Donald Trump is traveling the world right now. His “world religions tour” starts in Saudi Arabia, and will end at the Vatican. Then he will go to Italy and Belgium for G7 and NATO meetings. Let’s take a look at what is making local(ish) news in the places he is visiting.
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, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man. Alumni editors include (but are not limited to) palantir, wader, 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 (or if it is Friday night and the editor is me, a bit later).
From The Washington Post:
An ambitious young prince wants to reimagine Saudi Arabia — and make it fun
JIDDAH, SAUDI ARABIA — In a country where cinemas are banned and even Starbucks are segregated by gender, a powerful young prince is pushing a plan to create jobs for women and a more integrated and satisfying social life for a youthful population long straitjacketed by oppressive cultural norms.
The expansive effort aims to overhaul and diversify Saudi Arabia’s oil-dependent economy and modernize a restless culture in which women make up just 22 percent of the workforce and nearly two-thirds of the population is under 30.
An interesting article on Saudi tourism was in yesterday’s Financial Times.
From the Salt Lake Tribune (an article originally from The Washington Post):
Will Melania Trump wear a headscarf in Saudi Arabia? Donald Trump circa 2015 seems to think she should.
By Adam Taylor
In January 2015, President Barack Obama visited Saudi Arabia. It was a high-profile trip: Obama was there to attend the funeral of the late Saudi King Abdullah at a time when the Washington-Riyadh relationship was strained for a number of factors, including the U.S. attempt to secure a nuclear deal with Iran. Much of the immediate attention, however, wasn't on the president, but on then-first lady Michelle Obama and her choice of attire.
During a number of public events, she appeared without a headscarf — an unusual move in the conservative Islamic country where women are expected to cover their heads and many wear niqabs, a cloth which can cover almost all of the face. The decision sparked criticism on Saudi social media.
From The Economist (by way of The Weekend Australian):
Trump trip to Saudi Arabia, Israel, Europe: what could go wrong?
On his first trip abroad as President, Donald Trump may be happy to have left Washington, but the cloud he is under will travel with him. And while every preparation has been made to ensure nothing will go awry, there is every reason to fear it will.
Trump’s boasting to Russian officials about the “great intel” he had on a plot by Islamic State underlines just how hazardous this excursion is. His shocking indiscretion seems to have sprung largely from a desire to impress his visitors.
There has been comforting talk of a foreign policy “firewall”, thanks to the influence of the so-called “axis of adults”: Defence Secretary Jim Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and national security adviser HR McMaster. The result has been a supposedly traditional Republican foreign policy emerging, distant from Trump’s campaign rhetoric.
Moving on to Palestine, we have this item (about Palestinians, not about the country itself) from the UN News Centre:
UN agency micro-loan helps Palestine refugee’s small business thrive amid rubble of Syrian war
19 May 2017 – Hidden literally under the rubble of the Syrian war is the economic success story of a widow who, refusing to submit to despair, founded a thriving micro-enterprise venture with assistance from a United Nations agency loan.
Hanan Odah is a 30-year-old Palestine refugee who, living in the Jaramana refugee camp in the Syrian capital, Damascus, supports her displaced family of three with a stationery and perfume business that she first founded with a loan from the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).
“Young, innovative and courageous, she is living proof that as large businesses have collapsed, small scale enterprises can survive and even thrive in the markets opening up at the grassroots,” said UNRWA Commissioner-General Pierre Krähenbühl in an opinion piece published today.
From The Guardian:
If we cared about peace we would be talking to Hamas
Sarah Helm
The west has a unique opportunity to help end the Gaza stalemate. But it suits us to turn a blind eye
In his house in the Gaza Strip last month, a senior Hamas minister was explaining to me that the movement needed to modernise its policies when the lights suddenly cut out, as they so often do under Israel’s siege of the territory. Ghazi Hamad’s disembodied voice rumbled on in the pitch black.
Shortly after that, Hamas, which governs Gaza, published what is effectively the first revision of its charter since it was founded 30 years ago. Most significantly, Hamas has for the first time put on paper its commitment to a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The movement, it said, was ready to discuss “a fully sovereign and independent Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital along 1967 lines”.
From The Daily Pakistan:
JERUSALEM – Israel’s culture and sports minister chose a rather unique ensemble for her appearance at the Cannes Film Festival, wearing a dress which featured the Old City of Jerusalem. Unsurprisingly, the internet quickly fired out its own variations of the dress.
Miri Regev was dressed rather elegantly for the posh affair, wearing a dress which featured a sparkly neckline, and with her hair styled. In fact, at first glance nothing about her ensemble seemed out of the ordinary – from the knees up, at least.
However, the bottom of Regev’s dress was a different story. It featured the skyline of the Old City of Jerusalem, in a move designed to honor the “50th anniversary of its liberation and unification,” according to her press release, as cited by Haaretz.
Many on the internet were quick to remind Regev that most of the international community regards east Jerusalem as being under Israeli occupation – despite the country claiming sovereignty over the entire city.
From Yeshiva World News:
Jerusalem To Become The First City In Israel With New Wireless Millimeter-Wave Technology
Jerusalem is to become the first city in Israel with the new wireless millimeter-wave technology, which will bring with it an array of services including cameras, control and emergency services, parking solution, high-seed internet access to the city schools, free Wi-Fi service throughout the city, high-speed data transmission and more.
Mayor Barkat: “We place Jerusalem in line with the world’s leading smartest cities”.
The Jerusalem Municipality is the first authority in Israel to receive the approval of the Ministry of Communications for the establishment of an independent municipal wireless network. The wireless network will be based on millimeter wave technology, in order to avoid the deployment of fiber optic and transmission lines that are expensive, slow deployment and involve public hazards.
