One of teh Google's tributes to Sesame Street
Overnight News Digest is a daily series posting around midnight Eastern time with a host of editors. We acknowledge being led now by EIC Neon Vincent, former leaders ek hornbeck, and our founder Magnifico.
This evening: A spin around the world and around Utah, from your diarist based in Salt Lake City. All from newspapers, some of which the diarist has read or seen in person.
The letter J? It's the diarist's favorite letter ;-)
THE WAR ZONE
Turkish President Calls for Cooperation to Help Afghanistan
Turkish President Abdullah Gul has called for concerted effort to help Afghan government rebuild and ensure peace and order in the country.
"We cannot expect that the United States and the European countries, as the major actors in the region, can solve the problem on their own. We need to take responsibility as well," Abdullah Gul told an informal meeting of "Afghanistan's neighbors" on the sidelines of a summit of the Standing Committee for Economic and Commercial Cooperation (COMCEC) of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) in Istanbul.
"We need to re-think our presence in Afghanistan and ask ourselves this question: 'Why are we there and what is our strategy?' We all want to see an Afghanistan that is peaceful and prosperous. And that is why we need to concentrate our powers. Afghanistan's success will be our success, too," Gul said.
'Undeployables' sent to the Afghan front
As the Barack Obama administration debates whether to send tens of thousands of extra troops to Afghanistan, an already overstretched military is increasingly struggling to meet its deployment numbers. Surprisingly, one place it seems to be targeting is military personnel who go absent without leave (AWOL) and then are caught or turn themselves in.
Hidden behind the gates of military bases across the United States troops facing AWOL and desertion charges regularly find themselves in the hands of a military that metes out informal, open-ended punishments by forcing them to wait months - sometimes more than a year - to face military justice. In the meantime, some of these soldiers are offered a free pass out of this legal limbo as long as they agree to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq - even if they have been diagnosed with severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In August 2008, at TomDispatch.com, we reported on the deplorable conditions at the 82nd Replacement Barracks at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. There, more than 50 members of Echo Platoon of the 82nd Airborne Division's 82nd Replacement Detachment were being held while awaiting AWOL and desertion charges.
Report on N-assets mischievous and absurd: Gen Majid
ISLAMABAD: Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Gen Tariq Majid has dismissed as ‘absurd and plain mischievous’ a report by American journalist Seymour Hersh published in The New Yorker about alleged vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear assets and facilities.
He said Pakistan did not need any foreign help to guard its nuclear facilities because they were already well protected.
On Sunday, Foreign Office rejected the report and said it amounted to ‘nothing more than a concoction to tarnish the image of Pakistan and create misgivings among its people’.
General Tariq Majid said in a statement issued by the Inter-Services Public Relations: ‘We have operationalised a very effective nuclear security regime which incorporates very stringent custodial and access controls’.
The statement said: ‘As overall custodian of the development of our strategic programme, I reiterate in very unambiguous terms that there is absolutely no question of sharing or allowing any foreign individual, entity or a state, any access to sensitive information about our nuclear assets. Our engagement with other countries through the International Atomic Energy Agency or bilaterally is to learn more about best practices for security of such assets and are based on two clearly spelt-out red lines —non intrusiveness and our right to pick and choose.’
AROUND THE WORLD
Minchin faces Liberals backlash over climate change
LIBERAL Senate leader Nick Minchin is under fire from his own troops today over his “bloody unhelpful” and “uninformed” views on climate change and his decision to directly challenge Malcolm Turnbull's authority on the issue.
Senator Minchin told last night's Four Corners program on climate change, Malcolm and the Malcontents, that a majority of the party does not back Mr Turnbull's acceptance of the science behind climate change.
One Liberal frontbencher told The Australian that Senator Minchin came across as a "complete fruit loop".
"Border control is going along a treat and they come out behaving like total f...wits. They don’t know how crazy they look, because crazy people never do," the Liberal said.
"Ironically they have made it easier for people who want to pass this legislation because we cannot be seen to give in to these people.
IIRC, Labor is the ruling party and sits to the left, while the Liberals are the opposition and swing toward the right. All relative to Australia and no relation to US Politics.
Ex-poet laureate accused in war over plagiarism
FORMER British poet laureate Andrew Motion has been accused of "shameless burglary" by a military historian whose research he lifted and put into a poem about shell shock for Remembrance Sunday.
The former poet laureate yesterday insisted his use of quotations that he discovered in a history book belonged to a noble tradition of "found poetry" dating back to Shakespeare.
But Ben Shephard, an expert who produced The World at War for television, complained that the poet had been "extracting sexy soundbites" from his painstaking work on military psychiatry.
Motion's poem, published as a tribute to war veterans in The Guardian on Saturday, uses quotations from soldiers and psychiatrists whose accounts Shephard spent 10 years compiling. "He has no right to claim any sort of legal or moral ownership of the material," Shephard said. "There is nothing original in this at all."
'Shoot Them in the Head': World Cup Hosts Brazil and South Africa Crack Down on Crime
There are 50 murders a day in South Africa, the host country of the 2010 football World Cup. And Brazil, host of both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, also suffers from extreme violence. With a view to the high-profile events, the two countries are now attempting to crack down on rampant crime -- and are using ruthless tactics to do so.
An orchid, a laptop and a Bible adorn the desk of Pricilla de Oliveira Azevedo. She is wearing the blue uniform of the military police, but there is no weapon visible in her small office. Her territory is the Favela Santa Marta, a hillside slum in the heart of the southern tourist zone of the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro. From the top of the hill, there is a magnificent view of Sugar Loaf Mountain, the statue of Christ the Redeemer and Copacabana beach.
