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.
Pictures of the week, from The Guardian (wildlife), NBC News, New York Times (fashion week!), Al Jazeera, the BBC, BuzzFeed, and BBC again (Africa).
News this week comes from Central and East Asia and the Pacific.
The big story around the world tonight is probably the start of the Winter Olympics. Images come from there too:
It ought to be renamed the runway of nations, because it really is a chance for countries to highlight not only homegrown talent, but cultural traditions
Our first story comes from Kazakhstan, where people are following their countrymen. This was published in the Astana Times:
BY AIGERIM SADYKOVA
ASTANA – International media and experts expect Kazakh sportsmen to win medals in mogul and 50K Mass Start at the upcoming Winter Olympics in South Korea. The Associated Press (AP) and Gracenote Virtual Medal Table (VMT) predict bronze for freestyle skier Dmitry Reiherd, while Sports Illustrated feels he will take the silver.
“Kazakhstan is forecast to win a bronze medal with freestyle skier Dmitry Reiherd, who is ranked third by the VMT in the moguls event,” writes Gracenote. “If Reiherd secures his spot on the podium, it would be Kazakhstan’s first Olympic medal in freestyle skiing.”
And one on the Olympics from Quartz:
Maria Thomas
It’s never been easy to be an Indian athlete with Olympic dreams.
As the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics proved, talented young gymnasts and wrestlers have had to struggle against the odds to represent India on the global stage, fighting for adequate funding and training. But when it comes to winter sports in a cricket-crazed country, the difficulties are almost overwhelming.
This year, only two Indians have qualified for the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea, which opens today (Feb. 09). Cross-country skier Jagdish Singh is one of them, while the other is Shiva Keshavan, the country’s only Olympic-level luge rider who debuted at the 1998 Nagano Olympics in Japan. Keshavan is marking his sixth time at the Winter Olympics, but he’s said it may also be his last, capping a career spent overcoming government apathy and an almost crippling lack of funds.
More below the fold.
On a different topic, from the Astana Times:
BY ZHAZIRA DYUSSEMBEKOVA in BUSINESS on 9 FEBRUARY 2018
ASTANA – Kazakhstan’s economy moved up one spot to 41st on the recently released 2018 Index of Economic Freedom annual report published by the Heritage Foundation. It was the highest ranking in Central Asia and among the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
Out of 180 countries represented in the ranking, Hong Kong was recognised as the freest economy of the world, the same as 2017. The second place was taken by Singapore and the third went to New Zealand. The top 10 countries also include Switzerland, Australia, Ireland, Estonia, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United Arab Emirates. China placed 110th and the United States ranked 18th.
Kazakhstan’s economic freedom score is 69.1 out of 100 maximum.
From The Diplomat:
Nepal’s two transitional justice mechanisms have failed to deliver justice to war-era victims.
February 10, 2018 marks three years for Nepal’s two transitional justice mechanisms — the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) — formed to provide justice for war-era victims.
On February 5, the government formally extended the tenure of these two commissions by a year. Justice, however, is still a distant thing for the conflict’s victims. In the past three years, neither commission has settled even a single case of rights violations during the ten-year Maoist insurgency, further dismaying war-era victims.
From the Siberian Times (I know this is a week old, but I missed it last week and didn’t want to let it get by):
Creature behaves 'absolutely peacefully' before emergency team picked her up
A Siberian tiger that blocked the front door of a house in a Russian village, had come in for "help" with severe dental problems, the director of a local animal centre has claimed.
Sergey Aramilev said the creature “behaved absolutely peacefully, as if she was waiting for help”.
The predator, one of fewer than 600 still living in the wild, came out from the forest in the Khabarovsk region of Russia lying down on the porch of a property in the village of Solonetsovy.
From the BBC:
Police in India have arrested an air force officer for allegedly sharing classified information online with Pakistani spies who pretended to be female models.
Arun Marwaha, 51, allegedly exchanged classified documents in exchange for obscene photos on WhatsApp.
Mr Marwaha, a skydiving instructor, was reportedly detained on 31 January. He was arrested on Thursday.
If convicted he faces 14 years in jail under India's official secrets act.
From WREG.com:
WEST BENGAL, India – An Indian man is in police custody after allegedly stealing one of his wife’s kidneys to serve as a dowry. When she complained of stomach pain two years ago, Rita Sarkar, 28, says her husband arranged a visit to a private nursing home in Kolkata, where the couple stayed with one of his relatives, per the BBC.
Sarkar—who claims her husband abused her for years with demands for a dowry, though dowries are banned in India—says she was given a drink that made her feel drowsy, per the Telegraph of India.
From The Washington Post:
NEW DELHI — It’s only the fourth day of annual examinations in India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh and already the government says 661,643 students — around 10 percent of the total number enrolled — have failed to show up.
