Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, Interceptor7, Magnifico, annetteboardman, jck, and Besame. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Man Oh Man, wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), 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.
We begin with this from NPR:
Americans are now able to visit the European Union again, vaccinated or not. The European Council has updated its list of countries whose citizens and residents should be allowed to travel freely to the bloc's 27 member nations, and the United States is finally on it.
But before you get on a plane, be aware there may be catches. In fact, there could be 27 different combinations of them. While the updated list published Friday is a recommendation on who may be granted entry based on their home country's health situation, each EU government makes its own border decisions. This includes what nationalities to admit, whether to require PCR or rapid antigen coronavirus tests upon arrival, and whether quarantine is mandatory. And while the European Commission, the EU executive branch, emphatically urges countries to coordinate such rules with their neighbors to ensure mobility, that plea has often fallen on deaf administrative ears.
From Yahoo News:
Isaac Schorr
From CNN:
More than 350 doctors and medical workers have caught Covid-19 in Indonesia despite being vaccinated with Sinovac, officials said, as concerns grow about the efficacy of some vaccines against more infectious variants.
Most of the workers were asymptomatic and self-isolating at home, said Badai Ismoyo, head of the health office in the district of Kudus in central Java, but dozens have been hospitalized with high fevers and falling oxygen-saturation levels.
From Yahoo News (a N Y Times story):
A Canadian couple who drew widespread criticism for flying to a small Indigenous community in January to get vaccinated pleaded guilty Wednesday to violating local coronavirus restrictions, according to court records.
The couple, Rodney and Ekaterina Baker of Vancouver, British Columbia, appeared virtually in Yukon Territorial Court and pleaded guilty to charges under the territory’s Civil Emergency Measures Act, which was enacted during the pandemic and required people to isolate themselves for 14 days after entering Yukon, records show.
From the Daily Beast:
The wild mystery has taken several dramatic turns in recent days.
The wild saga of the South African woman who claims she gave birth to a record-setting 10 babies—who have yet to be seen publicly—has taken several more dramatic turns.
Health authorities took Gosiame Sithole into custody this week, reportedly for a psychiatric examination, prompting her attorney to threaten legal action to get her released.
Meanwhile, a South African media outlet is reporting an exam showed no signs that Sithole had been pregnant—as a top government minister is promising that the mystery will be solved by next week.
From the BBC:
A Conservative MP is to stand trial charged with sexually assaulting a 15-year-old boy in 2008.
Imran Ahmad Khan, MP for Wakefield in West Yorkshire, denies sexually touching the teenager in Staffordshire.
The 47-year-old appeared before Westminster magistrates via video-link on Thursday. Reporting restrictions on the case were lifted on Friday.
From the BBC:
Ministers have said they feel "deeply ashamed" of low conviction rates for rape cases in England and Wales.
Speaking to the BBC, Justice Secretary Robert Buckland apologised to victims and promised to "do a lot better".
He also admitted budget cuts were partly to blame for convictions falling to a record low in recent years.
The government says it is now considering allowing victims to pre-record their evidence to spare them the trauma of a courtroom trial.
From the Wall Street Journal:
Palestinian Authority says the soon-to-expire vaccines didn’t meet agreed-upon standards
TEL AVIV—The Palestinian Authority on Friday pulled out of a swap of Pfizer -BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine with Israel, citing concerns about the quality of an initial shipment.
Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh said 90,000 doses Israel had sent of the soon-to-expire Pfizer vaccine would be returned. The shipment from Israel was to be the first of the up to 1.4 million doses that the Palestinian Authority would receive. In return, the Palestinians would ship an identical quantity to the Israeli government later in the year, after receiving a new shipment from Pfizer.
From The Hill:
Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily printed 500,000 copies on Friday, five times more than usual, a day after Chinese authorities arrested five editors and executives for allegedly conspiring with foreign governments to endanger national security, according to The Associated Press.
The front page prominently featured images of the editors and executives handcuffed and led away by police.
