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, jck, 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.
Photos of the week this week come from The Atlantic, CNN, BBC, Buzzfeed, HuffPost, Roll Call, and Colorado Public Radio. Also, NatGeo has readers’ photos, as usual.
We begin with weather and climate news. This from CNN:
By Tara John and Gianluca Mezzofiore, CNN
(CNN)A damaged reservoir in northern England is threatening to collapse and submerge the town of Whaley Bridge in Derbyshire, prompting authorities to evacuate hundreds of homes in an emergency operation.
The army,
environmental agencies and firefighters from across the country are part of a task force battling to shore up the crumbling wall of Toddbrook reservoir -- which suffered extensive damage during flooding this week,
Derbyshire police said in a statement.
Another from CNN:
Scientists found that the event would have been a once-in-a-millennium occurrence without a changing climate, but was made up to 100 times more probable because of the process.
The UK, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands all recorded their highest temperatures ever in the July heat wave, with the mercury topping 40 degrees in much of mainland Europe.
From The Guardian:
Far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro calls satellite data showing rise in deforestation ‘lies’
Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
The director of Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (INPE) has been sacked in the midst of a controversy over its satellite data showing a rise in Amazon deforestation, which the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has called “lies”.
Ricardo Galvão, who had defended the institute and criticised Bolsonaro’s attack, was dismissed on Friday after a meeting with the science and technology minister, Marcos Pontes.
From The Sun:
SOLDIERS have been drafted in to help clear one of the world's most polluted stretches of water - usually known as Indonesia's 'Happy River'.
Worrying images show how the Bahagia waterway in Bekasi has been completely deluged with plastic waste and other rubbish dumped by those living nearby.
From Mongabay:
- The Indonesian government will build a new capital city on the island of Borneo within the next five years, and without clearing any protected forest, the planning minister says.
- The exact location for the so-called forest city hasn’t been announced yet, but the plan has already raised fears about the impact to the environment and to local communities who are dependent on the region’s dwindling forests.
- Mining, logging, and oil palm cultivation have already taken a heavy toll on Borneo’s rainforests and wildlife, including critically endangered orangutans.
- The influx of migrants from other parts of Indonesia has historically been a flash point, sparking sometimes deadly conflicts with indigenous communities, and activists fear an escalation in both conflicts and land grabs as more people move to the new capital.
JAKARTA — Indonesia’s proposed new capital city on the island of Borneo will be built in just five years and without the need to raze any protected rainforest, a government official claims.
President Joko Widodo declared his intention to relocate the capital from the bustling, traffic-choked and polluted metropolis of Jakarta following his April 17 re-election. While the idea of moving the capital has been floated by previous presidents, Widodo says he is serious about implementing it.
And from The Independent:
But British experts condemn comments as 'unhelpful and a step too far'
Jane Dalton
People should not kill mosquitoes but allow them to take "blood donations", a French animal-rights activist has said.
Aymeric Caron, a television presenter, said the insects sucked human blood to obtain protein for their eggs, which was “embarrassing for anti-specists who realise they are being attacked by a mother trying to nourish her future children”.
There is news on other things, of course. This half-hour program is from Al Jazeera:
The Houthis have been ramping up attacks on the Saudi-led coalition while the UAE is gradually pulling out of Yemen and reaching out to Iran
From The Sydney Morning Herald:
Goma, Congo: Congolese authorities are racing to contain an Ebola epidemic, after a gold miner with a large family contaminated several people in the east's main city of Goma before dying of the hemorrhagic fever, officials said.
The government's Ebola response coordinator Jean-Jacques Muyembe said an estimated half of cases of Ebola - which has killed at least 1,800 since the outbreak started a year ago - were going unidentified.
Another ongoing situation, coverage from the BBC:
By Katie Prescott
The number of tourists visiting the UK from China has risen by almost a fifth this summer, the latest figures show.
Travel data firm ForwardKeys said that summer flight bookings from long-haul markets were also 6% higher than in the same period last year.
It credited the weakness of the pound for boosting tourists' spending power.
From The Independent:
Pilot says the Cambridge student ‘did not say a word’ before ‘she opened the door and jumped’
A 19-year-old British student who fell to her death from a light aircraft in Madagascar could have been suffering from a bad reaction to her medication, her uncle has said.
Police have launched an investigation into whether Alana Cutland, 19, threw herself to her death after escaping from the tiny two-door plane as it flew over the savanna on 25 July.
The Cambridge University student’s uncle said she had become sick during her time in Madagascar, possibly due to prescription medication.
“She had [been] taken ill after being there for a few days and when she spoke to her mother on the phone two days before the accident she was mumbling and sounded pretty incoherent,” Lester Riley, the brother of Ms Cutland’s mother Alison,
told the Mail Online.
“We think she had suffered a severe reaction to some drugs but not anti-malaria ones because she had taken those on her trip last year to China without any side effects.”
(note: I kept a longer excerpt because I think the anti-malaria pills are probably the key, as in my experience with them they grew more and more hallucinatory each time I took them. This is a nightmare scenario, of course, but I can see it happening to anyone. Now back to your regularly-scheduled newscast.)
From Al Jazeera:
Unprecedented order forces stockpiling of supplies as fears over removal of special law for Muslim-majority region grow.
Srinagar, India-administered Kashmir - Fear and confusion have gripped residents in India-administered Kashmir after authorities issued an unprecedented order, cancelling a Hindu pilgrimage and asking tourists to leave the disputed region.
The order, issued on Friday by the Jammu and Kashmir state's government, said that because of "intelligence inputs of terror threats" against the "Amarnath Yatra" (pilgrimage) and "the prevailing security situation", pilgrims and tourists should leave the region "immediately".
And news from the arts world, beginning with the Sydney Morning Herald:
It's a film that will show the arrival of the first European settlers from an Indigenous perspective. A epic drama that Phil Noyce, who brought another seminal Aboriginal story to the screen in Rabbit Proof Fence, calls Australia's Braveheart.
A band of filmmakers - two based in Los Angeles - and Indigenous elders have spent a week in a western Sydney hotel next to the Blacktown drive-in theatre planning a bio-pic of the Indigenous warrior Pemulwuy.
From the BBC:
By Gary Nunn Sydney
When famed Australian artist Brett Whiteley died of a heroin overdose in 1992, his wife of 32 years Wendy was plunged into grief.
That sorrow multiplied dramatically when the couple's only daughter, Arkie, died of cancer less than a decade later, aged 37.
Wendy Whiteley's unlikely source of comfort was an overgrown wasteland in Sydney that tangled its way down from the house she had shared with Brett to Lavender Bay, which looks out to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
The railway-owned land became an outlet for Whiteley's grief - despite her "not having a single clue" about gardening.
From CNN:
Kampala, Uganda (CNN)A Ugandan feminist and activist reacted with fury and defiance after being sentenced to nine more months in prison for publishing a metaphorical poem about the birth of President Yoweri Museveni and his mother's vagina.
Stella Nyanzi was found guilty of "cyber harassment" on Thursday and sentenced on Friday for posting a Facebook
poem using graphic imagery as a metaphor for Museveni's "oppression, suppression and repression" over 33 years of rule.
And from The Independent:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Shakespeare are among favourites
Mutanabbi Street, in the heart of downtown Baghdad, has been home to booksellers for centuries.
Through years of war, censorship and dictatorship it has served as a cultural hub for the city. “Cairo writes, Beirut prints, and Baghdad reads,” goes the proverb, and this is where they come to do it.
The cafes that branch off from the main thoroughfare are a din of smoke and conversation. Books spill out from the pavement stalls onto the street, where browsers kneel to rifle through an eclectic offering.