Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, December 22, 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 - respect is due.
This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Bodysurfing by Hanoka & Azita
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Top News |
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One million children forced out of school in Nigeria
By (Al Jazeera)
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An estimated one million children have been forced out of school as a result of violent attacks by Boko Haram in northeastern Nigeria and its neighbouring countries, a new UNICEF report said on Tuesday.
The ongoing violence has led to the closure of more than 2,000 schools in Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon, the agency said. Hundreds of others have been attacked, looted or burned by Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates to "Western education is forbidden".
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Overall, some 10.5 million children are out of school in Nigeria - Africa's most populous nation - with 9.5 million from the northern part of the country, according to professor Kyari Mohammed from the Modibbo Adama University of Technology in Yola.
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Insecurity and the threat of attacks are also discouraging many teachers from returning to classes. In Nigeria alone, about 600 teachers have been killed since the start of the Boko Haram insurgency in 2009.
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"Teachers, students and parents are living in despair without any hope of restoration of education. In many places, schools will have to start from the scratch."
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International |
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Africa blighted by multiple Jihadist threats
By Tomi Oladipo
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. . .
The vast Sahel region, which spreads coast to coast across a band of northern Africa, is itself a haven for armed groups from bandits to global extremist franchises.
Among the latter is al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM), which seemed to be on the back foot, but has recently seen a mending of relations between its offshoots.
Its leader Abdelmalek Droukdel recently announced that AQIM was working with al-Mourabitoun - led by the veteran Algerian jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar - to fight against France and its allies in the region.
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Since 2006, al-Shabab has been the source of instability in the Horn of Africa but as fresh fissures become increasingly apparent within the group, this fragile nation could potentially be home to two global jihadist movements.
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African governments and their partners should not underestimate the ideological angle - assuming that jihadist insurgencies are driven solely by poverty, even though that is itself an important factor.
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USA |
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American Politics Is Fueled by Ignorance and Hatred
By Kevin Drum
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. . .
In a country that has become not just polarized, but also atomized; in which we root unwaveringly for our own political “teams” composed of those who look, think, vote and raise children exactly as we do; and in which we treat opposing viewpoints as motivated by malice or stupidity rather than honest disagreement, perhaps it is not so surprising that so many Americans have come down with a serious case of dictator envy, a longing for a political strongman (such as, say, Donald Trump) who will put our neighbors in their place and skirt the pluralistic niceties and nonsense of democracy.
I guess it was inevitable that this piece would somehow end with Donald Trump, since he's the ultimate mystery to my tribe of hypereducated lefties. Still, Rampell's point stands without him: if America's two major tribes think the other tribe is not merely wrong, but dangerous and morally degenerate, democracy gets a lot harder. After all, the underlying prerequisite of democracy isn't elections, it's the peaceful transfer of power. But that only happens if both sides consider the other fundamentally legitimate and neither side fears destruction when the other side governs. If you think that Republicans are trying to enslave women's bodies or that Democrats are secretly in league with Islamic jihadists, that peaceful transfer of power gets harder and harder.
We're nowhere near to losing it, and the political polarization we feel today isn't unique in American history. Unfortunately, modern media, both traditional and social, amplifies this polarization. If you watch Fox and MSNBC, you'd barely recognize that they were reporting about the same country. . .
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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:
Honoka Katayama, 17, and Azita Ganjali, 14, two spunky teens from Hawaii, play an amazing rendition of the upbeat classic on ukulele. They're so amazing, in fact, that the pair were named MVP of the 2013 International Ukulele Contest in Honolulu, and came in first place for the group division.
The dynamic duo -- who are "like sisters," according to their manager -- only started playing together before last year’s contest. They've been studying the ukulele since they were 10 and 5, respectively, and met at the Ukulele Hale studio in Honolulu where they take weekly lessons.
“They started out playing as solo artists, then they decided to enter the contest together,” their teacher and manager Jody Kamisato told The Huffington Post. After their win last year, they traveled to Japan to open for the popular Okinawan band Begin and have maintained monthly performances at the Hard Rock Cafe in Honolulu ever since.
Back to what's happening:
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Environmental |
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Climate change is coming for the Southwest’s forests
By Kate Yoder
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Southwest folks, prepare to wave farewell to your beloved pines. A new study predicts that 72 percent of the Southwest’s needleleaf evergreen forests will die off by 2050, and nearly all of them will disappear by the end of the century.
