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) Man Oh Man, wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) 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 sometimes a little bit later if the diarist is me. I have a terrible habit of cutting things close.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Before we get to the rest of the news, some pictures of the week, from the BBC, The Guardian (wildlife), Buzzfeed, Associated Press (via the Napa Valley Register), CNN, National Geographic (your shot photos), and BBC Africa.
Getting us south of the equator for a change, we begin with this from The Daily Hive:
Kevin Hansen
In 2011, I left the rat race to cycle around the world with my brother, Trevor. After an initial attempt failed due to being robbed in Central America, we gave it another go in 2012 and successfully circumnavigated the world on our bicycles. We pedalled over 57,000 km through five continents but never touched Africa.
Fast forward a few years later to 2017 and the opportunity to cycle through Africa fell into my lap. I was between jobs and my friend Justin who had also quit the daily grind was cycling around the world. As I was a bit apprehensive about going solo through Africa, I contacted Justin who at the time was cycling through Australia and posited the idea of cycling Africa together. Fortunately, he accepted and a few months later we were in Cape Town for the start of our African odyssey.
From NPR:
Botswana, home to the world's largest elephant population, is moving toward culling the numbers of the giant mammals by lifting a wildlife hunting ban, after a group of Cabinet ministers endorsed the move.
In June, President Mokgweetsi Masisi tasked a government subcommittee with reviewing a moratorium on trophy hunting put in place by his predecessor, in 2014. On Thursday the group said it had decided to advise lifting the ban which prohibited hunting the pachyderms on public lands.
This comes from IOL (South Africa):
OSA MBONU
Finally, African men’s sexual prowess can be put to use. Already, quite a number of women from the western world are embarking on sex tourism trips to Africa.
When they come, they are served, serviced and pampered, writes Tatenda Gwaambuka on how female sex tourists are exploiting African men.”Older women from Europe and North America are now known to frequent African resorts in pursuit of ‘sexcapades’ as they are called,” Tatenda describes.
“The scenery in Africa is great, that cannot be doubted. European women cannot get enough of it, but beyond the scenery, there is a new attraction drawing them in. When they want to have a good time no one will know about back home where they are held in high esteem, they come to Africa. Young men stage-manage romantic affairs with the older European women and get to wine and dine with them.”
From NBC News:
The ruling, potentially a landmark decision for gay rights in Africa, was due to be issued Friday, but the court said it needed until May 24 to decide.
By Reuters
Supporters and opponents of gay rights said on Friday they accepted a decision by Kenya's High Court to delay for another three months a ruling on whether to strike down a colonial-era law banning gay sex.
The ruling, potentially a landmark decision for gay rights in Africa, was due to be issued on Friday, but the court said it needed until May 24 to reach a decision.
From the BBC:
Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir has declared a national state of emergency, dismissed the federal government and sacked all state governors.
Mr Bashir made the announcement in a TV address to the nation, but later appointed members of the security forces as replacement governors.
Earlier, Sudan's National Security and Intelligence Services (NISS) said that Mr Bashir would be stepping down.
Mr Bashir has been the focus of anti-government protests in recent weeks.
The Beeb has coverage of elections in Africa:
By Dickens Olewe
More and more elections are being held in Africa however analysts dismiss many as being "lawful but illegitimate". Although studies show that a majority of Africans still want to live in democracies, an increasing number are looking to alternative, autocratic models, reports the BBC's Dickens Olewe.
In the last three years African countries have registered an overall decline in the quality of political participation and rule of law, analysts say.
"Today there are almost the same number of defective democracies (15) as there are hard-line autocracies (16), among the continent's 54 states," Nic Cheeseman, Professor of Democracy at Birmingham University, concludes from his analysis of the last three years.
From The Guardian:
Nigerians are hoping vote will go ahead following delay over unspecified ‘challenges’
Ruth Maclean
Nigerians are preparing to go to the polls again, hoping the presidential election will go ahead on Saturday morning after last weekend’s 11th-hour postponement.
