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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
BBC
G7 summit: Iranian foreign minister attends unexpected talks
Iran's foreign minister made a brief and unannounced visit to the G7 summit in France on Sunday.
Mohammad Javad Zarif attended side-line talks in the seaside town of Biarritz where world leaders, including US President Donald Trump, have gathered.
Reports suggest the US delegation was surprised by his visit, which comes at a time of high tension with Iran.
Mr Zarif said on Twitter that he held "constructive" talks with his French counterpart and the French president.
"Road ahead is difficult. But worth trying," he posted on Sunday evening, adding he gave a joint briefing to German and British officials.
Mr Zarif also met President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on Friday on the eve of the summit.
The Guardian
G7: Trump's demands for Russia's readmission cause row in Biarritz
Donald Trump has rowed with his fellow G7 leaders over his demand that Russia be readmitted to the group, rejecting arguments that it should remain an association of liberal democracies, according to diplomats at the summit in Biarritz.
The disagreement led to heated exchanges at a dinner on Saturday night inside the seaside resort’s 19th-century lighthouse. According to diplomatic sources, Trump argued strenuously that Vladimir Putin should be invited back, five years after Russia was ejected from the then G8) for its annexation of Crimea.
Of the other leaders around the table, only Giuseppe Conte, the outgoing Italian prime minister, offered Trump any support, according to this account. Shinzo Abe of Japan was neutral. The rest – the UK’s Boris Johnson, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, the EU council president, Donald Tusk, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron – pushed back firmly against the suggestion.
“On that point … it became a bit tense to say the least,” a European diplomat said. “Most of the other leaders insisted on this being a family, a club, a community of liberal democracies and for that reason they said you cannot allow President Putin – who does not represent that – back in.”
BBC
Floods kill more than 60 in Sudan
Torrential rain and floods have killed 62 people in Sudan, according to the official state news agency.
The country has been battered by heavy rains since early July, affecting almost 200,000 people across 15 states. White Nile state in the south of the country has been hit hardest.
The UN said that more than 37,000 homes have been destroyed or damaged while more flashfloods are expected.
The rainy season continues until the end of October.
The Guardian
Ex-minister: Bolsonaro ‘most detested’ leader as he neglects the Amazon
Jair Bolsonaro’s neglect of the Amazon has made him “the most despised and detested leader” on earth, Brazil’s former environment minister has claimed, as the far-right leader again rebuked French president Emmanuel Macron for challenging his environmental record.
Rubens Ricupero warned Bolsonaro was wreaking havoc on both Brazil’s environment and its global standing, as Bolsonaro used Facebook to scold Macron’s “inappropriate and gratuitous attacks” over the Amazon fires and insult France’s first lady.
“These people are lunatics,” Ricupero said of Bolsonaro’s administration in an interview with the Guardian.
“In my opinion, he has turned himself into the most despised and detested leader in the world. I can’t see anyone else – not even Duterte in the Philippines … not Trump, not anyone – who today provokes so much anger.”
“Never, in more than 50 years of our history, has there been a disaster involving Brazil’s image and the perception of Brazil so serious and probably so irremediable as this one,” added Ricupero, who was also Brazil’s finance minister and ambassador to the United States.
The Guardian (Prague was one of the places we most wanted to visit)
The fall of Prague: ‘Drunk tourists are acting like they’ve conquered our city’
Eugen Kukla could not have made his feelings clearer as 120 drunken tourists thronged noisily past his home around midnight, rudely breaking the silence of a normally sedate city-centre residential street.
“Fuck pub crawls, fuck pub crawls,” he repeated over and over again, while filming the scene on his smart phone. Some of the crowd reacted in amusement, smiling and waving into the camera.
But Kukla, 55, a photojournalist, did not see the joke. “It’s an expression of my personal feelings, a buildup of frustration over a long period of time, years and years and years,” he said. Kukla says his and his family’s lives have been disrupted by the snowballing trade in pub crawls through the centre of Prague and past their fourth-storey flat. “It’s been going on for 10 or 15 years – but it’s got worse.”
Kukla’s act of resistance was witnessed by the Observer, which joined one of the organised crawls along with a senior councillor from Prague 1 municipality, the local authority responsible for the Czech capital’s historic tourist district – now under strain as never before from a burgeoning influx of foreign visitors.
The Guardian
Nasa astronaut 'accessed ex-partner's bank account from space station'
Nasa is investigating a claim that an astronaut accessed the bank account of her estranged partner while she was living on the International Space Station (ISS).
The case appears to be the first allegation of a crime committed in low Earth orbit, according to the New York Times.
Anne McClain acknowledged she accessed the account while she was onboard the ISS but has denied any wrongdoing. Through a lawyer she has insisted she was shepherding the couple’s still-intertwined finances.
McClain has since returned to Earth after completing her six-month mission.
Her estranged spouse, Summer Worden, is said to have filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission. According to Worden, her bank account was accessed without her permission from a Nasa-affiliated computer network. A family member also filed a complaint with Nasa’s internal office of inspector general and has accused McClain of identity theft and improper access to Worden’s private financial records, according to the newspaper.
