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.
Pictures of the week come from the BBC and the Beeb’s Africa Feed, the Guardian (the week in wildlife), Arab News, Buzzfeed, and the Atlantic. Readers’ best pictures for National Geographic are here and the week’s best space photos are to be found on Florida Today.
And photos/videos from Cyclone Idai are to be found across the web. I like (well, not like, per se) this one from CNN and this from VOX.
From NBC News:
The country is one of the most pro-American places on Earth thanks to a U.S.-led bombing campaign in 1999.
By Alexander Smith and Vladimir Banic
MITROVICA, Kosovo — When Ibrahim Delija walks the streets of his hometown, he worries someone will ask him for a light.
Here in Mitrovica, an ethnically divided city in northern Kosovo, even this innocent question can carry a sinister motive. Delija, 21, is not worried about unprepared cigarette smokers, but rather nationalist agitators eager to provoke ethnic violence.
"If you answer in your language and they can't understand it, they know you're not part of their community and you will be in serious trouble," he says, sitting in a hazy, sunlit cafe during an afternoon away from his university English studies. "It's like being in prison, living here."
But not everyone’s most intense activity is war, as this from NPR shows:
Two bare-chested men on horseback wrestle. The goal is to pull your opponent off the horse so a part of his body touches the ground.
Three dogs chase a dummy clad in a fox or hare skin to see who's fastest. Biting an opponent is grounds for disqualification.
And then there is this sport: "Each team seeks to throw as many goat carcasses as possible into the tai kazan (goal) of the opposing team."
Also from central Asia, courtesy of the New York Post:
Melting glaciers on Mount Everest are revealing the bodies of dead climbers, sparking concern from the organizers of expeditions to the famous peak, according to the BBC.
The BBC reports that global warming is unlocking the deadly mountain’s gruesome secrets. Everest has claimed the lives of almost 300 climbers since the first attempt to conquer the mountain in 1921, two-thirds of whom are buried in the mountain’s ice and snow. In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers to reach Everest’s summit.
“Because of global warming, the ice sheet and glaciers are fast melting and the dead bodies that remained buried all these years are now becoming exposed,” Ang Tshering Sherpa, former president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association, told the news outlet.
The Independent (UK) has this:
Omir Bekali says he was almost driven to suicide during his detention in Xinjiang province
Muslims imprisoned in China’s “re-education camps” are forced to eat pork and banned from praying or growing beards, according to a former inmate.
Omir Bekali said the treatment of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in the Xinjiang province was designed to strip them of their religious beliefs.
From CNN:
The puppy, a Kunming wolfdog called Kunxun, was created using cells from what police described as the "Sherlock Holmes" of canine law enforcement, as part of a program they hope will reduce the training time and cost of police dogs in future.
Kunxun was born on December 19 last year at a healthy 1.19 pounds (540 grams) and 9 inches (23 centimeters) in length, according to Beijing-based Sinogene Biotechnology.
Kunxun, China's first cloned police dog in training, was born December 2018
The genetic material used to create Kunxun was taken from a 7-year-old female police sniffer named Huahuangma who has helped bust 12 murder cases and participated in more than 20 other criminal cases. In 2016, she was given the first-class meritorious dog award by China's Ministry of Public Security.
I am finding the Brexit situation more and more frightening, and these days I am starting to think they are headed for what is termed a “hard Brexit,” which I hadn’t thought was really possible. There are lots of unforeseen consequences to that kind of event. The Troubles are back, as shown by this article in the Independent (UK):
Staff raise alert at postal returns centre after finding ‘identical’ package to bombs received in London and Glasgow
A letter bomb discovered at a sorting office in Ireland is believed to be part of a campaign that saw similar devices sent to targets in the UK.
Bomb disposal experts were called to the An Post depot in Limerick after staff raised the alert on Friday morning.
Investigators said the package appeared to be “identical” to four bombs received earlier this month at Heathrow, London City Airport, Waterloo railway station and the University of Glasgow.
More from The Independent, although from yesterday before the UK got a three-week reprieve. I don’t think anything has changed, really.:
Operation Yellowhammer described as the ‘biggest peacetime project in the history of the civil service’
With only days to go until Brexit and no sign of progress in breaking the deadlock, Whitehall officials are poised to activate emergency no-deal plans.
Theresa May has appealed to the EU for a short delay to Brexit up to 30 June after MPs twice rejected her deal and ordered her to extend the two-year Article 50 process.
From the Independent:
Officials at site remind public more than one million people were killed there
Colin Drury
Visitors to Auschwitz, the former Nazi death camp, have been asked to stop posing for photos while balancing on its infamous railway tracks.
Officials at Auschwitz Memorial, which preserves the site where more than 1.1 million Jews were killed, said visitors must “respect” the memory of the dead.
Let’s end with news that is more cheering, from the BBC:
Ghil’ad Zuckermann has found that resurrecting lost languages may bring many benefits to indigenous populations – with knock-on effects for their health and happiness.
Like many people in Australia, Professor Ghil’ad Zuckermann is a regular contributor to the fund to save the Tasmanian Devil. The Tasmanian Devil, which Zuckermann remarks is an “ugly animal”, is listed as endangered, along with much of the unique and beautiful wildlife that makes Australia such a distinctive and enigmatic place. Yet animal life is not the only thing that has struggled to keep up with the pressures of modern life down under.
While Australia may be famous the world over for its biodiversity, for a linguistics professor like Zuckermann, the country has another allure: its languages. Before European colonisers arrived, Australia used to be one of the most linguistically diverse areas in the world, boasting around 250 different languages. Due in part to Australia’s long geographic isolation, many of these had developed unique grammatical structures and concepts that were unknown to languages in other parts of the world.
News from the world of the arts, beginning with this video story from AZfamily:
And from The Independent:
Excursion will stick to warmer waters, rather than look for proof the globe is not, well, a globe
It is, according to Flat Earth conspiracy theorists, the place where the world ends – but, for now, it seems, they have no plans to go there and prove it.
Reports that believers have chartered a cruise ship to go in search of the planet’s outer edge at the Antarctic are – a little like the group themselves, helio-centrics might say – somewhat confused.
Newspapers across the globe have reported theorists are planning an expedition to the ice continent to prove, contrary to 600 years of orthodox thought, the world is not spherical.
CNN on K-Pop:
Seoul (CNN)South Korea's entertainment industry is a cultural juggernaut that has allowed the East Asian nation to punch well above its weight in terms of global soft power.
But a digital sex scandal that police say involves some of K-Pop's biggest stars has rocked the K-Pop world, leaving it
facing a reckoning from which some believe it might not recover.
In the past month, four major K-Pop idols have apologized or announced early retirement after being linked to a group chat in which members shared sexual videos of women who were allegedly filmed without their consent. On Thursday, singer Jung Joon-young
was arrested in connection with the scandal.
From Page Six:
They’re no angels, but irreverent artists Domingo Zapata and Mr. Brainwash were invited to the Vatican to paint an artwork with Pope Francis based on the theme of immigration.
Spanish, New York-based artist Zapata and French-born, Los Angeles-based street artist Brainwash (real name Thierry Guetta) were invited Thursday to create a canvas with Pope Francis titled “El Inmigrante.”
Zapata wrote “I am human” in Spanish on the canvas, and Brainwash scrawled “Life Is Beautiful” in pink with a heart.
The pope added a cross and a bird.