Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, April 19, 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: Ma’agalim by Jane Bordeaux
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Top News |
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UN drugs summit opens with worldwide divisions laid bare
By (BBC)
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A UN meeting on worldwide drugs policy has opened in New York in what has been billed as the most significant such conference in years.
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While some countries favour decriminalisation, others still punish drug-taking with the death penalty.
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Among the signatories were several former presidents, US politicians and businesspeople, who argued that prohibition has done more harm than good.
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Mexico's President Enrique Pena Nieto warned that harsh penalties "create a vicious cycle of marginalisation and crime".
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SS7 hack explained: what can you do about it?
By Samuel Gibbs
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SS7 is a set of protocols allowing phone networks to exchange the information needed for passing calls and text messages between each other and to ensure correct billing. It also allows users on one network to roam on another, such as when travelling in a foreign country. What can access to SS7 enable hackers to do?
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Since the exposure of security holes within the SS7 system, certain bodies, including the mobile phone operators’ trade association, the GSMA, have set up a series of services that monitor the networks, looking for intrusions or abuse of the signalling system.
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The risk of surveillance of your average user, given the billions of mobile phone users across the globe, is small. Those in a place of power, within organisations or government, could be at risk of targeting, as all that’s required to perform the surveillance is access to the SS7 system and a phone number.
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For text messages, avoiding SMS and instead using encrypted messaging services such as Apple’s iMessage, Facebook’s WhatsApp or the many others available will allow you to send and receive instant messages without having to go through the SMS network, protecting them from surveillance.
For calls, using a service that carries voice over data rather than through the voice call network will help prevent your calls from being snooped on. Messaging services including WhatsApp permit calls. Silent Circle’s end-to-end encrypted Phone service or the open-source Signal app also allow secure voice communications.
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Ministers back down on rule ‘gagging’ scientists
By Ian Sample
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Ministers have exempted thousands of scientists from a controversial “gagging clause” that would have prevented the academics from trying to influence government on public policy matters.
The move follows intense pressure from the scientific community to amend proposals drawn up by the Cabinet Office to stop organisations, mostly charities, from using taxpayer-funded grants to lobby the government or parliament.
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“If government or commerce, whether inadvertent or knowingly, put people at risk then scientists must be free to sound the warning bells without the risk of censure or legal proceedings. By rights the government should be granting a full exemption to all scientists sending a clear message that scientific knowledge is above petty party politics and is there for the betterment of all citizens,” he said. “What we have is a mess with an imprecise exemption which does not ensure that all scientists can criticise the government with impunity.”
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International |
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Soy boom threatens Brazil’s climate goals
By Jeffrey Hoelle and Peter Richards
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Brazil’s economy is teetering on the edge of collapse. The country’s political regime has been rocked by recent corruption scandals, and impeachment proceedings are encircling the nation’s leaders. And yet things couldn’t be much better for Brazil’s soybean farmers.
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After the international community and Brazil’s domestic environmental groups denounced large-scale deforestation in the Amazon in the early 2000s, the government adopted a battery of reforms to reduce forest losses.
Enormous new forest reserves were created and indigenous reserves were expanded. New environmental regulations were enacted to inhibit clearings for cattle pastures and soybean farms. Private agribusinesses worked with environmental advocacy groups, intervening in the soybean and cattle supply chains to discourage land clearing, especially for soybean production.
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Early signs of a new wave of deforestation in the Amazon are already appearing. Late last year the Brazilian government released data that showed a 16 percent increase in tree destruction over 2014 levels. The largest increases in forest loss were recorded in Brazil’s leading soybean-producing state, Mato Grosso.
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USA |
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The Science behind the DEA's Long War on Marijuana
By David Downs
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Disgraced Attorney General John Mitchell of the Nixon administration placed marijuana in this category in 1972 as part of the ranking or “scheduling” of all drugs under the 1970 Controlled Substances Act. Schedule I drugs are deemed to have no medical use and a high potential for abuse. Cannabis has been there ever since. “As of today, marijuana has never been determined to be medicine,” says Russ Baer, staff coordinator in the Office of Congressional and Public Affairs at the DEA. “There’s no safe, effective medical use, and a high abuse potential, and it can’t be used in medical settings.” This determination has come to be insulated by a byzantine, Kafkaesque bureaucratic process now impervious to the opinion of the majority of U.S. doctors—and to a vast body of scientific knowledge—many experts say.
