OND Editors OND is a 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 12:00AM Eastern Time.
OND Editors consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors maggiejean, wader, Man Oh Man, side pocket, rfall, and JML9999, alumni editors palantir, Bentliberal, Oke, jlms qkw, Interceptor7, and ScottyUrb, guest editor annetteboardman, and current editor-in-chief Neon Vincent, along with anyone else who reads and comments, informs and entertains you.
OND, Overnight News Digest
BBC:Egypt crisis: Dozens dead in Egypt 'day of anger'
Egypt crisis: Dozens dead in Egypt 'day of anger'
At least 60 people have been killed in Egypt, officials say, as protesters loyal to the ousted President Mohammed Morsi clashed with security forces.
Most of the reported deaths were in Cairo, but about 25 were elsewhere, including 12 in Nile Delta cities.
Mr Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood said on Friday that there would be a week of daily rallies across Egypt.
Two days ago the protesters' camps were cleared, leaving at least 638 dead and sparking international condemnation.
BBC:Nigeria unrest: 'Boko Haram' in deadly attack on Damboa
Nigeria unrest: 'Boko Haram' in deadly attack on Damboa
Suspected Islamic militants have attacked a town in north-eastern Nigeria, killing at least 11 people, reports say.
Witnesses said gunmen shot civilians and police in Damboa, about 85km (52 miles) from the Borno state capital, Maiduguri.
The area is a stronghold of the Boko Haram militant group.
The group was blamed for the deaths of 44 people in a mosque in the nearby town of Konduga last Sunday.
BBC:Ecuador approves Yasuni park oil drilling in Amazon rainforest
Ecuador approves Yasuni park oil drilling in Amazon rainforest
Ecuador has abandoned a conservation plan that would have paid the country not to drill for oil in previously untouched parts of Yasuni National Park in the Amazon rainforest.
President Rafael Correa said rich nations had failed to back the initiative, leaving Ecuador with no choice but go ahead with drilling.
The park is one of the most biodiverse areas in the world.
Hundreds of people gathered in Quito to protest against Mr Correa's decision.
BBC:DR Congo unrest: Children freed from militia, says UN
DR Congo unrest: Children freed from militia, says UN
The UN mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo says that 82 children - some as young as eight - have been rescued from an armed group.
Monusco says the children, including 13 girls, had been forcibly recruited in the past six months by the Mai Mai Bakata Katanga militia.
The group is active in Katanga province in the south-east of the country.
BBC:Bahamas deports Cuban refugees despite protests
Bahamas deports Cuban refugees despite protests
The government of the Bahamas has deported back to Cuba 24 refugees who had applied for asylum in the United States and other countries.
Campaigners in the US have accused the Bahamas of putting the lives of the refugees in danger by sending them back to the communist-run island.
The Bahamas has become a transit point for economic and political refugees who arrive by boat from Cuba and Haiti.
The authorities say the archipelago cannot afford to house all refugees.
BBC:Zimbabwe's MDC drops Robert Mugabe election challenge
Zimbabwe's MDC drops Robert Mugabe election challenge
Zimbabwe's MDC party has dropped its legal challenge to President Robert Mugabe's re-election, saying it could not get a fair hearing.
It had filed a separate case seeking access to full details of the results from the electoral commission.
But the High Court has delayed judgement in the case.
The MDC says that without information such as the number of people not on the voters' roll who voted, it cannot prove that the elections were fraudulent.
Reuters:Wall Street slips, Dow posts biggest weekly loss of 2013
Wall Street slips, Dow posts biggest weekly loss of 2013
(Reuters) - U.S. stocks fell slightly on Friday, and the Dow industrials posted the biggest weekly loss this year as rising bond yields hurt shares paying rich dividends and earnings from retailers disappointed investors.
The S&P 500 utilities sector .SPLRCU, down 1.1 percent, led the day's decline as the yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note rose to a two-year high, making the highest dividend-paying stocks less attractive.
Nordstrom (JWN.N) late Thursday was the most recent department store chain to miss revenue estimates. The upscale retailer cut its full-year sales and profit forecasts. Shares fell 4.9 percent to $56.43.
Earlier this week, Macy's (M.N) reported an unexpected decline in sales and blamed hesitation by consumers. Macy's stock was down 2.8 percent to $44.99.
Reuters:Military judge finds Manning's WikiLeaks acts 'wanton and reckless'
Military judge finds Manning's WikiLeaks acts 'wanton and reckless'
(Reuters) - The military judge who will determine how long U.S. soldier Bradley Manning will spend in prison for the biggest breach of classified data in the nation's history on Friday said she found that his acts were "wanton and reckless."
Judge Colonel Denise Lind last month found Manning, 25, guilty of 20 criminal counts, including espionage and theft, for handing over some 700,000 secret U.S. documents to the WikiLeaks pro-transparency website.
On Monday, she will begin deliberations on Manning's sentence. He could face up to 90 years in prison for his role in a case that catapulted WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, into the world spotlight.
"Manning's conduct was of a heedless nature that made it actually and imminently dangerous to others. His conduct was both wanton and reckless," Lind said in a series of written findings issued after prosecutors finished their sentencing arguments on Friday.
