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.
I was in Paris one year over spring break and went with my cousin to a restaurant where we had a lovely dinner. At the large table next to us (it took up half the restaurant) was a group of maybe 10 women. They were exchanging gifts (it looked like a Christmas exchange, but in March), and we couldn’t figure out what the occasion was, so my cousin asked the waiter if it was someone’s birthday. The waiter told her it was the International Day of the Woman, as if it was something we should have known. Now I realize it should have been something we knew. I do now.
Now on to the international news, beginning with women’s news.
First from the Washington Post:
LONDON — It’s International Women’s Day. U.N. Secretary General António Guterres has urged faster action to achieve gender equality, amid what he described as “a fierce backlash against women’s rights.”
“Billions of women and girls face marginalization, injustice and discrimination, while the persistent epidemic of violence against women disgraces humanity,” he said last week.
From the Washington Post:
As the world marks International Women’s Day, Ireland is voting on a pair of referendum questions about how its constitution should refer to the role of women, who is responsible for providing care, and how to define a family.
But what at first seemed like a simple decision about updating outdated language in the 1937 constitution has become fraught, and it’s not at all clear which way the country will vote.
From Al Jazeera:
Country becomes first in world to explicitly guarantee abortion as a constitutional right as Macron seals amendment and pledges to push for lifting of restrictions across Europe.
France has officially become the first country in the world to guarantee the right to abortion in its constitution, and President Emmanuel Macron has promised he “will not rest” until women across Europe have the same protection.
The constitutional amendment, passed by the French Parliament earlier in the week, was sealed with hot wax in Paris on Friday.
From Politico Europe:
The Ukraine war is driving the mothers and wives of Russian soldiers to take up the gauntlet against the Kremlin.
Three days after news broke of Alexei Navalny’s death, his wife Yulia announced she would take over his cause.
“We need to form one strong fist and use it to strike this crazy regime,” she urged in a stoic YouTube video.
From NBC News (Reuters):
Danai Deligeorges and Alexia Beziki became one of the first gay couples in Greece to wed after parliament passed a bill last month allowing same-sex marriage.
From CNN:
Iran’s “repression of peaceful protests” and “institutional discrimination against women and girls” has led to human rights violations, some of which amount to “crimes against humanity,” according to a United Nations’ report.
Such violations and crimes include “extrajudicial and unlawful killings and murder, unnecessary and disproportionate use of force, arbitrary deprivation of liberty, torture, rape, enforced disappearances, and gender persecution,” the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) said in a press release Friday.
From The Guardian:
Gion residents asked city council to crack down after rise in tourist numbers leads to increased harassment of traditional entertainers
Visitors to the geisha district of Gion – one of Kyoto’s most popular sightseeing spots – will be banned from entering its picturesque alleyways as authorities in Japan attempt to tackle a dramatic rise in tourism.
Residents of Japan’s ancient capital have struggled to reconcile the financial boost from a return to pre-pandemic visitor numbers with overcrowding and incidents of bad behaviour among tourists.
This weekend ends with the start of Ramadan. This is from Mint:
The first day of fasting for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in Mecca will be Monday, March 11 or Tuesday, March 12
The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan on Friday officially switched on this year's Ramadan lights installation at Piccadilly Circus to start the celebrations
He said that the great thing about Ramadan lights is that it gives Muslims Brits a sense of belonging. It sends a message ‘we are not simply tolerated but respected, embraced and celebrated. Also, not only Muslims, but even non-Muslims enjoy these lights. People come here and shop and that way the business around here also benefit largely during this time’
From Al Jazeera:
The dawn-to-dusk fast lasts anywhere from 12 to 17 hours, depending on where in the world you are.
The Muslim holy month of Ramadan will begin on Monday, March 11 or Tuesday, March 12, depending on the sighting of the new moon.
The dawn-to-dusk fast lasts anywhere from 12 to 17 hours, depending on which part of the world you are in.
