Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Doctor RJ, rfall, JML9999 and Man Oh Man with guest editors annetteboardman and Chitown Kev. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw.
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 each day near 12:00AM Eastern Time.
Today's featured story is the fallout from the disaster in
Mecca during the hajj. The story comes from the BBC:
Hajj Disaster Fallout Puts Pressure on the Saudis
By Sebastian Usher BBC Arab affairs editor
It is a matter of immense prestige for the Saudi royal family that it hosts the Hajj. Saudi kings have proudly adopted the title of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.
But the honour carries a heavy responsibility too.
The Saudis feel they have lived up to this by spending billions on expanding Mecca and Medina and improving the transport and infrastructure to try to ensure that the huge mass of humanity that converges on Islam's holiest sites is able to move as smoothly and safely as possible.
But a tragedy on this scale calls into question Saudi Arabia's ability to manage such an extraordinary logistical challenge.
In other strikingly awful news, the
BBC also has a recent count of the number of refugees pouring into Europe:
Europe gets 8,000 refugees daily - UN
A daily flow of about 8,000 refugees to Europe is likely to continue, the United Nations warns.
The figure came from UN regional coordinator for refugees, Amin Awad, in comments quoted by Reuters news agency.
More than 5,000 refugees - many from Syria or Iraq - arrive daily in Greece.
That flow could continue during the winter if the weather remains good and the borders open, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) told the BBC.
Follow me below the somersaulting tangelos for some calmer but still interesting news you might have missed from around the world.
A bit of good news for a change -- The Guardian's Simon Allison on recent events in Burkina Faso:
How the people of Burkina Faso foiled a military coup
With arrested leaders reinstated and elections back on track, analysts say negotiated deal is a victory for democracy
If there is one thing that Burkina Faso has proved, it is that the country has an almost unlimited capacity to confound the predictions of even the most seasoned observers.
When citizens protested against then president Blaise Compaoré last year, no one expected the mass movement to work – or to see the much-feared Compaoré, who had clung to power for 27 years, retreat into exile. And last week, when the head of the presidential guard arrested the interim leadership and declared himself in charge just three weeks before planned elections, few thought that General Gilbert Diendéré would be forced out within the week.
Yet this is exactly what happened.
A few stories about political art from around the world:
From The Guardian and written by Ellie Violet Bramley:
How a Beirut graffiti artist is using his murals to try to unite a fragmented city
Yazan Halwani is a young Beiruti artist who paints murals of revered Lebanese and Arab figures on prominent walls in a bid to help overcome sectarianism in this fragmented city. “What I try to do,” he explains down a fuzzy line from Beirut, “is write the stories of the city, on its own walls – creating a memory for the city.”
The Lebanese civil war had officially ended a few years before Halwani was born in 1993, but it continued to shape the Beirut he grew up in. “You could actually feel the remnants of the war in the city. Buildings had been destroyed but, most importantly, you could feel it in the political landscape and in the people.”
In Europe, a picture show about
Pussy Riot rehearsing to perform at Dismaland (Banksy's amusement park):
Pussy Riot rehearse for Dismaland concert finale – in pictures
The Russian group rehearse their performance to mark the closure of Banksy’s ‘bemusement’ park in Weston-super-Mare. The practice, which choreographs 25 actors and martial arts fighters in full police riot gear, took place at The Laundry
Food:
As we head into the weekend it is time to fantasize about travel, courtesy of Agence France Presse, and author Henry Morales Arana:
Guatemala's Mayan heritage lives on in spicy pepian
Guatemala City (AFP) - The smells of a bygone era waft through the air as Elsa Morales tosses an ancient Mayan spice on her sizzling grill to make a batch of pepian stew.
The meaty dish is an explosion of flavors that combines tastes from the New World and the Old -- the history of Guatemala on a plate, but with less bitterness and more spice.
Pepian blends foods brought from Europe by the Spanish conquistadors, like onion, sesame, cinnamon, and coriander, with the key ingredient: an indigenous spice called pepitoria, made by roasting and grinding the seeds of a native squash.
The dish is a cultural cornerstone in Guatemala, despite the impoverished Central American country's sometimes uneasy relationship with its Mayan heritage.
Amanda
Ruggeri writes about seaweed eating in the northern islands of Britain (from the BBC):
North Ronaldsay sheep eat seaweed and little else
Living on an isolated Scottish island, and prevented from venturing onto inland pastures, these sheep have adopted an unconventional diet
Under the shadow of two lighthouses, sheep graze along the sea-swept coastline of North Ronaldsay. But these are no ordinary sheep, and newcomers to the island may be surprised. Instead of munching grass, these sheep eat seaweed.
North Ronaldsay is the most remote of the 70 islands of Orkney, which lie north of the Scottish mainland, and the sheep outnumber the people. From the moment the tide begins to go out, dozens of sheep move nimbly among the treacherous, wet rocks, delicately foraging.