Until the end of last year, the Comando Vermelho, or Red Command, the city's largest and oldest organized crime group, controlled Santa Marta, a favela with a population of about 10,000. The street leading up the hill begins behind a German school. Child soldiers working for the drug mafia used to stand guard at access points into the slum, wearing T-shirts and sandals, with Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders and pistols stuck into the waistbands of their Bermuda shorts. Only a few steps away from a main thoroughfare, they sold cocaine, crack and marijuana.
Der Spiegel is all about the wall (see my first comment), but toward the bottom of their web page I found this story.
Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower
The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.
The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
The allegations raise serious questions about the accuracy of the organisation's latest World Energy Outlook on oil demand and supply to be published tomorrow – which is used by the British and many other governments to help guide their wider energy and climate change policies.
Male doctors earn £15,000 a year more than women, study reveals
Female doctors working in the NHS are paid thousands of pounds a year less than their male colleagues as a result of widespread discrimination and a "hostile culture" at work, a study reveals.
There is an average salary gap of £15,245 between men and women among the UK's 135,000 medics, according to a report by the British Medical Association. After excluding differences owing to age, experience and area of specialism, the study found that female consultants typically earn £5,500 less than their male peers and female junior doctors' pay is around £2,000 below that of their male counterparts. The research, to be published on Friday, is the first to investigate differences in doctors' salaries.
"Our results show that men and women with identical experience and expertise are paid differently – which suggests evidence of discrimination," concludes the report, which has been funded by the BMA, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Imperial College London and the Medical Women's Federation.
I just want equal legal, social, and economic rights for everyone born in the world. And my dream is taking heavy hits these days, with another blow from this story.
Phytoplankton flourishes in Antarctic open areas of water where ice retreated
This remarkable colonisation is having a beneficial impact on climate change. As the blooms die back phytoplankton sinks to the sea-bed where it can store carbon for thousands or millions of years.
In a recent report from the journal Global Change Biology, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) estimate that this new natural 'sink' is taking an estimated 3.5 million tonnes of carbon from the ocean and atmosphere each year.
Lead author, Professor Lloyd Peck from BAS says, "Although this is a small amount of carbon compared to global emissions of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere it is nevertheless an important discovery. It shows nature's ability to thrive in the face of adversity. We need to factor this natural carbon-absorption into our calculations and models to predict future climate change. So far we don't know if we will see more events like this around the rest of Antarctica's coast but it's something we'll be keeping a close eye on."
AROUND UTAH AND THE USA
BYU scientists take lawmakers to task on climate change issues
A group of earth scientists at conservative Brigham Young University has sent a stinging rebuke to state lawmakers on their recent handling of climate-change science.
The 18 scientists wrote the governor and legislators Oct. 26, urging them to "consider separating the science from the policy issues." They challenged lawmakers for giving the "fringe" position of a climate skeptic equal weight to that of the broad, scientific consensus that climate change is happening, largely because of human activities.
"We have no specific political agenda to support but agree that whatever action is taken, it should be informed by the best available scientific evidence," the scientists said. "We encourage our legislators not to
manipulate the scientific evidence to suit any political agenda."
The scientists sent the letter five days after the Public Utilities and Technology Interim Committee heard from Roy Spencer, an Alabama climatologist who doubts human activities are largely responsible for climate change, and Jim Steenburgh, chairman and professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah.
I so seldom want to cheer for anything at BYU (except the BYU Young Dems), I was so happy to see this story. Go professors go!
New ID law didn't greatly hamper voters
While a new state law may have forced Salt Lake County residents to fetch a driver license, passport or even a concealed weapon permit from home before setting out to vote in last week's election, it prevented only a handful of voters valleywide from casting traditional ballots.
The Salt Lake County Clerk's Office has confirmed only 13 cases of voters having to pick their candidates by provisional ballot because they didn't have the proper identification to vote electronically -- a tiny portion of the 1,300 provisional ballots cast countywide.
Those residents had until Monday to present a valid ID to their county clerk or city recorder to have their votes counted.
It's the not-so-staggering aftermath of a new state law that uses stricter voter identification standards to prevent fraud and ensure that mistakes aren't made at the polls in confirming people's identities. So voters now must present a photo ID or two forms of identification -- such as a utility bill, hunting license or paycheck -- that proves their name and address.
Of course it wasn't a big deal in a very low-key election in an almost totally Republican-controlled state. Fuck the Republicans - I want my civil rights.
Utah's Matheson may get Dem rival over health vote
A Democratic state lawmaker said Monday he may run against U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson because of his vote against health care legislation.
State Sen. Scott McCoy of Salt Lake City said he and other Democratic activists are disappointed and frustrated with Matheson for joining with Republicans in opposing the $1.2 trillion, 10-year measure that would expand coverage to millions of uninsured.
In a posting on his Facebook page, McCoy wondered publicly, "So is it time for me to form an exploratory 'McCoy for Congress' committee given Jim Matheson's vote against the healthcare reform bill?"
That drew scores of comments in support of the idea, although McCoy said it is much too early to decide if he'll enter the race.
Matheson is seeking a sixth term in 2010 and no Democrats or Republicans have filed to run against him.
The AP wrote this story from a short sentence on a politican's blog. Bad idea - needs second source. Idiotic idea anyway - the district is too R for McCoy to have a snowball's chance. Color me disillusioned again. Where is our fourth seat anyway?
