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, 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 photographs, including the Sony World Photography Awards, Africa’s week in pictures from the BBC, and then there’s this:
Since 1955 the World Press Photo Contest has recognized professional photographers for the best pictures contributing to the past year of visual journalism. On 16 April 2020, we announced the winners of the 63rd edition of the annual Photo Contest and 10th Digital Storytelling Contest.
The winners were chosen by an independent jury that reviewed more than 73,996 photographs entered by 4,282 photographers from 125 countries.
Yes, the dominant story in the world is still Coronavirus. Let’s check in, shall we?
From NPR:
Indonesia now has the highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in all of Southeast Asia, according to numbers released by the government on Friday.
The Health Ministry in Jakarta reports 5,923 positive cases — following the country's largest daily jump of more than 400 new infections since Thursday. COVID-19 has killed 520 people in Indonesia. In the region, only China, where the novel coronavirus originated, has a higher death toll.
It isn’t the only thing happening though — this comes from Reuters:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - On Oct. 10 last year, eight North Korean vessels - several carrying illicit coal shipments - were anchored in Chinese waters off the port of Ningbo-Zhoushan, according to a photo in a U.N. report published online on Friday.
That appears to be a lax enforcement by China of U.N. sanctions aimed at curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear program under which countries are required to inspect cargo destined to or coming from North Korea that is within their territory or being transported on North Korean-flagged vessels.
From The Hill:
Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe expressed his support for the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday, calling on the global community to do the same following President Trump’s announcement that the United States would halt funding to the health body.
“The cooperation of the WHO is essential in fighting the coronavirus,” Abe told reporters in Tokyo, according to Bloomberg.
From Al Jazeera:
Censoring information about the coronavirus outbreak would prevent the media from holding those in power accountable.
by Pragya Tiwari
India is fighting on two fronts right now - the global pandemic and an escalating humanitarian crisis of millions of migrant workers battling hunger and homelessness due to the lockdown.
Historically, pandemics, wars, and famines have led to the expansion of powers of the state at the expense of democratic rights and freedoms. These freedoms once lost, are not easily regained. And when it comes to downgrading democracy, the right to free speech tends to be the proverbial canary in the coal mine.
From Accuweather:
By Courtney Spamer, AccuWeather meteorologist
& Maura Kelly, AccuWeather meteorologist
The average start of India's southwest monsoon is just a month and a half away. Will this year's wet season bring similar conditions as the last two years? AccuWeather's long-range forecasters have already been hard at work answering this question.
The average date of the onset of the southwest monsoon in India is 1 June, and the season typically continues through the end of September, bringing the country, as a whole, a wet season.
From the BBC:
rnobyl nuclear plant has blanketed Ukraine's capital Kyiv, making its air pollution among the worst in the world.
Kyiv's pollution now ranks alongside that of several Chinese cities, Swiss monitoring group IQAir reports.
The coronavirus lockdown is keeping most Kyiv residents at home anyway.
Ukraine's health ministry says the radiation level remains normal and Chernobyl faces no immediate threat.
From the Associated Press:
By TIM SULLIVAN and SHEIKH SAALIQ
The street peddler watched the prime minister’s speech on a battered TV, with her family of five crowded around her in a one-room house with no toilet and no running water. It’s squeezed into a Mumbai shantytown controlled by an obscure Mumbai organized crime family.
Mina Jakhawadiya knew that outside, somewhere in India, the coronavirus had arrived, wending its way through this sprawling nation of 1.3 billion people. But the invisible danger seemed far away.
From Eurasia.net:
Kazakhstan is still far from being the developed market economy its leaders pine for. And the current crisis risks shunting the country back toward a more traditional, state-directed stance.
Almaz Kumenov
The government’s sudden generosity is prompting questions about longer-term strategies. (Akorda.kz)
Kazakhstan’s government has in recent weeks pushed through a raft of business-stimulating measures of a kind the country has never seen before.
Entrepreneurs will only rue that they had to come during an all-encompassing, economy-crushing pandemic.
From The Guardian:
Princess Basmah, a human rights advocate and niece of King Salman, says she has been detained without charge
Martin Chulov
A senior Saudi royal and granddaughter of the country’s founding monarch has revealed she is being held in prison and demanded that the current ruler and her cousin, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, release her and provide medical care.