A government official said it’s because this year they've upped their anti-cheating efforts, and clamped down on the state’s notorious education mafia by installing CCTV cameras and deploying a police task force to catch the cheaters.
From The Verge:
It’s the latest battle for equal rights in China, but it won’t be the last
On Valentine’s Day in 2012, Xiao Meili walked through a Beijing commercial district in a wedding dress, its shimmering white folds splattered with red. She and two other Chinese activists had decided to march through the busy shopping area in gowns covered in fake blood to raise awareness about domestic abuse, which affects 1 in 4 women in China,according to 2017 government estimates. As they carried signs with slogans like “Love is not an excuse for violence,” Xiao says passersby expressed their curiosity and support.
Activists have been advocating for equal rights for women in China for years, but because of the government’s strict rule, they face different struggles than their counterparts in the West — including online censorship, arrests, and forced evictions. “In a country where the government still exerts tight control over ideology, those inside the system rarely find the courage to speak up,” Xiao wrote in a 2015 op-ed. “Strong public pressure is necessary. We cannot afford to go about our campaign quietly.”
From The Phnom Penh Post:
Two forestry administration officials and a soldier identified as Moeng Duong stand in front of a tractor loaded with timber he was allegedly hauling in January. Photo supplied
Forest patrollers and rights groups are questioning why the Oddar Meanchey Forestry Administration has yet to take action after a soldier transporting illegal timber allegedly beat and threatened to kill a patroller last month.
Patroller Loeut Las and Sorng Rukhavorn community forest chief Venerable Bun Saluth say they have filed complaints to local representatives of the rights groups Adhoc and Licadho in hopes of bringing the suspect to court.
From Voice of America:
During the 21 months he spent imprisoned in the secret Khmer Rouge prison code-named S-21, Bou Meng found a strange comfort in his prison uniform: black cotton shorts and sometimes, when he was lucky, a shirt.
“It was very cold at night, as I remember,” he told VOA Khmer in a recent interview. No blankets or any other personal items were given to prisoners, who spent most of their days and nights shackled to beds inside tiny rooms. Often they were released only to be tortured.
For Bou Meng, one of the few people to have survived the infamous prison, where 14,000 people were confined and ultimately executed, the clothes still bring back vivid memories of those months.
“They smelled very disgusting,” he said. When he was tortured, “they would strip my shirt off,” Bou Meng recalled. “My body was covered with blood.”
From VN Express:
By Thien Chuong
Chinese people are not forgetting their roots when they join their Vietnamese neighbors to celebrate Tet.
The Chinese community is a part of Saigon, and no one can deny it.
Surrounded by the Vietnamese world, Chinese people here have a unique way of keeping their long-standing traditions alive.
This fried cake (jian dui), which is said to be an indispensible part of the Lunar New Year for Chinese people, is evidence of that.
From The Star (Malaysia):
INDUSTRIALISATION is the process of transformation from a primarily agrarian economy to one based on the manufacturing of goods. This process fosters development in aspects beyond economic fundamentals such as social, demography, and politics.
Besides that, it enables urban-rural migration and social mobility, improves purchasing power and spending habits, and creates political movements that challenge the traditional agrarian elites.
However, industrialisation is passé for most advanced economies as they have long progressed past that into the post-industrial phase of development, which was brought about through new technological discoveries.
From The Smithsonian:
About 280 people north of the Malay Peninsula speak the language, which is called Jedek
Researchers have cataloged close to 7,000 distinct human languages on Earth, per Linguistic Society of America’s latest count. That may seem like a pretty exhaustive list, but it hasn’t stopped anthropologists and linguists from continuing to encounter new languages, like one recently discovered in a village in the northern part of the Malay Peninsula.
According to a press release, researchers from Lund University in Sweden discovered the language during a project called Tongues of the Semang. The documentation effort in villages of the ethnic Semang people was intended to collect data on their languages, which belong to an Austoasiatic language family called Aslian. While researchers were studying a language called Jahai in one village, they came to understand that not everyone there was speaking it. “We realized that a large part of the village spoke a different language. They used words, phonemes and grammatical structures that are not used in Jahai,” says Joanne Yager, lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Linguist Typology. “Some of these words suggested a link with other Aslian languages spoken far away in other parts of the Malay Peninsula.”
From The Washington Post:
By Vincent Bevins
JAKARTA, Indonesia — Prodded by religious conservatives, Indonesia is moving toward outlawing gay sex — and even sex outside marriage — in a jarring change for a country long seen as a bastion of tolerance in the Islamic world.