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Marijuana’s placement in Schedule I did not happen in a vacuum, historians note. Overt racism, combined with New Deal reforms and bureaucratic self-interest are often blamed for the first round of federal cannabis prohibition under the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937, which restricted possession to those who paid a steep tax for a limited set of medical and industrial applications. (Cannabis was removed from the official U.S. Pharmacopeia in 1942.) “In segregated America newspapers were saying, ‘this stuff makes white women and black men have sex,’” notes historian Martin Lee, author of Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana.
. . . a classic catch-22, as the paucity of research is the direct result of a federal blockade on such research by the DEA and the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). “The reason we don’t have more data is because it’s quite difficult to study. The only legal source of cannabis is NIDA, which has a Congressional mandate to only study its harms,” Abrams says. Researchers also note that about two dozen countries including Israel, Canada and the Netherlands as well as several legalization states such as California and Colorado, have reams of scientific data on the safety and efficacy of smoked cannabis as well as other formulations.
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In 2014 lawmakers blasted DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart on the floor of Congress for failing to reply to questions about whether or not heroin was more or less dangerous than marijuana, which is also often used to treat pain. Both are Schedule I—yet cannabis has no obtainable lethal overdose threshold whereas 19,000 Americans died from prescription opioid overdoses in 2014 alone. Earlier this year a researcher at The Brookings Institution called for emergency rescheduling of cannabis to save American lives. . .
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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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Doron Talmon came to Tel Aviv to study music and that’s when she met the musicians that became “Jane Bordeaux” at the end : Mati Gilad and Amir Zeevi. They released a short EP and started to collect fans and followers to their great interpretation in Hebrew of the American folk-country music – something that never happened in Israel before.
Back to what's happening:
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Environmental |
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Just 7% of Australia's Great Barrier Reef escapes bleaching
By (BBC)
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Prof Terry Hughes from the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce told the BBC the link between bleaching and global warming was "very well established".
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The effects of El Nino, as well as climate change, are being blamed for the rise in sea temperatures that causes the bleaching.
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Tourism to the Great Barrier Reef generates $A5bn ($3.9b, £2.7bn) each year and employs around 70,000 people, the National Coral Bleaching Taskforce said.
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The current worldwide bleaching event, which is also affecting reefs on Australia's north-west coast, is predicted to be the worst on record.
The Australian Department of Environment previously said that state and federal governments were investing a projected A$2bn over the next decade to protect the reef.
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Science and Health |
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Cities have individual microbial signatures
By (ScienceDaily)
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Cities have their own distinct microbial communities but these communities don't vary much between offices located in the same city, according to a new study. The work, published this week in mSystems, an open access journal from the American Society for Microbiology, offers insight into what drives the composition of microbes in built environments.
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"This was especially interesting because even within each city, the offices we studied differed from each other in terms of size, usage patterns, and ventilation systems," said Caporaso, "suggesting that geography is more important than any of these features in driving the bacterial community composition of the offices within the ranges that we studied."
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Researchers found no significant associations between the office microbes collected and indoor environmental variables such as temperature or humidity.
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Technology |
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Social media cries foul over Twitter's new China boss
By Stephen McDonell
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So Twitter now has a managing director in China - a Chinese woman who used to be in the military - and online activists on the open side of the Great Firewall are freaking out.
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What's worried many has been the content of Kathy Chen's initial burst of tweets, like when she proclaimed to Chinese state television @cctvnews "let's work together to tell great China story to the World!"
People asked: Why would Twitter be wanting to work together with Communist Party controlled media? What would that co-operation entail?
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The appointment of Twitter's new China managing director is a money-making exercise. She's there to sell advertising, to forge commercial links. The company has already said publicly that it has nothing to do with any attempt to have its site un-blocked for a quarter of the world's population.
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Cultural |
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Malawi empowers children to fight sexual abuse
By Hannah McNeish
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In little over a year, and with only 50 instructors, small Kenyan charity Ujamaa has trained almost 25,000 Malawian children to fight the sexual abuse that is commonly committed by those they most trust.
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Backed by the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF, the Ujamaa network, which started in some of the Kenyan capital Nairobi's toughest slums, now extends to more than 250 schools across seven districts.
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"The most vulnerable age group is aged 9 to 13," said the centre's police officer Emmanuel Kalumbu, who only has the power to refer cases to the local police station and not to make arrests.
He sees the few child rapists that police hear about, arrest and have evidence to convict, walk free from trials or receive a sentence of a few months.
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Thole has already taught her "proud mother" and step-sister what she learned so that they can also benefit. In Kenya, half the female pupils had used their skills to prevent sexual assault within a year, and rape incidences in Ujamaa schools fell by almost half.
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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.