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.
Al Jazeera
Thousands of women across the globe took part in annual marches and protests to mark International Women’s Day, in a muted affair due to restrictions on large gatherings as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
From India to the Philippines to Spain, women called for equal rights and freedoms and an end to violence against women.
Several hundred Muslim Uighur women in Turkey staged an International Women’s Day march along the Bosphorus demanding the closure of mass incarceration camps in China’s Xinjiang region.
The protesters chanted “stop the genocide” and “close the camps” as they marched within a few hundred metres of China’s walled-off consulate in Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul.
NPR
Three hundred years ago, in 1721, England was in the grips of a smallpox epidemic.
"There were people dying all over the place," says Isobel Grundy, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alberta in Canada. "Social life came to a standstill — and all the things we've suddenly become familiar with again."
[…]
But in the 1700s in the Ottoman Empire, centered around modern day Turkey, some women knew how to stop it.
These women were part of a vast informal network of female medical professionals. "There were a lot of women practitioners in the Ottoman Empire," says Akif Yerlioglu, a historian of Ottoman medicine at the University of Oslo in Norway. They were not allowed into the madrassas, Ottoman universities, but they shared knowledge among themselves, working as faith healers, midwives, surgeons and, even in one case Yerlioglu says, an eye doctor.
What these women knew was this: Take a bit of pus from a smallpox patient and use a needle to scratch a tiny amount just beneath the skin so it gets into the blood of a healthy person. That person would get a mild form of smallpox and become immune to the more serious version.
Al Jazeera
COVID-19 has taken a toll on virtually every part of the global economy, but not every group has felt the pandemic’s devastation equally. Women forced into the “double shift” of working and caregiving have borne the brunt of the crisis, and two million women in the United States alone have left the workforce since February 2020, with economists warning that a “lost generation” of working parents may never bounce back.
To be clear, many mothers said the system wasn’t working before the pandemic. Worldwide, women do at least two and a half times more unpaid housework and caregiving than men, according to the United Nations, even if both people work full time outside of the home. In the US, gender pay disparities and the lack of a social safety net in the form of paid family leave and affordable childcare exacerbate that reality.
DW
Women joyfully rallied in Pakistan's major cities as they marked the International Women's day, defying religious hard-liners.
Mask-wearing protesters marched in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi on the International Women's Day
to demand equal rights for women, Pakistani media reported on Monday. The organizers made it mandatory for protesters to maintain social distance during the coronavirus pandemic. They also encouraged protesters to take their demands to social media, according to the Pakistani newspaper DAWN.
The rallies come after a 2020 march was attacked.
The Guardian
ed. note: There are more. Check it out.
Amanda Gorman
‘She was a breath of fresh air on inauguration day’
She is a young, intelligent and brilliant woman who will accomplish great things for good causes such as feminism, [and fighting] marginalisation, oppression, racism, etc. Our world today needs women and men of this calibre in order to live better together. In this difficult period, with the Covid-19 pandemic, it was so wonderful to get a breath of fresh air on Joe Biden’s inauguration day, and the accompanying enthusiasm to maintain good mental and physical health. Young people, especially, need hope for a future that looks so bleak.
Greta Thunberg
‘She dedicated her childhood to defend this planet’
The Guardian
Ed. note: This is the story leading all 4 editions of The Guardian. The US edition, the UK edition, the Australian edition, and the International edition.
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were not behind comments about the colour of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s child, according to Oprah Winfrey, who conducted the interview in which the startling revelation was made.
In the interview aired in the US on CBS on Sunday night, Meghan said that when she was pregnant with her son, Archie, there were “conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born”. Prince Harry added that he was “a bit shocked” by the comments but said he wouldn’t identify who made them.
Winfrey said on Monday Harry would not share the identity of the person but had stressed “it was not his grandmother or grandfather who were part of those conversations”.
She added: “I tried to get that answer, on camera and off.”
The Guardian
A Bowling Green State University student has died after an alleged hazing incident involving alcohol, his family’s attorney said.
The death of Stone Foltz, 20, is “a tragedy”, attorney Sean Alto said in a statement released on Sunday night. Alto said Foltz’s family was “gathering all of the facts leading to his untimely death”.
The university placed the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity on interim suspension and was working with law enforcement investigating what the fraternity’s parent organization called “an alleged incident of alcohol-related hazing at an off-campus event” that left officials “horrified and outraged”.
Reuters
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - With plenty of practice sending out coronavirus relief payments, the U.S. government should be able to start delivering $1,400 checks almost immediately once Congress finalizes a new aid bill and President Joe Biden signs it, tax experts say.
Some Americans might receive direct payments as soon as this week if the House of Representatives, as expected, passes the $1.9 trillion bill on Tuesday, compared with the lag of several weeks experienced in April 2020. Nearly 160 million households are expected to get payments, the White House estimates.
The Treasury Department’s Internal Revenue Service will have new challenges on its hands, though, thanks to the relief bill, which Biden and his fellow Democrats argue is needed to stem the continuing economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
Reuters
(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped a chance to review the scope of a legal defense called qualified immunity that increasingly has been used to shield police accused of excessive force, turning away an appeal by a Cleveland man who sued after being roughed up by police while trying to enter his own home.
The justices declined to hear the appeal by Shase Howse, who said he was slammed to the ground outside the house where he lived with his mother in a poor and mostly Black neighborhood, struck in the back of the neck and jailed after police deemed his actions suspicious. Howse, who was 20 at the time, is Black. The police involved in the 2016 incident are white.
