Welcome to the Overnight News Digest (OND) for Tuesday, April 07, 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 - proper respect is due.
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This diary is named for its "Hump Point" video: Godless by The Dandy Warhols
News below Aunt Flossie's hairdo . . .
Please feel free to browse and add your own links, content or thoughts in the Comments section.
Any timestamps shown are relative to each publication.
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Top News |
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US accelerates arms deliveries to Saudi-led coalition
By (Al Jazeera)
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The United States is supplying intelligence to the Saudi-led coalition bombing rebel positions in Yemen and will expedite arms supplies to the alliance, Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken has said.
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The Houthi rebels swept into the Yemeni capital Sanaa in September and have since tried to expand their control across the country. In February, they placed President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi under house arrest before he fled to his power base in the southern city of Aden and then to Saudi Arabia.
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The Red Cross warned on Tuesday of a "catastrophic" situation in Aden, as the rebels and their allies made a new push on a port in the central Mualla district of the city but were forced back by Hadi loyalists, witnesses said.
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More than a 100,000 people have fled their homes after the Saudi-led coalition launched air strikes in Yemen, according to UNICEF, the UN agency responsible for children welfare.
A spokesman from the agency, Rajat Madhok, told Al Jazeera that most of those who have been displaced are women and children.
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Stolen Credit Card Data Spreads Around the World "Staggeringly" Fast
By Kate Knibbs
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How do thieves share their stolen data online? Security firm BitGlass tried to answer the question by leaking a fake trove of profiles that included credit card info and social security numbers.
BitGlass placed tracking watermark on the falsified data, so researchers could see each time someone clicked on it. After dropping the bait (a few Excel files with different names) on seven darknet Pastebin sites and anonymous upload sites, all the team had to do was wait. At first, the data languished, sitting on the websites for a little over a week. But once it got picked up, it didn’t take long to go around the world. Write the researchers in their report:
The speed at which the bait was taken was staggering. In the first few days, the data had reached over 5 countries, 3 continents and was viewed over 200 times... by 12 days it had received over 1,081 clicks, and had spread across the globe to 22 different countries, in 5 different continents. By the end of the experiment the fake document of employee data had made its way to North America, South America, Asia, Europe, and Africa
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Taiwan rations water amid drought
By (BBC)
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Taiwan has begun rationing water supplies to more than one million households as it tackles the island's worst drought in years.
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Local media said the water level in Shihmen Reservoir, which supplies the northern area, was now at 24.56% of capacity, the lowest since it became operational in 1964.
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The island's current and previous governments, and the state-owned water company, are being criticised for not doing enough to deal with this problem earlier, our correspondent adds.
The government is now offering incentives to promote conservation, including discounts for reduced use and subsidies for installing water-saving taps or toilets.
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Microsoft seeks to recruit autistic workers
By (BBC)
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Microsoft says it wants to hire more people with autism in full-time roles.
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Announcing the new scheme in a blog, Ms Smith said: "Each individual is different, some have an amazing ability to retain information, think at a level of detail and depth or excel in math or code."
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Sarah Lambert, from the National Autistic Society, said: "It's encouraging to see a global company like Microsoft recognise the untapped potential of adults with autism.
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"Simple adjustments, like making job interviews more accessible and providing support to help those in work understand the 'unwritten rules' of the workplace can unlock the potential of a whole section of society."
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International |
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Malaysia passes controversial anti-terror bill
By (BBC)
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Malaysia has passed a controversial anti-terrorism bill, which the government says is needed to tackle the threat from Islamic extremists.
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Officials assure Malaysians that the proposed law cannot be used against people with different political beliefs. But Malaysia's Bar Council says this is a "false comfort" because the bill is vague.
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Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch said that by "restoring indefinite detention without trial, Malaysia has re-opened Pandora's Box for politically motivated, abusive state actions".
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Journalists, activists and opposition figures have all been targeted by the equally controversial sedition law, which regulates speech deemed to incite unrest or religious and social tensions.
Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, meanwhile, remains in prison after being convicted of sodomy - an act which is illegal in Malaysia but for which few are ever prosecuted.
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France declassifies Rwanda genocide archive
By (BBC)
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France has declassified documents relating to the Rwandan genocide, the president's office has said.
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The mass killings in 1994 claimed more than 800,000 lives, mostly ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus.
