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, JeremyBloom, and doomandgloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man (RIP), wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos since 2007, 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.
Cheerier stories (including weird news) above the fold, gloomier ones beneath.
Pictures this week come from Al Ahram (Egypt) — the Grand Egyptian Museum before its “official” grand opening, although it has been open since last October and of Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, attending Russia’s VE Day celebration; and from the BBC, with Africa’s pictures of the week.
We begin with one of my major questions:
It’s a game where futility is expected and frustration is always simmering. At least it’s a decent metaphor for Trump’s presidency
We have already tumbled past the first 100 days of the second Trump presidency, careening down the hill with reckless abandon. One hundred days is, of course, a totally arbitrary milestone – a nice, round number that looks monumental because of the number of zeros attached.
With inflation and looming tariffs continuing to hobble commerce, shouldn’t we extend this marker in kind? If you go by the rate of inflation since the final year before Donald Trump’s ascension to power, we should be looking at the first 133.25 days. Time itself is arbitrary, speeding up or slowing down based on context and personal perception. A minute can feel like an eternity if you’re stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard.
Also from The Guardian, on the same theme:
- US set to host in 2031, the UK in 2035
- Fifa approves strategy for Afghan women’s football
The Women’s World Cup will expand to 48 teams from the 2031 tournament onwards after the proposal was approved by the Fifa council on Friday.
The UK is set to host the event in 2035 and that tournament will now involve 12 groups of four teams and more than 100 matches, with the format mirroring the newly expanded men’s World Cup. It is understood Fifa took this decision after consulting the continental confederations and believe expansion of its most important tournament befits the rapid growth of the women’s game.
From the Daily Galaxy:
A massive wave appeared out of nowhere off the coast of Vancouver Island, towering over nearby waters. This rare phenomenon defied scientific expectations and left experts stunned.
n November 2020, a colossal rogue wave was recorded off the coast of Ucluelet, a small town on Vancouver Island, Canada. This extraordinary event saw a wave rise to a height of 17.6 meters, about the same size as a four-story building. Captured by a research buoy operated by MarineLabs, the phenomenon has since become a pivotal moment in oceanographic science.
What made this wave truly unique was not just its size, but its extreme proportion relative to surrounding waves. The rogue wave was nearly three times higher than the nearby waves, a record-breaking event in the world of oceanography.
From CNN, via KWWL (yes, this story is about a volcano off of Oregon, but it fits with the previous story):
(CNN) — Things are heating up hundreds of miles off the coast of Oregon, where a large undersea volcano is showing signs of impending eruption, scientists say.
The volcano, known as Axial Seamount, is located nearly 1 mile (1.4 kilometers) underwater on a geological hot spot, where searing gushes of molten rock rise from Earth’s mantle and into the crust. Hotspot volcanoes are common on the seafloor. But Axial Seamount also happens to be located on the Juan de Fuca Ridge — an area where two massive tectonic plates (the Pacific and the Juan de Fuca plates) are constantly spreading apart, causing a steady buildup of pressure beneath the planet’s surface.
From The Guardian:
Nicknamed ‘Moana’, Charlene Erasito is the only female Pacific Islander on the expedition to document unexplored parts of the ocean
On the island of Rotuma in Fiji, Christmas is a time of joy, a celebration bursting with song, dance and laughter. Charlene Erasito remembers watching the festivities there when she was a child, captivated as people paraded through the village for “fara,” a local Christmas celebration.
Erasito never imagined that decades later, she would return to the same shores, no longer as a spectator but as a scientist. Erasito, now 30 years old, is the only female Pacific Islander aboard an ambitious expedition seeking to document unexplored ocean ecosystems in Fijian waters.
From al-Ahram:
Novelist Samar Nour told Al-Ahram Weekly all about her personal narrative of Nubia
On 14 May 1964, president Gamal Abdel-Nasser watched while engineers who had been working on the construction of the High Dam since 1960 diverted the watercourse of the River Nile to complete the first phase of the barrage. That day remains deeply significant in Nubian history because it is the day that brought about the end of Nubia as it had been since it came into being around 2300 BC. Unlike the Aswan Dam, constructed in the early years of the 20th century and subsequently expanded, by flooding numerous villages and population centres, the High Dam ended much life on the banks of the Nile, together with the culture associated with it.
