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 JeremyBloom. 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.
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 the week come from CNN.
There are several interesting stories from the Americas today, so that is where we begin with this from Insider:
The drug lord Pablo Escobar imported hippos to live on his Colombian ranch. They've rapidly bred.
Now authorities want to send at least 70 hippos to Mexico and India, CBS News reported.
The proposed plan to curb the number of hippos follows failed sterilization efforts by authorities.
From Al Jazeera:
Eighty-eight officers and employees have been released after violence broke out against the oil company Emerald Energy.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro has announced on Twitter that his ministers successfully negotiated the release of 88 hostages taken during a deadly protest against the oil company Emerald Energy.
“Thanks to the efforts of the ministers of Defense and the Interior, all police members and oil officials retained in San Vicente del Caguán, Caquetá, have been released,” Petro wrote on Friday.
From Reuters, via NBC News:
It names President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo, his wife, as participants in the violations and calls for international legal action and sanctions against those involved.
Nicaragua’s government has committed serious and systematic violations which amount to crimes against humanity, a United Nations-appointed team of human rights experts said on Thursday, calling for international sanctions against the government.
The three-person body said the government has committed, and continues to commit, acts of torture, extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detention since 2018.
And from the BBC:
In recent weeks, Canadian media have released a steady drip of reports, based on leaked intelligence, of detailed claims of Chinese meddling in the country's last two federal elections in 2019 and 2021 - the latest Western nation to sound the alarm over concerns of foreign election interference.
Chinese officials have denied any interference, calling the allegations "purely baseless and defamatory" in a statement to the BBC.
From the BBC:
Libreville, Luanda, Brazzaville, Kinshasa - France's President Emmanuel Macron is on a whirlwind tour of African capitals as he tries to shift French policy on the continent away from military involvement.
He can hardly be accused of ignoring Africa - this is his 18th presidential trip - but this comes at a time of ever-increasing competition from China and Russia, and growing resentment of the close economic ties between France and its former colonial, which some see as a form of continued exploitation.
From Reuters:
ABUJA, March 3 (Reuters) - Six opposition-led Nigerian states on Friday night withdrew a Supreme Court petition to invalidate the result of last weekend's presidential vote, which they had argued violated electoral rules, court papers showed.
The states, in a court filing signed by their attorneys general, did not give reasons for their decision.
From the Middle East Eye:
Nine metre passageway unveiled by Egyptian officials, which could provide answers on how ancient wonder was built
A nine-metre-long hidden passageway has been discovered inside Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza.
The corridor, which is two metres wide and located on the northern side of one of the world’s largest pyramids, was unveiled during a press conference on Thursday by Egyptian antiquities officials.
The findings were made as part of the Scan Pyramids project, which uses infrared thermography, 3D construction technology, and radiographic muons, among other non-destructive and non-invasive techniques, to investigate the site.
From Al Jazeera:
Volker Turk slams Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s comments calling for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be ‘wiped out’.
The human rights chief of the United Nations has criticised Israel’s far-right finance minister for remarks in which he called for the Palestinian village of Huwara to be “wiped out”, describing the comments as “an unfathomable statement of incitement to violence and hostility”.
“The situation in the occupied Palestinian territory is a tragedy, a tragedy above all for the Palestinian people,” Volker Turk told the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council on Friday as he formally presented a report on the situation in the occupied territories.
From NBC News (Reuters):
Soldiers shoved protesters to the ground in the West Bank town of Hawara, activists said, pressing their knees into their necks and backs before briefly detaining them.
Israeli troops fired stun grenades and tear gas on Friday to block busloads of Israeli left-wing activists from staging a solidarity rally in a Palestinian town that was set ablaze by radical Jewish settlers earlier this week, protesters said.
The soldiers shoved protesters to the ground in the occupied West Bank town of Hawara, activists said, pressing their knees into their necks and backs before briefly detaining them. According to Sally Abed from the group Standing Together, at least two protesters were briefly arrested. The army threw them to the ground, kicking and handcuffing them, she said.
From the Times of Israel:
PM’s son says demonstrators tried to ‘lynch’ his mother after protest at Tel Aviv hairdresser, later deletes tweet; senior intelligence officer says he ‘lost it completely’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son Yair on Thursday branded the hundreds of thousands of Israelis protesting against the government’s judicial overhaul plans “terrorists” in a since-deleted tweet posted after hundreds of demonstrators surrounded a Tel Aviv salon where his mother was getting her hair done, requiring police to extract her from the scene.
“These are not protesters. They are not anarchists either. They are terrorists! A violent underground movement has sprung up here (with billions in funding from criminals and evil people). We’re talking about domestic terrorism,” Netanyahu tweeted.
From the Bellingham Herald (AP):
Israel acknowledged on Friday that an inscription in clay found in the country's south bearing the name of Darius the Great, ruler of the ancient Persian Empire, was not authentic.
The shard of pottery in question was discovered by a passerby last December and caused a sensation as the first mention of sixth century B.C. empire builder to appear in Israel.
