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.
The pictures of the year, not just the week, from the World Press Photo Contest.
Pictures of the week, however, are from The Guardian (wildlife), the BBC (Africa) and the world in general, from Sputnik, NBC, and Time Out (pictures from Instagram).
I went looking for a story about North Korea, from North Korea, but I found a discussion of North Korea from the United States instead. This is from Tennessee’s WBIR:
April 13, 2018: A popular tourist attraction in East Tennessee is also used by the U.S. Department of Defense to monitor nuclear testing in North Korea.
Another look at Syrians, this from The Washington Post:
When the war in Syria started, Hassan al-Kontar knew he couldn't go back. Kontar had been working in the United Arab Emirates since 2006. He had left his home to avoid conscription in the Syrian army.
“I am a human being, and I don't consider it right to participate in war,” he told BBC. “I'm not a killing machine, and I don't want any part in destroying Syria.”
But in 2016, Kontar lost his work permit and his job. UAE officials expelled him.
And there is another one about the same situation in Business Insider.
France is also in the news because of Syria, but there are other things happening there as well. This report is from The Local (France):
Ten people died and another 80 fell ill in France after eating contaminated Morbier and Mont d’Or cheese in a salmonella outbreak that health authorities knew about, a new report has revealed.
An investigation by France Inter radio said the two cheeses made in the Franche-Comté region in the east of the country from unpasteurised milk were at the root of the outbreak in late 2015 and early 2016.
Latin America includes Mexico, doesn’t it? This news comes from Mexico News Daily:
Excessive anaesthetic blamed in boy's death; doctors altered report, officials allege
Just minutes before he went into an operating room in Oaxaca on the night of November 26, 2017, three-year-old Edward Luna Trujillo was in good spirits, smiling and laughing in a video filmed by his parents despite having a fractured left arm he sustained in an accident earlier the same day.
And the other NAFTA partner on our borders, Canada, is the source of this article from The Observer of Uganda:
Uganda is engrossed in a battle with authorities in Ottawa, Canada over a plan to demolish a building which once hosted the Ugandan high commission.
The two-storey red brick building on 231 Cobourg street was constructed in the 1940s as an apartment building, and became Uganda's high commission in 1985. Owned by the Ugandan government, the building was used as Uganda's high commission to Canada until 2014 when it was declared unsafe.
It has been sitting in an increasingly dilapidated state ever since, with serious foundation problems and mould resulting from water damage. Ugandan high commissioner to Ottawa Joy Acheng is quoted by Canadian based CBC news saying that the building has cracks from the foundation up to the roof.
As a result, the Ugandan government announced that it wanted to demolish the building and build a new high commission in its place. However, the plan suffered a setback on Thursday when Ottawa's Built Heritage sub-committee ignored the advice of both the city's own professional heritage planners and a third-party engineering firm, who agreed the building is in such bad shape and it isn't worth repairing.
And another Canadian story, this from The Guardian:
Case of street named in the 1920s divides Ontario town of Puslinch, as some condemn offensive symbol and others say it’s part of history
Ashifa Kassam in Toronto
A street named Swastika Trail has sparked a polarising debate in a small Canadian municipality, where residents have taken their cause to court after a months-long campaign to change the name proved fruitless.
After years of quietly complaining about the name, a group of residents in the tight-knit southern Ontario township of Puslinch, population 7,300, launched a campaign last autumn aimed at convincing their neighbours that it was time for change.
Some living on the private road were uneasy about having it listed on their driver’s licenses and other government documents. Others said it was simply time to untangle the municipality from the offensive symbol.
One final bit of Canadian content, from NPR:
As a bill that would legalize recreational marijuana works its way through the Canadian Parliament, the government is gearing up to track cannabis consumption more closely than it has before. Statistics Canada has begun to do city-scale drug screening �by monitoring what Canadians flush down the toilet.
Six cities have agreed to contribute samples from the place where all drains congregate �— their wastewater treatment plants. Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, Alberta; Vancouver and Surrey in British Columbia; and Halifax, Nova Scotia, will participate. All told, the network would capture data on drug use from about a quarter of Canada's total 36 million inhabitants.