The proposed sexual crackdown in the Southeast Asian archipelago of more than 260 million people — the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation and third-largest democracy — is drawing criticism at home and abroad from human rights organizations and LGBT activists. They warn that penal-code revisions now under consideration in parliament would discriminate against large numbers of people, promote extremist views and reverse democratic gains.
From Radio New Zealand:
The Kiribati government has hit out at media organisations in Australia and New Zealand over their attempts to cover the aftermath of a ferry sinking.
The Butiraoi sunk near the island of Nonouti last month, and is estimated to have killed anywhere between 80 and 100 people. Only seven people survived.
Two organisations, the ABC and New Zealand's Newshub, attempted to send journalists to cover the aftermath and the investigations, but they were prevented from doing so.
And from News Hub (New Zealand):
OPINION: New Zealand is being left behind when it comes to public displays of flexing our military muscle.
So is it time to get the biceps out, or, in our case, the supple deltoids of peace.
We used to have military parades all the time, but they stopped somewhere in between our post-World War II euphoria and the anti-war protests of Vietnam and anti-nuclear flotillas.
We've become a nation of the anti-military, even the NZ defence force doesn't use the word 'soldiers' anymore; it likes to describe them as 'peacekeepers'.
A good old fashioned war parade might use up some of those long neglected roles of khaki cloth at Spotlight as well.
Imagine Queen St awash with military spectacle, minus, of course, a few decimals on the state funding scale.
Who leads the parade?
We'll need a mighty band, and our military has plenty of them. There's an Air Force, Army and Navy band, but I think we'd need to modernise the beats to appeal to the war-sceptical younger generations.
Those military beats would need to be bangers, so Lorde, who is basically named after some old geezer with a moustache who probably fought in a war, is the perfect choice to lead the band.
Her song 'Green Light' would also be a nice fit because khaki is basically a shade of green.
And he goes on from there…
It’s a good time to go for news from the Arts (ish). This first is from The Moscow Times:
Russian prisoners have touched up their snow-sculpting skills by creating a life-size replica of a ballistic missile launcher in Siberia.
Last year, prisoners from the correctional institute in Siberia’s Omsk region created a huge snow replica of the Aurora naval cruiser to commemorate the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution.
From Eurasianet:
Kyrgyz organizations in New York and Chicago strive to make their community feel welcomed – and included – in their new home.
Nurmira Salimbaeva-Greenberg playing the komuz, a traditional Kyrgyz instrument, during the Kyrgyz American cultural event co-hosted by Columbia University's Harriman Institute and the Kyrgyz American Foundation on November 17, 2017. (Photo by Jonathan Levin/Kyrgyz American Foundation)
The Kyrgyz are among the smallest and newest Central Asian diasporas to settle in the United States, but a recent event suggests they are one of the most active.
Most Kyrgyz emigres settle in Chicago and New York. In Chicago, members of the diaspora have set up a community center to provide culture and language classes for children as well as job-training courses in IT and computer software. “We founded our center for the future generation,” Ulanbek Azimbaev, president of the Kyrgyz Community Center in Chicago, told Eurasianet.
From ArtsHub:
While the leak of the Nauru Files happened a year ago, this group of award winning artists is here to remind us the problem is still very present.
Described as Australia's first exhibition to give people a visual glimpse into life on Nauru, the short run exhibition All We Can’t See, offers a reality check and prompt for audiences to remain alert to human rights abuses and the cost of offshore processing.
33 award-winning Australian artists, including four-time Archibald finalist Abdul Abdullah, Rockefeller and Churchill Fellowship recipient Janet Laurence, and 2017 Bvlgari Art Award recipient Tomislav Nikolic, among others, have joined forces to make new work that interprets the leaked Nauru files exposed by The Guardian in 2016.
From Hyperallergic:
“This survey is not just for women. And not just for employees.”
As marches, tweets, and scandals have reminded us in recent years, women tend to earn, on average, significantly less than men — even when they work identical jobs. And just because salaries in the art world are often much lower than in, say, finance or law, that doesn’t mean museums, galleries, and publications don’t also have a problem with paying women less than men. But how much, exactly? And in which parts of the industry?
And finally, from Newsweek:
Last week, Alex Ruth Bertulis-Fernandes, a 23-year-old art student from London, got a word of advice from a male instructor: "Dial down the feminism."
She responded as any good artist would: with art. A week after her teacher's comment, Bertulis-Fernandes presented him a mock-up of a new piece titled—you guessed it—"Dial Down The Feminism." The digitally edited photo is clean, simple and straightforward. It's a single, gleaming dial set to "Raging Feminist," with the only other setting being "Complicit in My Own Dehumanisation."
On Wednesday, Bertulis-Fernandes shared the piece on Twitter. Two days later, it had received more than 300,000 likes and more than 90,000 retweets.