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The violence was triggered by the death of President Juvenal Habyarimana, an ethnic Hutu who was killed when his plane was shot down.
The genocide came to an end after Mr Kagame's Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) - a Tutsi-led rebel group - defeated government troops later that year.
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USA Politics, Economy, Major Events |
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Arkansas Will Force Doctors To Tell Women Abortions Can Be "Reversed"
By Molly Redden
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As conservative lawmakers pass a record number of anti-abortion laws, it is staggering to consider how many require doctors to tell patients information that has no basis in science. Five states now require abortion providers to inform women about a bogus link between abortion and breast cancer. Several states mandate that doctors say ending a pregnancy can lead to mental health conditions like clinical depression—another falsehood, in the eyes of most mainstream medical groups.
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Most drug-induced abortions require two pills taken a few days apart. The initial dose, of mifepristone, blocks the progesterone hormones that help sustain the pregnancy. The second dose, of misopristol, causes contractions that flush out the pregnancy. Delgado says he's stopped abortions by injecting supplemental progesterone between the two rounds of medicine. The evidence backing his discovery, however, is incredibly thin. . .
The injections might not only be useless—large doses of progesterone can actually be dangerous: "There can be cardiovascular side effects, glucose tolerance issues, it can cause problems with depression in people who already had it," Ilana Addis, a gynecologist who opposed the Arizona measure, told The Atlantic. "And there are more annoying things, like bloating, fatigue, that kind of stuff. It's an unpleasant drug to take."
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Alabama Bill Would Increase Workers’ Comp Benefits for Amputees
By Michael Grabell
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Alabama lawmakers have introduced a bill that would nearly triple the maximum compensation for workers who suffer amputations on the job.
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The Alabama bill would eliminate a cap of $220 a week that had been in place since 1985. It would raise the maximum benefit to 80 percent of the state average weekly wage, or about $635. Under the new formula, the most a worker could receive for losing an arm would rise from $48,840 to about $140,000 — a big increase, but still below the national average of $169,878.
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Several states in the Southeast, including Florida and North Carolina, have passed laws in recent years cutting off workers' comp benefits at or near retirement age. Others, such as Mississippi, have long limited permanently disabled workers to no more than nine years of benefits.
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Still, lifetime benefits remain the norm in the vast majority of the country under the idea that the most severely disabled workers do not get a chance to earn raises and save for the future and shouldn't become taxpayers' burden when they get old.
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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:
The Dandy Warhols have a history that seems to have been talked about more than absorbed. Their discography is spotty by anyone’s standards, and their currency was that of amplified apathy masquerading as something more meaningful or sincere, or at least cool.
I don’t know, do you know anyone that truly loves this band? I know people who dig on a song here or there. I know Igby Goes Down benefited greatly from their music. But they have put all their supporters and detractors in the same place: an annoying, somewhat painful purgatory that allows us much room to drift between applauding their strange, surprising beauty and their stuff that clearly exists and can be enjoyed by nobody except the Dandies. A band like the Dandy Warhols—hold on, I should drink a beer.
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The interesting thing with Dandy Warhols though, is they put out one album that does a pretty good job of discarding all the apathetic hippie nonsense, and for the most part, keeps things close to the heart. Or, at the very least, strums along into something worth singing along to. That album is Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia (2000). A strange, totally unexpected mutant twitch of an album that for the most part, completely betrays what we had come to expect form the group, which is of course a pretty and totally forgettable disconnect that is impossible to latch onto in any discernible way. Thirteen Tales DOES mean something to the world, and not in any ironic way. The band seems to be on the road revisiting this wonderful offering, and I had the chance to talk to the group about how this came about.
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Talking to Dandy Warhols didn’t do me much good. If you were expecting a great Q&A, it definitely wouldn’t do you much good, either. But perhaps that conversation, or lack thereof, is the logical continuum of Thirteen Tales. It lives in a strange and surreal world, where everyone is bumping into each other, but seems to have a purpose that stretches beyond the obvious linear destination. Does that sound stupid? Maybe, I don’t think so. But Thirteen Tales proves us both wrong. It’s living proof that beauty is easily lost, and that which is a slab of driving monotony can rapidly transform into something truly memorable, transformative. After talking to them, it’s impossible to see how this was created. But it’s probably best that way.