After the news broke earlier this week, an expert in ancient Aramaic inscriptions approached the Israel Antiquities Authority to explain that she herself had actually etched those words onto the ancient fragment.
From the BBC:
The first state visits of the reign of King Charles are going to be to France and Germany, Buckingham Palace has announced.
King Charles and Camilla the Queen Consort will travel to the countries on a visit from 26 to 31 March.
President Emmanuel Macron of France will host a state banquet for the royal couple at the Palace of Versailles.
From The Guardian:
Whether lessons are learned by the security services should be a matter for democratic debate
The final report of the public inquiry into the Manchester Arena attack in May 2017, which left 22 people dead, offers revealing insights into how the bomber, Salman Abedi, ended up as a violent jihadist; and how the security services lost chances to prevent him from carrying out the deadly blast. Sir John Saunders, the inquiry’s chairman, paints a quietly devastating portrait of wrong calls and serious misjudgments. The conclusion of the 226-page report is that there had been a “significant missed opportunity” by MI5 that might have stopped the carnage. Sir John found it had failed to act on two key pieces of intelligence, rejecting earlier claims by the agency that the information was related to “non‑terrorist criminality”. The apology from MI5’s director general, Ken McCallum, was necessary. The agency had to acknowledge its mistake. But it does not ease the pain felt by bereaved families.
From the BBC:
A Belgian woman who murdered her five children has been euthanised at her own request, 16 years after the killings.
Genevieve Lhermitte killed her son and four daughters, aged three to 14, in the town of Nivelles on 28 February 2007, while their father was away.
She then tried to take her own life but failed, and ended up calling emergency services for help.
From PBS:
COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre met with Indigenous Sami reindeer herders Friday after more than a week of protests against wind farms that activists say endanger the herders’ way of life.
The prime minister acknowledged “ongoing human rights violations” in the situation.
From NPR:
Greek authorities released a new recording on Thursday that shed light on what may have caused one of the country's worst railway wrecks in history.
In the audio, a station manager appears to instruct a driver to "pass the red signal" before that train collided head-on with another on Tuesday night local time, near the city of Larissa in northern Greece, according to Greek news media.
From CNN:
Russia could find itself with no money as soon as next year and needs foreign investment, outspoken Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska has said.
“There will be no money already next year, we need foreign investors,” he said at an economic conference in Siberia Thursday, according to comments reported by TASS, a Russian state-owned news agency.
From Business Insider:
Alina Kabaeva, a former rhythmic gymnast and politician, is the rumored longtime girlfriend of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Take a look inside the $15 million penthouse considered to be "the largest apartment in Russia."
From Space.com:
China's Shenzhou 15 astronauts are keeping busy on the nation's Tiangong space station.
Two of the three
Shenzhou 15 spaceflyers — Fei Junlong and Zhang Lu — conducted a spacewalk outside Tiangong recently, officials with the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) said in an
update on Wednesday(opens in new tab) (March 1). Fellow crewmate Deng Qingming supported the excursion from inside the station.
Fei and Zhang "successfully completed all the scheduled tasks and returned safely to the Wentian experimental cabin," CMSEO officials wrote (in Chinese; translation by Google), without specifying what those tasks were or when exactly the spacewalk took place. Wentian is one of the T-shaped Tiangong's three modules; the others are Mengtian and Tianhe.
From CNN:
Concerns about North Korea’s chronic food shortages are growing, with multiple sources suggesting this week that deaths due to starvation are likely.
Some experts say the country has hit its worst point since a 1990s famine known as the “Arduous March” caused mass starvation and killed hundreds of thousands of people, or an estimated 3-5% of what was then a 20 million-strong population.
From USA Today:
Geographers say the number of islands in Japan is expected to more than double after a recount of its islands, Kyodo News reported.
A total of 7,000 more islands Japan didn't know existed were found through digital mapping by the Geospatial Information Authority of Japan (GSI). The agency used advanced technology cross-referenced with past aerial photos to conduct the recount.
From Al Jazeera:
Two children are among the victims and 50 other people have been admitted to hospital, some with severe burns, fire official says.
Indonesian officials have called for an investigation and an audit of state energy company Pertamina’s facilities after a fire at its fuel storage station killed 13 people.
The fire, which started at around 8pm (01:00 GMT) on Friday from a fuel pipe at Pertamina’s Plumpang fuel storage depot in the capital Jakarta, quickly spread to nearby houses and sent residents in the densely populated area into a panic.
From the Miami Herald:
ASPEN PFLUGHOEFT
Landing on the sandy beach, a team of researchers headed into the rainforest of an uninhabited island off the coast of Australia. Scouring the rocky terrain, they soon discovered an unfamiliar creature.
Conrad Hoskin led the reptile survey to Scawfell Island, a rugged island with a rainforest canopy and numerous boulders, James Cook University said in a Friday, March 3, news release. He set out with a goal in mind.