Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, interceptor7, Magnifico, annetteboardman and Besame. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, planter, JML9999, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Man Oh Man, Doctor RJ, 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
Italy's Matteo Salvini shuts ports to migrant rescue ship
Italy's new interior minister has refused permission for a rescue vessel to drop off 629 migrants picked up off Libya's coast.
Matteo Salvini, leader of the far-right League, said Malta should let the Aquarius dock but he was rejected.
Malta said the German charity SOS Méditerranée had picked up the migrants in Libyan waters, which meant they fell under Italy's jurisdiction
Italy is the main entry for migrants crossing from North Africa to Europe.
The League promised voters during Italy's recent general election that it would take a tough stance on immigration.
SOS Méditerranée, which runs the Aquarius, said the ship had been instructed by the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre to stand by in its current position, 35 nautical miles from Italy and 27 nautical miles from Malta.
It reports that 629 migrants were picked up in six different rescue operations off Libya's coast on Sunday.
The Guardian
Palermo defies populist coalition to offer safe port to migrant ship
In defiance of orders from the new Italian populist government that ports were closed to migrants from Libya, Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo, said he would allow a rescue boat with 629 on board to dock in the Sicilian capital.
In the first evidence of the new government’s hardline approach, the interior minister and leader of the far right League, Matteo Salvini, said on Sunday that all Italian ports were closed to the rescue boat, Aquarius.
The Maltese government rejected a request to take the boat, saying international law required that the migrants should be taken to Italian ports.
BBC
Royalty News, like it or not.
Harry and Meghan to visit Australia and New Zealand
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex will make an official visit to Australia, Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand in autumn.
This is the couple's first official royal tour to be announced since getting married in May.
The couple follow in the footsteps of Prince Harry's parents - Charles and Diana - whose first royal tour was to Australia and New Zealand.
The tour coincides with the fourth Invictus Games which will be held in Sydney in October.
The Guardian
'A great item to have': flamethrowers sell like hot cakes at Elon Musk sale
Some may think it the worst idea in the history of capitalism, an irresponsible stunt by a pyromaniac Willy Wonka, but for Earle Tabula there was no better feeling than buying a flamethrower.
“I love fire. I play with torches and gasoline all the time so this is the ultimate toy that I’ll play with for all my life,” he beamed, gripping his purchase. “I’ve bought a bunch of wood. I’m ready.”
Tabula, 28, an IT company owner, was among approximately a thousand buyers who gathered in Los Angeles on Saturday for a “pick-up party” thrown by Elon Musk. The tech billionaire initially proposed selling flamethrowers as a joke, yet here they were, in rectangular white boxes, priced at $500, with a queue of buyers snaking around SpaceX’s headquarters pondering things to burn.
[snip]
A wind-driven brush fire erupted north of Los Angeles, shutting freeways and prompting evacuations in a stark reminder that much of California is tinder-box dry and ripe for another devastating wildfire season.
That didn’t dent the Santa’s grotto atmosphere around SpaceX. Some people had flown in from Canada, others had driven for days from across the US to be part of what many considered libertarian-tinged whimsy.
The Guardian
Guatemala volcano: woman searches for 50 buried relatives
Eufemia Garcia watched in horror as Guatemala’s Fuego volcano sent scalding ash and gas surging over her home a week ago, burying her children and grandson among 50 of her extended family. She has been searching for their remains ever since.
At least 110 people died after Fuego erupted last Sunday, pushing fast-moving currents of dust, lava and gas down the volcano’s slopes in its greatest eruption in four decades, and close to 200 more are believed buried beneath the waste.
Among them, Garcia believes, her nine siblings and their families as well as her mother, her own grown-up children and a grandson, making her family one of the hardest hit in a disaster that officials admit was made worse by delays in official warnings.
The hamlet of San Miguel Los Lotes on the lush southern flank of the volcano was almost completely swallowed by several metres of ash, and formal search efforts have been suspended until the still-erupting volcano stabilises.
The Guardian
'Australia doesn’t realise’: worsening drought pushes farmers to the brink
In the south-west corner of NSW’s Liverpool plains, in an area called Bundella, farmer Megan Kuhn runs beef cattle and merino sheep with her husband, Martin.
They have 400 breeding cows that will calve in six weeks. Shortly, 89 of those cows will leave the property, sold to an abattoir because the cost of feeding the animals during drought has become too great.
“There is nowhere to send them to pasture so they are going to be slaughtered,” Kuhn says.
“We’re killing a cow and a calf at this late stage of pregnancy. The drought is so widespread there’s just no options left for stock producers to put them anywhere. That’s why it’s so heartbreaking.
“Australia doesn’t realise. The cattle we’ve got are rapidly diminishing because of the drought.”
Further north, about 20 km from Mullaley, Margaret Fleck is seeing conditions on her property she has not encountered in the 20 years she has been there.
Al Jazeera
UN: Attack on Yemen's Hudaida to have 'catastrophic' impact
The United Nations has warned that a military attack or siege by pro-Yemeni government forces supported by a Saudi-led coalition on the port city of Hudaida will impact hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
Lise Grande, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen, said on Friday that humanitarian agencies "fear, in a prolonged worst case, that as many as 250,000 people may lose everything - even their lives".