Princess Basmah bint Saud bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, an outspoken human rights advocate, claims she is being detained without charge in Riyadh with one of her daughters. She says neither have received explanations for their arrests, despite repeated pleas to the kingdom’s royal court, and to her uncle King Salman.
From NPR:
So far, countries on the African continent have largely managed to dodge the brunt of the coronavirus. Even as the global pandemic has besieged medical centers in the U.S. and Western Europe, with a total death toll north of 100,000 in those regions, all of Africa's confirmed cases number in the thousands — most of which remain concentrated in just a handful of North African nations.
But global health authorities fear this won't continue forever.
From CBS:
BY CHRISTOPHER BRITO
Pictures from a national park in South Africa show a pride of lions appearing to nap in the middle of a road as much of the world has come to a halt over the coronavirus pandemic. South Africa has been on lockdown since March 25.
Kruger National Park, one of the largest game reserves in Africa, has been tweeting photos and videos of animals roaming the park without the intrusion of tourists. One set of photos showed lions lounging on a vacant stretch of road.
From Africanews:
Ghana’s COVID-19 statistics as of April 16 stood at 641, with five new cases recorded, 83 recoveries and eight deaths, the information Minister Kojo Oppong Nkrumah told a press briefing in the capital Accra.
The figure especially relative to recoveries was the biggest one-day rise. The latest figure of 83 meant that 66 more recoveries had been added to the paltry 17 of the day before.
From Al Jazeera:
Prominent thinkers urge continent's leaders to use coronavirus pandemic crisis as opportunity to spur 'radical change'.
Dozens of prominent intellectuals, writers and academics from across Africa have co-signed an open letter addressed to the continent's leaders, asking them to use the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to spur "radical change" in direction.
"In the call, we urge African leaders to also think beyond the current crisis as a symptom of deep structural problems Africa has to confront if it is to become one day sovereign and an actor that contributes to the new global order," Amy Niang, one of the academics behind the initiative, told Al Jazeera. "We are calling for a second independence."
From The Hill:
BY HERMAN J. COHEN, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
Skepticism over
President Trump’s policy regarding Africa followed Secretary of State
Mike Pompeo on his February trip to the continent. “China is the only constant of Trump’s US-Africa policy,"
opined Yomi Kazeem and Yinka Adegoke in a representative piece for Quartz Africa. “On the last day of his visit, Pompeo took a thinly veiled swipe at China, warning African countries to be wary of ‘empty promises’ by authoritarian regimes,” they wrote, without raising the question of what happened on every other day of Pompeo’s tour.
This is a longstanding phenomenon: For years, commentators have been split on whether the Trump Africa policy is nonexistent or is awful. Journalist and Columbia University professor Howard French decried a state of “absentee diplomacy,” asserting that “since the end of the Cold War, the United States has steadily grown more and more disengaged with Africa. … Most of America’s diplomacy in Africa seems to be run out of the Pentagon.” Former NSC Africa director Grant T. Harris said it’s “difficult to take the Trump administration seriously given its poor record on Africa so far.”
From CNBC:
It’s been nearly five weeks since I first flew to Stockholm, Sweden, from New York City to visit my husband, who is a Swedish citizen and lives in his home country while we navigate the visa process in the U.S.
What was initially supposed to be an eight-day trip quickly turned into a much longer one due to the coronavirus pandemic. When I left for Sweden, I was aware of Trump’s travel ban on travel from Europe to the U.S. and understood the risk involved, but I felt strongly that I wanted to be with my husband during the pandemic.
From the New York Times:
Danish elementary schools have become the first in Europe to reopen after shutting down for the coronavirus. Our reporter visited one in southern Denmark, which could become a template for a post-lockdown world.
By Patrick Kingsley
LOGUMKLOSTER, Denmark — The cluster of red brick buildings in a remote part of southern Denmark looks unremarkable from the outside, but this week, its classrooms housed some of the rarest people during the pandemic in today’s Europe.
Schoolchildren.
On Wednesday, 350 pupils returned to classes at the Logumkloster District School for the first time in a month, as Denmark became the first country in the Western world to reopen its elementary schools since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. It has turned the Danish education system into a laboratory for whether and how schools can function in an age of contagion.
