OND Editors OND is a 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 12:00AM Eastern Time.
OND Editors Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Man Oh Man, rfall, Doctor RJ and JML9999. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke and jlms qkw. The guest editor is annetteboardman.
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BBC
'Jihadi John': Mohammed Emwazi was a cold, loner, ex-fighter says
The Islamic State fighter known as "Jihadi John" was a cold loner who set himself apart from others, says an IS defector who met him in Syria.
The BBC has spoken to a man who came across Mohammed Emwazi when he first arrived in Syria about two years ago.
Unlike other Britons, Emwazi wanted to appear in IS videos, the man said.
Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born UK citizen, formerly from west London, has been named as the man in several IS videos where hostages have been beheaded.
Abu Ayman, as he calls himself, is a skinny young man in his 20s, with a ready smile, and a defector from IS, also known as Isis or Isil.
He spoke to us about his encounters with one of the world's most wanted men.
When they met, they were both just ordinary fighters with Islamist groups fighting the Syrian regime.
BBC
North Korea fires missiles as US-S Korea drills begin
North Korea fired two short-range missiles into the sea as annual US-South Korea military exercises got under way, officials in Seoul say.
The two missiles, with a range of 490km (305 miles), were fired from the western city of Nampo into the sea east of the Korean peninsula, the South Korean military said.
The drills, involving tens of thousands of troops, always anger Pyongyang.
It traditionally shows its displeasure with missile tests and louder rhetoric.
Seoul and Washington describe the military exercises as defensive in nature. North Korea calls them a rehearsal for invasion.
Key Resolve, a largely computer-simulated exercise, lasts 12 days and Foal Eagle, which has ground, air and sea components, lasts eight weeks.
Reuters
The mysterious Mr. Ri returns, urbane survivor of North Korea purge
(Reuters) - The young Kim Jong Un may be the public face of isolated North Korea, but the man who represents Pyongyang on the international stage is an urbane 75-year-old who lived under an assumed name for decades and survived a vicious purge over a year ago.
Now North Korea's foreign minister and one of the most powerful men in the regime, Ri Su Yong was rumored to have been executed along with his mentor Jang Song Thaek, Kim's uncle, and several of his aides.
But the French-speaking Ri, who acted as Kim's surrogate father when he was at a Swiss school, is touring international capitals again, defending his country's nuclear capability and trying to parry allegations of human rights abuses.
Like Jang, Ri is known as a powerful and close family confidant, open to economic reforms. But Jang fell afoul of the various factions around Kim, possibly because of his rapid rise to power.
Ri returns to Switzerland this week, where he spent two decades as North Korea's envoy to Berne and the United Nations in Geneva and became doyen of the diplomatic corps.
On Tuesday, he will make North Korea's first address to the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose independent inquiry last year accused the regime of committing violations tantamount to crimes against humanity.
The guy looks like Scalia's brother.
BBC
Boris Nemtsov murder: Tens of thousands march in Moscow
Tens of thousands of people have marched through central Moscow to honour opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, who was shot dead on Friday.
They carried portraits of Mr Nemtsov and banners saying "I am not afraid".
He had been due to lead an opposition march on Sunday but his killing turned the event into a mourning rally.
Mr Nemtsov's allies have accused the Kremlin of involvement, but President Vladimir Putin condemned the murder as "vile" and vowed to find the killers.
Opposition supporters gathered at a point not far from the Kremlin before marching past the spot on Great Moskvoretsky Bridge where Mr Nemtsov was killed. Some chanted "Russia without Putin!"
Several thousand people also marched in St Petersburg.
BBC
Netanyahu arrives in US for contested Congress Iran speech
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in the US to argue against a possible nuclear deal with Iran.
Mr Netanyahu says the deal would be inadequate to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear bomb.
He is due to give a speech in Congress on Tuesday which was not agreed in advance with the Obama administration, angering the White House.
The speech comes two weeks before Israeli elections, with his Likud party under pressure in domestic polls.
The US and other powers - the so-called P5+1 - are negotiating with Iran on its nuclear programme.
They want a framework agreement by the end of the month which addresses concerns that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons technology, something Tehran denies.
Before getting on the plane for Washington, Mr Netanyahu described his trip as a "fateful and even historic mission".
"I feel deep and genuine concern for the security of all the people of Israel," he said. "I will do everything in my ability to secure our future."
CNN
Missing UK teens seen on video in Turkey before going to Syria
(link has auto-play video)
CNN)Three teen British girls suspected of traveling to Syria to join ISIS appeared on surveillance video in Turkey before they went to their destination.
Images show the teens boarding a bus in Istanbul, Turkish HBR television reported. It's the first sighting of the girls since they left London almost two weeks ago.
Authorities have said they have no reason to believe the girls are still in Turkey and believe they have crossed into neighboring Syria, parts of which have been taken over by Islamist terror group ISIS.
The three east London classmates -- Shamima Begum, 15; Kadiza Sultana, 16; and Amira Abase, 15 -- boarded a Turkish Airlines plane from London's Gatwick Airport to Istanbul on February 17.
A British counterterrorism officer said police had tried to reach out to the girls using the Turkish media and social media to persuade them to return home.
The girls' parents have also publicly begged for them to come home.
NPR
Avalanches Kill Nearly 250 In Afghanistan
Massive avalanches in a valley not far from the Afghan capital have reportedly killed nearly 200 people, adding to a total of almost 250 deaths from the worst such snow slides in three decades in the country's mountainous northeast.
Rescue workers using bulldozers worked to clear roads to the Panjshir Valley area just northeast of Kabul — an area where villagers have been cut off for almost a week.
Gov. Abdul Rahman Kabiri, the acting governor of Panjshir province, said a total 196 people had been killed and dozens more injured in the deadly avalanches. Hundreds of homes have been damaged and destroyed, he said, according to The Wall Street Journal. Some 50 others were killed in avalanches elsewhere.
Al Jazeera America
Algerians suffering from French atomic legacy, 55 years after nuke tests
Ahmed el-Hadj Hamadi was huddled into a building with the rest of his community by French soldiers early in the morning. They were instructed to lie down, close their eyes and cover their ears. He then remembers a sound like “the world coming to an end” and the windows turning white. A cord above their prone bodies swung erratically until the light bulb it held shattered.
“I thought it was the apocalypse. We all did,” he said. “We all thought we might die.” Later, the French military began tasking out labor to residents in the isolated desert region of Algeria. “They had built a kind of village at the explosion area, and even put animals in it,” Hamadi added. “After the blast we were sent out to gather all the rubbish. The ground was all burned, white, liquid.”
To nomadic communities around the town of Reggane, they’re known more than half a century later as “leopard skins” — stretches of sand across Algeria’s southern Sahara that are peppered with small black clumps. People used to collect scrap metal from the charred warplanes and trucks that emerge, fossil-like, and then smelt them into jewelry and kitchen utensils.
But these Algerians were not properly warned of their danger after France’s misgoverned nuclear bomb-testing campaign of the early 1960s, which vitrified vast tracts of desert with heat and plutonium and left a legacy of uncontained radiation that is still crippling inhabitants. Estimates of the number of Algerians affected by testing range from 27,000 — cited by the French Ministry of Defense — to 60,000, the figure given by Abdul Kadhim al-Aboudi, an Algerian professor of nuclear physics.
N Y Times
U.S. Seeks to Deport Bosnians Over War Crimes
WASHINGTON — Immigration officials are moving to deport at least 150 Bosnians living in the United States who they believe took part in war crimes and “ethnic cleansing” during the bitter conflict that raged in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
In all, officials have identified about 300 immigrants who they believe concealed their involvement in wartime atrocities when they came to the United States as part of a wave of Bosnian war refugees fleeing the violence there. With more records from Bosnia becoming available, the officials said the number of suspects could eventually top 600.
“The more we dig, the more documents we find,” said Michael MacQueen, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement historian who has led many investigations in the agency’s war crimes section. The accused immigrants, many of them former soldiers from Bosnia, include a soccer coach in Virginia, a metal worker in Ohio and four hotel casino workers in Las Vegas.
N Y Times
Julian Fellowes on Twists in the ‘Downton Abbey’ Season Finale
Spoiler Alert if you haven't watched.
The fifth season finale of “Downton Abbey” tugged at many heartstrings, and we’re not talking about Lord Grantham’s mistaken case of angina. (Stop reading here if you wish to avoid spoilers.)
In one fell swoop, the Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) abandoned any thought of rekindling a past infatuation with the Russian Prince Kuragin, and Isobel Crawley (Penelope Wilton) closed the door on her engagement to Lord Merton. Love bloomed in the servants’ quarters, where the stately Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) at long last proposed to the kindly Mrs. Hughes (Phyllis Logan).
These turns of fate, seen on Sunday’s installment of this PBS “Masterpiece” period drama, are only the latest to have been flung at the noble Crawleys and their household staff by Julian Fellowes, the creator and writer of “Downton Abbey.”
Speaking by telephone from his home in Dorset, England, Mr. Fellowes discussed the developments of the past season and what the future might hold for “Downton” and its characters.