As your faithful scribe, I welcome you all to another edition of Overnight News Digest.
I am most pleased to share this platform with jlms qkw, maggiejean, wader, rfall, JLM9999 and side pocket. Additionally, I wish to recognize our alumni editors palantir, Bentliberal, Oke, Interceptor7, and ScottyUrb along with annetteboardman as our guest editor.
Neon Vincent is our editor-in-chief.
Special thanks go to Magnifico for starting this venerable series.
Lead Off Story
Gateway To Hell: The Threat Of Ebola Grows Worse
Kalashnikovs cost as little as $100 in Port Harcourt, says Helmut Lux, an orthopedist and trauma surgeon from the city of Neckarsulm, Germany. The machine gun is said to be the favorite weapon of gangs in the Nigerian city. And they are used in street fights almost every day. "If 100 people start firing at each other," Lux says, "around 10 die and five wind up on the operating table."
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Despite having worked in Port-au-Prince after a devastating earthquake destroyed the Haitian capital in 2010, Lux was shocked by what he saw in Nigeria. "Port Harcourt is an extremely filthy and broken city," he says. "It's the gateway to hell." Now, the situation has become even worse. The city is threatened by Ebola.
By Friday, three people had died of the disease in Port Harcourt and more than 380 people were under observation due to possible infection. The 60 people with the highest risk of infection are currently under quarantine and 500 volunteers are measuring the temperature of the others twice each day and checking the state of their health. If a person starts to fall ill, then he or she is immediately quarantined to prevent further infection.
Even though the Nigerian authorities have responded correctly, it's in no way certain that they will succeed in halting the outbreak. "Everything will depend on whether all the contacts of the sick come out," says Oyewale Tomori, a professor for virology at Redeemer's University in western Nigeria and the rapporteur for the World Health Organization's Ebola Emergency Committee.
All the ingredients for a catastrophe are in place. Disease control experts are united in their fears that if the virus spreads to Lagos, a metropolis with millions of inhabitants and mass slums, the number of deaths in Nigeria could quickly eclipse the victim total in all of West Africa thus far.
derspiegel
World News
More Than 90,000 Still Living In Makeshift Housing As Buildings Deteriorate
More than 90,000 people still live in temporary housing in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, three and a half years after the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated the region.
About 80 percent of prefabricated homes remain occupied, due to delays in the construction of municipal housing for disaster-affected people.
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Officials with the Iwate Prefectural Government who inspected two temporary housing buildings in the coastal city of Kamaishi in August found damage to the surface of weather-beaten wooden supports used in foundations, because they had not been weather-treated.
The supports were reinforced with steel foundation posts, while deformed wooden entrance steps were replaced. The inspections were conducted to estimate the cost and time needed for full repairs.
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The government of the Miyagi coastal city of Ishinomaki included costs for repairs of moldy temporary housing in a supplementary budget for fiscal 2014, compiled in June. Some residents reported widening gaps in the structures of their rooms, a city official said, adding: “Such makeshift facilities have simple structures and the expected service life is unclear.”
japantimes
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France To Miss Deficit Target, Lowers Growth Projections
France's finance minister Michel Sapin has said the country will not achieve a 3% EU budget deficit target.
France's budget deficit will be around 4.4% of GDP in 2014, drop to 4.3% next year, and will not go below 3% until 2017, he said.
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Projections for growth were lowered from 0.7% to 0.4% in 2014, and down from 1.7% to 1% in 2015.
The government will maintain its current plan for 21bn euros (£17bn) of public spending savings in 2015 while not raising taxes during that year, he added.
France plans to cut public spending by 50bn euros by 2017.
bbc
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Scottish Independence: Everything You Need To Know About The Vote
The polls are tightening and decision day is drawing nearer. In this extensive interactive feature we hear from the key figures in the debate – from the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon to Better Together’s Alistair Darling – and the Scottish voters, about a decision that will be felt for generations.
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One of the central arguments made by the yes campaign is that independence will allow those living in Scotland to decide how that wealth is spent.
A key element of this is the debate around the worth and longevity of Scotland’s oil reserves. The yes campaign argues that the country’s growing economy, not based on oil alone, will be capable of sustaining welfare spending, including its pensions debt and the childcare plans that were a flagship policy in the Scottish government’s white paper.
Power to decide how to spend its entire budget would allow Scotland to scrap the spending on nuclear weapons that it is committed to as part of the UK – and spend the money on “bairns not bombs”, as one bumper sticker has it. Because Trident is based at Faslane this would leave the rest of the UK seeking a new location for its nuclear deterrent scheme.
