Kyiv, Ukraine – The Russian general who lost a strategic town in eastern Ukraine should spill his blood on the front line to “wash away his shame”.
That’s what Ramzan Kadyrov, Chechnya’s leader and one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s key allies, said of Alexander Lapin, the Russian colonel general who led the defence of Lyman in the Donetsk region and ordered a retreat last weekend.
Before he pulled back his troops, Lapin moved his headquarters to the separatist stronghold of Luhansk, 160km (100 miles) away from Lyman, Kadyrov said.
The Chechen leader accused Lapin of then failing to secure a supply of ammunition and communication equipment and said he did not coordinate his forces on the ground.
What's happening
Local elections offices are being flooded with records requests, phone calls and in-person visits from supporters of former President Trump who still falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen. They're swamping small staffs that need to focus on the November elections.
Why it matters
County clerks, along with advocates for free and fair elections, say these people aren't actually looking for answers. They're trying to monopolize time and resources ahead of the midterms.
What's next
Candidates who continue to falsely claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen are running for key state-wide offices. Democracy advocates fear that if they're elected they could put in place election laws that disenfranchise many voters and choose to not certify the results of the next presidential election.
The office of Ingham County Clerk Barb Byrum is being inundated with Freedom of Information Act requests.
BBC
Brazil's election is going into a second round in which left-winger Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will face far-right incumbent Jair Bolsonaro.
With almost all the votes counted, Lula had won 48% against Bolsonaro's 43% - a much closer result than opinion polls had suggested.
But Lula fell short of the more than 50% of valid votes needed to prevent a run-off.
Voters now have four weeks to decide which of the two should lead Brazil.
Winning outright in the first round was always going to be a tall order for any candidate - the last time it happened was 24 years ago.
But President Bolsonaro and Lula had given their supporters hope that they could achieve just that.
Al Jazeera
Beqaa Valley, Lebanon – At 11am, Erica Accari retreats to the shade from the energy-zapping 36C (96.8F) heat radiating from her farm in eastern Lebanon.
She started her day at 6am, irrigating the 6,000 square metres (64,600sq ft) of mainly vegetable crops before checking all the plants for any disease, then transplanting new seedlings for the next season.
The farm’s name, Turba, meaning soil, couldn’t be more apt for a regenerative organic farm.
“Almost 80 percent of our topsoil is dead worldwide, and it scares me. I don’t know how it doesn’t scare other people,” Accari, 28, told Al Jazeera as she sliced a melon from her field.
Originally from Tripoli in Lebanon’s north, Accari co-founded Turba two years ago with Jehane Akiki, who runs Farms Not Arms, a project that aims to heal social divides through agriculture and highlight the important role Syrian refugees play in farms across the country.
Deutsche Welle
The Swedish researcher Svante Paabo won this year's Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research into how human beings evolved, Sweden's Karolinska Institute announced on Monday.
Paabo was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1955 and performed his prize-winning studies at the University of Munich and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Paabo sequenced the genome of the Neanderthal and also discovered the previously unknown hominin Denisova. His work showed the genomic changes that came to differentiate humans and their closest cousins. He also showed that both Neanderthals and Denisovans contributed genes that still exist in modern humans.
"By revealing genetic differences that distinguish all living humans from extinct hominins, his discoveries provide the basis for exploring what makes us uniquely human," the Nobel committee said.
Deutsche Welle
Representatives from the European Union and Israel held high-level talks on Monday for the first time in a decade.
The EU said it would press Israel on stalled peace efforts and the situation in the Palestinian territories during the talks in Brussels.
This is the first time the bloc has held an "Association Council" meeting with Israel since 2012.
What will the EU, Israel talks address?
"We will discuss frankly and openly about some specific issues which are of our mutual concern," EU top diplomat Josep Borrell said at the start of the meeting.
"I am talking about the situation in the Palestinian territories and the Middle East peace process, which is stalled."
Borrell expressed support for a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid to the UN General Assembly, in which the Israeli leader called for an "agreement with the Palestinians based on two states for two peoples."
The Guardian
A former US army combat medic and counterintelligence agent allegedly solicited asylum seekers to join flights out of Texas to Martha’s Vineyard that Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, chartered.
Perla Huerta was sent to Texas from Tampa to fill the planes at the center of the trips, which many have argued could amount to illegal human trafficking, a person briefed on an investigation into the case told the New York Times.
In September, dozens of asylum seekers were transported to Martha’s Vineyard, an affluent community in Massachusetts, and were promised cash assistance, help with housing and other resources if they traveled to the state. DeSantis
claimed responsibility for the flights, portraying it as a protest against the Joe Biden White House’s immigration policy.
