Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, April 12, 2016
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 - respect is due.
This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video:
The Land of Make Believe by Chuck Mangione
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Top News |
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Global leaders are very worried about water shortages
By Nathan Halverson
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Classified U.S. cables reviewed by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting show a mounting concern by global political and business leaders that water shortages could spark unrest across the world, with dire consequences.
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The classified diplomatic cables, made public years ago by Wikileaks, now are providing fresh perspective on how water shortages have helped push Syria and Yemen into civil war, and prompted the king of neighboring Saudi Arabia to direct his country’s food companies to scour the globe for farmland. Since then, concerns about the world’s freshwater supplies have only accelerated.
It’s not just government officials who are worried. In 2009, U.S. Embassy officers visited Nestle’s headquarters in Switzerland, where company executives, who run the world’s largest food company and are dependent on freshwater to grow ingredients, provided a grim outlook of the coming years. An embassy official cabled Washington with the subject line, “Tour D’Horizon with Nestle: Forget the Global Financial Crisis, the World Is Running Out of Fresh Water.”
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Back in Yemen in 2009, U.S. Ambassador Seche described how as aquifers were drained, and groundwater levels dropped lower, rich landowners drilled deeper and deeper wells. But everyday citizens did not have the money to dig deeper, and as their wells ran dry, they were forced to leave their land and livelihoods behind.
“The effects of water scarcity will leave the rich and powerful largely unaffected,” Seche wrote in the classified 2009 cable. “These examples illustrate how the rich always have a creative way of getting water, which not only is unavailable to the poor, but also cuts into the unreplenishable resources.”
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Poverty beyond the numbers
By (Al Jazeera)
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Although many public and private groups already collect data on a range of issues affecting poor communities such as nutrition, maternal health, or access to education, such information remains largely untapped and is rarely shared across institutions.
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When we rely on a single number to measure poverty, we misdiagnose the needs of poor people. In my home country, Paraguay, I work with one of the country's largest social enterprises, Fundacion Paraguaya, to provide microfinance, education, and training to thousands of our poorest citizens. We look at 50 metrics across six dimensions of poverty, including income, housing, education, and infrastructure.
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In Tanzania, where I worked for three years in rural communities, we helped villages in the Southern Highlands adapt our poverty indicators to the local context in order to tackle water, sanitation, and electrification needs.
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Moreover, if the World Bank's Commission on Global Poverty adopts multidimensional poverty measures, it will spur other organisations to produce and share more detailed poverty data. That will give aid workers a more comprehensive poverty map of the world, helping to boost the effectiveness of anti-poverty efforts everywhere.
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Cause of global warming: Consensus on consensus
By (ScienceDaily)
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A research team confirms that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by humans. The group includes Sarah Green, a chemistry professor at Michigan Technological University.
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"The public has a very skewed view of how much disagreement there is in the scientific community," she says. Only 12 percent of the US public are aware there is such strong scientific agreement in this area, and those who reject mainstream climate science continue to claim that there is a lack of scientific consensus. People who think scientists are still debating climate change do not see the problem as urgent and are unlikely to support solutions.
This new paper is a rebuttal to a comment criticizing the 2013 paper. Green is quick to point out that skepticism, a drive to dig deeper and seeking to better validate data, is a crucial part of the scientific process.
"But climate change denial is not about scientific skepticism," she says.
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International |
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Shanghai law uses credit scores to enforce filial piety
By Cory Doctorow
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Multiple generations of one-child policies have left China with a calamitous demographic crunch: a system that formerly relied upon large cohorts of descendants to care for their elders is now finding itself top-heavy with ever-longer-lived pensioners relying on dwindling cohorts of working-age descendants who have all but abandoned the Confucionist virtue of filial piety.
The country can't afford a robust state pension service for these elders, and their kids are refusing to support them. What is to be done?
In Shanghai, the local government has announced that it will add black marks to the credit records of working age people who do not visit or send greetings to their elderly relatives often enough, starting May 1.
