The Overnight News Digest is nightly series dedicated to chronicling the day’s news of import or interest. Everyone is welcome to add their own news items in the comments. Tonight’s ad hoc OND collects news from around the world.
Guardian - Guatemalan migrant sent to same US detention facility where he nearly died
🇺🇸 🇬🇹 Immigration authorities who approved the supervised release of a Guatemalan man after he allegedly contracted a horrific gangrene infection in their custodyhave now returned him to the same facility where his family says he nearly died.
“Why can’t he come home?” Ángel Rosa’s 18-year-old daughter, Lorena, asked on Thursday upon hearing her father had been turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for deportation instead of being allowed to return to his family in Hyrum, Utah.
Rosa was first held at the Utah County jail in 2013 after he pleaded guilty to a felony criminal offense of illegal re-entry, and was transferred to ICE, which has a contract to hold immigrants there. In late 2014, he says guards put him in a cell with an overflowing toilet and refused to let him shower, which led to an infection of his scrotum that went untreated and caused his rectum to swell shut and then an intestinal infection.
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Wired - Zika Virus May Push South America to Loosen Abortion Bans
🇧🇷 🇭🇳 🇨🇴 🇸🇻 With no vaccine, no cure, and without even a reliable diagnosis, doctors are at a loss for how to protect their patients from the Zika virus. In the past year, the mosquito-borne disease has spread throughout Latin America, sparking panic because of a possible link to microcephaly—babies born with abnormally small brains. Without more information, medical advice so far has boiled down to this: Don’t get pregnant. So say official guidelines from Brazil, Colombia, and Honduras. El Salvador has gone so far as to recommend women do not get pregnant until 2018.
But most of these Latin American countries are also Catholic, so access to birth control is often poor and abortion is flat-out banned. “This kind of recommendation that women should avoid pregnancy is not realistic,” says Beatriz Galli, a Brazil-based policy advisor for the reproductive health organization Ipas. “How can they put all the burden of this situation on the women?”
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NYT - Researchers Weigh Risks of Zika Spreading at Rio Olympics
🇧🇷 With about 500,000 people expected to visit Brazil for the Olympics here this year, researchers are scrambling to figure how much of a risk the Games might pose in spreading the Zika virus around the world.
Infectious disease specialists are particularly focused on the potential for Zika to spread to the United States. As many as 200,000 Americans are expected to travel to Rio de Janeiro for the Olympics in August. When they return to the Northern Hemisphere and its summer heat, far more mosquitoes will be around to potentially transmit the virus in the United States.
Brazilian researchers believe that Zika, which has been linked to severe birth defects, came to their country during another major sports event — the 2014 World Cup — when hundreds of thousands of visitors flowed into Brazil. Virus trackers here say that the strain raging in Brazil probably came from Polynesia, where an outbreak was rattling small islands around the Pacific.
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NPR - 30 Years After Explosion, Challenger Engineer Still Blames Himself
🇺🇸 Thirty years ago, as the nation mourned the loss of seven astronauts on the space shuttle Challenger, Bob Ebeling was steeped in his own deep grief.
The night before the launch, Ebeling and four other engineers at NASA contractor Morton Thiokol had tried to stop the launch. Their managers and NASA overruled them.
That night, he told his wife, Darlene, "It's going to blow up."
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Euronews - Death camp survivors mark 71 years since Auschwitz liberation
🇵🇱 🇩🇪 Survivors arrived with wreaths at a former execution site on the grounds of what now is the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum.
Flowers and candles were laid at the site where thousands were executed by firing squad, under the windows of prisoners’ living quarters, before methods of mass murder in gas chambers were introduced by the camp’s German administrators.
“I experienced hell on earth, I’m scared to tell. I have seen human death, pain and suffering,” one survivor, Bronislawa Czeczulowska, said, showing a tattooed inmate number on her forearm.
“The fire from the crematorium chimneys, it is still embedded in the eyes of everyone who saw it,” said Jerzy Kucharski, who was 15 years old when he was in the death camp.
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Defense News - Nicholson Nominated as Next Afghan War Head
🇺🇸 🇦🇫 The Pentagon has nominated Lt. Gen. John W. "Mick" Nicholson as its next commander of Operation Resolute Support, the ongoing US operation in Afghanistan.
If confirmed, Nicholson would replace Gen. John Campbell in the role.
Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook announced the nomination Wednesday, while confirming that Nicholson would pin on a fourth star in the role.
Nicholson is currently the commander of NATO's Allied Land Command in Turkey. From October 2012 to October 2014, Nicholson commanded the 82nd Airborne Division.
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China Daily - Government set eliminating outdated capacity 'a priority'
🇨🇳 New ideas and concepts on sharpening supply side reform have been raised by Premier Li Keqiang at a symposium with economists and enterprise representatives.[…]
Monday's symposium stressed the importance of supply side reform, which is aimed at ending ineffective supplies, creating new types of supplies, transforming outdated capacity and releasing the potential of the demand side.
One government priority this year is to eliminate outdated capacity in the iron, steel and coal industries through market forces.
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SMH - Australia sinks on 'most credible' environmental index in the world
🇦🇺 Australia's global ranking has dived on an international survey that Environment Minister Greg Hunt had described as "the most credible, scientifically based" analysis in the world.
