Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, 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 12:00 AM Eastern Time.
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BBC
Philippines: Duterte vows to bring back death penalty
Philippines President-elect Rodrigo Duterte has vowed to reintroduce capital punishment and give security forces permission to shoot to kill.
The controversial policies are the latest in a series from the soon-to-be leader, including bans on alcohol and smoking and a curfew for children.
He has also promised to turn the presidential palace into a hospital.
Mr Duterte was nicknamed "The Punisher" for his record as the crime-crushing mayor of the southern town of Davao.
More than 1,000 criminals were killed by security forces in Davao during Mr Duterte's stewardship.
The Philippines abolished capital punishment in 2006.
Speaking at a press conference in the town, Mr Duterte, 71, said: "What I will do is to urge Congress to restore the death penalty by hanging."
He said permission to shoot to kill would be given for organised crime figures and people resisting arrest.
BBC
French female ministers decry sexual harassment
Seventeen women who have served as ministers in France say they will no longer be silent about sexual harassment in politics.
All 17 signatories to the declaration are current or former ministers.
Among them is Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund and France's former finance minister.
On Monday, the deputy speaker of the National Assembly, Denis Baupin, resigned over sexual harassment claims, which he denies.
In the declaration, the women call for a toughening of the law against sexual harassment, as well as specialist desks set up in police stations to deal with such complaints.
Examples of some of the sexual harassment suffered by the women are also given in the article.
It explains that Fleur Pellerin, who was culture minister in Francois Hollande's Socialist government from 2014 until this February this year, rarely suffered harassment until she was appointed to office.
After her first appointment in government, she was asked by a male journalist if she was given the job "because you are a beautiful woman".
BBC
Nelson Mandela: CIA tip-off led to 1962 Durban arrest
Nelson Mandela's arrest in 1962 came as a result of a tip-off from an agent of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), a report says.
The revelations, made in the Sunday Times newspaper, are based on an interview with ex-CIA agent Donald Rickard shortly before he died.
Mandela served 27 years in jail for resisting white minority rule before being released in 1990.
He was subsequently elected as South Africa's first black president.
Rickard, who died earlier this year, was never formally associated with the CIA but worked as a diplomat in South Africa before retiring in the late 70s.
The interview was conducted by British film director John Irvin, who has made a film, Mandela's Gun, about his brief career as an armed rebel, the Sunday Times said.
The events leading up the the arrest of Nelson Mandela, on a dark night near Durban in 1962, have always been murky. In the era of Cold War politics, Mandela, then leader of the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC), was considered a terrorist and a threat to the West.
Climate
The Guardian
April breaks global temperature record, marking seven months of new highs
April 2016 was the hottest April on record globally – and the seventh month in a row to have broken global temperature records.
The latest figures smashed the previous record for April by the largest margin ever recorded.
It makes three months in a row that the monthly record has been broken by the largest margin ever, and seven months in a row that are at least 1C above the 1951-80 mean for that month. When the string of record-smashing months started in February, scientists began talking about a “climate emergency”.
Figures released by Nasa over the weekend show the global temperature of land and sea was 1.11C warmer in April than the average temperature for April during the period 1951-1980.
It all but assures that 2016 will be the hottest year on record, and probably by the largest margin ever.
L A Times
A 'global terrorist' comes in from the cold: Afghan warlord was ally of CIA, then Osama bin Laden
He was a CIA ally against the Soviet Union, a friend of Osama bin Laden and a ruthless insurgent leader whose forces killed thousands of civilians during the Afghan civil war.
Now the inveterate militant Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is trying to open a new chapter by making peace with the Afghan government.
Hekmatyar, the leader of the Hezb-i-Islami militant organization, is reportedly close to a truce that would end nearly two decades in exile for one of the most enduring and controversial figures in the long Afghan conflict.
Now in his 60s, Hekmatyar has been exiled since the Taliban came to power in 1996 and drove him out of the country. Hezb-i-Islami is often described as the second largest insurgent group in Afghanistan, but his fighters have little presence on the battlefield and many of Hekmatyar’s former loyalists have defected to the much larger Taliban.
Reuters
Islamic State on the defensive, territory shrinking in Syria and Iraq: U.S. official
Islamic State has not gained significant ground since it took the Iraqi city of Ramadi a year ago, which it then lost in December, as the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq and Syria has been helped by better intelligence and better equipped local forces, a senior U.S. official said on Sunday.
Islamic State "is shrinking so they are very much on the defensive," Brett McGurk, U.S. President Barack Obama's special envoy in the fight against Islamic State, told a news conference in Amman.
Islamic State controls the cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria and is proving a potent threat abroad, claiming credit for major attacks in Paris in November and Brussels in March.
McGurk said that U.S.-led coalition effort to capture Mosul and Raqqa was making progress.
"We are doing precision strikes in Mosul almost every day," he added. "There is constant synchronized pressure," he said.
OTOH
Reuters
Islamic State Yemen suicide bomber kills 25 police recruits: medics
A suicide bomber killed at least 25 new recruits inside a police compound in the southern Yemeni city of Mukalla on Sunday in an attack claimed by Islamic State, medical and security sources said.
The victims were queuing up to register when the bomb, which wounded 25 others, went off, the sources said.
It was the second deadly blast in four days to hit the city, a hub for al Qaeda before the militant group was pushed out last month in an offensive by Yemeni troops backed by a Saudi-led coalition.
In a message on its online news agency Amaq, Islamic State said Sunday's attacker was a "martrydom-seeker" who had detonated his explosive belt. It said around 40 died in the attack.
