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 are not limited to) palantir, wader, 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 (or if it is Friday night and the editor is me, a bit later).
Stories of war and peace dominate the news around the world. Here are a few you may have missed.
The first tonight comes from Reuters, and was published in Pakistan’s Tribune:
NEW YORK: People surveyed on five continents mistakenly think wealthy Western countries are welcoming most refugees as the world grapples with its worst migration crisis in decades, a survey showed on Thursday.
With more people than ever fleeing home since World War Two, most respondents thought the United States, France and Germany accepted the largest number of refugees over the last decade, the survey by the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative (AHI) found.
However, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey welcomed most refugees and asylum seekers over that time period – some 10 million people, according to data by the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) cited as part of the findings.
From The Kashmir Observer:
The much vaunted Indian military superiority is largely an accounting subterfuge
In the 1983 film WarGames, a nuclear war simulation is accidentally started by a supercomputer designed to take over in event of the cold war spiralling out of control. After evaluating all the possibilities, the computer declares that “war is a strange game, in which the only winning move – is not to play”. That advice is possibly truest for India right now.
For all the xenophobic war mongering touted in every medium, India cannot ‘win’ a war against Pakistan and the sooner we appreciate this politico-military reality, the more coherent and serious we will sound to our adversaries and the world community. The demands for a ‘once and for all’ resolution of Kashmir/Pakistan emanating from several quarters, which surprisingly includes some veterans – equating India’s non-retaliation with impotence – perhaps don’t factor the larger picture and the stark truth of modern military warfare.
Matter of fact, short of total genocide, no country regardless of its war-withal can hope to achieve a decisive victory with a ‘short war’ in today’s world. As the US is discovering eight years, trillion dollars and over 25,000 casualties later - in Afghanistan. That era of “decisive” short wars – especially in context of an Indo-Pak war is largely over because of several reasons.
From Al Jazeera:
The trio behind North Korea's 21st-century missiles
Laughing men surrounding Kim Jong-un in photos are serious technocrats who have vastly improved the North's arsenal.
After successful missile launches, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un often exchanges smiles and hugs with the same three men and shares a celebratory smoke.
The three, shown with Kim in photographs and TV footage in North Korean media, are of great interest to Western intelligence agencies since they are the top people in the secretive country's rapidly accelerating missile programme.
They include Ri Pyong-chol, a former top air force general, Kim Jong-sik, a veteran rocket scientist, and Jang Chang-ha, the head of a weapons development and procurement centre.
Photographs and TV footage show the three are clearly Kim's favourites. Their behavior with him is sharply at variance with the obsequiousness of other senior aides, most of whom bow and hold their hands over their mouths when speaking to the young leader.
Some articles about wars of words and symbols, with three from The New York Times:
LONDON — An outspoken commentator who gained fame after appearing on “The Apprentice” will be leaving her job at the radio station LBC after a post on social media about the recent attack in Manchester.
The commentator, Katie Hopkins, a conservative provocateur in the mold of Ann Coulter, is to step down after calling on Twitter for a “final solution” to the terrorism problem, which some had interpreted as a call for genocide, echoing the Nazi euphemism for the Holocaust.
The post was later changed so that it read “true solution” rather than “final solution.”
and a second:
By JULFIKAR ALI MANIK and ELLEN BARRY
DHAKA, Bangladesh — Under pressure from Islamic hard-liners, the Bangladeshi authorities in the predawn hours on Friday swiftly and quietly removed a sculpture of a woman personifying justice from outside the country’s Supreme Court building.
The statue had been the target of angry, swelling protests by Hefazat-e-Islam, a vast Islamic organization based in Chittagong, which argued that art depicting living beings was proscribed by Islam.
The decision is a substantial victory for Hefazat, and within hours of the statue’s removal its leaders issued a broader call for statues all over the country to be destroyed or removed from public view. The joint secretary of Hefazat’s Dhaka city unit, Mujibur Rahman Hamidi, said new statues should not be built or displayed, except within the confines of Hindu temples.
By TACEY RYCHTER
SYDNEY, Australia — Hundreds of Australian Aboriginal leaders gathered on Friday at Uluru, a massive sandstone monolith in
Australia’s central desert, to call for constitutional recognition of their people. Around the same time, a new emoji was quietly added to
Twitter: the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags.
The emoji showing both flags together amounts to a small (very small) action, but for the group of people it stands for, the digital recognition carries deep significance.
“Emojis are huge,” said Luke Pearson, a digital producer of the Indigenous radio unit of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “We use them all day, every day, on so many different platforms. They aren’t entirely insignificant, because they’ve become such a core part of our communications.”
Al Ahram (Egypt) has extensive coverage of the attack today on Copts on their way to a monastery. One example:
Dar Al-Iftaa, the Egyptian state body responsible for issuing Islamic edicts, has cancelled the celebrations scheduled on Friday to mark the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan.
The grand mufti, Shawqi Allam, who heads Dar Al-Iftaa, has issued a statement condemning the attack.
