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Overnight News Digest for Wednesday, March 22 (Special BIRTHDAY edition) [1]
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Date: 2023-03-22
Well, I thought I might get to watch the Former guy — aka the Orange Julius, aka the Cheeto Benito — do his perp walk for my birthday today. It was not to be, but there are still a bunch of fun stories.
Welcome to the pre-perp-walk Overnight News Digest.
..According to estimates released by the European Commission, around 53% of environmental claims made by companies contain "vague, misleading or unfounded" information, while 40% are "completely unsubstantiated." ...The new law, dubbed Green Claims Directive, will neither create a unified EU-wide label nor ban existing ones. Instead, it will harmonise the requirements that apply to the hundreds of environmental labels currently on the market. Adding an environmental label will continue to be a business decision at the discretion of companies. But if they choose to do so explicitly, they will need to follow the directive's guidelines.
T’S 6 P.M. and the pink-tinged skies turn black above Agolan, a village on the outskirts of Erbil in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. Thick plumes of smoke have begun to billow out of dozens of flaring towers, part of an oil refinery owned by an Iraqi energy company called the KAR Group. The towers are just about 150 feet from where 60-year-old Kamila Rashid stands on the front porch of her house. She looks squarely at the oil plant, which sits on what she says used to be her family’s land. ...As far back as 2005, the United Nations had estimated that Iraq was already littered with several thousand contaminated sites. Five years later, an investigation by The Times, a London-based newspaper, suggested that the U.S. military had generated some 11 million pounds of toxic waste and abandoned it in Iraq. Today, it is easy to find soil and water polluted by depleted uranium, dioxin and other hazardous materials, and extractive industries like the KAR oil refinery often operate with minimal transparency. On top of all of this, Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to climate change, which has already contributed to grinding water shortages and prolonged drought. In short, Iraq presents a uniquely dystopian tableau — one where human activity contaminates virtually every ecosystem, and where terms like “ecocide” have special currency. According to Iraqi physicians, the many overlapping environmental insults could account for the country’s high rates of cancer, birth defects, and other diseases. Preliminary research by local scientists supports these claims, but the country lacks the money and technology needed to investigate on its own. To get a better handle on the scale and severity of the contamination, as well as any health impacts, they say, international teams will need to assist in comprehensive investigations. With the recent close of the ISIS caliphate, experts say, a window has opened.
You’ve heard the expression, “Don’t take any wooden nickels”?
The London Metal Exchange revealed a surprising mix-up last week at a warehouse in the Dutch port city of Rotterdam. An operator for the warehouse weighed bags that were thought to contain 54 metric tons of nickel, only to find that they were filled with stones, according to The Wall Street Journal. ...Had they contained nickel, the bags would have been worth $1.3 million at current prices, representing 0.14% of nickel inventories, Bloomberg reported. While that means the mix-up will have a relatively minor impact on metal markets, it does call the security of the LME's contracts into question. "In an industry riddled with scandals, the LME's contracts are viewed as unquestionably safe," Bloomberg said.
Drug dealers have found a new way to destroy lives. It’s a scary one.
The Drug Enforcement Administration is warning that a powerful veterinary sedative is being combined illicitly with fentanyl, making it even more dangerous. ...Users of the mixture can be at higher risk for deadly overdose because unlike fentanyl, xylazine is not an opioid, and so the common opioid overdose treatment naloxone (Narcan) is not known to be effective in reversing its effects, according to the federal government. In addition to the risk of increased risk of death posed by xylazine, "people who inject drug mixtures containing xylazine also can develop severe wounds, including necrosis -- the rotting of human tissue -- that may lead to amputation," the DEA said in a statement.
The notion of the Big Bang goes back nearly 100 years, when the first evidence for the expanding Universe appeared. If the Universe is expanding and cooling today, that implies a past that was smaller, denser, and hotter. In our imaginations, we can extrapolate back to arbitrarily small sizes, high densities, and hot temperatures: all the way to a singularity, where all of the Universe’s matter and energy was condensed in a single point. For many decades, these two notions of the Big Bang — of the hot dense state that describes the early Universe and the initial singularity — were inseparable. But beginning in the 1970s, scientists started identifying some puzzles surrounding the Big Bang, noting several properties of the Universe that weren’t explainable within the context of these two notions simultaneously. When cosmic inflation was first put forth and developed in the early 1980s, it separated the two definitions of the Big Bang, proposing that the early hot, dense state never achieved these singular conditions, but rather that a new, inflationary state preceded it. There really was a Universe before the hot Big Bang, and some very strong evidence from the 21st century truly proves that it’s so. Although we’re certain that we can describe the very early Universe as being hot, dense, rapidly expanding, and full of matter-and-radiation — i.e., by the hot Big Bang — the question of whether that was truly the beginning of the Universe or not is one that can be answered with evidence. The differences between a Universe that began with a hot Big Bang and a Universe that had an inflationary phase that precedes and sets up the hot Big Bang are subtle, but tremendously important. After all, if we want to know what the very beginning of the Universe was, we need to look for evidence from the Universe itself.
x Grey glacier is in Southern Patagonia, Chile, here an enormous chunk breaks off
the underbelly appears dark blue as it is pressured by the sea to squeeze out air bubbles that scatter white light, bubble free ice reflects blue light
📹Laura Q. /LSpic.twitter.com/1gDr2twtBA — Science girl (@gunsnrosesgirl3) March 19, 2023
In addition to this being your Wednesday Night News Editor’s birthday, it’s the natal day of another Canadian Jew…
Star Trek's William Shatner turns 92 today. People with a history with the legendary science fiction actor celebrated his accomplishments across Twitter, and there are some pretty juicy tidbits about the actor's life embedded in the tweets. Live long and prosper, Shatner! Recalling one of the earlier moments in Shatner's life, one fan shared a family story about how her family attended the actor's bar mitzvah. Mazel tov! x One of my biggest claims to fame is that my Montreal-based great aunts and uncles attended William Shatner's bar mitzvah. Try as you might, you can never take that away from me. — Mollie Katzen (@MollieKatzen) March 22, 2023 Jimmy Failla, who wrote Shatner's monologue for "Gotham Comedy Live," recalled a funny memory. Failla asked the Shatner if there were any subjects to avoid in the monologue, and the actor said, "Kid, I'm 85, and I don't give a f**k." Now, we understand how the Futurama team got Shatner to say the lines that made fun of himself.
This is an open thread where everyone is welcome, especially night owls and early birds, to share and discuss the happenings of the day. Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, jeremybloom, Magnifico, annetteboardman, eeff, rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
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