Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame and jck. 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.
it is 4:30 am, to early to start collecting today’s stories but I worry about electricity!
USA Today
'Just a real mess': 100M from the South to the East Coast in path of a new winter storm; 2.1M power outages across 8 states
Winter's brutal assault continued Wednesday night as another snowstorm roared its way across the nation through the end of the week, hitting areas where millions were already without electricity in record-breaking cold.
More than 100 million Americans are in the path of the storm as it tracks from the southern Plains to the East Coast over the next few days, the National Weather Service said.
But the nation's heartland will get some relief over the weekend, the weather service reported, as the frigid air will begin to moderate over the next couple days
Aljazeera News
In Pictures: Etna’s spectacular new eruption
Mount Etna belched smoke and ashes in a new eruption this week but Italian authorities said the volcano, one of the world’s most active, did not pose any danger to the villages nearby.
“We’ve seen worse,” the head of the INGV National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology in the nearby city of Catania, Stefano Branca, told Italian news agency AGI.
Estimating that the eruption from Etna’s southeastern crater began late on Tuesday afternoon, Branca insisted that the latest burst of activity was “not at all worrying”.
Aljazeera News
‘Wildly unfair’: UN boss says 10 nations used 75% of all vaccines
The United Nations chief has sharply criticised the “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, pointing out that just 10 countries have administered 75 percent of all vaccinations.
Addressing a high-level meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday, Antonio Guterres said 130 countries have not received a single dose of vaccine.
Aljazeera News
‘They are no more’: Three missing K2 climbers declared dead
Three mountaineers who went missing in Pakistan earlier this month while attempting to scale the world’s second-highest mountain, K2, are now considered dead, according to Pakistani officials.
Thursday’s announcement brings closure to a dramatic tragedy on one of the most dangerous mountains to climb in the world.
Search efforts for the climbers – famous Pakistani mountaineer Ali Sadpara, Jon Snorri of Iceland and Juan Pablo Mohr of Chile – who went missing on February 5 were called off last week amid bad weather.
“All the weather experts, climbers and experts from the Pakistan army have reached the conclusion that a human being cannot live for that long in such harsh weather. That’s why we are announcing that they are no more,” said Raja Nasir Ali Khan, a provincial minister for tourism in Gilgit-Baltistan, where K2 is located.
Aljazeera News
In Pictures: Jerusalem turns white after rare snowfall
Jerusalem woke up to the rare experience of seeing its holy sites covered in snow on Thursday, with the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall under a layer of white after an overnight snowstorm.
Before dawn children were up hurling snowballs at each other outside the Old City gates, as the faithful trudged to sites holy to Judaism, Islam and Christianity.
The snowstorm began on Wednesday evening, leading the authorities to shut down public transportation and block the main road to Jerusalem.
Reuters News
Hedge funds, Robinhood face grilling by Congress over GameStop Reddit rally
Wall Street hedge fund managers, the chief executives of Robinhood and Reddit, and a YouTube streamer known as Roaring Kitty face a grilling on Thursday afternoon from U.S. lawmakers over the Reddit rally in shares of GameStop Corp.
Some of Wall Street’s most powerful players, including billionaire Republican mega-donor and Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, will make rare public statements about their businesses during the congressional hearing on how Reddit users trading on retail platforms banded together to squeeze hedge funds that had bet against shares of the video game retailer and other companies.
Griffin will appear before the Democratic-led House finance panel alongside Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, Melvin Capital CEO Gabriel Plotkin, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and Keith Gill, a Reddit user and YouTube streamer known as Roaring Kitty who promoted his investment in GameStop.
Reuters News
How Amsterdam is stealing a march on rivals as Brexit trading hub
All the talk was of Frankfurt or Paris luring London’s financial business as Britain peeled away from the EU. Yet it is Amsterdam that is proving the most visible early winner.
Data last week showed the Dutch capital had displaced London as Europe’s biggest share trading centre in January, grabbing a fifth of the 40 billion euros-a-day action, up from below a tenth of trading pre-Brexit.
Yet that is just one of several areas the city has quietly stolen a march on its rivals as it attracts businesses from Britain, evoking memories of its history as a global trading powerhouse in the 17th century.
Amsterdam has also overtaken London to become Europe’s number one corporate listing venue so far this year, data shows, and the leader in euro-denominated interest-rate swaps, a market estimated to be worth about $135 trillion in 2020.