The city's security director, Mubarak al-Awthaban, who was at a nearby office when the suicide bomber struck the Fowa camp in the southern part of Mukalla, survived, security sources said.
Christian Science Monitor
Five Boko Haram leaders captured, dozens of hostages freed
YAOUNDE, CAMEROON — The multinational forces fighting the Islamic extremists of Boko Haram have arrested five of the group's leaders and freed dozens of captive women and children, Cameroon's government announced Saturday.
The raids targeting Boko Haram bases in the northern Madawaya forest earlier this month freed 28 children and at least 18 women, government spokesman Issa Tchiroma said.
Boko Haram had set up camp in the forest after fleeing another military operation in neighboring Nigeria and had been training captive young girls and women as suicide bombers, he said.
N Y Times
Al Qaeda Turns to Syria, With a Plan to Challenge ISIS
WASHINGTON — Al Qaeda’s top leadership in Pakistan, badly weakened after a decade of C.I.A. drone strikes, has decided that the terror group’s future lies in Syria and has secretly dispatched more than a dozen of its most seasoned veterans there, according to senior American and European intelligence and counterterrorism officials.
The movement of the senior Qaeda jihadists reflects Syria’s growing importance to the terrorist organization and most likely foreshadows an escalation of the group’s bloody rivalry with the Islamic State, Western officials say.
The operatives have been told to start the process of creating an alternate headquarters in Syria and lay the groundwork for possibly establishing an emirate through Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, to compete with the Islamic State, from which Nusra broke in 2013. This would be a significant shift for Al Qaeda and its affiliate, which have resisted creating an emirate, or formal sovereign state, until they deem conditions on the ground are ready. Such an entity could also pose a heightened terrorist threat to the United States and Europe.
Christian Science Monitor
How solar brought Muslims and Jews together in one West Bank village
A solar project funded and operated by both Jews and Muslims is shining some light on Auja, a small Palestinian town located in one of the most controversial territories on Earth.
The $100,000 project is harnessing solar energy to power the drawing of water from deep underground to irrigate a grove of palms growing the prized Medjool dates. It is the first large project to be funded by both Jews and Muslims in the United States – including former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg – and to be operated by Israeli Jews and Palestinian Muslims on the ground.
The solar array is providing an economic boost to 45 farming families in this town of 5,000 Palestinians on the eastern flank of the West Bank who struggle with scarce water and unreliable and expensive electricity. Although claimed by the State of Palestine, along with the Gaza Strip and a portion of eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank has been contentiously occupied by Israel, which continues to build settlements across the region in defiance of international law, as The Christian Science Monitor has reported.
N Y Times
Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela’s Failing Hospitals
BARCELONA, Venezuela — By morning, three newborns were already dead.
The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the city, shutting down the respirators in the maternity ward.
Doctors kept ailing infants alive by pumping air into their lungs by hand for hours. By nightfall, four more newborns had died.
“The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the toll from Venezuela’s collapsing hospitals.
The economic crisis in this country has exploded into a public health emergency, claiming the lives of untold numbers of Venezuelans. It is just part of a larger unraveling here that has become so severe it has prompted President Nicolás Maduro to impose a state of emergency and has raised fears of a government collapse.
Hospital wards have become crucibles where the forces tearing Venezuela apart have converged. Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left.
Raw Story
Ben Carson accidentally reveals Sarah Palin is on Trump’s short list for vice president
Trump campaign surrogate Ben Carson let it slip over the weekend that Sarah Palin had made the candidate’s short list of running mates.
According to The Washington Post, Carson was on the way to a television interview when he explained to a reporter in the car how he would behave as the head of Trump’s vice presidential search committee.
After Carson assured the reporter that he would not pick himself as Dick Cheney had done while search for George W. Bush’s running mate, Carson’s wife, Candy, pointed out that a recent poll named him as the top choice.
Carson was told that John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin and Chris Christie had also been named in the poll.
“Those are all people on our list,” he revealed.
“Well, not you,” his wife observed.
CNN
Trump: Rubio not under consideration for VP pick
Washington (CNN)Donald Trump is making it clear he's not considering Marco Rubio as his running mate.
The Florida senator is an oft-mentioned name as a vice-presidential choice for the presumptive GOP nominee. Speculation heightened after
The Washington Post reported Sunday on five names that Trump surrogate Ben Carson suggested were under consideration.
Trump took to Twitter Sunday evening to dismiss those claims.
"The @washingtonpost report on potential VP candidates is wrong. Marco Rubio and most others mentioned are NOT under consideration," Trump tweeted.
C/Net
Sky mapping software dates Sappho poem
Not a lot is known about the Greek poet Sappho. She was probably born sometime between 630 and 612 BCE, and she is thought to have died in around 570 BCE after returning to Lesbos from exile.
Thanks to a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Arlington, we now know for certain that she was alive until at least 570 BCE. This is because of a poem fragment called "Midnight Poem", and astronomy software called Starry Night version 7.3 and Digistar 5 from the International Planetarium Society, which can recreate the night sky over Greece during Sappho's lifetime.
The moon has set
and the Pleiades;
It is midnight,
The time is going by,
And I sleep alone.
(Henry Thornton Wharton, 1887:68)
The team took the information provided in this fragment -- that the star cluster known as the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus had set at midnight, assuming Sappho was not taking poetic licence -- and ran it through the software. They calculated that the earliest date the poem could have been written was on January 25, 570 BC, when the Pleiades set at midnight. Their research was published in the Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage.