Happy December!
Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Doctor RJ, Magnifico, and annetteboardman. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) wader, planter, JML9999, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke, Man Oh Man, 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 (or sometimes slightly later).
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
We begin with pictures of the week, of wildlife from The Guardian, news images from Al Jazeera, Buzzfeed, and photojournalism from The Week.
Now to the articles, first from The Straits Times:
MANILA - The Philippines has put on hold its 3.5 billion-peso (S$94 million) dengue vaccination programme, following an alert issued by French pharmaceutical giant, Sanofi Pasteur, that its Dengvaxia vaccine could prove harmful to people never infected by the mosquito-borne disease.
Philippine health officials began vaccinating over a million children in April last year (2016) with Dengvaxia, the world's first dengue vaccine, amid safety concerns expressed by public health advocates.
Sanofi recently sent out an alert saying: "For those not previously infected by dengue virus, the analysis found that in the longer term, more cases of severe disease could occur following vaccination upon a subsequent dengue infection."
And another one from the same paper:
SYDNEY - A student who was alleged to have spent A$4.6 million (S$4.7 million) on designer goods with an unlimited overdraft account her bank accidentally gave her has had all her charges dropped, Australian media reported on Friday (Dec 1).
Ms Christine Jiaxin Lee, a 21-year-old Malaysian resident who is studying at Sydney University, was alleged to have splurged the money on designer handbags, clothes, jewellery, mobile phones and a vacuum cleaner over 11 months.
Japan Today reports on a problem I had never considered before:
Calendar, diary and fortune-telling businesses are anxiously awaiting the announcement of the name of Japan's next imperial era, as the government said Friday it is expected to begin on May 1, 2019, the day after the emperor abdicates.
In modern Japan, a gengo era name lasts for the length of an emperor's reign and is widely used in calendars and official documents along with the Gregorian calendar. The government is expected to announce the new era name sometime in 2018 to minimize disruption to people's lives.
From Japan Times:
Japan will consider joining a U.S.-proposed project to build a new space station orbiting the moon, hoping such a move will boost the chances of sending Japanese astronauts to the lunar surface, government officials said Friday.
The move indicates Tokyo’s desire to not fall behind in the field of space exploration, as Russia said in September it will collaborate with the United States on the new space station, with an envisioned completion date in the latter half of the 2020s.
From Quartz:
Josh Horwitz
On Dec. 3, researchers, business leaders, and government officials from all over the world will head to the scenic town of Wuzhen in east China for the three-day World Internet Conference. Past attendees include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Facebook vice president Vaughan Smith—and high-level officials from Russia, Pakistan, and Tajikistan.
Despite its global implications, the name “World Internet Conference” is a bit of a misnomer—the event will showcase the internet not as the world sees it, but as China and its ideological peers see it. And while representatives from China’s government will likely hail the “openness” of the country’s internet, the past year made it all too clear that China’s cyberspace is more restricted than ever.
Other Chinese news, from the BBC:
By Sherie Ryder
Visitors expecting an array of exotic animals at a zoo in southern China were left disappointed when they were confronted with inflatable penguins.
As the first zoo to be set up in Yulin, Guangxi province, locals were keen to see what Guishan Zoo had to offer.
It had been advertised as a place to see rare animals and learn about wildlife.
Beside the plastic blow-up penguins, attractions included a handful of roosters, geese and a tortoise in a tank with a sprinkling of money around it.
From the Hutchinson News (Kansas):
Luke Ranker / The Topeka Capital-Journal
Temperatures on the Mongolian steppe dropped well below freezing at night as Kansas State University professor Juergen Richt traveled across the sparsely populated country in an old Toyota Land Cruiser searching for camels.
In a country where animals outnumber people 70 million to 3 million, Richt, a veterinarian doctor and director of Center of Excellence for Emerging and Zoonotic Animal Diseases, spent a week in September surveying animals known to carry diseases capable of jumping to humans — particularly, the double-humped Bactrian camel and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), a potentially deadly virus relatively new to humans. During the trip, he and his team, heavily staffed with local veterinarians and researchers, spent six hours south of Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, and collected nearly 100 samples in an effort to combat viruses like MERS before they spread to the United States.
From The Daily Sabah:
A formerly isolated Central Asian state, Uzbekistan, has begun incremental change under President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, paving the way to become the political center of Central Asia.