Although just under half of the Scottish electorate opposes nuclear weapons, Trident has become one of the totemic issues of the yes campaign, along with the ability never again to be involved in a war like Iraq, and used as proof that if Scotland were to make its own choices it would make different choices.
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An independent Scotland would most likely never again be ruled by a Conservative government, independence supporters argue. The SNP is quick to point out that this does not automatically mean electoral success for its own party, but rather bolsters the argument that this referendum is not about party politics but about a once in a lifetime opportunity for the people of Scotland to ensure that at each and every future election they will get the government of their choice.
guardian
U.S. News
Judge Agrees to Delay Detroit Bankruptcy Trial
A federal judge agreed on Wednesday to delay Detroit’s bankruptcy trial to give the city and its fiercest opponent a chance to finish a major settlement that could speed an end to the city’s court fight over its future.
A tentative deal with Syncora Guarantee, a bond insurer that said its exposure in Detroit amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, was announced Tuesday, and Judge Steven W. Rhodes agreed to halt the trial, which began last week, until Monday so details of the deal could be worked out. A final settlement with Syncora could permit Detroit, the largest American city ever to file for bankruptcy, to emerge from court far more quickly and smoothly than expected.
For months, as the city reached deals with other creditors, including city employees and retirees, Syncora had been the most forceful and public critic, and its legal objections to the city’s plan for eliminating $7 billion in debts threatened to keep Detroit in litigation for months, even years.
Describing “an agreement in principle” between the city and Syncora, newly filed court documents emphasized the significance of the deal, noting, “if this agreement is finalized within this time period as we expect, it will profoundly alter the course of the proceeding and the litigation plans of the remaining parties.”
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A person with information about the negotiations, which have taken place under strict, court-ordered secrecy rules, described an unusual set of circumstances that ultimately became the basis of Syncora’s deal — one that will give the insurer a stake in vehicle tolls from the tunnel that runs between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, as well as some nearby land.
nyt
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St. Louis County Police To Put Body Cameras On Officers
Within two weeks, about half of St. Louis County police officers will be recording every call for service using tiny video cameras on their chests, glasses or collars.
Several companies are lending free technology to police departments in hope of landing lucrative contracts in an industry that surged after a national outcry about the Ferguson police shooting. In St. Louis County, 188 police officers will be using cameras in the north and central county precincts, as well as in Jennings and Dellwood.
About two dozen officers from the county police received cameras and training on Tuesday. Chief Jon Belmar said his goal is to have all 465 patrol officers wearing them as soon as possible.
For the next 90 days, the department will experiment with different types of cameras and approaches. Some officers will be assigned cameras, some will share among shifts. The experience will help officials decide which devices to buy, and how many.
“Given the events in Ferguson and the skepticism that’s been directed at law enforcement, we have to take steps to ensure the public trust,” Belmar said.
stlpostdispatch
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Andrew Kay Dies At 95; Inventor Pioneered Compact Computers
For a few years in the 1980s, Andrew Kay's computers were top-quality, low-cost and, for the day, feather-light..
The Kaypro II, one of the top-selling "portables" in America, weighed in at a mere 26 pounds. While elephantine by today's standards, it was a favorite of early computer aficionados and Kay became, albeit briefly, a high-tech titan. By 1990 he had filed for bankruptcy protection.
Kay, a charismatic inventor who scoffed at traditional management techniques and gave his factory workers and salespeople an unusual degree of freedom, died Aug. 28 at an assisted living home in Vista. He was 95.
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At Kay's plant in Solana Beach, Calif., he junked the time clocks. Salespeople were not forced to produce detailed expense reports but were trusted to spend their monthly expense allowances wisely.
Assembly line workers were paid as much as 25% more than minimum wage. After Kay noticed that the workers who put the final touches on a product at the end of the line seemed a lot happier than the ones at the start, he developed self-governing teams of six to nine employees who did it all.
"We regard management as basically an affair of teaching and training, not one of directing and controlling," he told an interviewer. "We control the process, not the people."
latimes
Science and Technology
Highest Resolution Ever With X-ray Microscopy
A record-setting X-ray microscopy experiment may have ushered in a new era for nanoscale imaging. Working at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a collaboration of researchers used low energy or "soft" X-rays to image structures only five nanometers in size. This resolution, obtained at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, is the highest ever achieved with X-ray microscopy.
Using ptychography, a coherent diffractive imaging technique based on high-performance scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM), the collaboration was able to map the chemical composition of lithium iron phosphate nanocrystals after partial dilithiation. The results yielded important new insights into a material of high interest for electrochemical energy storage.