As many as 600,000 civilians are currently living in and around the rebel-held city, a vital lifelinethrough which most of Yemen's population gets food and medicine, according to estimates by the UN and its partners.
The UN warned that the likely "catastrophic humanitarian impact" would be worsened due to Hudaida's key role as the point of entry for some 70 percent of Yemen's imports.
Reuters
Colorado wildfire doubles in size, thousands evacuated This is in Kossack Thinking Fella’s area.
(Reuters) - A largely unchecked Colorado wildfire nearly doubled in size from Saturday to Sunday, prompting a fresh round of evacuations, with the blaze expected to grow in size as it is fueled by bone-dry conditions and pushed by gusting winds, officials said.
The so-called 416 Fire in southwest Colorado had burned nearly 17,000 acres (6,880 hectares) by Sunday afternoon, an area larger than Manhattan. More than 800 firefighters were battling the blaze located north of Durango, which was 10 percent contained, the Rocky Mountain Incident Management Team said.
The fire had burned about 9,000 acres (3,640 hectares) by early on Saturday, according to an aerial survey.
A mandatory evacuation order was issued on Sunday for 859 residences, bringing the total number of homes under evacuation to about 2,000, La Plata County, Colorado, spokeswoman Megan Graham said.
Law enforcement officials were going door to door and residents have been warned to leave via calls to their phones, text message and emails, Graham said.
Raw Story
Storage site housing half of Baghdad’s ballot boxes from Iraq’s parliamentary election burns
A storage site housing half of Baghdad’s ballot boxes from Iraq’s parliamentary election in May has caught fire, just days after parliament demanded a nationwide recount of votes, drawing calls for the election to be re-run.
An Interior Ministry spokesman said later the fire was confined to one of four warehouses at the site. State television said the ballot boxes were being moved to another location under heavy security.
Authorities did not say whether they believed the fire was deliberately set, but its timing undermined the results of an election whose validity was already in doubt. Fewer than 45 percent of voters cast a ballot, a record low, and allegations of fraud began almost immediately after the vote.
Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, whose electoral alliance came third in the election, said on Tuesday that a government investigation had found serious violations and blamed Iraq’s independent elections commission for most of them.
Parliament mandated a full manual recount the next day. The Independent High Elections Commission had used electronic vote- counting devices to tally the results.
A recount could undermine nationalist cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, a long-time adversary of the United States whose bloc won the largest number of seats in the election. One of Sadr’s top aides expressed concern that some parties were trying to sabotage the cleric’s victory.
Washington Post
Goodbye to net neutrality. Hello to an even-bigger AT&T?
Two pivotal developments this week could dramatically expand the power and footprint of major telecom companies, altering how Americans access everything from political news to “Game of Thrones” on the Internet.
Monday marks the official end of the U.S. government’s net neutrality rules, which had required broadband providers such as AT&T, Charter, Comcast and Verizon to treat all Web traffic equally. The repeal is part of a campaign by Ajit Pai, the Republican chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, to deregulate the telecom industry in a bid to boost its investments — particularly in rural areas.
“I think ultimately it’s going to mean better, faster, cheaper Internet access and more competition,” Pai said in an interview. Others disagree and will challenge Pai in court, while many states are fighting back with their own laws, further muddling the situation.
One day after the net neutrality changes, a federal judge is set to rule on Tuesday on whether AT&T can buy Time Warner. AT&T, already the country’s second-largest wireless network, stands to gain a content trove from Time Warner that includes HBO and CNN — leading the Justice Department, which filed the lawsuit, to argue that the company could harm its rivals.
The Guardian
Antibiotic resistance could be countered by anti-bacterial viruses
Viruses that invade bacteria but leave human cells alone could help scientists find ways around the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, researchers have said.
A study has showed that a cocktail of bacteriophages, or “phages”, resulted in no side effects when given to individuals with gastrointestinal problems and did not appear to greatly disrupt the diversity of microbes in the gut – the so-called gut microbiota. But they did reduce levels of one marker of inflammation and certain problematic species of bacteria.
“[Phages] are a wonderful alternative to antibiotics,” said nutrition blogger and scientific consultant Dr Taylor Wallace of George Mason University, Virginia, who is presenting the results of the study at the American Society for Nutrition annual meeting in Boston. “These are selective, you don’t have any problem with bacterial resistance … and they are safe.”
Experts say microbial resistance to antibiotics, largely fuelled by overuse and misuse of the drugs, has left the world facing “a dreadful post-antibiotic apocalypse” as such treatments become ineffective.
The new research, funded by probiotic company Deerland Enzymes, split 32 participants, all of whom reported recurring gastrointestinal problems but were otherwise healthy, into two groups. One group was given a placebo capsule for four weeks, the other group was given a capsule from the company containing four phage strains expected to attack E coli. Neither the participants nor the researchers knew which capsules were given to whom during the trial.