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 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.
Forgive me for the distracted tone today. I had a root canal this morning,. I’d forgotten how much it hurts. Ow, (at least I didn’t put a picture of a dentist at the top of the diary, tempting as it was).
To the news…
We begin with pictures of the week, from the BBC and the BBC (Africa), Al Jazeera, Reuters, Buzzfeed, and The Guardian (the week in wildlife).
We haven’t spent too much time in the southern part of the world recently, so tonight’s stories will focus on Africa. The first up is from Al Jazeera:
Ethiopia has declared a state of emergency, a day after the country's prime minister abruptly resigned.
The measure was announced on Friday by the Council of Ministers, the Ethiopian government's cabinet, according to state broadcaster EBC.
Local media said the measure is effective as of Friday, but it was not immediately clear how long it would last.
From Xinhua:
FREETOWN, Feb. 16 (Xinhua) -- President Ernest Bai Koroma on Friday launched the Sierra Leone Social Health Insurance Scheme to ensure universal health coverage.
In the beginning,the scheme would cover primary health care, including cholera, malaria. It would later extend to secondary health care.
To be eligible for the scheme, citizens are required to pay a minimal contribution that would give them access to affordable and quality health service in all government-owned hospitals across the country.
Another about Sierra Leone, this courtesy of Reuters:
FREETOWN (Reuters) - Voters across Sierra Leone stayed glued to their radios and TVs deep into the night as candidates vying for the presidency of the West African nation faced off in the first ever debate to feature all the main candidates.
Hundreds packed into a conference center in the capital Freetown where six candidates answered questions for three hours about the direction of a country still trying to bounce back from years of civil war and a devastating Ebola outbreak.
From The Guardian:
Algeria’s ‘lost generation’ has been shaped by years of conflict, unemployment and state repression. Sheep fighting offers an arena where young men can escape the constant supervision of the state. By Hannah Rae Armstrong
Last August in Algiers, one week before the holiday of Eid al-Adha, men in tracksuits and trainers were guarding their sheep in anticipation of the fights to come. Kbabshis, as these men are known, scour villages looking for lambs that are fast, belligerent and shock-resistant. They then spend years raising them to be champion fighters. Coaches are tough but also surprisingly tender. They treat their sheep like mistresses, stopping by the garages where they install them, bringing food, caressing and massaging them before they head out together for long walks on the beach.
Professional trainers toughen their sheep by chaining their horns to a wall: as they pull and twist to break away, the resistance thickens their sinewy necks. Unlike with cockfighting, there is no gambling on sheep fights, but speculation on the sheep market can make it a lucrative trade. Each fight lifts the value of its victor and sentences the loser to slaughter. A champion ram might fetch as much as $10,000 – although most sheep trainers on a winning streak prefer to chase glory than cash. The sheep are given names that inspire fear, like Rambo, Jaws or Lawyer. In the third round of one recent match, Hitler delivered a brutal defeat to Saddam.
More animal news, this from Pulse (Nigeria):
The owner of the snake which reportedly swallowed phones and money was stripped naked by a mob.
Pictures showing a snake beheaded by a mob for stealing phones and money in the New Benin Market, has circulated the internet.
On Facebook, a man believed to be the owner of the reptile was stripped naked by a group of justice seekers who reportedly made the subject produce the stolen items.
Uuzele Louis who posted the images on his page made this known on Tuesday, February 13, 2018.
From CNN:
Lassa fever, an acute viral hemorrhagic illness, is endemic in most of West Africa, especially Nigeria, where it was discovered in 1969. Symptoms can be mild or severe, including hemorrhaging in the gums, eyes or nose.
From KYTX (CBS 19 in Tyler, TX):
PYEONGCHANG, SOUTH KOREA - Growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, Akuoma Omeoga was raised on Nigerian food, language and culture. Next week, the 25-year-old will represent her parents' homeland in the Winter Games, hurtling down the bobsled track with her tresses — dyed green as a tribute to the country — flapping beneath her helmet like a flag.