"We have developed diffractive imaging methods capable of achieving a spatial resolution that cannot be matched by conventional imaging schemes," says David Shapiro, a physicist with the ALS. "We are now entering a stage in which our X-ray microscopes are no longer limited by our optics and we can image at nearly the wavelength of our X-ray light."
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In ptychography (pronounced tie-cog-raphee), acombination of multiple coherent diffraction measurements is used to obtain 2D or 3D maps of micron-sized objects with high resolution and sensitivity. Because of the sensitivity of soft x-rays to electronic states, ptychography can be used to image chemical phase transformations and the mechanical consequences of those transformations that a material undergoes.
"Until this work, however, the spatial resolution of ptychographic microscopes did not surpass that of the best conventional systems using X-ray zone plate lenses," says Howard Padmore, leader of the Experimental Systems Group at the ALS and a co-author of the Nature Photonics paper. "The problem stemmed from the fact that ptychography was primarily developed on hard X-ray sources using simple pinhole optics for illumination. This resulted in a low scattering cross-section and low coherent intensity at the sample, which meant that exposure times had to be extremely long, and that mechanical and illumination stabilities were not good enough for high resolution."
sciencedaily
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Next-Generation Stem Cells Cleared For Human Trial
A Japanese patient with a debilitating eye disease is about to become the first person to be treated with induced pluripotent stem cells, which have generated enthusiastic expectations and earned their inventor a Nobel Prize. A health-ministry committee has vetted researchers' safety tests and cleared the team to begin the experimental procedure.
Masayo Takahashi, an ophthalmologist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, has been using induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to prepare a treatment for age-related macular degeneration. Unlike embryonic stem cells, iPS cells are produced from adult cells, so they can be genetically tailored to each recipient. They are capable of becoming any cell type in the body, and have the potential to treat a wide range of diseases. The CDB trial will be the first opportunity for the technology to prove its clinical value.
In age-related macular degeneration, extra blood vessels form in the eye, destabilizing a supportive base layer of the retina known as the retinal pigment epithelium. This results in the loss of the light-sensitive photoreceptors that are anchored in the epithelium, and often leads to blindness.
Takahashi took skin cells from people with the disease and converted them to iPS cells. She then coaxed these cells to become retinal pigment epithelium cells, and then to grow into thin sheets that can be transplanted to the damaged retina.
nature
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Researcher Loses Job At NSF: Government Questions Her Role As 1980s Activist
Valerie Barr was 22 and living in New York City in 1979 when she became politically active. A recent graduate of New York University with a master’s degree in computer science, Barr handed out leaflets, stood behind tables at rallies, and baked cookies to support two left-wing groups, the Women’s Committee Against Genocide and the New Movement in Solidarity with Puerto Rican Independence. Despite her passion for those issues, she had a full-time job as a software developer—with 50-plus-hour workweeks and frequent visits to clients around the country—that took precedence.
After a few years, she found herself devoting even less time to those causes. By the late 1980s, she had resumed her pursuit of an academic career. A quarter-century later, she’s a tenured professor of computer science at Union College in Schenectady, New York, with a national reputation for her work improving computing education and attracting more women and minorities into the field.
That social conscience also led her to decide it was time to “give something back to the community.” So in August 2013 she took a leave from Union College to join the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a program director in its Division of Undergraduate Education. And that’s when her 3-decade-old foray into political activism came back to haunt her.
Federal investigators say that Barr lied during a routine background check about her affiliations with a domestic terrorist group that had ties to the two organizations to which she had belonged in the early 1980s. On 27 August, NSF said that her “dishonest conduct” compelled them to cancel her temporary assignment immediately, at the end of the first of what was expected to be a 2-year stint.
Colleagues who decry Barr’s fate worry that the incident could make other scientists think twice about coming to work for NSF. In addition, Barr’s case offers a rare glimpse into the practices of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), an obscure agency within the White House that wields vast power over the entire federal bureaucracy through its authority to vet recently hired workers.
sciencemag
Well, that's different...
Readers' Choice
The tornado that ripped through Kingsport, Tennessee, on July 27 damaged Jerrod Christian's house, leaving furniture and tools strewn about his lawn. Unfortunately, according to police who filed four charges against him the next day, some of the items (an air compressor, a welder, a ratchet, an air hose, a weed trimmer) belonged to his neighbors, who had long suspected (without proof) that Christian had burglarized their homes.
newsoftheweird
Bill Moyers and Company:
Elizabeth Warren on Fighting Back Against Wall St. Giants
The Massachusetts senator talks to Bill about taking on the entrenched political and Wall Street interests that have rigged the game against the rest of us.