greece.
The creditor said Greece's public debt had become "highly unsustainable" and it needed relief from its debts.
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The conditional agreement to receive up to €86bn (£61bn; $95bn) from the EU over three years depends on further economic reforms - including the labour markets, banks and privatisation - being passed after Wednesday.
Hard-liners in Mr Tsipras' own Syriza party are likely to rebel and the junior coalition party, the Independent Greeks, have offered only limited support for the reforms
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Meanwhile, unions and trade associations representing those including civil servants, municipal workers and pharmacy owners have called or extended strikes to coincide with Wednesday's parliamentary votes.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Highways Are Now Being Held Hostage to Lower Corporate Taxes
By Kevin Drum
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A bipartisan proposal, to be introduced soon in Congress, would tax the estimated $2 trillion in foreign profits held by U.S. corporations in overseas accounts....The tax would generate tens of billions of dollars for the federal Highway Trust Fund, which will run out of money at the end of the month. Lawmakers have been in a desperate scramble to replenish the fund, which helps pay for new roads, bridges and other transportation infrastructure.
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....Business groups want changes to the international tax system to be made as part of a broader overhaul that includes lowering the corporate tax rate for domestic earnings as well. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has indicated that he prefers a comprehensive tax overhaul.
Roger that. The business community is willing to support a small, one-time gimmick that will cost them around $200 billion or so—and free them to repatriate all their foreign earnings and bring that money back to the US—but only if it's tied to a large, permanent corporate tax change that will save them far more in the long run. Suddenly it all makes sense. |
Gas surges ahead of coal in US power generation
By Karl Mathiesen
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For the first time ever, gas has usurped coal as the biggest producer of electricity in the US. Analysts say Obama administration’s proposed climate change rules are likely to establish gas as the predominant source of electricity as early as 2020.
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The downfall of king coal has been just as much about the rise of hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’), which has tapped gas from the country’s vast, shallow fields of sedimentary shale. The price of natural gas in the US was close to $15/m Btu in 2005. Plentiful, cheap, accessible gas and a friendly regulatory environment created a boom that has upended the US energy market.
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Betsy Monseu, chief executive of the American Coal Council, said the industry had abandoned any plans to replace the retiring fleet. “Regulations, and the threat of new regulations, mean that no new coal plants are on the drawing board. This is not the case with for natural gas. Even with natural gas generation retiring, more new natural gas generation is being permitted and built.”
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Yet despite all of the pressures on coal, the EIA’s current assessment is that it will remain, just barely, the US’s largest source of electricity until at least 2040. However those projections do not factor in the Obama administration’s new climate change regulations, the Clean Power Plan, which aims to cut carbon emissions from power plants by 30% and are due to come into force this summer. When you do, said Monseu, you get a “starkly different picture”.
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Laura Poitras sues the US Government to find out why she was repeatedly detained in airports
By Cory Doctorow
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he Oscar-winning documentarian, who directed Citizenfour, was detained and searched over 50 times, but the breaking-point was when the US Government refused to respond to her Freedom of Information Act request for the reasons for her harassment.
The harassment began with Poitras's 2006 documentary about the Iraq war, My Country, My Country. She has many electronic devices seized at the border, and was refused permission to take notes on her detention lest she use her pen as "a weapon."
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Poitras is being represented by lawyers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights advocacy group. “The well-documented difficulties Ms. Poitras experienced while traveling strongly suggest that she was improperly targeted by federal agencies as a result of her journalistic activities,” EFF senior counsel David Sobel told the Intercept. . .
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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:
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The inspiration for Bernie Taupin's lyrics, however, was the short story The Rocket Man, written by Ray Bradbury. The sci-fi author's tale is told from the perspective of a child, whose astronaut father has mixed feelings at leaving his family in order to do his job. It was published as part of the anthology The Illustrated Man in 1951.
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This was produced by Gus Dudgeon, who worked with David Bowie on his 1969 song "Space Oddity." Both songs have similar subject matter, and lots of people accused Elton of ripping off Bowie, something both Elton and Bernie Taupin deny.
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The song can be interpreted as a symbol of how Rock Stars are isolated from their friends, family and from the real world by those with power in the music industry. Some lyric analysis as part of the Rock Star isolation theory:
"I'm burning out his fuse up here alone" - Rocketing through space on stage.
"Higher than a kite" - Feeling outside the box called normal.
"Mars" - "The place he is when he's high; don't need to be raising children when you're an addict. It's a "cold" place, being an addict and larger than life when you want to be "Normal" and a "Rocketman" at the same time.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Global warming is causing rain to melt the Greenland ice sheet
By John Abraham
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It might seem obvious that in a warming world, the Greenland ice sheet will melt. But, what seems obvious and simple can be more complex when investigated more deeply. With respect to Greenland, it is expected that warmer temperatures increase melting but warmer temperatures can also mean more snowfall, as there is more moisture in warm air which can then fall as snow. So, it has been a question of which of these two competing processes would win out. Would Greenland get smaller because of melting or would it grow as more snow fell?