Transformed into a New Nubia after it was relocated to a place much further from the water, the Nubian homeland would never be the same again, and for decades and generations Nubians lived to mourn their history and lament a new reality that hampered their traditions.
Also from al-Ahram:
Amira Hisham
Properties nationwide will soon have their own unique IDs under a new system to be rolled out this year
In late April, the House of Representatives passed a law to introduce national IDs for real estate. The law calls for the creation of a unified national database of all real-estate properties, each of which will be assigned an individual number. These numbers will be printed on plaques that will be affixed to all properties.
As a result, every real-estate unit — freestanding house, apartment, factory, office, or vacant plot — will have its own unique “digital fingerprint”. The database will contain all the technical, legal, and administrative information about the property, including its address, usage, ownership, licensing, violations, and transaction records.
From Deutsche Welle (link is to a video):
Heike Kruse
May 6, 2025
The Danish postal service is discontinuing letter delivery as the country becomes increasingly digital. Mail carriers will soon be a thing of the past.
This makes me sad, because I like writing and receiving letters.
From The Guardian:
Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory finds common ground between Ella Fitzgerald and Charli xcx – and its free-thinking alumni are thriving. We go on a tour to see what’s in the water there (aside from shipwrecks)
Before she was getting DMs from Dua Lipa and minting K-pop hits, and long before yesterday’s surprise release of her sumptuous fourth album, Erika de Casier was a nervous student in her 20s debating what to wear on her first day.
It was 2019, her debut album Essentials had come out that year and received critical acclaim. But at Copenhagen’s Rhythmic Music Conservatory (RMC), that was by the by. “In Denmark, it’s incorporated in our way of being: everybody is so humble,” says the Portuguese musician. “It wasn’t like I went to school and people were like …” She makes an exaggerated starstruck face. “That would be crazy. It was just, ‘Oh, congrats. I heard the new album. Sounds great.’”
From DW :
Sarah Judith Hofmann9 hours ago
In 2023, DW spoke with one of the then oldest living Holocaust survivors, Margot Friedländer, who moved back to Germany in 2010 and regained her German citizenship. Friedländer died on May 9, 2025.
German President
Frank-Walter Steinmeier was due to honor Margot Friedländer with a state medal on Friday. When the news came that
Friedländer had died, he expressed his condolences instead, saying that she "gifted our country reconciliation."
Friedländer, nee Bendheim, was born in Berlin in 1921. Several attempts by her family to emigrate after the November pogroms of 1938 failed. When her brother Ralph was arrested in January 1943, their mother turned herself in to the Gestapo, was deported to Auschwitz together with her son, and was murdered there. Friedländer, then 21 years old, went into hiding and survived for 15 months in 16 different underground hiding places in Berlin. In the spring of 1944, she encountered a patrol of so-called "graspers" — Jewish people who were forced to track down and extradite other Jews on behalf of the SS.
After the fall of France in 1940, the clergy welcomed Marshal Pétain as a saviour. But when Jewish people started being rounded up in the summer of 1942, Protestant pastors and Catholic clerics spoke out against the deportations. Their words broke the silence of the institutions and encouraged the Resistance, while schools and convents opened their doors to Jewish refugees.
In the spring of 1940, the French army was defeated by the Wehrmacht, and Marshal Pétain agreed to collaborate with the occupying forces. Among the measures taken by his Vichy-based government was the "status of Jews", on October 18. The law excluded Jews from public life and many foreign Jewish refugees were also rounded up in internment camps.
From The Guardian:
After a relationship breakup, rambling 700 miles from the Highlands to Dorset with Martin helped restore my faith in people
I’ve always had a keen sense of adventure. During the summer holidays, my parents would push me and my sister out of the front door and tell us only to come home to eat. I went from roaming the streets of Hackney in east London as a child, to trekking, wild camping and hitchhiking the length of the Americas in my late 20s.
After returning to my home in Liverpool, I worked as a photographer and got into a relationship. When we broke up years later, I was distraught – but it led me back to the life of exploration that I’d put on the back‑burner. In the summer of 2016, I embarked on a solo 1,000-mile (1,600km) route through Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Not wanting to feel sealed off from the wondrous environments around me, I did the majority of it on foot.