The incumbent, Muhammadu Buhari, and his main challenger, Atiku Abubakar, resumed campaigning this week after the announcement by the independent national electoral commission (INEC) at 3am last Saturday, five hours before polling stations were due to open, that the vote was being pushed back.
Unspecified “challenges” meant it could not hold the election as scheduled, it said, amid reports that materials such as ballot papers and tally sheets had not all been distributed.
Another elections is taking place in Senegal, and this coverage comes from CNN:
- Young candidate Ousmane Sonko is challenging incumbent Macky Sall
- Sonko has energized young supporters and has pledged to end use of the CFA Franc
With the economy in robust shape, Senegal's President Macky Sall might have anticipated a cruise to victory in his re-election campaign in the country's Sunday elections.
Our last Africa article come to us via Forbes:
In many cultures around the world, fossils and rocks were part of myths and legends.
Maya people collected fossil shark teeth to be used as cutting tools, but incorporated the petrified remains into their myths, explaining them by a primordial flood that inundated the world and transported dead fish high into the mountains. In the Alps, the casts of large cockleshells found in the sedimentary rocks making up many alpine peaks, formed in an ancient sea and later pushed up by earth's tectonic movements, were explained as the
devil's hoof tracks.
For centuries, "dragon bones" have been collected from the Chinese countryside, crushed down to a fine powder and used as medicine. Only later did geologists recognize these bones as the fossils of extinct ice-age mammals. Along the Pacific Northwest, large boulders, deposited by tsunami and landslides, were regarded as cursed by "A'yahos," shape-shifter spirits able to shake the entire earth.
Moving on to the other major inhabited southern hemisphere continent, we start with a story about islands out in the middle of the ocean from Adelaide Now:
A new law, which has been eased into effect since August, 2018 and went into full affect this February, aims to protect the island from overpopulation by limiting who can move to the island and by limiting tourists to staying no more than 30 days.
From a rarely-cited OND source, we have an interesting article from PLOS (the prestigious science journal):
Background
To our knowledge, no study has assessed the association between heatwaves and risk of hospitalization and how it may change over time in Brazil. We quantified the heatwave–hospitalization association in Brazil during 2000–2015.
There was an earthquake this morning — in Ecuador close to the Peru border. Coverage from The Independent:
Ground felt shaking 150 miles away after early morning quake
A 7.5-magnitude earthquake has struck Ecuador, near the country’s border with Peru
The epicentre of the quake was in a sparsely populated area 139 miles (224km) southeast of the city of Ambato. It originated struck at a depth of 82 miles (132km) at at 5.17am local time (10.17am UK time) on Friday.
The ground was felt to shake for “a good 30 seconds” in Cuenca, a city 157 miles (253km) from the epicentre of the quake, according to a witness report on the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre website.
From the South China Morning Post:
- City holidaymakers lose phone, bag and passport in attack
New details have emerged of the terrifying scenes as a group of 20 Hongkongers in Peru had to flee to a hotel kitchen as rifle-toting robbers attacked.
One Peruvian tour guide was killed in
the robbery, while some of the Hongkongers were threatened, losing a bag, a mobile phone and a passport.
Thomas Chau Wing-keung, general manager at travel agency Jetour, said on Friday that the 19 holidaymakers and one tour escort from his company were having dinner at the luxury Inkaterra Reserva Amazonica, outside the city of Puerto Maldonado in the country’s southeast, at about 9pm on Tuesday.
From ABC News:
The female Chelonoidis phantasticus was located on a remote island.
A species of tortoise thought by scientists to be extinct for more than 100 years were actually hiding in plain sight on a remote Galapagos island.
The Galapagos Conservancy, a Fairfax, Virginia-based organization dedicated to the long-term protection of the Galapagos Islands, wrote on Twitter Wednesday that one of its employees had just returned from Fernandina Island, where he spotted a female adult Chelonoidis phantasticus, describing the discovery as a "monumental finding."
And on a similar theme, from the cold cold northern part of the world, this comes from the BBC:
Kind-hearted Estonian workers rushed to rescue a dog in distress from a freezing river on Wednesday - unaware of the fact they were actually about to bundle a wild wolf into their car.
