Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, annetteboardman, jck, Rise above the swamp, and Besame. Alumni editors include (but are not limited to) Man Oh Man, wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), ScottyUrb, Interceptor 7, Neon Vincent, 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.
There is a lot of news from the western hemisphere (not the US) for a change, so we will focus on that, although there will be a bit from the eastern half of the globe as well. But first…
At least something has appreciates the warmth of the summer. From NBC News:
We will go roughly from north to south, beginning with Canada, and a couple from The Guardian:
Government pays stipend to employees who speak French and English but Treasury Board says it has no plans to expand scheme
Canada’s federal government says it will not expand the scope of a program that pays an annual bonus to bilingual employees, excluding hundreds of government workers who speak an Indigenous language on the job.
Since the late 1970s, the federal government has paid a bonus of C$800 (US$617) to workers who use English and French, the country’s two official languages. But Canada has more than 60 Indigenous languages, and about 500 federal employees frequently speak an Indigenous language on the job.
Another from the same newspaper:
Giovanna Boniface received an $8,000 bill from Avis after driving roughly 300km around Toronto and surrounding area
Car rental companies have long earned a reputation for gouging customers, penny-pinching on frills and finding new and unscrupulous ways to charge for add-ons.
But a Canadian woman says she was billed thousands in extra mileage after a rental company claimed she drove a distance nearly the circumference of the Earth over a three-day period.
From the BBC:
By Peter Gillibrand
A blind woman has criticised an airline after her dog was left "squashed" in a cramped space for two transatlantic flights.
Chloe McBratney's labrador Emily was confined to a footwell on her flight from London to Canada and back.
WestJet apologised, but said special arrangements were not made with the required notice of 48 hours in advance.
From Yahoo! News and Next Shark:
Michelle De Pacina
Followers of Filipino QAnon influencer Romana Didulo, who claims to be the newly installed Queen of Canada, obeyed her request to meet in Peterborough, Canada, and arrest police officers.
Didulo, who has over 70,000 followers online, is a leader in the QAnon movement in Canada, which is a far-right political conspiracy theory movement.
From The Toronto Star:
After a famous Canadian photo of Winston Churchill was discovered to be replaced by a fake at the Château Laurier, we look at other intriguing heists.
A painting was stolen from a pharmaceutical company and replaced with a replica. In the 29 years before the theft was discovered, the original changed hands at least twice, until a judge ruled that the painting return to the company.
A librarian stole more than 140 paintings from a fine arts school in China, replacing them with fakes he painted himself. (Later, the librarian told court, those paintings were in turn stolen and replaced by worse imitations.)
And finally, one more from The Guardian:
Dawn Walker, who says she fled domestic abuse, is arrested and accused of stealing friend’s identity to cross border
An acclaimed writer who says she fled Canada to escape domestic abuse is to be extradited from the US, amid accusations she faked her own death, kidnapped her son and illegally crossed the American border.
Dawn Walker, an Indigenous author from Okanese Cree Nation in the province of Saskatchewan, was due to be driven to the border on Wednesday by US officials and handed over to Canadian police, more than a month after she first went missing.
From NPR:
Milton Guevara and A Martínez
TIJUANA, Mexico — Six miles from the U.S.-Mexico border, Muslims gather to pray in an oud-scented musalla. The prayer room sits within a two-story, 8,000 square foot refugee shelter, complete with a minaret and a blue dome.
It's a beacon for Muslims arriving to the city from all over the world seeking a new life elsewhere.
From CNN:
Mexico City (CNN)The families of the ten miners trapped underground in Mexico since early August have rejected a new rescue strategy proposed by the government, Mexico's president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on Friday.
The proposal, which entailed tunneling underground, was rejected on the basis of how time-consuming it would be, Lopez Obrador said.
From the New York Post:
By David Spector
Now we will move west over to the east, beginning with this from ABC:
A U.S. coast guard cutter conducting patrols as part of an international mission to prevent illegal fishing was recently unable to get clearance for a scheduled port call in the Solomon Islands
BANGKOK -- A U.S. coast guard cutter conducting patrols as part of an international mission to prevent illegal fishing was recently unable to get clearance for a scheduled port call in Solomon Islands, an incident that comes amid growing concerns of Chinese influence on the Pacific nation.
The cutter Oliver Henry was taking part in Operation Island Chief monitoring fishing activities in the Pacific, which ended Friday, when it sought to make a scheduled stop at Guadalcanal, Solomon Islands, to refuel and re-provision, the Coast Guard office in Honolulu said.
From The Guardian:
Tributes paid to Dominic Abelen, the first New Zealander to die in the conflict, who was on leave without pay from the defence force
Charlotte Graham-McLay i
A New Zealand soldier who was on leave without pay from his country’s army when he was killed in Ukraine has become the latest foreign fighter and first New Zealander to die in the war.
Friends of Cpl Dominic Abelen, 28, told the Guardian he had enlisted with Ukraine’s international legion, joining thousands of soldiers who have travelled to the conflict from around the world in the months since Ukraine’s government called for volunteers.
And also from The Guardian:
On wild beaches, secretive harvesters seek the coveted whale byproduct that can make a fortune in an instant
Frans Beuse sits at his kitchen table, examining what looks like an array of rocks. Using a slim, sharpened blade he scrapes each in turn, producing five mounds of powder: bright white, deep caramel, tarry black.
Lighting a candle, he holds a thick needle into the flame, then into the powder, which smokes and bubbles into glossy liquid. Beuse leans forward, closing his eyes, and draws a thin tendril of smoke into his left nostril.
“Sweet and ambery,” he says. “It sits on my lips, so I can constantly taste it.”
And from Africa, several stories. This first from the BBC:
By Ahmed Elshamy
Women wearing hijabs (Muslim headscarves) are being discriminated against by businesses in Egypt, a BBC Arabic investigation has discovered.
The evidence appears to violate Egypt's constitution, which bans discrimination based on religion, sex, race or social class.
Since 2015, some Egyptian women wearing a hijab have taken to social media to complain about such treatment.
From Al Jazeera:
Witnesses say a kindergarten in the Tigrayan capital Mekelle was hit by an air strike and four civilians were killed, but the federal government denies the reports.
An air raid killed at least four people, including two children, in the capital of Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region, the head of a hospital said.
The federal government denied the allegations saying the air force only targeted military sites and accused Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) forces of staging civilian deaths.
From The Guardian:
Some asylum seekers have received letters saying government intends to remove them, the Guardian has learned
The Home Office is planning a new deportation flight to Rwanda, the Guardian has learned.
Some newly arrived asylum seekers in hotels have received letters from the department telling them their asylum claims are deemed inadmissible for consideration in the UK.
They go on to say the government intends to send them to Rwanda to have their claims processed there. Asylum seekers have 14 days to raise objections over their forced removal to the east African country.
But there is happier news from Africa as well. This also comes from The Guardian:
WHO hails west African country as first in world to stamp out Guinea worm, lymphatic filariasis, sleeping sickness and trachoma
Togo has been praised by the World Health Organization for becoming the first country in the world to eliminate four neglected tropical diseases.
The WHO presented the west African country with an outstanding achievement award this week for eliminating Guinea worm, lymphatic filariasis, sleeping sickness and trachoma in just 11 years.