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Luo said linking credit scores to filial responsibilities will ensure the law can be enforced.
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USA |
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The Pay Gap Is Costing Women $500 Billion Per Year
By Nina Liss-Schultz
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In 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, a law meant to close the wage gap between working men and women. But more than 50 years later, women on average earn just 79 cents for every dollar paid to men. And according to a new report by the National Partnership for Women and Families that was released before National Equal Pay Day on Tuesday, the persistent wage gap means women lose a combined $500 billion every year.
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The gender pay gap is even larger for women of color. African American women are paid 60 cents for every dollar paid to white men, and Latin American women make even less, at 55 cents for every dollar. All in all, the pay gap amounts to more than $10,800 in lost wages for the average woman each year.
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Wage inequality got national attention in March when five high-profile players on the women's national soccer team filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accusing the US Soccer Federation of gender-based wage discrimination. The players—who last year brought in their third World Cup gold medal and are projected to rake in $18 million in revenue next year—say they are paid four times less than their male counterparts.
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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:
Flugelhorn player Chuck Mangione is widely known for the crossover success of his catchy mid-1970s tunes. But his jazz credentials are rock-solid: His mentor Dizzy Gillespie once recommended him for a spot in Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. Mangione and bassist Gary Mazzaroppi team up with host Marian McPartland for some dynamic trio work in a session from 1999, including his famous tune "Feels So Good" and a few beloved standards.
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Chuck Mangione's first musical success came with his brother, Gap, as the Jazz Brothers while still attending the Eastman School of Music. At the time, Art Blakey was looking for a trumpeter to fill an open spot in his Jazz Messengers. He asked Gillespie to recommend someone, and Gillespie asked if he remembered Mangione from Rochester. Blakey did, and Mangione left to join the Jazz Messengers. He's always loved his hometown, though, and composed both "Rochester, My Sweet Home" and "The Boys From Rochester" for the city's 150th anniversary. In later years, Mangione returned to Eastman, where he served as director of the jazz ensemble and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music.
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Of his great talent for writing memorable melodies, Mangione says, "To do it always right, that is what music is to me." On Piano Jazz, Marian McPartland and Chuck Mangione team up to get his hit tune, "Feels So Good," just right.
Back to what's happening:
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Environmental |
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Four-fifths of China's water from wells 'unsafe because of pollution'
By (AP via theguardian.com)
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More than 80% of China’s underground water drawn from relatively shallow wells used by farms, factories and mostly rural households is unsafe for drinking because of pollution, a government report says.
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The ministry said that of those samples, 32.9% were classed as suitable only for industrial and agricultural use, while 47.3% were unfit for human consumption of any type. None were considered pristine, although water in wells in the Beijing area was rated better overall than elsewhere in the northeast.
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Water shortages are also expected to pose an increasing challenge to agriculture, with much of the arid North China Plain reliant on aquifers whose levels are falling fast. China’s major lakes are also heavily polluted, largely due to fertiliser run-off and the dumping of untreated factory waste.
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Part of the problem is that the Water Resources Ministry and Ministry of Environmental Protection have yet to clarify their roles and responsibilities in carrying out a National Groundwater Pollution Prevention Plan issued in 2011 and promised 34 billion yuan ($5.2bn) in funding, Kong said.
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Science and Health |
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Replacing butter with vegetable oils does not cut heart disease risk
By (ScienceDaily)
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The belief that replacing saturated fats with vegetable oils improves heart health dates back to the 1960s, when studies began to show that this dietary switch lowered blood cholesterol levels. Since then, some studies, including epidemiological and animal studies, have suggested that this intervention also reduces heart attack risk and related mortality. In 2009, the American Heart Association reaffirmed its view that a diet low in saturated fat and moderately high (5-10 percent of daily calories) amounts of linoleic acid and other omega-6 unsaturated fatty acids probably benefits the heart.
However, randomized controlled trials -- considered the gold standard for medical research -- have never shown that linoleic acid-based dietary interventions reduce the risk of heart attacks or deaths.
