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 (RIP), 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.
Pictures of Purim in times of COVID, and photos of the week from the BBC.
We begin with news from Africa from the Washington Post:
NAIROBI — In a meeting late Thursday, Somalia's prime minister persuaded opposition leaders to postpone mass anti-government protests and apologized for violence last week that targeted candidates in an election that was meant to take place this month but has been delayed indefinitely.
Somalia is in a protracted constitutional crisis, with opposition leaders claiming that President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed — commonly known by his nickname “Farmajo” — has overstayed his mandate. Tensions spiked on Friday last week, leading to exchanges of gunfire on the streets of the capital, Mogadishu, and heightening fears that the election dispute could spiral into civil conflict.
From the BBC:
Eritrean troops fighting in Ethiopia's northern region of Tigray killed hundreds of people in Aksum mainly over two days in November, witnesses say.
The mass killings on 28 and 29 November may amount to a crime against humanity, Amnesty International says in a report.
An eyewitness told the BBC how bodies remained unburied on the streets for days, with many being eaten by hyenas.
More coverage, from CNN:
They thought they'd be safe at a church.
Then the soldiers arrived
By Bethlehem Feleke, Eliza Mackintosh, Gianluca Mezzofiore and Katie Polglase,
All of the witnesses to this massacre have been given pseudonyms at their request due to fears of retribution.
Abraham began burying the bodies in the morning and didn't stop until nightfall.
The corpses, some dressed in white church robes drenched in blood, were scattered in arid fields, scrubby farmlands and a dry riverbed. Others had been shot on their doorsteps with their hands bound with belts. Among the dead were priests, old men, women, entire families and a group of more than 20 Sunday school children, some as young as 14, according to eyewitnesses, parents and their teacher.
From CNN, on somewhat the same topic:
Story by Reuters
The Dutch parliament on Thursday passed a non-binding motion saying the treatment of the Uyghur Muslim minority in China amounts to genocide, the first such move by a European country.
Activists and United Nations rights experts say at least one million Muslims are being detained in camps in the remote western region of Xinjiang. The activists and some Western politicians accuse China of using torture, forced labor and sterilizations.
From The Guardian:
Tamayo Marukawa among 50 conservative MPs to urge local body not to support policy change
Japan’s minister for women’s empowerment and
gender equality, Tamayo Marukawa, is among a group of conservative MPs who have opposed a legal change that would allow women to keep their birth name after
marriage.
Japan is one of only a few industrialised countries where it is illegal for married couples to have different surnames. The country’s civil code, introduced in 1896, requires married couples to share a surname and while it does not stipulate which name they should adopt, in practice women take their husband’s name in 96% of cases.
From The Guardian:
Police set up crime scene after large chunk of flesh, including a bellybutton, found at Mollymook
Australian Associated Press
Six days after Sydney businesswoman Melissa Caddick’s decaying foot washed up on a New South Wales south coast beach, more human remains have drifted ashore.
Police were called to Mollymook at 6.30pm on Friday after remains were discovered by members of the public.
From CNN:
A Malaysian man on Thursday won a landmark court challenge against an Islamic ban on sex "against the order of nature," raising hopes for greater acceptance of gay rights in the mostly Muslim country.
The Muslim man in his 30s -- whose name has been withheld by his lawyer to protect his privacy -- filed the lawsuit after he was arrested in the central Selangor state in 2018 for attempting gay sex, which he denies.
From CNN:
By Esha Mitra and Julia Hollingsworth, CNN
Bhopal, India (CNN)The white van arrived in slum areas of Bhopal, a city in central India, blasting a message over the speaker system that seemed too good to refuse: "Come and take the coronavirus vaccine and get 750 rupees ($10)."
Locals who recalled hearing it back in December said they scrambled to take up the offer -- 750 rupees was about twice what they'd usually earn for a day's hard labor. And many had struggled to work at all during the pandemic.