Back to what's happening:
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Environment and Greening |
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Tom Steyer launches effort to keep climate deniers out of office
By Kate Sheppard
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Tom Steyer’s climate-focused political group is already gearing up for the 2016 presidential race, announcing on Monday a new effort that will focus on putting Republican candidates on the defense when it comes to global warming.
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Through his NextGen Climate project, billionaire investor Steyer spent more than $74 million trying to make climate change a central issue in the 2014 midterm election. The group’s effort had decidedly mixed results: Of the seven races it targeted, NextGen’s endorsed candidates won in only three. But the group has maintained that 2014 was a success, since Republican candidates were forced to go on the record about their views on climate change.
“Climate really is playing a significant role in the national election and in battleground states,” said Lehane. He noted that 2014 was the “first time that climate had really been elevated to that level in the election, where folks who believe the science were able to use it offensively, and deniers were on defense.”
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The group thinks that 2016 will be an even bigger year for climate, given the higher turnouts in presidential election years and the role young voters will play in the debate. Polls have found that 80 percent of voters under the age of 35 support the actions the Obama administration has taken to address climate change, and even 52 percent of young Republican voters said they were more inclined to back a candidate who supported those climate efforts.
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Delaware family falls ill from pesticide poisoning at Virgin Islands resort
By (AP via Guardian)
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US authorities have determined that the highly toxic pesticide methyl bromide caused a Delaware family to become seriously ill at a US Virgin Islands resort, and that the chemical was used at the resort several times in the past year, officials said on Tuesday.
The US Environmental Protection Agency said it is contacting people including employees at Sirenusa resort in St John to determine how many others might have been exposed to the pesticide. It was banned for indoor residential use in 1984.
“Methyl bromide is a potent neurotoxin, so it really affects your central nervous system,” EPA regional administrator Judith Enck said in a telephone interview.
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The US Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation.
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Science and Health |
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Discovery of communication link between brain areas implicated in schizophrenia
By (ScienceDaily)
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The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays an important role in cognitive functions such as attention, memory and decision-making. Faulty wiring between PFC and other brain areas is thought to give rise to a variety of cognitive disorders. Disruptions to one particular brain circuit--between the PFC and another part of the brain called the thalamus--have been associated with schizophrenia, but the mechanistic details are unknown. Now, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory scientists have discovered an inhibitory connection between these brain areas in mice that can control the timing of information flow into PFC. This insight may help explain what goes wrong in schizophrenia and indicate a path to new treatments.
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The thalamus acts as a gateway through which information from other parts of the brain is collected and processed before being sent on to the cortex. This thalamocortical circuit is often fine-tuned by inhibitory neurons, which tamp down signaling between message-propagating excitatory neurons. Li and colleagues focused on connections between sections of the PFC and the thalamus called the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the mediodorsal thalamus (MD). They observed a process called feedforward inhibition, a mechanism in which one neuron excites a neighboring or "downstream" neuron, but also recruits a third neuron to inhibit the downstream target after some delay.
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"The current problem for treating schizophrenia is the lack of drugs that work, so the discovery of this mechanism for the disease is exciting," says Li. "This work is just the beginning of efforts to specify a neural pathway implicated in schizophrenia and what changes occur in this pathway."
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Games and social media: is there any scientific evidence for digital neglect?
By Andrew Przybylski and Netta Weinstein
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Comprehensive studies commissioned by the British and Australian governments, and conducted by a leading neuroscience laboratory in this country, have examined many of the parental and societal concerns regarding the effects of interactive media on the social and cognitive development of young people. Together these data highlight a number of plausible reasons for parents, teachers, and policy makers to keep an eye on digital technologies, but they do not identify harmful impacts from children’s media use. In other words, they make salient the ways by which media may present risks to young people, but do not provide empirical support that such technologies cause measurable harm to young people.
. . . we took care to balance the number of boys and girls in our sample and controlled for the sex of the young people in our more advanced models.
When we did, this relationship – the simple correlation between violent play and conduct problems – became undetectable. Young boys, compared to girls, are more rowdy in school and they are more likely, compared to girls, to gravitate towards violent games. Taking our three innovations together, simple steps to ensure high data quality, we did not find the anticipated link between gaming and aggression. Although we confirmed previous findings regarding the positives and negatives of quantity of gaming, it came as a bit of a shock that the general types of games played appeared to matter little.