In global news The Guardian offers this report:
How close the world is to a catastrophic collapse of giant ocean currents is unknown, making halting global warming more critical than ever, scientists say
Past collapses of the giant network have seen some of the most extreme impacts in climate history, with western Europe particularly vulnerable to a descent into freezing winters. A significantly weakened system is also likely to cause more severe storms in Europe, faster sea level rise on the east coast of the US and increasing drought in the Sahel in Africa.
The new research worries scientists because of the huge impact global warming has already had on the currents and the unpredictability of a future “tipping point”.
The Guardian also has this news story from England — London, to be specific:
Police search for two women after racially motivated assault on Spanish-speaking passenger
Police in London are searching for two women after another female who was speaking Spanish on the night tube was viciously attacked.
The 24-year-old victim was talking to friends on the Central line between Liverpool Street and Stratford when she was set upon at around 3.45am last Saturday.
Russia and England news from Axios:
Shannon Vavra
And there are also stories from places that have not been much in the news recently, but (at least to US eyes, of course, not to their own) have been relatively self-contained with their scandals and disasters and cute stories. We begin with these interesting items with news from Outside Online:
The world's highest peak will again be the focus of the climbing world
The 2018 Everest spring season is underway. While we’re excited for some of the record-setting attempts, there’s already the usual hand-wringing about overcrowding, trash, and deaths. Here’s a rundown of everything you need to know as the climbers begin to settle in at Base Camp.
It’ll Still Be Crowded
This year is expected to have a similar number of climbers as last year, when over 800 attempted the world’s highest peak. In 2017, six people died and 648 successfully summited—237 from the north side and 411 from the south side. As a long-term trend, the popularity of Everest continues to grow. In 2000, there were just 145 summits. By 2013, a record 661 mountaineers stood on top of the peak. Almost all of that growth is due to a rise in climbers from India and China, two countries with burgeoning mountaineering scenes.
From The Straits Times comes this story about events in Malaysia:
PETALING JAYA - Hundreds of people crowded a supermarket in the Johor town of Pontian on Thursday (April 12) after hearing that Johor's Crown Prince Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim was coming over to pay for their groceries, according to Malaysian media reports.
The prince had on Wednesday forked out over RM1 million (S$338,000) on groceries for shoppers at the Aeon Tebrau supermarket in Johor Baru.
Though told through public announcements at the Econsave Pontian supermarket that the news was fake, about 1,000 shoppers crowded the place as early as 10am on Thursday. Pontian is located to the south-west of Johor state.
And also from The Straits Times:
Singapore's beloved polar bear, Inuka, is ailing and might have to be put down.
Affectionately nicknamed "the sunbear" for how much he loved lazing and basking in the sun, Inuka is the first and only polar bear born in the tropics, and has spent his entire life in Singapore.
Born here on Boxing Day, 1990, he was called a Christmas present by keepers. And just like his fellow countrymen, he loves "ice-kachang" - in his case frozen blocks of ice containing tasty treats such as fish.
And news from the arts:
From Deutsche Welle, via USA Today:
Using drone cameras, scientists have documented spectacular line drawings newly discovered in southern Peru. They are likely much older than the famous Nazca lines.
The latest line drawings show geometric figures portraying humans, apes and a whale, according to a report published in National Geographic.
Twenty-five images of the previously undocumented line drawings — so-called geoglyphs, or "ground drawings" — in Palpa province in southern Peru were taken from drones, said Peruvian archeologist Johny Isla Cuadrado in the Peruvian daily, El Comercio.
From The Chicago Tribune:
There’s a kind of Zelig quality to the new “Arte Diseno Xicago” exhibition at the National Museum of Mexican Art.
Its subtitle is “Mexican Inspiration from the World's Columbian Exposition to the Civil Rights Era,” and across those 80 years this eye-opening show intersects with so many key figures in Chicago art and the culture more broadly.