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A new study, just published in Nature Geoscience, makes an important new contribution to our understanding of the forces at play in Greenland. Dr Samuel Doyle and an international team captured the wide-scale effects of an unusual week of warm, wet weather in late August and early September, 2011. They found that cyclonic weather led to extreme surface runoff – a combination of ice melt and rain – that overwhelmed the ice sheet’s basal drainage system. This drive a marked increase in ice flow across the entire western sector of the ice sheet that extended 140 km into the ice sheet’s interior. According to Dr. Doyle,
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The influence of such intense rainfall events has not, until now, been considered in assessments of the melt and flow response of any ice sheet. This is an important omission because cyclonic conditions are predicted to increase in the future, therefore likely playing an increasing role in driving ice mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet.
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Stop trying to put climate change in a box
By Clayton Aldern
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In the story of the blind men and the elephant, the trunky mammal is misidentified as a spear, a tree, a wall, a rope; the men are too siloed from one another to fully discern the animal they’re patting down. Today, the old metaphor from the Indian subcontinent is mostly used in corporate retreats and master’s of public policy programs to demonstrate the gains of synergy (or something thereabouts). There’s a new elephant lurking in the room, though, and its name is climate change.
A new report on the global risks of a changing climate, commissioned by the U.K. Foreign Office, suggests that we’re still mistaking the elephant for a spear. “In public debate, we have sometimes treated it as an issue of prediction, as if it were a long-term weather forecast,” writes Baroness Joyce Anelay, minister of state at the Foreign Office, in her introduction to the report. “Or as purely a question of economics — as if the whole of the threat could be accurately quantified by putting numbers into a calculator.”
It can’t, she argues. At the systemic level, we ought to be as serious about preventing climate change as we are about “preventing the spread of nuclear weapons.” In fact, taking systemic risks into account is the only responsible way to prioritize a national agenda in the face of competing goals (say, economic growth or reducing unemployment), writes Anelay.
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The feedback loops pictured above can make quantifying the effects of climate change a hideous, highly uncertain endeavor.
It’s the last question that’s most difficult to answer, though, and it’s the one that keeps national and international security experts up at night. As crop yields drop and water shortages increase, political and ethnic instabilities are only amplified. Among many other risks, this can lead to more successful terrorist recruitment, the authors argue. Climate change is also expected to force whole swathes of populations into cities. When migration becomes “more a necessity than a choice … the capacity of the international community for humanitarian assistance would be overwhelmed,” write the authors of the report.
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Science and Health |
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Non-invasive device could end daily finger pricking for people with diabetes
By (ScienceDaily)
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Currently, many people with diabetes need to measure their blood glucose levels by pricking their fingers, squeezing drops of blood onto test strips, and processing the results with portable glucometers. The process can be uncomfortable, messy and often has to be repeated several times every day.
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At the heart of the new technology is a piece of nano-engineered silica glass with ions that fluoresce in infrared light when a low power laser light hits them. When the glass is in contact with the users' skin, the extent of fluorescence signal varies in relation to the concentration of glucose in their blood. The device measures the length of time the fluorescence lasts for and uses that to calculate the glucose level in a person's bloodstream without the need for a needle. This process takes less than 30 seconds.
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The results of a pilot clinical study, carried out at the Leeds Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine under the supervision of Professor Peter Grant, suggest that the new monitor has the potential to perform as well as conventional technologies. More clinical trials and product optimization are required for regulatory approvals and before the technology can be put on the market.
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High exposure to formaldehyde linked to ALS
By Stephen Feller
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A large study of data revealed a link between high exposure to formaldehyde and an increased risk of developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.
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"Jobs involving both high probability and high intensity of formaldehyde are relatively uncommon in the USA," wrote the authors of a study published in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry which found exposure to formaldehyde can increase risk for ALS in men by three times.
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Researchers determined that funeral directors -- if not other jobs that include high exposure to formaldehyde on a regular basis -- have about three times as much a chance of developing ALS. The data showed that men are four times as likely to develop the disease.
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The LHC Has Discovered a New Sub-Atomic Particle Called a Pentaquark
By Jamie Condliffe
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Quarks are a series of charged sub-atomic particles that come together to form larger particles—such as protons and neutrons, which are each made of three of the things (a class of particle referred to as baryons). First proposed in 1964 by American physicist Murray Gell-Mann, their existence changed the way people thought about particle physicists.