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Why Earth Is Constantly Ringing Like a Bell
By Sarah Zhang
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Long ocean waves can actually travel thousands of miles from coast to coast, hugging the seafloor. The immense pressure of these waves on the ocean bottom generates the oscillation waves that makes the whole Earth resonate, according to computer models described by French scientists in Geophysical Research Letters. These oscillations are very slow, with periods of up to 300 seconds.
A second and better known mechanism explains the faster oscillations. They are the result of waves colliding in the oceans, generating seismic waves with periods of less than 13 seconds.
Together, the authors say two mechanisms account for the tiny seismic waves that continuously rock our planet. Understanding these small oscillations could help seismologists separate signal from noise, picking out ever fainter seismic signatures from earthquakes or nuclear explosions far away.
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Technology |
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India: City police to use pepper-spray drones
By (BBC)
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Police in one Indian city plan to use drones armed with pepper spray to disperse unruly crowds, it's reported.
The police force in Lucknow, the capital of northern Uttar Pradesh state, has bought a set of drones which can each lift 2kg (4.4lb) in weight, the Indian Express reports. "We are planning to use these drones to control unruly mobs by showering them with pepper spray," Senior Supt Yashasvi Yadav is quoted as saying. The method will be "less harsh" than a baton charge, he says, and police are hoping it will also be more effective. Drones are already used elsewhere in the state for aerial surveillance, but they haven't been used for crowd control before, the report adds.
While some social media users commenting on the story think it's a good investment, others say it will just make people try to knock the drones out of the sky. . .
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In Movie Piracy Case, Australian ISPs Are Ordered To Share Customers' Info
By Bill Chappell
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ustralia's Federal Court has ordered six Internet service providers to hand over information about people accused of illegally downloading and sharing the film Dallas Buyers Club online. The companies had initially refused a request to provide their customers' data.
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"Consumer groups say Australians are willing to pay for movies and TV shows but that the country has one of the highest rates of illegal downloading in the world because Hollywood makes the public wait, sometimes months, before movies are made available after their American release."
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"To uncover the alleged pirates, Dallas Buyers Club LLC, through Voltage Pictures, tasked German-based pirate-hunting firm Maverick Eye UG to identify those who were sharing the movie online.
"Maverick Eye joined torrent 'swarms' that were sharing Dallas Buyers Club and then tasked its software to log the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of those who distributed the movie without authorization and in breach of copyright laws. A total of 4726 IP addresses were identified."
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Cultural |
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Syria crisis: A brush with the brutal world of child refugees
By Michael Downey
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On a street in East Beirut, two small boys sit on the pavement, their heads between their knees, arms wrapped around their legs.
Around them, groups of people, laughing and raucous, spill out from the many bars, taking no notice of the now-common sight of Syrian child beggars.
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Only the younger of the two, Ahmed (not his real name), aged five, lifted his head. His six-year-old brother, however, was unresponsive and in need of help.
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Ahmed was sat in a wheelchair, wearing my jacket for warmth. Doctors asked him questions about his family. All he knew was he lived near the airport and there was no phone number to call. He was, after all, only five years old.
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He looked worried and asked when they could go - because if they weren't at the spot in the morning they'd be beaten.
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Tea Tuesdays: How Tea + Sugar Reshaped The British Empire
By Maria Godoy
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Tea was practically unknown in Europe until the mid-1600s. But in England, it got an early PR boost from Catherine of Braganza, a celebrity who became its ambassador: The Portuguese royal favored the infusion, and when she married England's Charles II in 1662, tea became the "it" drink among the British upper classes. But it might have faded as a passing fad if not for another favorite nibble of the nobility: sugar.
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The rise of tea and sugar as a power duo was a boon for British government coffers. By the mid-1700s, tea imports accounted for one-tenth of overall tax income, says Laudan, a visiting professor at the University of Texas, Austin.
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As for sugar? According to one analysis, Laudan notes, in the 1760s, the annual duties on sugar imports were "enough to pay to maintain all ships in the navy." A great deal of that sugar, historians say, was being stirred into tea.
Those tea-and-sugar monies helped supply the British navy with better foodstuffs, Laudan says, including vegetables when available. And that navy was key to spreading British might across the globe.
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As Smith notes, the fad for tea came in just as sugar was under attack and had started to fall out of favor. By creating a new and lasting use for this sweetener, tea helped buoy demand for sugar from the West Indies. "And indeed, it continued to support the expansion of slavery there," Smith says.
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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. |