Brace yourselves and your 401K tomorrow.
Reuters
Asian shares slugged, bonds bought amid trade gloom
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Asian shares sank on Monday as the latest salvo in the Sino-U.S. trade war shook confidence in the world economy and sent investors steaming to the safe harbors of sovereign bonds and gold, while slugging emerging market currencies.
Yields on benchmark 10-year Treasury debt dropped to their lowest since mid-2016, while gold hit its highest since April 2013 as risk was shunned.
There was some relief that China fixed the yuan’s midpoint at a relatively steady 7.0570 per dollar when it had been trading as weak as 7.1850 offshore, countering concerns Beijing would let the currency slide to keep exports competitive.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan still shed 2.0%, and Australia 1.5%.
Japan’s Nikkei lost 2.3%, while Shanghai blue chips fell 1.2%. E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 eased 0.8%, and EUROSTOXX 50 futures 1.1%.
Reuters
Warplanes dump water on Amazon as Brazil military begins fighting fires
BRASILIA/PORTO VELHO, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazilian warplanes are dumping water on the burning forest in the Amazon state of Rondonia, responding to a global outcry over the destruction of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.
As of Sunday, President Jair Bolsonaro had authorized military operations in seven states to combat raging fires in the Amazon, responding to requests for assistance from their local governments, a spokeswoman for his office said.
Reuters accompanied a firefighting brigade near the state capital of Porto Velho, where there were areas larger than football fields that had been charred, but active fires were contained to small areas of individual trees.
The dozen or so yellow clad firefighters from environmental enforcement agency Ibama easily cleared brush from around a burning stump with a leaf blower, doused it with jets connected to water packs mounted on their backs and covered it in earth.
A video posted by the Defense Ministry on Saturday evening showed a military plane pumping thousands of liters (thousands of gallons) of water out of two giant jets as it passed through clouds of smoke close to the forest canopy.
Reuters
Bolivia president does about-face and will now accept aid to put out wildfires
LA PAZ, Bolivia (Reuters) - Bolivian President Evo Morales did an about-face on Sunday and said he was now open to international aid to fight the blazes that have engulfed rural villages and doubled in size since Thursday.
Morales is also suspending his campaign for re-election for at least a week, just two months from election day, to focus on the wildfires.
The blazes burn unabated across vast swaths of hilly tropical forest and savannah near Bolivia’s border with Paraguay and Brazil. At least 1 million hectares, or approximately 3,800 square miles, have been impacted by the fires, officials said.
“There have been offers of aid,” Morales told reporters on a tour of some of the impacted areas. “They are welcome, be they from international groups, people or presidents.”
Reuters
G7 nations close to agreement on tackling Amazon fires: Macron
BIARRITZ, France (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron said on Sunday the leaders of the world’s major industrialized nations were close to an agreement on how to help fight the Amazon forest fires and try to repair the devastation.“There’s a real convergence to say: ‘let’s all agree to help those countries hit by these fires’,” he told reporters in Biarritz, which is hosting the annual summit of leaders from the Group of Seven nations.
He said the G7 countries comprising the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Canada, were finalizing a possible deal on “technical and financial help”.
Macron shunted the Amazon fires to the top of the summit agenda after declaring them a global emergency, and kicked off discussions about the disaster at a welcome dinner for fellow leaders on Saturday.
Washington Post
Hong Kong police draw guns, arrest 36 from latest protest
HONG KONG — Hong Kong police drew their guns and fired a warning shot after protesters attacked officers with sticks and rods, and brought out water cannon trucks for the first time, in an escalation in the summerlong protests that have shaken the city’s government and residents.
Sunday’s main showdown took place on a major drag in the outlying Tsuen Wan district following a protest march that ended in a nearby park. While a large crowd rallied in the park, a group of hard-line protesters took over a main street, strewing bamboo poles on the pavement and lining up orange and white traffic barriers and cones to obstruct police.
After hoisting warning flags, police used tear gas to try to disperse the crowd. Protesters responded by throwing bricks and gasoline bombs toward the police. The result was a surreal scene of small fires and scattered paving bricks on the street between the two sides, rising clouds of tear gas and green and blue laser lights pointed by the protesters at the police.
NPR
Giant Pumice Raft Floating Towards Australia Could Help Replenish Great Barrier Reef
A massive raft made of pumice stones is floating towards Australia, carrying marine organisms that scientists say could help replenish Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
Some of the stones are as large as basketballs, and have formed a giant sheet stretching about 58 square miles — nearly the size of Washington, D.C.
An explosion from an underwater volcano near the tiny island nation of Tonga is thought to have produced the raft, according to NASA.
Michael Hoult and Larissa Brill, an Australian couple that was sailing to Fiji on a catamaran, posted to Facebook about the pumice sheet on August 17th.
They had heard the previous day of "pumice fields," and in a Facebook post, they reported they encountered a "faint but distinct smell of sulfur" when they were near a location "charted as area of volcanic activity."
Later, the couple wrote they "entered a total rock rubble slick made up of pumice stones from marble to basketball size ... The rubble slick went as far as we could see in the moonlight and with our spotlight."