Reuters:Under fire, U.S. spy agency defends surveillance programs as lawful
Under fire, U.S. spy agency defends surveillance programs as lawful
(Reuters) - Under increasing pressure to justify electronic surveillance programs that at times capture communications of American citizens, the U.S. National Security Agency went to unusual lengths on Friday to insist its activities are lawful and any mistakes largely unintentional.
In a sign of how much heat it has taken since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden started disclosing details of highly classified U.S. surveillance programs, the ultra-secretive intelligence agency held a rare conference call with reporters to counter public perceptions that NSA transgressions were willful violations of rules against eavesdropping on Americans.
The NSA's presentation was an attempt to calm the latest firestorm over documents disclosed by Snowden. The Washington Post late Thursday reported that the NSA had broken privacy rules or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since 2008, citing an internal agency audit and other top secret documents.
"These are not willful violations, they are not malicious, these are not people trying to break the law," John DeLong, NSA director of compliance, told reporters.
Reuters:Cosmonauts prepare for new lab in record Russian spacewalk
Cosmonauts prepare for new lab in record Russian spacewalk
(Reuters) - Two Russian cosmonauts floated outside the International Space Station on Friday to set up power and ethernet cables for a new research laboratory scheduled to arrive in December.
Flight engineers Fyodor Yurchikhin and Alexander Misurkin opened the hatch on the station's Pirs airlock at 10:36 a.m. EDT (1436 GMT) to kick off a 7-hour, 29-minute spacewalk, the longest ever by Russian cosmonauts.
The spacewalk eclipsed by 13 minutes the Russians' previous record set in July 2000 outside the Mir space station. The longest spacewalk overall was an 8-hour, 56-minute outing in 2001 by two NASA astronauts working outside the International Space Station.
Yurchikhin, who was making his seventh spacewalk, and Misurkin, on his second, spent most of their time routing two power cables and an ethernet line for a new Russian multipurpose laboratory called Nauka.
Reuters:Petrobras raises $2.1 billion in petrochemical, oil assets sale
Petrobras raises $2.1 billion in petrochemical, oil assets sale
(Reuters) - Brazilian state-controlled oil company Petróleo Brasileiro SA (PETR4.SA) raised $2.1 billion on Friday from the sale of stakes in several petrochemical and oil exploration projects, making progress in its effort to shed non-core assets and protect cash.
Petrobras, as the Rio de Janeiro-based company is known, sold a 35 percent stake in a Santos Basin oil exploration project to China's Sinochem Group Co Ltd SINOC.UL for $1.54 billion, all of the shares it owned in a petrochemical compound, as well as stakes in a Gulf of Mexico bloc and a thermal energy company in Brazil, according to a securities filing.
The sale of oil fields, exploration rights, refineries and other assets are being made to help finance a $237 billion, five-year investment plan. However, selling assets has been harder than expected. In March, Petrobras lowered its forecast for the value of asset sales by nearly 40 percent to $9 billion from $14.8 billion.
Chief Financial Officer Almir Barbassa said this week that the bulk of the five-year, asset sale program will be completed this year. A dearth of cash, rising debt and what seems as signs of over stretching caused by increasing goals and projects are taking a toll on the company, whose shares have slumped 20 percent over the past 12 months.
Reuters:Import tax overhaul bill coming, would help U.S. seaports
Import tax overhaul bill coming, would help U.S. seaports
(Reuters) - A U.S. import tax collected only at shipping ports would be converted into a fee on goods brought into the United States by rail and highway from Canada and Mexico under legislation expected to be introduced next month in the U.S. Senate.
The two senators from Washington State said on Thursday that they will offer the bill to repeal the harbor maintenance tax and impose a new road-and-rail import tax, a move that would benefit seaports such as Seattle and Tacoma in their state.
The overhaul proposed by senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, both Democrats, would prevent businesses from dodging the harbor maintenance tax by unloading goods at a Canadian or Mexican port and then shipping the products into the United States by road or rail, Murray said on Thursday.
"This legislation will change the harbor maintenance tax to give shippers new incentives to move their goods through American ports - particularly those in the Pacific Northwest," Murray said in a statement.
WaPo:Government officially acknowledges existence of Area 51, but not the UFOs
Government officially acknowledges existence of Area 51, but not the UFOs
The last time I visited Area 51, it didn’t exist.
But as of this week it does. Officially.
For reasons unknown, the government finally has admitted that Area 51 — the Shangri-La of alien hunters and a sturdy trope of science-fiction movies — is a real place in the Mojave Desert about 100 miles north of Las Vegas.
It presumably does not house hideous squidlike ETs, but at least you can see the place on a map. Area 51 is confirmed in declassified CIA documents posted online Thursday by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. A dogged researcher pried from the CIA a report on the history of the U-2 spy plane, which was tested and operated at Area 51.
The military, which runs the base, always denied that Area 51 was called by its famous moniker, preferring a designation connected to the Groom Lake salt flat, a landing strip for the U-2 and other stealth aircraft.