The 2016 Environmental Performance Index, released every two years by Yale University in the US, has dropped Australia's ranking by 10 places to 13th out of 180 nations in its latest update.[…]
The country's worst performance, though, came in the climate and energy category, where Australia was ranked 150th for its trend in carbon emissions for electricity generation.
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MercoPress - Tompkins widow plans to hand over thousands of acres to create national parks in Patagonia
🇦🇷 🇨🇱 The widow of American conservationist Doug Tompkins, who died last month while kayaking in South America's Patagonia region, says she'll build on her husband's legacy of protecting threatened ecosystems in Argentina and Chile.
Kristine McDivitt Tompkins said in a telephone interview from Puerto Varas in southern Chile that since her husband died at age 72, she has been working non-stop to permanently protect from development the millions of acres they acquired over a quarter-century.
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The Hindu - City paints ugly picture on second day of strike
🇮🇳 Trash littered the streets of the Capital on Thursday as municipal workers, including sanitation staff, remained on strike for the second day to protest against the delay in salaries.
Two of the three municipal corporations of Delhi – North and East – have not handed out salaries to most of their employees for three months now, though safai karamcharis have been issued wages for December last week.
The two civic bodies have been hit by a financial crisis and have failed to disburse salaries on time for about a year.
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Reuters - DuPont faces 40 trials a year over cancer tied to Teflon chemical
🇺🇸 Chemical maker DuPont will face 40 trials a year starting April 2017 involving plaintiffs who say they developed cancer from a toxic chemical used to make Teflon that leaked from one of the company’s plants in West Virginia.
The schedule laid out by U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus in the Southern District of Ohio during a hearing Wednesday is aimed at pushing the parties closer to resolving more than 3,550 lawsuits.[…]
The lawsuits center on claims DuPont used C-8 at a West Virginia plant for decades despite knowing it was toxic and had been found in nearby drinking water.
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LAT - Taliban targets a major achievement of the U.S. war in Afghanistan: the private media
🇦🇫 It was a cruel twist when many Afghans learned of last week's deadly Taliban bombing of a bus carrying workers of the country’s largest private broadcaster directly from the Tolo TV network.
The spread of private media has been one of the only clear successes in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led international coalition invaded in 2001 and toppled a Taliban government. Tolo, which airs a mix of news coverage and original entertainment, has dominated the market since its launch in 2003.
“We provided people with accurate, fair information and informed them of their rights,” said Shakeela Ebrahimkhel, a veteran Tolo reporter. “We also entertained the public and offered them reasons to celebrate and smile.”
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AFP - Gbagbo trial rekindles controversy in Africa over western justice
🇨🇮 🇳🇱 The groundbreaking war crimes trial in The Hague on Thursday of former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo has rekindled a bitter row across Africa over the international justice system.
With Gbagbo the first ex-head of state hauled into the dock at the world's only permanent war crimes court, some in Africa are lashing out at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for allegedly pursuing Africans alone.
The continent, they argue, instead should have its own court. "It leaves me a bit puzzled to see former African leaders dragged before the ICC," Babacar Ba, who heads a judicial forum in Senegal, told AFP.
"It's as if we Africans are incompetent to decide the law or lack the resources to judge our own people," added Ba.
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WaPo - Clay tablets reveal Babylonians discovered astronomical geometry 1,400 years before Europeans
🇮🇶 🇬🇧 The medieval mathematicians of Oxford, toiling in torchlight in a land ravaged by plague, managed to invent a simple form of calculus that could be used to track the motion of heavenly bodies. But now a scholar studying ancient clay tablets suggests that the Babylonians got there first, and by at least 1,400 years.
The astronomers of Babylonia, scratching tiny marks in soft clay, used surprisingly sophisticated geometry to calculate the orbit of what they called the White Star — the planet Jupiter.
These tablets are quite incomprehensible to the untrained eye. Thousands of clay tablets — many unearthed in the 19th century by adventurers hoping to build museum collections in Europe, the United States and elsewhere — remain undeciphered.
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Middle East Eye - Snow falls in Kuwait for 'first time ever'
🇰🇼 Snow fell on Kuwait on Thursday morning for the first time in the country's history, pictures sent to Middle East Eye show. Footage sent to MEE showed snow flakes falling in the Gulf state, where temperatures have plummeted in recent days.
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CBC - Legal pot taxes could add $5B a year to government coffers, CIBC says
🇨🇦 Call it Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's secret stash.
A new report from CIBC World Markets says Canada's federal and provincial governments could reap as much as $5 billion annually in tax revenues from the sale of legal marijuana.
CIBC economist Avery Shenfeld crunched the numbers using current estimates of Canadian recreational pot consumption, the revenue experience in U.S. states that have legalized, and other factors — such as prevailing "sin tax" rates on alcohol and tobacco.
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Mail & Guardian - Record levels for rhino poaching across Africa
🇿🇦 🇿🇼 🇳🇦 Around 1 312 rhino were poached and killed across the African continent last year. According to wildlife-monitoring group TRAFFIC, this makes last year the worst in recent history for rhino.
The increase comes during a time where South Africa has managed to stabilise its rhino poaching levels. Last year 1 175 rhino were killed in the country, a drop from the record of 1 215 in 2014. The country has the majority of the world’s rhino.
It is the first time in eight years that poaching levels in South Africa have dropped. But this has come at the expense of an increase in poaching in its neighbouring countries, such as Zimbabwe and Namibia.
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