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And it could make climate change much worse. Chris Mooney at the Washington Post reports:
So many trees could die and decompose, in fact, that the study suggests that 10 gigatons of carbon — equivalent to 36.67 gigatons of carbon dioxide — could be emitted to the atmosphere as a result, in forests across the globe. That would amounting to a positive feedback that would worsen human-caused climate change; indeed, the number is pretty similar to one year’s worth of the globe’s current fossil fuel emissions.
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“This region of the U.S. has beautiful, old forests with historic trees like Ponderosa pine that you don’t find in many other places. A treeless Southwest would be a major change not only to the landscape, but to the overall ecosystem,” Rauscher said. “There is always hope that if we reduce carbon emissions, if we continue to address climate change, then perhaps these dire projections won’t come to pass.”
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Science and Health |
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Research Confirms a Link between Intelligence and Life Expectancy
By David Z. Hambrick
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. . . evidence suggests that genes may contribute to the link between IQ and living a long life. The results of a new study by Rosalind Arden and colleagues in the International Journal of Epidemiology provide the first evidence for this hypothesis. Arden and colleagues identified three twin studies (one from the U.S., one from Denmark, and one from Sweden) in which both IQ and mortality were recorded. (Twin studies disentangle the effects of environmental and genetic factors on an outcome such as intelligence or lifespan by comparing identical twins, who share 100% of their genes, and fraternal twins, who on average share only 50% of their genes.) They then performed statistical analyses to estimate the contribution of genetic factors to the IQ-lifespan relationship. The results were clear and consistent: genes accounted for most of the relationship.
Exactly what could explain the genetic link between IQ and mortality remains unclear. One possibility is that a higher IQ contributes to optimal health behaviors, such as exercising, wearing a seatbelt, and not smoking. Consistent with this hypothesis, in the Scottish data, there was no relationship between IQ and smoking behavior in the 1930s and 1940s, when the health risks of smoking were unknown, but after that, people with higher IQs were more likely to quit smoking. Alternatively, it could be that some of the same genetic factors contribute to variation in both IQ and in the propensity to engage in these sorts of behaviors.
Another possibility is that IQ is an index of bodily integrity, and particularly the efficiency of the nervous system. To test this hypothesis, in one study, researchers looked at the relationships among IQ, mortality, and performance on a reaction time test designed to measure the brain’s information processing efficiency. (In the reaction time test, the people pressed one of four keys on a response box depending on which of four digits appeared on a screen.) The researchers found that, once a person’s score on the reaction time test was taken into account, there was no longer any correlation between IQ and mortality. Reaction time explained the relationship between IQ and mortality.
These and other findings from cognitive epidemiology have potentially profound implications for public health. Along with factors such as family history of disease, IQ could be used proactively to assess people’s risk for developing health problems and early death. At the same time, this potential use of intelligence tests raises ethical questions. As intelligence researchers are quick to point out, IQ doesn’t reflect one thing—it reflects many things. This includes not only what you might think of as “native” intelligence—brain regions like the prefrontal cortex—but a myriad of “non-ability” factors. For example, there is evidence that a person’s beliefs about their ability to do well on an intelligence test, which may be tied to their ethnicity or gender, can impact how well that person actually does on the test. In turn, being labeled “low IQ” or “high IQ” may impact a person’s sense of self-worth.
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Cultural |
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Birmingham's ancient Koran history revealed
By Sean Coughlan
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When it was revealed this summer that the University of Birmingham had fragments from one of the world's oldest Korans, it made front-page news around the world.
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It seems likely the fragments in Birmingham, at least 1,370 years old, were once held in Egypt's oldest mosque, the Mosque of Amr ibn al-As in Fustat. Paris match
This is because academics are increasingly confident the Birmingham manuscript has an exact match in the National Library of France, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France. . . .
David Thomas, Birmingham University's professor of Christianity and Islam, explained how much this puts the manuscript into the earliest years of Islam: "The person who actually wrote it could well have known the Prophet Muhammad."
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Jamal bin Huwaireb sees the discovery of such a "priceless manuscript" in the UK, rather than a Muslim country, as sending a message of mutual tolerance between religions.
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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.