Reuters News
White House revokes Trump order limiting climate change in federal reviews
The Biden administration on Thursday revoked a Trump administration policy that aimed to prevent federal agencies from weighing climate change impacts in their decision-making around major projects like pipelines and highways.
The White House Council for Environmental Quality revoked the Trump administration's 2019 draft National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) guidance for greenhouse gas emissions, which had rolled back an Obama-era policy here that required agencies to evaluate the climate change impacts of major infrastructure projects in their reviews.
“Today’s action ... will help federal agencies put their decisions on firmer legal and scientific footing,” said Jomar Maldonado, associate director at the council, the agency that oversees the implementation of the NEPA across the government.
AP News
Iranian skier makes appeal for women’s rights in her country
Iranian skier Forough Abbasi accomplished one goal Thursday merely by completing her giant slalom run at the skiing world championships.
It made no difference to her that she crossed the finish line nearly 25 seconds behind American favorite Mikaela Shiffrin, the first-run leader.
Still, Abbasi was just getting started.
The 27-year-old Abbasi then made an emotional appeal for women’s rights in her country after her coach, Samira Zargari, was banned from leaving Iran by her husband.
Under Iranian law, husbands can stop their wives from traveling outside of country.
AP News
A day in the Life of an Indian Child Scavenger
Once school is done for the day, 10-year-old Imradul Ali rushes home to change out of his uniform so he can start his job as a scavenger in India’s remote northeast.
Armed with a gunny bag, he goes to a landfill in the slums of Gauhati, the capital of Assam state. Here, he hunts through heaps of other people’s garbage, searching for plastic bottles, glass or anything salvageable he can recycle or sell. Around him, cows graze on the mountains of waste that line the site.
Ali comes from a family of scavengers, or “rag pickers” — his father, mother and elder brother all earn their income through it. He started doing it over a year ago to help his family make more money.
AP News
DIY education: Greek teacher creates TV classes for inmates
Setting up a television channel from scratch isn’t the most obvious or easiest thing for a math teacher to do — especially without prior technical knowledge and for use inside a prison.
But that is exactly the task Petros Damianos, director of the school at Greece’s Avlona Special Youth Detention Center, took on so his students could access the lessons that coronavirus lockdowns cut them off from.
Greek schools have shut, reopened, and closed again over the past year as authorities sought to curtail the spread of the virus. Like their peers across much of the globe, the country’s students adapted to virtual classes.
The Avlona detention center, a former military prison, holds nearly 300 young men aged 18-21, and sometimes up to 25. The school Damianos founded there in 2000 now teaches primary grades through to college, following the national curriculum and awarding graduation certificates equivalent to any Greek school.
Good News Network
Man Raises $25,000 For 70-Year-old Woman Who’s Worked at KFC With a Smile For Almost 50 Years
There’s no denying that Kentucky Fried Chicken is finger-lickin’ good, but that’s not the only thing that keeps one Toronto fan coming back to his favorite franchise year after year.
Apart from the food, this loyal customer has formed a special bond with a KFC employee who befriended him when he was just 5 years old.
Jason Schweitzer first met Emilia when he and his mom would stop in for a weekly Sunday meal. “From being a young boy and hanging out with my mom at the walk-in location at Broadview and Gerrard in Chinatown,” Schweitzer told the Toronto Sun, “When you grow up, and you recognize a face, it becomes a part of your mind-space.”
There was an almost instant rapport between the little boy and the sweet-natured worker who took a shine to him. “I would always ask my mom ‘Is the funny lady there? Is the funny lady there?’” Schweitzer said in an interview with CTV News. “[Emilia] would always hook me up with some French fries. She was always very kind and she was always very funny.
Good News Network
110-Year-old Has Turned Into a Singing Sensation on Social Media, Fulfilling Life-long Dream Thanks to Great-Grandson
At the end of World War I, Amy Hawkins was a 7-year-old child who loved nothing more than to sing and dance. As a teen, Hawkins set her sights on becoming an entertainer.
Hawkins was on her way, touring the country with a dance troupe—until her ambition to tread the boards was cut short by her mom who didn’t see it as a respectable occupation for a young lady.
All these years later, the supercentenarian chanteuse lives at home in Monmouth, South Wales, surrounded by her loved ones. The four-generation family unit includes her granddaughter, Hannah Freeman, and Freeman’s 14-year-old son, Sacha. Even though she’s no longer doing it professionally, Hawkins has never stopped singing.
“She’s like a clock, once you wind her up she won’t stop,” Freeman said in an interview with the BBC. “She just keeps asking, ‘Would you like another one?’.”