Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck and Rise above the swamp. 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.
Since 2007 the OND has been 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.
Some stories for tonight:
-
Canada's internet outage caused by 'maintenance’
-
South Africa: Fifteen shot dead in Soweto township bar
-
At least 15 were killed and others are trapped after a Russian strike in Ukraine
-
Garbage collectors in Kharkiv dodge mortars to pick up the trash
-
Germany braces for ‘nightmare’ of Russia turning off gas for good
-
Macau shuts down all its casinos in race to curb covid spread
-
Wild species can help feed the world
-
Embattled Leaders in Hiding, Sri Lankans Ask: What’s Next?
-
‘Hit the kill switch’: Uber used covert tech to thwart government raids
BBC
Canada's internet outage caused by 'maintenance’
One of Canada's largest mobile and internet providers, Rogers, has apologised for the country-wide outage of its services which began on Friday.
The company's CEO Tony Staffieri said the failure followed "a maintenance update in our core network".
Transport, banking and emergency services were all hit by Friday's blackout, with 911 hotlines and bank ATMs left unavailable.
Canadians flocked to coffee shops and libraries to find a connection.
The service outage began at 04:30 local time (08:30 GMT) on Friday and lasted for more than 15 hours, but most services have now been restored.
Mr Staffieri said the maintenance work "caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning".
The outage had a huge effect on a wide range of services across Canada, serving as a reminder of how reliant society has become on modern communications.
BBC
South Africa: Fifteen shot dead in Soweto township bar
At least 15 people have been shot dead in a bar in the South African township of Soweto, police say.
Police said gunmen entered the Orlando East tavern in the early hours of Sunday morning and started firing randomly at a group of young people.
They then fled the scene in a white minibus. No motive for the attack has been established, police said.
Several more people are in a critical condition in hospital, the BBC's Nomsa Maseko reports.
The victims are believed to be between 19 and 35 years old.
"Bodies were on top of each other with blood all over. We were looking for our loved ones, we had to jump over bodies looking for our brothers," said local resident Ntombikayise Meji.
Gauteng province's head of police, Lt-Gen Elias Mawela, told the BBC the shooting appears to have been "a cold-blooded attack on innocent tavern patrons".
A press statement released by his office said the gunmen had been armed with rifles and 9mm pistols when they entered the bar.
NPR
At least 15 were killed and others are trapped after a Russian strike in Ukraine
CHASIV YAR, Ukraine — Dozens of Ukrainian emergency workers labored Sunday to pull people out of the rubble after a Russian rocket attack smashed into apartment buildings in eastern Ukraine, killing at least 15 people. More than 20 people were believed still trapped.
The strike late Saturday destroyed three buildings in a residential quarter of the town of Chasiv Yar, inhabited mostly by people who work in nearby factories.
On Sunday evening, rescuers were able to remove enough of the bricks and concrete to retrieve a man who had been trapped for almost 24 hours. Rescuers laid him on a stretcher and he was quickly taken to a hospital.
Ukraine's Emergency Services said the latest rescue brought to six the number of people dug out of the rubble. Earlier in the day, they made contact with three others still trapped alive beneath the ruins.
NPR
Garbage collectors in Kharkiv dodge mortars to pick up the trash
KHARKIV, Ukraine — On the northeastern edge of Kharkiv, the streets are empty but the dumpsters are full.
Andrey Taranenko is driving a white municipal garbage truck through Kharkiv's Saltivka neighborhood.
Rows of high-rise apartment buildings in Saltivka are in ruins. Some of the Soviet-era housing complexes have craters from Russian rockets. Others are streaked from fires. Some of the buildings have been so heavily pounded by Russian artillery that they've partially collapsed.
Yet some residents are returning to fix up their apartments, while some never left. And they produce more and more trash every week, says Taranenko.
"When people started to come back, they'd left fridges here full of food," he says of the residents who fled this neighborhood during the intense attacks on Saltivka in the early weeks of the war. "So they started to throw away things they didn't need. So of course there was a lot of garbage here."
Because of the shelling and debris in the streets, he says garbage trucks couldn't get in to some areas for weeks. Trash was piling up on the sidewalks. Everything was rotting.