From the Washington Post:
TOKYO — A wild bear went on a rampage in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo on Friday, storming a Japanese military base, forcing its way into an airport and injuring four people.
Video footage showed the bear galloping across a busy road and pushing its way into a base run by Japan’s Self-Defense Forces.
From 538.com:
From the Beeb:
By Michael McBride
Edwin Poots has resigned as DUP leader after just 21 days in the job following an internal party revolt.
He had been elected in the first leadership contest in the DUP's 50-year history, with predecessors chosen by the party's top ranks.
So what went so wrong, so quickly, for the party's shortest-serving leader?
From The Guardian:
After 123 days, Alexandr Kudlay and Viktoria Pustovitova decide they were not meant to be together
The couple, from the eastern city of Kharkiv, decided to handcuff themselves together on Valentine’s Day in a last-ditch attempt to break the cycle of breaking up and making up.
From the BBC:
By Rayhan Demytrie
Armenians vote on Sunday in a snap parliamentary election that will decide their post-war future following defeat in last year's conflict with neighbouring Azerbaijan over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
"We must establish a dictatorship of law, a dictatorship of the free will of the people," acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan told supporters as he waved a steel hammer.
From CNN:
By Stephanie Busari and Nimi Princewill, CNN
Lagos, Nigeria (CNN)Several students and three teachers were abducted Thursday by armed men from a federal college in Nigeria's north-western Kebbi State, State Governor Abubakar Bagudu told CNN.
According to Governor Bagudu, the gunmen — locally known as bandits — raided the co-educational Federal Government College in Kebbi's Birnin Yauri district on Thursday, killing a policeman in the attack.
From the Los Angeles Times:
GABORONE, Botswana —
A huge diamond weighing more than 1,000 carats, which could be the third-largest mined in history, has been discovered in the southern African country of Botswana.
The high-quality gemstone weighing 1,098.3 carats was unearthed earlier this month in the Jwaneng mine owned by Debswana, the mining company jointly owned by the Botswanan government and the De Beers Group.
From CNN:
Geneva A Liberian rebel commander was sentenced in Switzerland to 20 years in jail on Friday for rape, killings and an act of cannibalism, in one of the first ever convictions over the West African country's civil war.
The case was also Switzerland's first war crimes trial in a civilian court. It involved 46-year-old Alieu Kosiah who went by the nom de guerre "bluff boy" in the rebel faction ULIMO that fought former President Charles Taylor's army in the 1990s.
From NPR:
DALIA FAHEID
Six years ago, Saudi Arabian authorities arrested Mustafa Hashem al-Darwish and charged him with attending anti-government protests years earlier, when he was 17. According to Reprieve, a U.K. nonprofit that investigates human rights abuses, a court found al-Darwish guilty and sentenced him to death, despite the fact that he was a minor at the time he allegedly attended the protests.
From the BBC:
Authorities in the Portuguese capital Lisbon illegally handed over protesters' personal details to the foreign embassies they were picketing, an audit has found.
Data was shared 52 times from 2018-19, said Lisbon mayor Fernando Medina.
He declined to say which embassies were involved, but media reports cited China, Israel and Russia.
From Reuters:
LUCKNOW, India June 18 (Reuters) - Police in India have summoned Twitter’s top official in the country to answer allegations that the U.S. firm failed to stop the spread of a video that allegedly incited “hate and enmity” between Hindu and Muslim communities.
An official police notice, seen by Reuters, showed a case had been registered in Ghaziabad in northern Uttar Pradesh state over a video of a few men, apparently Hindu, beating an elderly man believed to be a Muslim and cutting his beard.
Also from Reuters:
BANGKOK, June 18 (Reuters) - Thailand’s planned reopening of the resort island Phuket next month to vaccinated visitors, bypassing quarantine requirements, has met a lukewarm response, with hotel bookings indicating expected occupancy of less than 20% so far.
The "Phuket Sandbox" initiative from July 1 will allow free movement on the island for tourists fully vaccinated against COVID-19, with no self-isolation on arrival. They will be given a green light to travel elsewhere in Thailand after 14 days.