From the BBC:
Former President of Ireland Mary Robinson made a "big mistake" over Princess Latifa Al Maktoum.
The daughter of Dubai's ruler, who tried to flee the country in 2018, was previously described as a "troubled young woman" by Mrs Robinson.
From The Hill:
The Navy on Friday reported more than a dozen COVID-19 cases among service members aboard a warship in the Middle East, with several people possibly infected on another ship.
The military branch announced the coronavirus outbreak aboard the amphibious transport dock USS San Diego in a press release, adding that it had also identified “several persons under investigation” on the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea.
From Vox:
Navalny’s movement is unlike any in recent history.
In August 2020, Russian politician Alexei Navalny was campaigning in Siberia when he suddenly fell ill. He collapsed, was rushed to a hospital, then evacuated to Berlin, Germany, where doctors concluded that he had been poisoned with a lethal nerve agent called Novichok.
It was not completely unexpected. In recent years, a number of Russian dissidents and defectors have been poisoned. And Navalny is the most outspoken critic of the country’s president, Vladimir Putin. In less than 10 years, Navalny has risen from blogging about corruption to being the face of Russia’s opposition movement. When he was poisoned, he was organizing a campaign that threatened Putin’s party in elections across the country.
From The Guardian:
Begum, who fled as a schoolgirl to join Isis in Syria, will not be able to re-enter UK to fight case in person
Shamima Begum, who fled Britain as a schoolgirl to join Islamic State in Syria, has failed to restore her British citizenship after the supreme court ruled she had lost her case.
The judgment on Friday from the UK’s highest court is a critical – and controversial – test case of the UK’s policy to strip the citizenship of Britons who went to join Isis and are being detained by Syrian Kurdish groups without trial.
From CBS:
Three-year-old Madeleine McCann vanished from her bed on vacation in 2007. Now, investigators believe they have a credible suspect who may know what happened to McCann. Peter Van Sant joins "CBS This Morning" with the investigation into this suspect on this week's "48 Hours."
From CNN:
By Christopher Johnson, CNN
(CNN)A zoo worker in Spain died when an elephant hit him with her trunk, throwing him against the bars of her enclosure, local officials confirmed.
Joaquin Gutierrez Arnaiz, aged 44, was hit by a 4,000-kilogram (4.4-ton) female African elephant in Cabarceno Natural Park in Cantabria, northern Spain, on Wednesday.
Guttierez Arnaiz was rushed to the Marques de Valdecilla University Hospital, where he died from his injuries.
From Boston.com:
LAURIE KELLMAN
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Violet light bathed the club stage as 300 people, masked and socially distanced, erupted in gentle applause. For the first time since the pandemic began, Israeli musician Aviv Geffen stepped to his electric piano and began to play for an audience seated right in front of him.
“A miracle is happening here tonight,” Geffen told the crowd.
From the Washington Post:
A large iceberg about 20 times the size of Manhattan broke off the Brunt Ice Shelf in the Weddell Sea section of Antarctica during the past day, following the buildup of a large crack in the floating ice during the past decade. The iceberg is about 490 square miles and about 492 feet thick, according to the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
News of the Arts
From the Guardian:
The novelist talks about the heartache and hedonism that inspired her debut – and how writing helped her find a way out of the chaos of young adult life
Megan Nolan is weighing up how she feels about her relatives back home in Waterford, Ireland, reading her first novel, Acts of Desperation. She is not, she says, looking forward to it. I tell her that she might have to get used to it; I don’t live far from Waterford, and have noticed that she has already made the local newspaper (not to mention previews of 2021’s notable new voices in the Irish Times and the Observer). Anyway, what’s the problem? Everyone has been so supportive, she replies, “as soon as they heard that I was writing this book, and was having the book published, you know, everyone is so nice about it. And they’ll say, ‘I can’t wait to get it, and we’re going to have such a party when you get back.’ And then I just think: ‘Oh my God, they’re all going to buy it and be really moved that they’re buying it and then they’ll get home and have to read that.’”