There is the gifted young sculptor Enrique Alferez — whose audacious, deco-influenced religious figures dominate the show’s opening gallery; the Moses is particularly striking — shown in a circa 1925 photo seated amid the apprentices working at Lorado Taft’s University of Chicago studio.
From The Desert Sun:
Just outside the newly expanded Sahara tent, a rainbow-colored cylinder rises from the Empire Polo Field grounds.
This seven-story column made of plexiglass windows ranging from red to purple beckons with mesmerizing hues. But Spectra by United Kingdom-based design studio Newsubstance is not just something to look at.
Start at the ground-level opening and make your way up the 1/4-mile ramp. As you pass by the various panels, your view changes with every step – as does the color that you're washed in.
And at the top? Emerge onto an observation deck with a breathtaking panorama of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and beyond.
From CNN:
Written by Oscar Holland, CNN
A long-lost Marc Chagall painting, stolen almost 30 years ago, has been recovered from the attic of a man connected to Bulgarian organized crime, according to new court
filings.
The artwork "Othello and Desdemona," which was taken from a New York apartment during a heist in 1988, was retrieved in Maryland by the FBI's
Art Crime Team after the man himself alerted investigators to its whereabouts.
Depicting characters from Shakespeare's "Othello," the 1911 painting was one of a number of artworks stolen from the Manhattan home of Ernest and Rose Heller, art collectors who have since passed away. According to news reports from the time, the couple also lost jewelry, sculptures, silverware and carpets in the heist. It was "a lifetime of collecting," Ernest
told UPI news agency after the robbery.
From boingboing.net:
Earlier this week, residents in the middle of Stockholm, Sweden were greeted with a giant blue penis painted on the side of a 5-story-high building. The mural, titled "Fuck the World," was meant to stay up for six months, painted by artist Carolina Falkholt on a wall meant for graffiti artists who have permission to paint whatever they want. But because of a local public reaction that's been both angry and repulsed, her painting's days are numbered to less than a week.
Falkholt, "one of Sweden's most renowned graffiti artists," told The Local that phallophobes "should consider what it is they are so upset about and then talk about it...Sex is so important, but it’s always been too dirty to discuss."
From the BBC:
A wave of poppies has taken over Fort Nelson in Hampshire.
The sculpture is in its final year of touring the UK, after first being installed around the Tower of London in 2014.
Wave was created by the arts programme 14-18 NOW to commemorate the centenary of World War One and it will be on display at the fort for the next three months.
From the BBC Music Magazine website, Classical-music.com:
Music by lesser-known composer Robert Ramsey has been found depicted in a painting at Norwich Castle Museum
Few works by Robert Ramsey have survived the centuries since he composed in the 1600s, so it was a surprise for art historians to find a perfectly preserved copy of his haunting song ‘Charon, O Charon heare a wretch opprest’ hidden in plain sight. The Paston Treasure, painted by an unknown artist is thought to have been commissioned by the wealthy Paston family around the time of 1670, and depicts two children among a mix of objects including Ramsey’s piece pictured in an open book.
In collaboration with the exhibition ‘The Paston Treasure: Riches and Rarities of the Known World’, which opens in Norwich Castle on 23 June, the Royal College of Music has made the first ever recording of Ramsey’s song. Curator of the exhibition, Dr Francesca Vanke, highlights that ‘the recording will play throughout the exhibition and provide eminently relevant musical context.’
And finally, from The Guardian:
Play tells story of poet Mikhail Kuzmin who disappeared into official obscurity during Soviet era
Andrew Roth in Moscow
A play about a largely forgotten gay poet from early 1900s Russia has emerged as the dark horse in this year’s Golden Mask awards, the Oscars of the Russian theatre world.
The Trout Breaks the Ice is based on the story of Mikhail Kuzmin, who disappeared into the official obscurity imposed by the Soviets on artists considered deviant or who were out of favour. The play’s success comes amid fears that the relative freedom enjoyed by Russian theatre is under threat.
Kuzmin was celebrated in his day for his poems on love and loss but from 1929 until the end of the Soviet Union his work was not published.