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, palantir, 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.
A huge fire has broken out at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, the oldest scientific institution in the country.
Firefighters are tackling the blaze at the building, which contains more than 20 million items in its collection.
It is not yet clear if anyone has been injured in Sunday's fire.
The museum, which once served as the residence for the Portuguese royal family, celebrated its 200-year anniversary earlier this year.
Images broadcast on Brazilian television showed how the fire, which is believed to have started after the facility had closed for the day, had spread throughout the building. Brazil's President Michel Temer said in a tweet that it was a "sad day for all Brazilians", adding: "The value of our history cannot be measured by the damage to the building.”
The US military says it is cancelling $300m (£230m) in aid to Pakistan over what it calls Islamabad's failure to take action against militant groups.
President Donald Trump has previously accused Pakistan of deceiving the US while receiving billions of dollars.
Pentagon spokesman Lt Col Koné Faulkner said the US military would aim to spend the money on other "urgent priorities".
The move, which needs to be approved by the US Congress, is part of a broader suspension announced in January.
The US state department has criticised Pakistan, a key ally, for failing to deal with terrorist networks operating on its soil, including the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban.
"We continue to press Pakistan to indiscriminately target all terrorist groups," Col Faulkner said in a statement on Saturday, adding that the $300m aid - which had earlier been suspended - should be used elsewhere due to "a lack of Pakistani decisive actions" in tackling the issue.
Argentina is expected to announce a raft of spending cuts on Monday, in an attempt to contain the country's acute currency crisis.
The peso has lost roughly half its value this year, despite the central bank's effort to stabilise it by raising a key interest rate to 60%.
President Mauricio Macri has pledged to tackle the country's ballooning debt.
Around 10 government ministries are likely to be axed as a result, according to media reports.
The measures come as Argentina's finance minister, Nicolas Dujovne, prepares to travel to Washington on Tuesday to meet with the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Christine Lagarde.
Nearly 40km from Augathella (population 450), Doug and Rachelle Cameron load supplements for their cattle. The day is typical for an Australian drought, still and silent as if the landscape has gone to sleep.
Their children Stirling, 11, Ella, 8 and Grace, 6 jump out of the ute and kick around the dust and cow pats as their cattle mill around the water troughs. Muffy the overgrown grey poddy calf comes up to watch. A bird’s nest sits in the struts of a disused windmill.
Their 34,000 acre station, Nive Downs, is 750km inland from Brisbane in south-west Queensland and they are facing their fifth year of drought. For the Camerons, the big dry started after the floods of 2012. Like most diligent farmers, they have tried to cut down their herd to take pressure off pastures and ensure they don’t need to spend too much on feed.
While most Australian farmers prepare for drought, the latest dry in the eastern states is lingering on and most have eaten through their reserves; of fodder, cash and patience. In a normal year, the Cameron family gets 19 inches of annual rainfall on Nive Downs, yet near the end of August they have only had six. Talk turns to what normal is.
The Guardian
Big Tech's double trouble: political heat from Trump and the left may signal reckoning ahead
Trump and Russia may have dominated the political discourse all summer, but last week the attention turned again to America’s internet technology giants. They had enjoyed a few months out of the spotlight following grueling congressional hearings in Washington late last year, after evidence emerged of Russia’s use of social media fake accounts to try to influence voters in the 2016 US presidential election.
But that respite ended last week after a tweet from Donald Trump that electrified the news agenda from Silicon Valley to the capital when, seemingly out of the blue – he posted a bizarre tweet. “Google search results for ‘Trump News’ shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD,” he tweeted
[snip]
But now the tech giants face a whole new political threat. And this time there is a growing volume of voices on the right from senior Republicans who are incensed about perceived bias against conservatives.
A reckoning may be coming and the companies lining up to defend themselves this week in Washington seem to be braced for some type of regulation. And, whilst Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has declared himself open to regulation, there’s some talk of the need to go further – to break up the companies using antitrust laws.
Al Jazeera
State of emergency declared in Tripoli after days of fighting
Libya's UN-backed government has announced a state of emergency in the capital, Tripoli, and its outskirts after several days of fierce fighting between rival armed groups.
At least 39 people, including civilians, have been killed in the violence and nearly 100 others wounded.
"Due to the danger of the current situation and for the sake of the public interest, the presidential council declares a state of emergency ... to protect and secure civilians, public and private possessions and vital institutions," the Government of National Accord (GNA) said in a statement on Sunday.
Reporting from Tripoli, Al Jazeera's Mahmoud Abdelwahed said stray rockets were responsible for the death of several civilians.
"Since the beginning of the clashes that broke out a week ago, many civilians have been killed as a result of random rockets falling onto densely populated areas," he said.