"One of the biggest things my parents did was speak the language at home," Omeoga recalled in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday. "It's super familiar to me, even though it's not something that I speak fluently ... I can also relate."
From Outbreak News Today:
From The Boston Pilot:
BY MARK LABBE
WEST ROXBURY -- The woman in the photo stands in the dirt. She's elderly, her face creased as she smiles at the camera. She's holding up a cellphone. It's an older model, without internet capabilities.
The phone, as Jacques Kabore, Partnership and Capacity Building Coordinator for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) Burkina Faso, said, might not look like much to the average American, but to her, it means the world.
"It changed her life. It gives hope," he tells the dozen or so people gathered at Holy Family Church in Roxbury, Jan. 29.
From The Nation:
Like Daniel arap Moi in 1982, Uhuru Kenyatta has embarked on a course of action that threatens hard-won democratic gains.
By Karen Rothmyer
Nairobi—A few days ago I had lunch with a longtime Kenyan friend. She’s one of the most solid people I know—not at all given to hyperbole or hysteria. So I listened hard when she told me she’s afraid that Kenya is sliding back into the kind of dictatorship that began in 1982, after an attempted coup. Then-President Daniel arap Moi responded with 10 years of ruthless suppression of dissent, followed by 10 more years of something less than real democracy, until he finally left office in 2002.
From Gulf News:
Threatend by thugs, hounded by police, this brave mother could set a precedent for environmental defenders in Africa
Omido has been threatened by thugs, arrested by police and forced into hiding for organising opposition to a lead-smelting factory in Mombasa, which allegedly poisoned residents in the neighbouring shantytown of Owino Uhuru.
Sometimes referred to as the “east African Erin Brockovich”, Omido was a co-winner of the Goldman environmental prize in 2015 along with Berta Caceres, the Honduran activist who was murdered a year later. Omido lives under constant threat. She has had to go into hiding several times and carries a panic button that can alert international supporters and trace her whereabouts if she is abducted.
“I face threats to my life because of this case,” she said.
From The Independent:
We slide down a steep path engulfed in clouds of kicked-up ochre dust. Pushing through the last of the palm fronds, we emerge onto a slice of white sand. The tide has come in, swallowing the beach – and our route home.
“Might get a bit damp,” says Pat, urging his horse out into the clear water.
We follow him. My little horse, smaller than the others, bounces happily forward, submerged up to his stomach. We wade through the glittering waves, roughly tracing a shoreline hemmed by tangled mangroves. Our boots fill with warm saltwater. A fishing Dhow glides past a few hundred metres away, its occupants waving. I find myself laughing in pure, childlike delight.
Patrick (Pat) and Mandy Retzlaff, owners of Mozambique Horse Safari, offer horse riding on an idyllic stretch of wild, dune-backed Mozambican coastline around 400 miles north of Maputo, the capital. The huge beaches gleam white in the hot sun. The water is rich in marine life, with manta rays, whale sharks and schools of dolphin.
From The Citizen:
Zimbabwean anti-corruption investigators said Friday they had arrested a university professor over the suspected fraudulent awarding of a doctorate to former first lady Grace Mugabe.
Levi Nyagura, the vice chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe, was arrested by the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission following an investigation into the PhD.
It emerged that Grace was awarded the degree by the university in 2014 after just months of study.
And although you have probably heard about Cape Town running out of water, it is not limited to Africa. This comes from Al Jazeera:
By Asad Hashim
Residents of Karachi, one of the largest cities in the world, are being held hostage by a ‘mafia’ that makes millions of dollars out of their need for water.
KARACHI, Pakistan - Orangi is a maze, a spider’s web of narrow, winding lanes, broken roads and endless rows of small concrete houses. More than two million people are crammed into what is one of the world’s largest unplanned settlements here in western Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city.
But Orangi has a problem: it has run out of water.
“What water?” asks Rabia Begum, 60, when told the reason for Al Jazeera’s visit to her neighbourhood earlier this year. “We don’t get any water here.”