From The Hill:
The famous Matterhorn mountain in the Swiss Alps was illuminated with an American flag this week in a show of solidarity for the U.S. during the coronavirus pandemic.
From CBS:
BY CHRIS LIVESAY
Rome — A nursing home in Milan where nearly 200 residents have reportedly died of the new coronavirus is at the center of an investigation into suspected negligence by managers, Italian police revealed Friday.
Tax police seized documents this week in the offices of the Lombardy regional government in a probe centered on the Pio Albergo Trivulzio rest home in Milan where, according to Italian daily La Repubblica, 190 seniors have died since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, although official numbers are not available.
From VInepair.com:
Pope Francis, already an outspoken proponent of the importance of wine, recently made clear his appreciation for good Scotch whisky.
As reported in the Scottish tabloid The Daily Record, filmmaker Tony Kearny was visiting the Vatican last year gathering footage for his upcoming documentary “Priest School.” While there, he captured footage of a group of Scottish student priests gifting the pontiff with a bottle of Oban single-malt Scotch.
News of the Arts:
We begin with this from Time Out:
It looks like New Yorkers will be on pause for at least another month, which means one more month of finding diversions to stay sane while sheltering in place. If you've already exhausted Netflix's entire library of content, here's a more hands-on type of activity to try.
The internet offers a vast playground of cool art to digitally experience. There are, for example, virtual tours of museums that you can take as well as online art history lectures you can attend. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in particular, has a rich trove of web-only features to check out, and that includes an online drawing class recently launched in honor of The Met's 150th anniversary in April.
From WFUV:
Alexandra Parker
While parents and students are adjusting to school at home, places like the Children’s Museum of Manhattan are trying to help. Their new series, “CMOM at Home” features a new activity everyday.
When the museum closed back in March, Curator David Rios said the team began to consider how best to provide resources online, “It was a way for us to share with our families that we’re still there for them and thinking about ways to keep them engaged the way we would in person.”
Parents who sign up for the CMOM at Home newsletter get an email every morning with that day’s activity. After that the activities can also be found on the museum’s website. Each day of the week has a different theme that encourages kids to explore everything from science and engineering to art and different cultures.
From Burning Man:
This past week I have attended a virtual quiz show, a virtual tarot reading, a virtual Big Art Event, and skipped out on a virtual sex party, among other things. People are trying anything, because “just hanging out” on group video chats really isn’t doing it.
“Two weeks in,” a friend of mine said, “and at every Zoom happy hour I go to, everybody’s running out of things to talk about. It’s getting more and more awkward.” I’ve heard a similar sentiment from several others.
From ART News:
In Liz Magic Laser’s five-channel “reality show” video installation In Real Life (2019), five contestants—freelance workers from around the globe—complete challenges aimed at bettering work/life balance. A graphic designer wears blue-light-blocking glasses to improve his sleep after a day at the computer monitor, while a social media guru seeks advice from a life coach on how to prioritize free time with friends. Laser hired the contestants through online gig labor websites like Fiverr and Upwork. She then recorded their conversations on Zoom, an online video conferencing platform that has rapidly become a household name for remote workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The work reflects on the sense of disjuncture—feeling at once overextended and isolated—produced when we are far away from the people we work with.
From CNN:
Researchers have recreated a vivid, purplish blue watercolor that can be found illustrating the pages of decorated medieval illuminated manuscripts, according to a new study.
But it took a diverse team of researchers, old recipes and a journey to a medieval walled village in Portugal to determine the source of the elusive color.
The color is called folium, and it was used as early as a thousand years ago. It fell out of favor by the 19th century, and scientists tried recreating it and discovered its source in the century that followed.
From The Guardian:
The street artist has kept busy by painting his toilet. But as everyone from Giorgione to Van Gogh can attest, separation from society can do wonders for the creative mind
Jonathan Jones
What’s a street artist to do when the streets are locked down? Banksy’s got nothing to keep him busy except create mayhem in his own bathroom. He has released photographs of what he says is his loo decorated with stencilled rats in a trompe l’oeil rodent rampage – swinging from the towel holder, balancing on a mirror frame, perching on a toilet splashed with orangey-brown matter.
For these filthy beasts long associated with plague, coronavirus means party time. They are celebrating our decline and fall. Maybe Banksy sees the anarchic potential in a world that has decided to suspend normal business.