The Guardian
Germany braces for ‘nightmare’ of Russia turning off gas for good
Germany is bracing itself for a potentially permanent halt to the flow of Russian gas from Monday when maintenance work begins on the Nord Stream 1 pipeline that brings the fuel to Europe’s largest economy via the Baltic Sea.
The work on the 759-mile (1,220km) pipeline is an annual event and requires the gas taps to be closed for 10 to 14 days. But never before in the pipeline’s decade-long history has Germany seriously been asking whether the flow will begin again.
Robert Habeck, Germany’s economy minister, has not shied away from addressing the government’s concerns. On Saturday, he spoke of the “nightmare scenario” that could occur.
Contingency plans are rapidly being drawn up across Germany, where there are genuine concerns that Moscow may use the opportunity to further weaponise gas as a lever against the west in its war with Ukraine and permanently turn off supplies.
Reuters
Macau shuts down all its casinos in race to curb covid spread
HONG KONG, July 11 (Reuters) - Macau shut all its casinos for the first time in more than two years on Monday, sending shares in gaming firms tumbling as authorities struggle to contain the worst coronavirus outbreak yet in the world's biggest gambling hub.
The city's 30-plus casinos and other businesses will shut for one week and people were ordered to stay at home though short trips for essential services were allowed.
Police will monitor flows of people outside and stringent punishments will be imposed for those who disobey, the government said.
Deutsche Welle
Wild species can help feed the world
"Transformative changes" are needed to save wild species from extinction and preserve ecosystems that are essential to human life, say the authors of a new landmark report from the the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
The report on the "Sustainable Use of Wild Species" examines options for using algae, animals, fungi, land-based and aquatic plants in a sustainable way.
The result of four years of work by nearly 300 experts and scientists, along with representatives of Indigenous communities, the report is the most detailed scientific summary to date on the benefits of wild species to life on Earth.
"Almost half the world's population actually depend to a greater or lesser extent on the use of wild species. And it's much more prevalent than most people think," said John Donaldson, co-chair of IPBES.
Currently, about a million species worldwide are threatened with extinction as biodiversity and ecosystem health deteriorates at unprecedented rates.
This undermines economic prosperity while harming the health and quality of life of people around the world.
New York Times
Embattled Leaders in Hiding, Sri Lankans Ask: What’s Next?
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lanka’s political and economic crisis offered a peculiar tableau Sunday after a day of high drama: The protesters were everywhere, cooking in the prime minister’s garden and even lounging in the president’s bedroom while the leaders were nowhere to be seen.
With President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe both in hiding after indicating they would resign, it was not clear who was running the country. But it mattered little to the thousands who have flooded into the capital city, Colombo, since Saturday: For months they had felt they were on their own anyway as they queued up for hours — often in vain — for fuel and cooking gas, pared down their meals and scrambled for lifesaving medicine.Would he actually quit on Wednesday, as officials have said, or was his silence a sign that he was gauging his options for a protracted fight? Discussions on who might succeed him were also taking shape, with the speaker of the Parliament viewed as the likely choice as interim president.
Washington Post
‘Hit the kill switch’: Uber used covert tech to thwart government raids
Twenty minutes after authorities raided Uber’s Amsterdam office in April 2015, Ligea Wells’s computer screen mysteriously went blank. The executive assistant tapped out a text warning her boss of another strange occurrence on an already eventful day.
“hi!” she typed in a message that’s part of a trove of more than 124,000 previously undisclosed Uber records. “My laptop shut down after acting funny.”
But her computer’s behavior was no mystery to some of her superiors.
Uber’s use of what insiders called the “kill switch” was a brazen example of how the company employed technological tools to prevent authorities from successfully investigating the company’s business practices as it disrupted the global taxi industry, according to the documents.
During this era, as Uber’s valuation was surging past $50 billion, government raids occurred with such frequency that the company distributed a Dawn Raid Manual to employees on how to respond. It ran more than 2,600 words with 66 bullet points. They included “Move the Regulators into a meeting room that does not contain any files” and “Never leave the Regulators alone.”