From The Straits Times, this originally from the New York Times:
(NYTIMES) - Philippine troops using tanks and helicopters stormed the southern city of Marawi on Thursday (May 25) in an effort to defeat militants linked to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) who have besieged the city for days, setting fire to buildings and taking hostages.
Here is a look at what is happening and who is involved.
From TV/C:
Hunger is forcing desperate refugees from South Sudan to steal food from poverty-stricken locals in northern Uganda, residents say, after a funding crisis compelled the United Nations slash rations in refugee camps by half this month.
More than 875,000 refugees have fled into neighbouring Uganda since South Sudan’s civil war broke out in 2013, and the cuts come nearly two months after the United Nations warned the situation was at breaking point.
Ugandans say they have caught hungry refugees taking crops, vegetables or livestock after the World Food Programme (WFP) was forced to cut monthly rations from 12 kg of maize a month to 6 kg.
From the BBC, another one from Africa:
Cohabiting couples in Burundi have until the end of the year to get married or face legal consequences.
The government order comes after President Pierre Nkurunziza launched a campaign "to moralise society".
A government spokesman said a crackdown on informal relationships was needed to combat a population explosion.
He said too many schoolgirls were getting pregnant and men were taking advantage of women by cohabiting with several simultaneously.
Burundi has been in crisis since 2015 when Mr Nkurunziza, a born-again Christian, announced he would run for a controversial third term.
In lighter news, this from the Straits Times about a sense of place:
Singapore's former master planner Liu Thai Ker made headlines recently when he said at a forum in China that he regretted not preserving one or two slums so that Singaporeans have an idea of where the country had come from.
Indeed, so little of the past has been preserved that it can be hard to keep in mind Singapore's rich history.
What has survived, though, is a tapestry of road and place names going back decades and even centuries, which serve to anchor the past in our ever-changing landscape.
Arts news, beginning with this from the BBC:
How to Talk to Girls at Parties is the biggest flop at the Cannes Film Festival – and possibly of all time, writes Nicholas Barber.
It may seem harsh to say that How to Talk to Girls at Parties is one of the worst films ever made, given that it isn’t a cynical studio blockbuster, but an indie passion project with a budget that wouldn’t pay for the Botox on most Hollywood productions. But this shambolic punks-meet-aliens rom-com is directed by John Cameron Mitchell, the acclaimed auteur behind Hedwig and the Angry Inch. It’s also adapted from a short story by Neil Gaiman, it has costumes by the triple-Oscar-winning Sandy Powell, and it features Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning. If nothing else, then, it should seem vaguely professional. Instead, it’s like a shoddy school play put on by a drama teacher who thinks he’s cool for liking the Sex Pistols.
The film is set in Croydon, south London, in 1977, a period which is a lot more significant to people who were teenagers at the time, as Mitchell, Gaiman and Powell were, than it is to anyone else. Its hero is the sensitive, artistic and annoying named Enn (Alex Sharp), one of three teenaged best mates who are redolent of the laddish trio in Ricky Gervais’s Cemetery Junction, but somehow even more obnoxious. One night they go to a punk gig in a basement club, and then go in search of the after-show party. (Did basement club gigs in Croydon in 1977 have after-show parties?) But they end up at a gathering of statuesque extra-terrestrial tourists dressed in brightly coloured, skintight latex.
From Gizmondo:
Pasta might not make you think "science". But then again, you probably haven't shouted "holy crap" while you watched it curl up before your eyes.
A team of MIT and Syracuse University researchers are working on how to reduce food shipping costs and required storage space — a fairly mundane problem, admittedly, but an important one. There are plenty of folks who need a lot of food in a small amount of space, like hikers and even astronauts. The scientists have come up with "transformative appetite", where two-dimensional films of a gelatin-cellulose composite curl up into various 3D shapes in water. One day, hopefully, they will be able to make pasta do the same.
From The Scotsman:
Alison Campsie
Piece by piece, the forthcoming Jacobites exhibition at the National Museums of Scotland fits into place. Pictured is Deborah Clarke, senior curator at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, giving this portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie a final inspection before it is sent off for the major summer show.
Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites opens at the Chambers Street museum on June 23.
From The Atlantic:
Is it that they take art so seriously, they don’t think of it as money?
Two weeks ago, Ivanka Trump caught some alone time in Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room. Staged at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the piece is a living room en blanc, a white-out room filled with all-white furniture and personal effects, that visitors are invited to cover over with tiny colorful dot stickers. The piece is mesmerizing, an Instagram sensation; a contemporary art lover like Trump wasn’t likely to miss out on the hottest ticket (and snap) in town.
Trump is an art lover, that much is plain. Her own Instagram feed is chock full of images of contemporary art from the Park Avenue condo she and husband Jared Kushner share. Her affection for art—not normally something even her detractors would likely begrudge her—may have worked against her family this week. As reporters at Artnet discovered, Kushner, a senior White House advisor, failed to report the couple’s extensive art collection in required financial disclosures.