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“The pentaquark is not just any new particle,” said Guy Wilkinson from the LHCb in a press release. “It represents a way to aggregate quarks, namely the fundamental constituents of ordinary protons and neutrons, in a pattern that has never been observed before in over fifty years of experimental searches. Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted.”
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Now, the scientists will study study the finer structure of the pentaquarks, to understand exactly how they’re bound together. It’s not the dark matter that CERN researchers are eventually hoping to find with the newly high-powered Collider, but it’s still another milestone in particle physics.
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Technology |
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Panasonic reportedly developing focus-after-capture technology
By Brittany Hillen
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According to a recent report, Panasonic is developing a technology for refocusing an image after it's been shot, and will be commercializing the feature sometime in the next year. The technology achieves something similar to Lytro's light field cameras but instead relies on 4K video capture.
. . . We're taking this to mean that it shoots a series of images while driving the focus, so that a range of focus depths are captured. Image comparison would then allow the camera to build a depth-map of the objects in the scene, which could then be used to deliver the desired focus point when you tap on a particular object in the scene.
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Facebook Is Apparently Building a Human-Powered Personal Assistant
By Jamie Condliffe
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New reports suggest that Facebook is working on a personal assistant service baked into Messenger called Moneypenny. But unlike Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, this isn’t a virtual helper—it’s a real human service at the other end.
The Information reports that the new service, known internally as Moneypenny, will allow users “to ask real people for help researching and ordering products and services, among other tasks.” Three sources have described the new service to the website, explaining that it is currently being tested internally by employees.
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Tour de France Cyclist Computers Hacked by Doping Critics
By Gerald Lynch
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If doping is a relatively modern problem for the sports world, the Tour de France 2015 sees it colliding headfirst with a modern technological concern, as race leaders Team Sky have accused rivals of hacking their computers.
According to Team Sky boss Sir Dave Brailsford, critics of cyclist Chris Froome (currently leading the pack in the gruelling race by 12 seconds) have tapped into their computers in an attempt to prove Froome is using performance-enhancing drugs.
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Though almost all smartphones and wearables now have provision to track a user’s fitness levels and regimen, in a race as competitive as the Tour de France losing the so-called “power data” to a rival can be crippling. Any techniques or equipment breakthroughs a team has made to shave fractions of seconds off leg times is invaluable. So if hackers have infiltrated Team Sky’s reports, it could have a devastating effect, whether evidence of Froome doping is found or not. It’s fitness data hacking as industrial espionage.
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Cultural |
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Mecca worshippers stream their stories live on Snapchat
By Aishi Gani
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Worshippers in Mecca are streaming their stories live on Snapchat, opening up the Saudi city to non-Muslims online.
#Mecca_Live began to trend on twitter this weekend as hundreds of thousands of people campaigned for the mobile app to feature the city as a live story.
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From worshippers breaking their fast in the largest mosque in the world to streaming the call to prayer – the snaps provide an insight into a city that is closed to non-Muslims. The snaps were screengrabbed and shared widely on twitter.
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Although Snapchat chooses the locations it features – today showcasing London, Los Angeles and Brasilia – users on social media have recently begun lobbying for stories from places they want to see.
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What happened when two men walked through Moscow... holding hands?
By (BBC)
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The two young men stride hand-in-hand past some of Moscow's best-known landmarks. But it's far from a relaxed stroll - instead they are bombarded with a string of insults, culminating in a confrontation with very aggressive men who appear ready to beat them up.
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"I was shocked by the reactions... They were just crazy. Every five minutes we would get a bad reaction," Nikita Rozhdesev, one of the filmmakers behind the video, tells BBC Trending. "We didn't know that so many people would watch it, but we knew that our subscribers would be interested in this topic."
Rozhdesev says the group filmed for about two to three hours and stuck to tourist areas in the centre of the city. The couple (two actors who in real life are neither a couple nor gay) can be seen walking through Red Square at several points. He says that although they were fearful when they were confronted by strangers, they were concerned that if they went into more conservative neighbourhoods, the abuse they faced would have been much worse.
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Homophobic abuse on the streets, as revealed by "social experiments," is not just a Russian phenomenon. A similar stunt, with broadly similar results, was carried out by a YouTube prankster in New York last year. And a hand-holding experiment by two male BBC reporters on the streets of the English city of Luton earlier this year also provoked insults - although neither shows the level of violence revealed in the Russian film.
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UK radio campaign launched to stop girls joining ISIL
By (Al Jazeera)
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UK anti-terror authorities have launched a radio campaign aimed at stopping young British girls and women from travelling to the Middle East to join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.
The campaign comes after the high-profile case of three UK schoolgirls, who were caught on camera in February before they disappeared on their way to join ISIL in Syria.
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"You might be being told you'll marry a fighter and help him in his work, but actually you'll become the sexual partner of someone you haven't chosen and I'm sure you'll be the victim of abuse."
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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. |