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, planter, JML9999, 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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
BBC
Catalan referendum: Catalonia has 'won right to statehood'
Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont says the Spanish region has won the right to statehood following a contentious referendum that was marred by violence.
He said the door had been opened to a unilateral declaration of independence.
Catalan officials later said 90% of those who voted backed independence in Sunday's vote. The turnout was 42.3%.
Spain's constitutional court had declared the poll illegal and hundreds of people were injured as police used force to try to block voting.
Officers seized ballot papers and boxes at polling stations.
"With this day of hope and suffering, the citizens of Catalonia have won the right to an independent state in the form a republic," Mr Puigdemont said in a televised address flanked by other senior Catalan leaders.
BBC (Worse than Republican voter suppression)
Catalonia: Video shows violence as police tackle voters
Police have been filmed violently tackling voters as they try to prevent a banned vote in Catalonia, Spain.
The footage appears to show people being thrown and a women being pulled by her hair.
Hundreds of people have been reported injured in clashes in the region as police tried to stop the independence referendum.
BBC
Bali volcano: What is it like waiting for an eruption?
The lifespan of a volcano can be measured in millennia, and so waiting a few days for it to erupt may not sound too stressful.
But for the tens of thousands of Balinese people forced from their homes, the "imminent" danger that they have been living with for more than a week feels very real.
Ketut Seri says she has already last track of time since arriving at one of the emergency shelters.
Sat surrounded by thin plastic bags stuffed with her children's clothes, she says she can't help but worry about what she's left behind.
"I wish I had brought my cooking utensils," she tells me, a sign that she expects to be here for the long haul.
The Guardian
70,000 Balinese volcano evacuees had no need to leave, Indonesia says
More than half the 140,000 Balinese who have fled to shelters from a rumbling volcano had no need to evacuate and should return home, Indonesian authorities have said.
Unnerved by daily tremors, and uncertain about the exact border of the danger zone – between 9-12km from the summit of Mt Agung – tens of thousands more than necessary have fled.
“Only people from 27 villages must evacuate,” said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, from Indonesia’s national disaster mitigation agency, referring to the communities inside the unsafe zone. “The rest can go home. They can either go home independently or with the help of the government.”
As Mt Agung continues to rumble, several Balinese priests have courted controversy in recent days after they hiked to Agung’s crater. One priest, Mangku Mokoh, posted photos and a video from the volcano’s steaming peak, footage of which has gone viral on social media
Al Jazeera
White supremacists gather for annual Stormfront summit
White supremacists from across the United States have gathered in the state of Tennessee for the annual Stormfront forum summit, drawing protests from some community members and anti-racist activists.
Dozens of protesters heckled the white supremacists as the summit attendees convened, according to local media.
With more than 330,000 members, Stormfront is a leading web forum for white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis, among others.
The forum started on Saturday in Crossville, a small town located 70km west of Knoxville, Tennessee and was announced by founder Don Black back in July.
Black, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), reportedly fell ill and has been unable to attend the conference. Billy Roper, another white supremacist, took Black's place.
Among the attendees are several leaders and prominent figures of far-right groups from across the country.
Raw Story
Anti-fascists battle far right neo-nazis in Sweden
Neo-Nazis and anti-fascist demonstrators clashed Saturday on the streets of Gothenburg, one of Sweden’s largest cities, in violence that saw dozens of people arrested.
Hundreds of people were present for a march organized by the far-right Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR), an extremist group that wants to unify the northern European Nordic nations under National Socialist rule.
Ranks of dark-clothed men marched through the city under the Fascist group’s dark green and white banner.
Images from the scene showed police using pepper spray on demonstrators, and demonstrators wielding customized riot shields as officers advance.
The NMR has a permit to march in the city and is not a banned organization in Sweden.
But counter demonstrators sought to disrupt the march and highlight local opposition to the NMR. They staged sit-ins and set up large alternative demonstrations along the march’s route.
Al Jazeera (Just wait till Uber sees this)
Waiting in the wings: Dubai's autonomous flying taxis
With a whirling buzz from 18 rotors, the pilot-less helicopter gently lifted off the ground and soared up into the afternoon sky, the spire of the world's tallest building visible behind it.
The recent unmanned flight by the German-made electric Volocopter represents the latest step in Dubai's pursuit of flying taxis.
Dubai already has invested in another model of a flying, autonomous taxi, and is working to design regulations for their use. Putting more passengers in the air could free its already clogged highways and burnish the city's cutting-edge image of itself.
"It's public transportation for everybody, so you can use, you can order it, you can pay for the trip and the trip is not much more expensive than with a car," said Alexander Zosel, Volocopter's cofounder.
"If you build roads, you build bridges, it's a huge amount and it's always much more cheaper to have a system where you don't need that infrastructure.”
The Guardian
Cameroon soldiers shoot independence activists dead
Soldiers shot dead at least eight people and wounded others in Cameroon’s restless English-speaking regions on Sunday during protests by activists calling for its independence from the majority francophone nation, an official and witnesses said.
The demonstrations – on the anniversary of anglophone Cameroon’s independence from Britain – came as a months-old movement against perceived marginalisation by the francophone-dominated government gathered pace.
The protests, which began late last year, have become a lightning rod for opposition to President Paul Biya’s 35-year rule.