It is so rare for water to flow through the taps here that residents say they have given up expecting it. The last time it flowed through the main pipeline in Begum’s neighbourhood, for example, was 33 days ago.
And now on to arts news. This first from The GUardian:
The Sacklers have made a fortune from OxyContin, the painkiller blamed for sparking the deadly opioid crisis. They cloak their shame with philanthropy
There is no Pablo Escobar Wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and no El Chapo Guzman gallery at the Guggenheim. Columbia University doesn’t host a Sinaloa Drug Cartel Center of Developmental Psychobiology. Oxford would no longer be Oxford if its library were named in honor of the Cali drug cartel.
Our most revered institutions hold themselves to an ethical standard that does not allow accepting money from wealthy drug dealers – however tempting the prospect or worthwhile the project. They refuse to become philanthropic money launderers, cleansing dirty reputations by selling prestigious naming rights.
From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
More than a month after the defacing of an ancient piece of Chinese cultural heritage, federal agents in Philadelphia have finally fingered a suspect – a guy, you might say, they now have firmly under their thumb.
Prosecutors allege that Michael Rohana, 24, of Bear, Del., sneaked into the Franklin Institute’s “Terracotta Warriors of the First Emperor” special exhibit in December and snapped the thumb off one of the priceless statues inside.
With the filched finger shoved in his pocket, he left an after-hours “Ugly Sweater Party” he was attending at the museum that night and kept the clay digit in a desk drawer in his bedroom for more than three weeks.
From The National (UAE edition):
From the physical destruction of cherished artefacts to attempts to 'erase' shared history, Audrey Azoulay warns the trend cannot go unchecked
The head of Unesco has warned that extremists cannot be allowed to carry out "cultural cleansing" as part of attempts to drive religions and communities apart.
Audrey Azoulay said the physical destruction of religious and historical buildings and attempts to "erase" recent history alike harms and increasingly divided world.
“In recent years, we have seen, in this region as well, an increased attempt at cultural cleansing by those who wish to erase traces of our shared history," she said.
"But culture is more than buildings, documents and traditions, it is how we see ourselves, how we see this world, how we learn about ourselves and about the others.”
From 9 News (Denver):
Creede is set right into the Colorado Rockies, with enormous cliffs on either side of its main street, but this artist wanted to paint what makes the town truly beautiful - the people living there
Creede is just like many other tiny mountain towns. It has beautiful views, a lot of hiking and recreation, and a place or two to meet friends and have a beer after work.
It also has those values that might seem old-fashioned to people who live in larger cities.
“Your neighbor may be the person who helps you out when you need something,” said Manuel Zarate, who said he has relied on those neighbors more than once, including a time when his dog went missing. “To me this is what America should be about—this is a place where you can have conversations even with the people who don’t agree with you.”
And two unrelated items to tie things up, the first from the BBC:
Spicy food is about more than pleasurable pain. BBC Future investigates why we can’t say no to spice.
Human beings around the world delight in fiery foods. Thai, Mexican, Chinese, Indian, Ethiopian – the cuisines that can take the roof off your mouth are numerous and flavourful.
Ranking the world's most spicy peppers and comparing the most awe-inducing dishes is a common pastime, even if, past a certain point, the distinctions are somewhat moot. Who can say, subjectively speaking, that one Indian restaurant’s Widower Phaal, made while wearing goggles with chilis that rank about 1,000,000 on the Scoville Scale – an international measurement of pungency – is necessarily a fierier experience than the notorious Korean Suicide Burrito?
And from The Guardian:
Dairy farms in the Netherlands are producing so much dung they can’t get rid of it safely. Now the WWF is calling for a 40% cut in herd numbers to protect the environment
Tom Levitt
There is a dirty stench emanating from the Dutch dairy sector. The industry is, by most measures, hugely successful: despite the small size of the country, it is the fifth largest exporter of dairy and has a much-touted reputation as
the tiny country that feeds the world.
But there’s a catch: the nation’s 1.8 million cows are producing so much manure that there isn’t enough space to get rid of it safely.