Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck and Rise above the swamp. . Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
Since 2007 the OND has been 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.
- Some stories for tonight:
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North Korea warns South of nuclear retaliation
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South Korea: Why so many struggle to sleep
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El Salvador reels as 6,000 people arrested in unprecedented crackdown
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Shanghai puts whole city on lockdown as Covid cases surge
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Biden rebuffed as US relations with Saudi Arabia and UAE hit new low
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How Russia rescued the ruble
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U.S. stops Russian bond payments, raising risk of default
BBC
North Korea warns South of nuclear retaliation
The sister of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un says Pyongyang would retaliate with nuclear strikes if South Korea launched a pre-emptive attack.
Kim Yo-jong, a senior official, has issued two statements responding to remarks from South Korean officials.
South Korean Defence Minister Suh Wook had said the South was able to strike the North's missile launch points - sparking the furious reaction.
North Korea has tested several missiles this year, heightening tensions.
On Tuesday, Kim Yo-jong released a second statement in state media saying any South Korean aggression would warrant an "inevitable" nuclear response from North Korea.
"In case South Korea opts for military confrontation with us, our nuclear combat force will have to inevitably carry out its duty," she said according to state media reports.
BBC (No wonder) South Korea: Why so many struggle to sleep
South Korea is one of the most sleep deprived nations on earth, and it has taken a massive toll on its population. The BBC's Chloe Hadjimatheou reports.
Ji-Eun began having trouble sleeping when her office hours became so gruelling she couldn't relax any longer.
On average she worked from 07:00 until around 22:00 but on particularly busy days, the 29-year-old public relations officer would find herself in the office until three in the morning.
Her boss often called in the middle of the night, requesting something be done right away.
"It was almost like I forgot how to relax," she says.
Addiction to sleep medication is a national epidemic. There are no official statistics but it is estimated 100,000 Koreans are addicted to sleeping pills.
When they still can't sleep they often resort to drinking alcohol on top of the medication - with dangerous consequences.
The Guardian
El Salvador reels as 6,000 people arrested in unprecedented crackdown
Distraught families across El Salvador are searching for information on the fate of their loved ones after almost 6,000 people were arrested in an unprecedented security crackdown over the past week.
Men, women and children have been rounded up across the Central American country since the government declared a state of emergency on 27 March, suspending constitutional rights including the presumption of innocence.
President Nayib Bukele, an authoritarian populist who uses Twitter to announce policies and denounce his enemies, has said that the detainees are all gang members and that they will not be released.
The state of emergency was declared after three days of violence left 87 dead, which Bukele blamed on the Mara Salvatrucha gang known as MS-13.
While the police claim to have captured the MS-13 leaders who ordered the killings, there is mounting evidence that ordinary people who live or work in gang-dominated neighbourhoods have been arrested arbitrarily.
The Guardian
Shanghai puts whole city on lockdown as Covid cases surge
Shanghai has put all its 26 million residents under lockdown in China’s single-biggest city-wide imposition of the restrictions since the pandemic began as authorities admitted the difficulty in containing the fast-spreading Omicron variant.
Until this week, the megacity – also China’s most populous – adopted an approach of phased lockdown. Initially, the eastern side of the Huangpu River went into lockdown between 28 March and 1 April, then the western side followed suit for another four days.
But that approach has not worked as case numbers continued to rise. On Monday, the number of new daily positive cases exceeded 10,000 for the first time. Since March, the Shanghai government said, over 73,000 positive cases have been found.
These numbers are small compared with countries such as the US and the UK, but they are some of the largest since Covid was first reported in China in late 2019.
The Guardian
Biden rebuffed as US relations with Saudi Arabia and UAE hit new low
As Joe Biden moved to open US strategic oil reserves, his two biggest oil-producing allies have kept their tanks firmly shut. The UAE and Saudi Arabia continue to rebuff the US president as he attempts to counter soaring oil prices prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And both countries have been unusually frank about their refusal to step in.
The five-week-old war is bringing tensions to a head in several parts of the world, but perhaps nowhere is a regional order more under strain than the Middle East, where two of America’s biggest allies are now seriously questioning the foundations of their relationship.
The Saudi and Emirati refusal to bail Biden out – or even to take his calls – has pushed relations between the Gulf states and Washington to an unprecedented low. The extraordinary flow of Russian wealth to Dubai, just as the US and Europe try to strangle Putin’s economy, has inflamed things further.
NPR
How Russia rescued the ruble
Russia said last week that it wants the European countries that buy its natural gas to make their payments in rubles, rather than dollars or euros. A month ago, that might have seemed like a pretty good deal: The ruble was down 40%, at 139 rubles to the dollar, in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Since that low point on March 7, however, the Russian ruble has staged a dramatic recovery. At the time of this writing, it was trading at 84 to the dollar, which is right back where it was at the time of the invasion. And this is no dead cat bounce. It's a sharp and sustained recovery that made the ruble the world's top-performing currencyin March.
Yet all the sanctions imposed when the war began are still in place, and in some cases they're even more robust. So how have the Russians managed to revive their currency?
Reuters
U.S. stops Russian bond payments, raising risk of default
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON, April 5 (Reuters) - The United States stopped the Russian government on Monday from paying holders of its sovereign debt more than $600 million from reserves held at U.S. banks, in a move meant to ratchet up pressure on Moscow and eat into its holdings of dollars.
Under sanctions put in place after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, foreign currency reserves held by the Russian central bank at U.S. financial institutions were frozen.
But the Treasury Department had been allowing the Russian government to use those funds to make coupon payments on dollar-denominated sovereign debt on a case-by-case basis.
On Monday, as the largest of the payments came due, including a $552.4 million principal payment on a maturing bond, the U.S. government decided to cut off Moscow's access to the frozen funds, according to a U.S. Treasury spokesperson.