The men were working on the Sindi dam on the Parnu river when they spotted the animal trapped in the icy water.
After clearing a path through the ice, they took the frozen canine to a clinic for medical care.
Only then was it revealed they had been carrying a wolf.
And in the news of the weird (my description, not the one attached to the story at The Guardian):
Hobbyists say Jackson Oswalt of Tennessee is youngest person to achieve fusion
Mattha Busby
An American 14-year-old has reportedly become the youngest known person in the world to create a successful nuclear reaction.
The Open Source Fusor Research Consortium, a hobbyist group, has recognised the achievement by Jackson Oswalt, from Memphis, Tennessee, when he was aged 12 in January 2018.
“For those that haven’t seen my recent posts, it will come as a surprise that I would even consider believing I had achieved fusion,” Oswalt wrote on the Fusor.net forum.
And now we move on to news from the arts world. First up, this article from The Guardian:
Ammar al-Baluchi’s defense team said they were stunned to see portrayal of his torture, including beatings, in Zero Dark Thirty
Julian Borger
The makers of the film Zero Dark Thirty were given detailed information about the torture of an inmate at a CIA “black site” that had been denied to the prisoner’s own defence counsel at his trial in Guantánamo Bay, his lawyers claim.
Members of defence team for Ammar al-Baluchi, undergoing pre-trial proceedings for his alleged role in the 9/11 attacks before a military tribunal at the US base, said they were stunned to see the portrayal of his torture, including beatings, suspension from manacles and waterboarding, in the Oscar-winning 2012 film.
From Town and Country:
The former talk show host is backing an art auction to support Miss Porter's, a private girls' school.
- Oprah Winfrey has partnered with artist Agnes Gund for an upcoming art auction, and created a great video to promote it.
- Proceeds from the auction will go towards financial aid programs at Miss Porter’s, an all-girls private school in Connecticut.
Oprah Winfrey, whose niece went to Miss Porter's School, and arts patron Agnes Gund, who's an alumni of Miss Porter's herself, have teamed up to curate and chair an art auction benefitting the school.
Titled "By Women, For Tomorrow's Women," the auction catalogue consists mainly of works by pioneering—and often under-recognized—women artists. To promote the event, Winfrey and Gund, who's also president emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, released a video with Dr. Katherine Windsor, Head of School at Miss Porter's.
From ABC 13 (Toledo, Ohio):
TOLEDO (WTVG) - ProMedica's Fire and Ice Winter Festival is in full swing in downtown Toledo. The festival includes a zip line, an escape room, ice sculptures and a fire-breathing dragon. But there's also a big art work unveiling.
A parking garage is probably not the first thing you think of when it comes to art, but a new mural spans the length of the lower level of the ProMedica parking garage. Other than a being beautiful piece of art it's also a teaching tool of sorts.
Natalie Lanese is an accomplished Toledo-based artist, "My work is typically site specific so I enjoy responding to existing architecture and 3D forms in a space."
From the Wichita Eagle:
Who knew ice can be fun? It can be if it’s a 300-pound block of ice or an ice cube used to create art.
For the fourth consecutive year, the Wichita Art Museum is showcasing using ice to create art – and apparently Wichitans love it. The average attendance at past annual ice-related events has been about 3,000 patrons, according to museum spokeswoman Teresa Veazey.
“That’s a really good Saturday,” Veazey said.
From The Art Newspaper:
French museums operator Culturespaces has launched a space in South Korea and is planning another in Bordeaux in 2020
ANNA SANSOM
Fresh from the success of its inaugural digital exhibition at the Atelier des Lumières in Paris, the French museums management company Culturespaces is moving to expand its multimedia art centres internationally.
The Atelier des Lumières, a 2,000 sq. m former foundry in the 11th arrondissement, was launched last spring with a 30-minute immersive audiovisual experience of Gustav Klimt’s paintings, featuring mural projections of the images set to music by Wagner, Strauss and Beethoven. With full-price tickets at €14.50, it attracted more than 1.2 million visitors from 13 April 2018 to 6 January 2019.