The Guardian
The defamation lawsuit that voting machine company Dominion is pursuing against the MyPillow chief executive, Mike Lindell, can proceed after the US supreme court rejected the prominent Donald Trump supporter’s appeal aiming to block the case.
Dominion Voting Systems in February 2021 filed a $1.3bn lawsuit accusing Lindell of promoting the debunked conspiracy theory that the company’s machines manipulated vote counts in favor of Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election that ousted Trump from the Oval Office.
Lindell had been appealing an August 2021 ruling by federal court judge Carl Nichols, who refused to dismiss the lawsuit at the MyPillow leader’s request. An appellate court in Washington DC later decided the case was not ready for review. And in its first day back from its summer break, the US supreme courtdecided it would not take up Lindell’s appeal for consideration, clearing the way for the lawsuit against Lindell to progress.
The Guardian
Jacob Rees-Mogg has said he would be “delighted” for his back garden to be fracked, as he risked deepening divisions within the Conservative party by deriding those who oppose the controversial practice as “socialists”.
The business secretary was bullish about restarting fracking in England after a nearly three-year moratorium, saying the current limit of magnitude 0.5 to avoid mini-earthquakes being caused was “ridiculously low”.
Companies that want to drill a new fracking well could “go around, door to door, as politicians do at elections and ask people if they would consent”, Rees-Mogg suggested.
“Then they have to go around to an identifiable community and if they get 50% plus one in favour then they should be able to go ahead,” he told the Chopper’s Politics fringe event hosted by the Telegraph at the Conservative conference in Birmingham.
The Guardian, Australia
Police in Queensland and New South Wales failed to investigate a series of alleged sexual assaults against a 14-year-old girl, lost key documents related to the case, and later told the alleged victim that her formal statement had been “destroyed”, a Guardian Australia investigation has found.
Legal sources say one of the allegations – a gang-rape attack by up to 15 teenagers and adult men in a Gold Coast hotel room in 1993 – is among the most serious ever reported to authorities in Australia.
Karen Iles came forward in 2004, in her early 20s, and made a statement to NSW police. It contained names, photographs and other identifying features of her alleged attackers; maps and locations of the alleged assaults; the names of witnesses and a co-victim; and contemporaneous evidence from her childhood diary.
Police records released under freedom of information laws show the case was assigned to Queensland detectives, but soon stalled due to inaction by officers in NSW. It then appears to have simply been forgotten in both states for more than a decade.
NPR
Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and four other members of the far-right group tried to change history and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021, prosecutor Jeffrey Nestler told jurors hearing the first seditious conspiracy trial to result from the assault on the U.S. Capitol last year.
"They concocted a plan for an armed rebellion to shatter a bedrock of American democracy," Nestler said.
Using text messages, video and recorded calls, the Justice Department is trying to persuade the jury at a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C., that the defendants set out to overturn the results of the 2020 election by storming the Capitol and interrupting the count of electoral votes.
Prosecutors said Rhodes, a graduate of the Yale Law School and known for his distinctive cowboy hat and eye patch, chose his words carefully, speaking in code and in shorthand in the weeks before the assault on the Capitol.
NPR
The top U.S. financial regulator has charged celebrity Kim Kardashian for touting a cryptocurrency on her Instagram account without disclosing that she was paid for the promotion.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said Monday Kardashian has agreed to pay a fine of $1 million, although she did not admit or deny the S.E.C.'s findings. She will also give back $260,000, which includes her payment from the company with interest.
"Ms. Kardashian's case also serves as a reminder to celebrities and others that the law requires them to disclose to the public when and how much they are paid to promote investing in securities," said SEC chair Gary Gensler.
Kardashian, who has around 330 million Instagram followers, was paid $250,000 to promote cryptocurrency offered by EthereumMax called EMAX tokens.
NPR
There was a moment during our interview earlier this year with Sacheen Littlefeather that had many of us, including Sacheen, in tears.
Sacheen Littlefeather talks at length about her life and what happened at the Oscars in 1973
We were talking to her for LAist Studios' The Academy Museum podcast and Jacqueline Stewart, the museum’s president, asked Sacheen about what brought her to organizing and activism in the 60s. Her answer came out stilted but with conviction. She described the pain of learning that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated.
“It really broke my heart when he died,” she said of hearing the news. “I was young back then, but I didn't see the need for it because he spoke the truth.”
Sacheen, who died Sunday at the age of 75, was someone who knew the value of speaking the truth, regardless of the consequences. After she rejected Marlon Brando’s Oscar in 1973, she was met with derision and fewer job prospects as an actress.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, 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.