From NPR:
JOHANNESBURG — Nigerian security forces are searching for more than 200 children abducted from their school by gunmen on motorcycles Thursday, in the latest mass kidnapping to hit Nigeria.
Officials and witnesses have given varying figures of the number of students taken from the school in Kuriga, a town in northwestern Nigeria, with between 200 and 300 children reported to be missing, some of them as young as 8 years old.
From The Guardian:
Victims’ families say Jon Boutcher’s report into British spy proves state and IRA were ‘co-conspirators’ in murder
The police chief who led the inquiry into a murderous British spy in the IRA known as Stakeknife has condemned MI5 for stalling his investigation, as his report was hailed by victims’ families as proof that the British state and the IRA had been “co-conspirators” in murder.
Jon Boutcher criticised attempts “to undermine me and the investigation” and spoke of a delay strategy deployed by the secret services as he revealed that agent Stakeknife had probably killed more people than he saved in the service of the British state.
From the BBC:
By Harriet Heywood & Brian Farmer
Police have launched an investigation after a painting of a politician, linked to the creation of Israel, was damaged.
Palestine Action said one if its activists had "ruined" a 1914 painting of Lord Balfour at Trinity College, part of the University of Cambridge.
From Politico:
Macron raised the possibility that foreign troops could be sent to Ukraine, but Berlin and many other capitals object.
France is building an alliance of countries open to potentially sending Western troops to Ukraine — and in the process deepening its clash with a more cautious Berlin.
French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné was in Lithuania on Friday, where he met his Baltic and Ukrainian counterparts to buttress the idea that foreign troops could end up helping Ukraine in areas like demining.
From NDTV:
Some of the men were told they would be working as helpers for the Russian army, but were assured they would not have to go to the frontlines.
Mukesh Singh Sengar, Edited by Rohit Paul
The CBI's raids on agents and companies involved in trafficking Indians to Russia have revealed the nefarious ways in which youngsters were duped into fighting the country's wars against Ukraine.
While some were sent on the pretext of being given jobs as delivery boys, others were told they would be working as helpers for the Russian army, but were categorically assured that their duties would have nothing to do with the frontlines. The youngsters were also told that since Russia needs manpower in the war effort, the country would issue a "government official" card to them, which would all but guarantee a permanent residency
From The Guardian:
With mass bleaching events so frequent, the prognosis is bad. Australia must lead with its actions on emissions and phasing out fossil fuel development
What will it take for us to collectively pay attention? Not a new question, but a reasonable one after the official declaration that the Great Barrier Reef is suffering through another mass bleaching event driven by global heating – the fifth since 2016.
There is no clearer visual demonstration of the climate crisis than what is happening to the reef. It’s a globally unique landmark, made up of thousands of individual reefs and islands and an extraordinary and eccentric array of species. It has been growing into its modern form, spread across an area the size of Italy, for about 8,000 years. People travel from across the planet to witness it. And we can literally see the impact of climate change on it as it changes colour and loses life in real time.
From CBS News:
By Caitlin O'Kane
An Australian TV show featured a chef frying fish during a cooking segment last week – but that fish happened to be a near-extinct species. The broadcaster and chef have since issued an apology after fishermen condemned the segment.
ORF, a public radio and TV broadcaster in Austria, apologized for cooking a Frauennerfling fish, according to AFP.
From People Magazine:
Febrio De-Zoysa, 19, is charged with six counts of first-degree murder
And finally, on the International Day of the Woman, a non-human mother story from Newser:
Scientists say wormlike caecilians offer this surprising sustenance to their young, like mammals
Researchers already knew that baby ringed caecilians, a wormlike amphibian that lives burrowed underneath the earth, gain some of their nutrition by feeding on the skin of their own mother once or twice a week. But when a team out of Brazil studying the creature (also known as Siphonops annulatus) noticed how active and energetic the babies were, despite their limited chow-down routine, they tracked the young occasionally gathering around the end of mom's tail for a more surprising source of sustenance: milk, more typically seen produced in mammals to feed their young, reports NPR.