In the New York Times:
Selling digitally isn’t the same, most agree. But that doesn’t mean that bricks-and-mortar exhibition spaces will all return to how they were.
LONDON — The showrooms are shut, the street all but deserted.
This, last Friday, was Cork Street in Mayfair, one of London’s prime locations for contemporary art galleries. After almost a year of coronavirus-related restrictions that have hampered gallerists’ ability to display and sell art, the Britain-based fair organizer and publisher Frieze has chosen this address to offer dealers another way of doing business.
From Art News:
The Tribal Arts Show and the American Indian Art Show, two regional showcases of African, Oceanic, and Indigenous art that have taken place in San Francisco for over three decades, opened together this year as one online edition on Thursday. The fair runs until next week, with 130 exhibitors from nine countries. This iteration, like numerous others over the past year, went digital for the time as a result of the pandemic.
The art fair typically invites small and mid-size dealers—with a few high-end exceptions, like Pace and Belgian dealer Didier Claes—to offer their wares, which range from antiquities to contemporary art by Indigenous artists. Last February, just before the coronavirus pandemic brought the art world to a grinding halt, John Morris and Kim Martindale, the co-directors of both fairs, staged them together as one event. (The duo had purchased the Tribal Arts Show from its founders three years prior; Martindale, who formerly headed the LA Art Show, had produced the American Indian Art Show on his own before the merge.)
From the New York Times:
She believed that life for her people in America was an act of near-superhuman perseverance, and she was determined to capture that history in every medium she could.
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Each morning at 4, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson would rise from the couch in her living room in Columbus, Ohio, and, with her dogs in tow, commit herself to her many continuing art projects. She would start, perhaps meditatively, with the watercolors in her basement, before moving on to other pieces in other rooms.
Almost every part of her house-turned-studio had been given over to the tools of her craft: paint, brushes, journals, sketchbooks, buttons, fabrics, music boxes, found objects and what she called hogmawg, the sculptural material she made with pig grease, mud, homemade dyes and glue that gave her sculptures an almost petrified quality.
From CPR News (Colorado):
From The Daily News:
- By Colleen Newvine Associated Press
If you’ve been watching experts and commentators appearing on television from their homes, their increased attention to decor might look familiar: In the early days of lockdown, they, like many of us, sat in front of blank white walls, while now their homes frequently display prominent artwork.
“Cinderella has nothing on these people,” said Claude Taylor, who created the Room Rater Twitter account with his fiancée, Jessie Bahrey. “I don’t think art is even something people thought of in April.”
Room Rater scores speakers’ setups on a 10-point scale for details like lighting and camera level. Good artwork can boost a score. For example, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson scored a 10/10 for appearing on "Morning Joe" in front of artwork by his wife, Avis Robison.
From The Guardian:
The actor talks about the struggle for pay parity, sympathising with Britney Spears, fond memories of Chadwick Boseman – and her frustration at tabloid headlines overshadowing her work
No excuses for lateness in the era of Zoom, perhaps, but cut Sienna Miller some slack. The 39-year-old has just appeared on This Morning, where she struggled valiantly to pitch her new film Wander Darkly, in which she plays a woman who may or may not have survived a car crash. (“It’s really hard to describe!”) Then she dashed to the bathroom to scrape off all that TV-friendly makeup. Now here she is in her bedroom, with her fresh, non-shiny face framed by bright blond locks. “Like a normal person again,” she says cheerfully. Yeah, right.
Take her current lockdown viewing habits. In between homeschooling Marlowe, her eight-year-old daughter with her former partner Tom Sturridge, and shooting a six-part Netflix thriller, Anatomy of a Scandal, she has been watching the documentary Framing Britney Spears. She identifies with the public suffering of that beleaguered star. She even recognises the faces of individual paparazzo who once hounded and harassed her, too.