"Mirziyoyev seems to realize that [former President Islam] Karimov's policies did not allow the country to develop economically. In the short term, opening up seems to be more about economic development than about an attempt to become the political center of Central Asia. But in time, this may change," Edward Lemon, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University's Harriman Institute, said.
"We will have to wait and see. When the countries emerged from the Soviet Union, most analysts expected Uzbekistan to become the most powerful country in the region. It had the largest population, the largest city [Tashkent], the strongest military and was quicker to recover from the collapse of the USSR than the other countries in the region," he noted.
As a cyclone hits Sri Lanka and the Maldives, this from Economy Next:
ECONOMYNEXT – Sri Lanka has called for making climate change a top priority in domestic politics given the importance of international co-operation in tackling the issue which has cross-border implications.
Defence Ministry Secretary Kapila Waidyaratne spoke of how countries need to be more proactive in their response to climate change at an international forum on climate change and resources security in South Asia
More South Asian environmental news from the Associated Press, via the New York Post:
NEW DELHI — U.S. oil refineries that are unable to sell a dirty fuel waste product at home are exporting vast quantities of it to India instead.
Petroleum coke, the bottom-of-the-barrel leftover from refining Canadian tar sands crude and other heavy oils, is cheaper and burns hotter than coal. But it also contains more planet-warming carbon and far more heart- and lung-damaging sulfur — a key reason few American companies use it.
Refineries instead are sending it around the world, especially to energy-hungry India, which last year got almost a fourth of all the fuel-grade “petcoke” the U.S. shipped out, an Associated Press investigation found. In 2016, the U.S. sent more than 8 million metric tons of petcoke to India. That’s about 20 times more than in 2010, and enough to fill the Empire State Building eight times.
From Business Insider:
- India wants to put a rover on the moon in 2018.
- The last time any country landed successfully on the moon was in 2013, when China sent its 'Yutu' rover for a monthlong walk there.
- The US is still the only country that has put people on the moon. The last "man on the moon," NASA astronaut Gene Cernan, touched down there in 1972.
The last time any country put boots or, rather, little metal feet, on the moon was in 2013, when China landed its Yutu rover there.
Before that, you'd have to look back to the 1970s to find anything built by Earthlings that camped out on the surface of the Moon.
But in 2018, India says it'll be ready to join the ranks of the moon lander. The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) is getting ready to land its very first lunar rover by the end of March 2018, as part of its Chandrayaan-2 mission.
‘Chaand’ is the word for moon in Hindi, so Chandrayaan literally means ‘moon vehicle’ or ‘moon journey.’
Art news now, from artnet news:
Plus, Jack Pierson teams up with the house of Dior and David Zwirner plans a blockbuster 25th anniversary exhibition.
New Museum Launches Citywide Video Project – To mark its 40th anniversary, the museum has teamed up with creative agency Droga5—the masterminds behind Christie’s Salvator Mundi marketing campaign—to launch “New Museum LIVE.” Until December 31, the museum will live stream exhibitions and events online and in diverse locations around New York City, including Times Square and downtown rooftop bar Mr. Purple. (Press release)
Toronto Will Get a Biennial of Its Own – After gaining city council support and securing funding, the Toronto Biennial is a go. The exhibition will open in fall 2019 and run for 90 days. “I feel like the city, and the art community, have been wanting a biennial for decades,” says its director Patrizia Libralato.
chron.com (Houston Chronicle):
By Patricia Dillon, patricia.dillon@chron.com
Those who have walked along The Woodlands Waterway may have noticed some benches that look anything but ordinary.
From piano keys to psychedelic colors to imprints of feet, these benches are part of an ongoing public art project by The Woodlands Arts Council.
And our last one tonight, also from The Houston Chronicle:
By Molly Glentzer
To an untrained eye, the late-13th-century "Star Tile" could seem like just another pretty object in a gallery full of exquisitely detailed treasures. The central image depicts a horse lying among flowers, framed by a border of abstract squiggles.
Aimée Froom sees a richer meaning in the tile because she can read those squiggles.
The inscription that decorates the cobalt border is a quatrain attributed to Majd al-Din Baghdadi: "Do you know, oh my admired one, why my two oppressed eyes are full of tears? My eyes draw from the desire of your lips, water from the mouth of my pupils."
Well, swoon.