Qualified immunity protects police officers and other types of government officials from civil litigation in certain circumstances, allowing lawsuits only when an individual’s “clearly established” statutory or constitutional rights have been violated.
C/NET
People who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 can gather indoors in small groups without wearing masks or social distancing, officials said during a joint briefing by the White House COVID-19 response team and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday. The CDC also added the updated guidelines to its site.
You're considered fully vaccinated two weeks after getting the second dose of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, or two weeks after receiving the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine. As of Monday, 90.4 million vaccines had been administered in the US.
If you've been vaccinated, you can visit unvaccinated people from a single household if they're low risk. Vaccinated people who are exposed to someone with the virus don't need to quarantine or get a test if they're asymptomatic.
C/NET
Tesla has a secret project to build more than 100-megawatt energy storage in Angleton, Texas, according to a report from Bloomberg Monday. Gambit Energy Storage is a Tesla subsidiary, and the company doing the building. It also shares the same address as Tesla's auto plant in Fremont, California. Images from over the site show equipment is covered up, but workers can be seen wearing Tesla logos.
BBC
The 51-year-old is a prolific film-maker, comedian, actor, producer, and screenwriter.
His movies and TV shows have made him a household name in the US, especially among African Americans.
Mr Perry is perhaps most famous for his Madea films, which he wrote, produced, directed and starred in as the title character, an older woman, with the help of elaborate prosthetics.
In 2015, he built a 330-acre (134-ha) movie studio outside of Atlanta, Georgia, helping to make the city a film-making destination.
BBC
A series of explosions on Sunday in Equatorial Guinea is now known to have killed 31 people, officials say. The number of those injured rose to 600.
The blasts hit a military base in the country's main city, Bata. Officials blame badly stored dynamite along with stubble burning by nearby farmers.
Teams including volunteers continue to search the wreckage of buildings and homes for victims.
Three young children were found alive and taken to hospital.
Local media showed a row of covered bodies along a street.
There are fears the death toll could rise further as some victims may still be trapped.
DW
Italy's blocking of coronavirus jabs from being shipped to Australia was not necessarily a "one-off," European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen says. She blames AstraZeneca for failing to meet its delivery targets.
The EU could prevent more vaccine deliveries from being shipped overseas, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, as the bloc struggles to ensure enough shots for its troubled immunization drive.
The Anglo-Swedish pharma giant AstraZeneca is still failing to meet the bloc's delivery targets, Von der Leyen told the Wirtschaftswoche business magazine on Monday.
The firm has only "delivered less than 10% of the amount ordered by the EU for the period from December to March," she said.
The European Union had expected to receive 100 million vaccines from the company by now, meaning there is a shortfall of about 90 million doses.
NPR
As the blackouts in Texas dragged on, millions of residents quickly realized they had more to worry about than trying to light and heat their homes. The water coming out their faucets was no longer safe to drink.
Like falling dominos, infrastructure around Texas, dependent on electricity, began failing in the extreme cold. In Austin, the Ullrich Water Treatment Plant shut down due to an electrical failure. That, combined with low water pressure from broken pipes, meant residents had to boil their water.
Blackouts are becoming increasingly common as extreme weather causes electricity demand to skyrocket, while simultaneously damaging the aging electric grid. Climate change-driven disasters, like more intense storms and hurricanes, only increase that risk.
NPR
Hennepin County Judge Peter Cahill postponed the start of Derek Chauvin's trial in the killing of George Floyd on Monday, after an appeals court ordered him to reconsider his original decision to dismiss a third-degree murder charge against the former Minneapolis police officer. The decision came as a pool of potential jurors waited to start the selection process.
The delay comes as Chauvin's defense attorney, Eric Nelson, said he is finalizing an appeal asking the Minnesota Supreme Court to review the question of whether Cahill should consider reinstating the murder charge.
"We're prepared to try this case. It is not our intent to cause delay," Nelson said. As he spoke in court, Chauvin took notes at a desk nearby, wearing a blue coat and tie and a black face mask.
New York Times
A few days before the presidential election, the leadership of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project gathered at the Utah home of Steve Schmidt, one of the group’s co-founders, and listened as he plotted out the organization’s future.
None of the dissident Republican consultants who created the Lincoln Project a year earlier had imagined how wildly successful it would be, pulling in more than $87 million in donations and producing scores of viral videos that doubled as a psy-ops campaign intended to drive President Donald J. Trump to distraction. Confident that a Biden administration was on the horizon, Mr. Schmidt, a swaggering former political adviser to John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger, pitched the other attendees on his post-Trump vision for the project over a breakfast of bagels and muffins. And it was ambitious.
“Five years from now, there will be a dozen billion-dollar media companies that don’t exist today,” he told the group, according to two people who attended. “I would like to build one, and would invite all of you to be part of that.”
Washington Post
A little-known element of President Biden’s massive stimulus relief package passed by the Senate on Saturday will pay billions of dollars to disadvantaged farmers — a provision that will benefit Black farmers in a way that some experts say no legislation has since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Of the $10.4 billion in the American Rescue Plan that will support agriculture, approximately half will go to disadvantaged farmers, according to estimates from the Farm Bureau, an industry organization. About a quarter of disadvantaged farmers are Black. The money will provide debt relief as well as grants, training, education and other forms of assistance aimed at acquiring land.
While it’s a fraction of the $1.9 trillion bill, advocates say it still represents a step toward righting a wrong after a century of mistreatment of Black farmers by the government and others. Some say it is a form of reparations for African Americans who have suffered a long history of racial oppression.