Their appetite for algae is not just a quirky behaviour. It has reshaped their bodies and their lifestyles. In fact the sheep are almost unique: aside from a single kind of lizard from the Galápagos Islands, they may be the only animals in the world that can survive entirely on seaweed.
Climate:
From France comes this AP story (via the Washington Post) about global warming (AKA climate change):
Skiing, climbing, global warming: French Alps show dilemma
By Lori Hinnant | AP
PARIS — The Alps are the birthplace of downhill skiing and a crucible for mountain climbing — but now the French government is trying to help their winter tourist towns adapt to a warming world.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls visited the Mer de Glace (the Sea of Ice) Friday on Mont Blanc, where the retreating glacier has been documented for more than a century, through water colors painted before the invention of the still camera, black-and-white photos depicting a then-modern steam locomotive chuffing alongside the ice and today’s high-definition satellite photos.
“The Mer de Glace reveals the extent of climate change, and, to the naked eye,” said Valls. “The time has come to mobilize.”
The Independent.ca (news from Newfoundland and Labrador) also has an article about climate issues:
Gwynne Dyer was right: climate change is making us sick and desperate
By: Perla Hernandez
As the planet continues to warm, climate change is posing a growing threat to human health and global insecurity, as the Newfoundland author wrote in his 2009 book Climate Wars. If current climate commitments are an indication, however, don’t expect an adequate solution in Paris this December unless countries make short-term commitments to cope with the climate crisis.
In 2009 I sat through a Gwynne Dyer lecture in Corner Brook. I recall feeling alarmed as the Newfoundland-born author and journalist laid out the apocalyptic scenario detailed in his book Climate Wars: extreme weather—precipitated by global warming—would lead to widespread insecurity, and as a result people and nations would be forced to compete for scarce and diminishing resources like food and water.
Fast-forward six years to 2015 and we are already beginning to see the grim impacts extreme weather events and temperatures have on human security and human health.
Arts too, and energy issues from the Guardian. Seven radio dramas coming from the BBC about oil:
The Price of Oil: New season of Radio 4 plays explores the history of oil
Nicolas Kent’s series of seven new dramas follow the politics, power and corruption behind the oil that has shaped the modern world
by John Vidal
In the 150 years since the emergence of the modern petroleum industry, oil has saturated cultures and shaped how billions of people live. It’s driven dreams of power and wealth, transformed economies, fuelled our transport, made our plastics, sent us to war, polluted our planet and could end all our days with climate change. It’s remarkable then, in this Age of Oil, that it’s been so little represented in fiction, and especially theatre.
“Oil is so woven into our lives,” says Nicolas Kent, the former director of the Tricycle theatre in north London, who has struck a gusher with a series - devised with others - of seven separate radio plays to run every day for a week on BBC Radio 4. “Oil has made so many people rich - the Nobels, the Gulbenkians, the Rockefellers. It has made our age,” he says.
The seven - a nod possibly to the seven oil companies which formed the infamous “Consortium for Iran” cartel which dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s – switch from Alaska to Iran by way of Nigeria, Kuwait, Iraq and Britain. They are linked by corruption, politics and history.
Weather also a bit further afield via
planetary.org:
Towards a Jupiter Weather Forecast
Posted by Leigh Fletcher
This article was originally posted on Leigh Fletcher's blog and is reposted here [planetary.org] with permission.
Trying to keep track of the ever-changing face of Jupiter is a pretty big challenge, given that it is prone to unexpected outbursts of spots, plumes and weird meteorological activity, in addition to large-scale variations between the ever-present belts and zones. Far from having a static and unchanging appearance, Jupiter is a dynamic world that can fascinate and surprise every time we turn our telescopes towards it.
Researchers here on planet 3 have only just begun to investigate the enormous forces and energy shaping the colourful bands that we see, and for some of us (cough cough) it's a life-long process of trying to understand what's going on deep within planet number 5. For that ambitious goal, we'll need to throw our whole arsenal of atmospheric science at the problem - cloud microphysics and haze formation; thermochemistry, photochemistry and ion chemistry; meteorology, dynamics and circulation; and many other strands of natural science. These are all diverse pieces of a puzzle that, when assembled into a whole, will allow us to understand the changing face of Jupiter, with implications for how atmospheres 'work' throughout our solar system.
Speaking of space, the BBC asks the
question"Who owns outer space?":
Who owns outer space?
By Yasmin Ali
When space crops up in conversation, ownership does not immediately spring to mind. But as the human race continues to advance in this field, and with commercial space enterprises just around the corner, questions about power politics and their interaction with space exploration must be asked and answered.
Neil Armstrong famously planted a US flag on the Moon in 1969. This gesture may have implied territorial ownership, but was purely symbolic because of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.
129 countries, including China, Russia, the UK and the US, have committed to this treaty, which is overseen by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.