From The Guardian:
‘If it isn’t recorded it will disappear’: the Muslim photographer shining a light on Bradford’s Jewish community
When Nudrat Afza learned that her friend’s synagogue was closing she began a multi-year project to document the city’s declining Jewish population. ‘In Bradford people from different communities respect each other,’ she says
In April 2013, Nudrat Afza, a Muslim woman from Bradford, gave her 90-year-old Jewish friend Lorle Michaelis a lift to the local Orthodox synagogue. “As Lorle got out of the car, she told me it would be the last service,” Afza recalls. “There were no longer enough people to run them. I was shocked. I knew the building would be sold or demolished.”
Afza got out of the car and took a few quick photos of the synagogue’s exterior. Months later, she happened to be passing when the caretakers were coming out. “I put my foot in the doorway and took some pictures inside, to quickly record what was there,” she says. The Orthodox synagogue was sold and redeveloped in 2015. Afza didn’t know it at the time but the photos were the start of a multi-year project to document Bradford’s declining Jewish population. “I grew up looking at pictures of the 1960s civil rights movement in the US, the Vietnam war and other political struggles in Britain and south Asia,” Afza explains. “I saw the importance of documenting something before it disappears.”
Moving on to some of the more serious stories, we start with this from The Guardian:
Adm Sir Ben Key has been asked to ‘step back’ as first sea lord, after MoD said he had departed for ‘private reasons’
The head of the Royal Navy has been suspended pending an investigation.
Adm Sir Ben Key has been asked to “step back” as first sea lord, sources at the MoD confirmed on Friday.
Key was absent from the lineup of senior military personnel on the Mall on Monday for celebrations to mark the 80th anniversary of VE Day, and it is understood that second sea lord V Adm Martin Connell has taken full charge until a permanent replacement is announced.
France24:
Eighty years ago this week, as jubilant crowds in Europe celebrated the defeat of Nazi Germany, French forces launched a ferocious colonial crackdown in eastern Algeria where demonstrators had dared to raise the Algerian flag. The Sétif massacres would lead Algerian nationalists to embrace armed struggle, paving the way for the country’s gruesome war of independence. Long forgotten in France, the tragedy still poisons relations between the two countries.
On the morning of May 8, 1945, even as revellers thronged the streets of French cities to celebrate the end of World War II, a crowd of around 10,000 people gathered in Sétif, a commercial hub in Algeria’s Constantine region, east of Algiers.
The local authorities, in what was then a French département, had authorised a rally to celebrate the victory over Nazi Germany, while forbidding any flag other than that of liberated France.
From DW (link is to a video):
May 8, 2025
On May 8, 1945, Germany was defeated by the allied forces. The years following the collapse of the Nazi regime are often described in Germany as its "zero hour." But what was it really like? How did Nazis become democrats?
From DW (link is to a video):
May 8, 2025
The King's African Rifles were a division of African soldiers in the British army during World War II. Toward the end of the war, East African soldiers fought Italians in Africa and Japanese in what was then Burma. DW spoke to one of the few remaining veterans in Kenya.
From The Guardian:
Despite attempts to build resilience by improving infrastructure and first response, extreme weather events and US aid cuts have left many feeling vulnerable
Catherine Davison in Panauti
When the monsoon rains came last September, they swept away most of the village of Panauti, in the foothills of the Nepali Himalayas. The Roshi River overflowed after the unprecedented rainfall, triggering landslides and destroying most of the roads and bridges.
Peering through the thick blanket of relentless rain “felt like waiting for morning to arrive so we could see the world again”, says Bishnu Humagain. “We lost everything – our home, our agriculture, and all of our belongings.”
From The Guardian:
Tofu factory owners in Indonesia’s East Java feed their boilers with tonnes of foreign plastics each week to produce tofu sold in the region
Michael Neilson in Tropodo
Plastic waste from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, the US and Britain is being used to fuel tofu production in Indonesia, the Guardian has learned.
Five factory owners in an industrial village in East Java, and one environmental organisation told the Guardian that imported plastic is burned daily to fuel furnaces in factories that produce tofu, prompting concern about serious health impacts.