Reuters
Some 400 prisoners escape prison in Tripoli chaos
TRIPOLI (Reuters) - Some 400 prisoners escaped from a jail in Libya’s capital on Sunday while fighting between rival armed groups raged nearby, a judiciary official said as the United Nations called for the warring parties to meet on Tuesday.
The inmates forced open the doors of the Ain Zara prison and guards were unable to stop them, the official said, confirming a judiciary police statement posted on social media.
The prison is located in southern Tripoli, an area hit for one week by heavy fighting between rival groups.
Separately, a missile fell on Sunday on the al-Fallah camp for displaced Tawergha people, killing two and wounding seven, including two children, said Emad Ergeha, an activist following Tawergha issues.
The Tawergha were forced to leave their settlement near the western city of Misrata in the NATO-backed uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and have been prevented from going back since.
Reuters
Kuwait emir announces visit to Washington, talks with Trump
CAIRO (Reuters) - Kuwait’s ruler will travel to Washington on Monday for a working visit and hold talks with U.S. President Donald Trump, the state news agency KUNA announced on Sunday.
The White House said in a statement the leaders would discuss trade, investment and security cooperation in their Sept. 5 meeting.
Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah has led mediation efforts to resolve a year-long dispute between Gulf Arab neighbors after Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic, trade and transport ties with Qatar.
The four countries accuse Doha of supporting terrorism and cosying up to regional foe Iran. Doha denies those charges and says the boycott is an attempt to impinge on its sovereignty.
Trump publicly sided with the Saudis and Emiratis early on in the crisis but then began pushing for a resolution to restore Gulf unity and maintain a united front against Iran.
NPR
Nicaragua has kicked out a human rights team from the United Nations, just two days after it published a report detailing repression, torture and abuse of protesters by the government.
"We put forward the report not to polarize, but rather to make known what we had seen," Guillermo Fernandez Maldonado, chief of the U.N.'s human rights mission in Nicaragua, told reporters on Friday. "We did not expect the government's reaction in this sense. We only did our job."
The U.N. human rights regional office in Central America said it had received a letter on Thursday from Nicaragua's foreign ministry that its "invitation is considered concluded."
Late Friday, the U.N. released a statement from Secretary-General António Guterres, saying he "regrets" Nicaragua's decision to withdraw its invitation to the human rights office, and urged the government to continue "constructive engagement.”
Washington Post
Lab-grown brain bits open windows to the mind — and a maze of ethical dilemmas
PHILADELPHIA — Xuyu Qian yanked open an incubator door at the University of Pennsylvania to reveal rows of cylindrical tubes swirling, like shaken-up snow globes, with a strange and exotic flurry. The pale, peppercorn-sized spheres were lab-grown globules of human brain tissue, or, as Qian occasionally refers to them, “minibrains.”
“Minibrain” is a controversial nickname, loathed by some scientists who fear it conjures alarmist images of fully functioning brains trapped in vats, while the reality today is balls of cells that can’t think or feel.
But the term vividly evokes the aspirational goal of this fast-moving area of research: to mimic the complexity of the human brain and illuminate the biology of the human mind, one of science’s darkest black boxes. As the technology, which scientists refer to in journal articles as “cerebral organoids,” improves, the more the “minibrain” title fits.Today, organoids that resemble different regions of the human brain are routinely spun up from stem cells in large batches in laboratories around the world. Researchers have refined their recipes since the technique was first described five years ago, but the process is surprisingly hands-off: after a few nudges from scientists, stem cells grow into spheres with about a million neurons through a naturally occurring choreography that mirrors early brain development in the womb. At Day 100, Qian’s minibrains resemble a portion of the prenatal brain in the second trimester of pregnancy.
NPR
Centuries-Old Plant Collection Now Online — A Treasure Trove For Researchers
There's a new effort underway make hundreds of thousands of dried and preserved plants collected along the East Coast available through a digital database.
For centuries, explorers, scientists, and amateur botanists scoured the country to document and preserve plant species. Once prized like fine art, the collections were often bequeathed to institutions that housed herbaria, or libraries for plants.
Over time these collections became obscure, and fell out of use. Aside from the occasional researcher who had to schedule an appointment to view the records, and often travel long distances, these plant collections were difficult to access for most people.
Rick McCourt, botany curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia, helps manage the oldest herbarium in North America. The herbarium has an estimated one and a half million plant species in its collection. About 35,000 plant species were collected along the East Coast.
The new database will allow researchers to answer questions about climate change, conservation and urbanization. Questions like: "How has the environment changed?" said McCourt. "What plants occur where? Do they occur someplace differently now than they used to? Are they vanished or gone from an area?"