Donatus Njong Fonyuy, the mayor of the town of Kumbo, said five prisoners were killed at about 6am after the jail where they were being held caught fire.
“We don’t know what caused the fire in the prison, but five prisoners were killed by soldiers. Two were wounded by bullets and are at the hospital,” he told Reuters, adding that another two civilians were injured.
Reuters
Two women plead not guilty to killing North Korean leader's half-brother
KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Two women accused of killing the estranged half-brother of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un pleaded not guilty to murder charges in a Malaysian court on Monday.
Indonesian Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong, a Vietnamese, are charged with assassinating Kim Jong Nam by smearing his face with VX, a chemical poison banned by the United Nations, at Kuala Lumpur’s international airport on Feb. 13.
They face the death penalty if convicted. The two women nodded their heads when the charge was read out to them at the Shah Alam court on the outskirts of the Malaysian capital.
Buzzfeed
O.J. Simpson Was Released From Prison After Being Granted Parole
O.J. Simpson was released from prison early Sunday morning after serving nine of the 33 years he was sentenced to prison for after being convicted of armed robbery and assault in Las Vegas.
Simpson was granted parole July 20 after the disgraced football star expressed regret for his actions, which he said occurred after having a few drinks and misjudging the situation.
"I haven’t made any excuses in the nine years that I’ve been here, and I’m not trying to make an excuse now," Simpson said at the hearing.
Simpson, 70, was convicted in 2008 of robbery and assault charges after he and several friends burst into a Las Vegas hotel room armed with guns and stole about $100,000 worth of his sports memorabilia from collectors Alfred Beardsley and Bruce Fromong, who had been expecting to meet a wealthy buyer.
Simpson argued that the memorabilia and personal family photos were taken from him, and that he was merely trying to get the items back. He also claimed he didn't know that his associates, who were acting as security guards, had guns with them.
Washington Post
A North Korean ship was seized off Egypt with a huge cache of weapons destined for a surprising buyer
Last August, a secret message was passed from Washington to Cairo warning about a mysterious vessel steaming toward the Suez Canal. The bulk freighter named Jie Shun was flying Cambodian colors but had sailed from North Korea, the warning said, with a North Korean crew and an unknown cargo shrouded by heavy tarps.
Armed with this tip, customs agents were waiting when the ship entered Egyptian waters. They swarmed the vessel and discovered, concealed under bins of iron ore, a cache of more than 30,000 rocket-propelled grenades. It was, as a United Nations report later concluded, the “largest seizure of ammunition in the history of sanctions against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.”
But who were the rockets for? The Jie Shun’s final secret would take months to resolve and would yield perhaps the biggest surprise of all: The buyers were the Egyptians themselves.
A U.N. investigation uncovered a complex arrangement in which Egyptian business executives ordered millions of dollars worth of North Korean rockets for the country’s military while also taking pains to keep the transaction hidden, according to U.S. officials and Western diplomats familiar with the findings. The incident, many details of which were never publicly revealed, prompted the latest in a series of intense, if private, U.S. complaints over Egyptian efforts to obtain banned military hardware from Pyongyang, the officials said.
N Y Times
Vast Exercise Demonstrated Russia’s Growing Military Prowess
WASHINGTON — A recent major exercise by the Russian military revealed significant strides in its ability to conduct the sort of complex, large-scale operations, using drones and other new technology, that would be part of any all-out war with the United States in Europe, according to American and allied officials.
Preliminary Pentagon and NATO assessments of the exercise, one of the largest of its kind since the end of the Cold War, are classified and will take months to complete. But Western officials said the military maneuvers, known as Zapad, Russian for “west,” far exceeded in scope and scale what Moscow had said it would conduct, and tracked more closely to what American intelligence officials suspected would unfold, based on Russian troop buildups in August.
Before the exercise, Russia said the drills would involve fewer than 13,000 troops engaged in a counterterrorism scenario in Belarus, the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, the Baltic Sea region and around St. Petersburg. Instead, tens of thousands of Russian troops in the Arctic and Far East, the Black Sea, close to Ukraine’s borders and in the Abkhazia region of Georgia also joined in, Western military officials said.
N Y Times
A Gray Puff, and the Old Kosciuszko Bridge Is No More
Sometimes this city that’s always rebuilding carefully preserves the traces of its past.
Occasionally, it just blows them up.
Such an occasion occurred early Sunday, when the last remnants of the old Kosciuszko Bridge — a despised hunk of steel that stitched Brooklyn and Queens together through 78 years of congestion and complaint — were brought down in a carefully controlled paroxysm of explosion.
The old bridge, soaring 125 feet above the industrial Newtown Creek on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, was long past its expiration date.
It was built for 10,000 cars a day and was forced to carry 180,000. It has already been replaced by the first of two spans of a graceful, gossamer crossing built in the new fashion of cable-stayed bridges that seem to hang suspended from the sky rather than stapled to the ground. New York State, which maintains the Kosciuszko, dismantled the main span of the old bridge in July, and for two months the approach ramps on both sides reached toward each other only to find a void.
Last week, the ramps, each one about 1,500 feet long, were wired with a total of 944 bits of ordnance called line charges. The ground beneath them was piled with shock-absorbing sand.