The largest of these trials, the Minnesota Coronary Experiment (MCE), was conducted by researchers at the University of Minnesota between1968 and 1973. It enrolled 9,423 patients in six state mental hospitals and one state-run nursing home. Its results did not appear in a medical journal until 1989. The investigators reported then that a switch to corn oil from butter and other saturated fats did lower cholesterol levels but made no difference in terms of heart attacks, deaths due to heart attacks, or overall deaths.
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Using the recovered data to perform analyses that had been pre-specified by the MCE investigators but never published, the team confirmed the cholesterol-lowering effect of the dietary intervention. But they also found that in the recovered autopsy records, the corn oil group had almost twice the number of heart attacks as the control group.
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Why linoleic acid-containing oils would lower cholesterol but worsen or at least fail to reduce heart attack risk is a subject of ongoing research and lively debate. Some studies suggest that these oils can -- under certain circumstances -- cause inflammation, a known risk factor for heart disease. There is also some evidence they can promote atherosclerosis when the oils are chemically modified in a process called oxidation.
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Technology |
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The Space Tech of Today That Could Power Stephen Hawking's Interstellar Craft of Tomorrow
By Darren Orf
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Stephen Hawking’s plan to create a starcraft that can traverse the inky blackness separating us and our cosmic neighbor is fantastically ambitious and filled with lots of “the tech will come” assumptions. But at its core, the technology that Hawking and billionaire Yuri Milner want to use to create the ship is already here. It’s just not quite at the level of development that it needs to be.
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One of the major issues is that we’ve reached the limits of silicon. Intel has been developing silicon-germanium chips, but the company still has a way to go before such chips becoming available. And all this equipment needs to weigh less than a few grams. So now we’re talking about a far-flung future.
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In order for this teeny package of sensors to arrive at its destination 4.3 light years away, you need something to power it ,and the project has opted for lightsails. The choice makes sense, since the lightweight material cuts down on weight, requires no chemical thrust, and uses a photon’s energy and momentum by reflecting light.
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The final challenge is propelling the Starshot up to 20 percent the speed of light. NASA is already funding work by Phillip Lubin, a physicist at University of California, Santa Barbara. His project, known as the Directed Energy Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration, looks at how lasers could push space-faring vehicles faster than ever before. With this technique, according to Lubin, we could send 220-pound satellites to Mars in just three days.
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Cultural |
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Inside a Western Town That Refuses to Quit Coal
By Elizabeth Harball
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At his City Hall desk, Mayor John Williams often used the word “value” when describing Colstrip. He produced a document showing two of the plant’s four coal-fired units provide about $14.2 million in tax revenue to state and local governments in Montana—dollars that help fund Colstrip’s history museum, recreation center, golf course, schools and 32 colorful playgrounds.
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But in addition to paying its workers about $50 million annually and generating enough electricity to power about 1.5 million homes across the Pacific Northwest, U.S. EPA reports that the 2,094-megawatt Colstrip Generating Station emits nearly 15 million metric tons of CO2 per year, placing it among the top 20 carbon-producing power plants in the United States.
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Colstrip is now a potent political symbol in Montana. Republican gubernatorial candidate Greg Gianforte is attacking the sitting Democratic governor’s approach to both the Washington legislation and the Clean Power Plan (ClimateWire, March 10). But although he acknowledges climate change as a threat, Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock supports Montana’s legal action against the EPA climate rule and asked Washington Gov. Inslee to veto the bill.
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Hedges suggested Colstrip’s residents could find jobs in the remediation work that will be needed if the units were shut down. She and others have also proposed Colstrip explore less carbon-intensive ways to send power down the valuable twin, 500-kilovolt transmission lines originating at the plant.
But Colstrip’s residents bristle at any suggestion of diversification. Local business advocate James Atchison, who runs the nonprofit SouthEastern Montana Development Corp., said he is weary of reporters asking about Colstrip’s “Plan B.”
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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.