And from The Daily Mail, about a room that is not gold plated (thankfully):
Trump 'to stay in $5,700-a-night bullet-proof, bomb-proof, poison gas-proof Jerusalem hotel room that can withstand building collapse' during visit to Israel
- As part of his first foreign trip, President Donald Trump is set to arrive in Israel on Monday for a two-day visit
- US and Israeli security services are undertaking a massive security operation to safeguard the president
- Trump will stay at the presidential suite of the luxurious King David Hotel in Jerusalem on Monday night
- US security operatives have started to outfit the hotel room windows with 'RPG-resistant glass'
- Trump's 'bullet-proof, bomb-proof, poison gas-proof suite' is said to be able to withstand 'a building collapse'
By Ariel Zilber
President Donald Trump's first trip abroad will be to the volatile Middle East, so security will be paramount for the commander in chief.
On his second stop, Israel, the president will be staying overnight in one of the safest places on earth – a bomb-proof, bullet-proof, poison gas-proof $5,700-a-night hotel suite that can withstand a rocket-propelled grenade or even a building collapse, NBC News reported on Friday.
Moving on to The Vatican, this from The Deseret News:
Pope Francis goes door-to-door to bless families in beach town
ROME — Pope Francis has made a surprise visit to a poor beachside town south of Rome where he went door-to-door blessing families.
The Vatican said in a statement that the pope visited public housing projects Friday (May 19) in Ostia, 20 miles south of the Italian capital, to express his “closeness” to those living in the parish of Stella Maris, or Star of the Sea.
It was the latest example of the pope’s “Mercy Friday” activities, his personal community outreach initiative that began during his Jubilee Year of Mercy in 2016.
From The Greenfield Recorder (an AP article):
How are saints made?
By NICOLE WINFIELD
VATICAN CITY — Lengthy historic investigations. Decrees of “heroic virtues.” Miraculous cures.
The Vatican’s complicated saint-making process has long fascinated Catholics and non-Catholics alike, and was on display May 12 and 13 when Pope Francis canonized two children whose “visions” of the Virgin Mary 100 years ago turned the sleepy farming town of Fatima into a major Catholic pilgrimage site.
Francis recently reformed the process to address financial abuses that had long tarnished the Vatican’s saint-making machine, but the basic criteria remain.
From The Independent:
DONALD TRUMP'S VISIT TO SICILY CAUSES PROBLEMS FOR HOLIDAYGOERS
Italy is suspending Schengen Agreement until the end of May
A week from now, the G7 Summit begins in Sicily — and travellers heading for Italy are already being warned to expect increased security and tougher checks of documentation. The free-movement Schengen Agreement is being suspended, meaning all airline passengers will go through immigration checks.
British Airways is
telling passengers: “There could be longer waiting times for all customers arriving into Italy during May but especially at Milan Linate, Catania and Pisa airports.
“We have also been told to expect longer waiting times for all customers as they go through security search areas and passport control areas for flights departing from Italian airports. Please arrive at the airport in good time for your flight.
From The Observer:
Italy Is Giving Away Over 100 Castles for Free
The application period is open until June 26, and special preference is given to people under 40
If you’ve ever wanted to live in an Italian castle for the low low price of absolutely nothing, today is your lucky day. Thanks to a new scheme by the country’s government-run State Property Agency, Italy is giving away 103 castles, towers, inns, farmhouses, and monasteries for free.
Of course, there’s a catch—sort of. If you acquire one of these disused properties, you have to transform the building “into facilities for pilgrims, hikers, tourists, and cyclists,” Roberto Reggi from the State Property Agency told The Local Italy. In other words, you have to take a building that’s fallen into disrepair and turn into a hotel, restaurant, or maybe one of those cool cafe/bookstores that you sometimes find in repurposed churches around Europe.
From Nigeria Today:
Horrible Lives of Nigerian Girls Trafficked into Italy and Forced Into Prostitution
Disheveled, barefoot and bleary-eyed, the Nigerian girls are some of the first to walk off the boats. A dream realised; they arrive in Europe — though the scene is anything but romantic.
Caskets are carried off, carrying those who didn’t survive the two-day journey across the Mediterranean, from Libya to the Sicilian port of Palermo. Babies wail and those sick and burned from the effects of the gasoline mixed with saltwater stumble towards the medical tent.
The Nigerian girls are given a plastic bag containing a litre of water, a piece of fruit and a sandwich. They’re ushered to a vinyl tent for “vulnerabili” — the vulnerable ones.
I promised you local and I give you local, this from Aberdeen (Scotland) Press and Journal includes news from Belgium:
Potato planting boost in north-west Europe
by PHILIPPA MERRY
The first estimate of acreage planted to potatoes in the North-Western European Potato Growers (NEPG) region is projected to have reached a 10-year high.
Excluding plantings of potatoes for starch or seed, the total planned area is about 1.41million acres.
The season estimates revealed that all five countries in the group (Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, France and the UK) will plant more potatoes in the upcoming season than they did last year, with the biggest increase expected in Belgium.
From The Brussels Times:
A fifth of clinical cancer trials in Europe are in Belgium
A fifth of all new medicines and therapies trialled in Europe, within the sphere of oncology, are in Belgium.
The umbrella organisation of the Belgian pharmaceutical sector,
pharma.be, flags this up. The organisation emphasises the country's expertise in the sphere.
Indeed, nearly one third (29%) of clinical trial requests concern the fight against cancer. Between the period from 2014 and 2016, more than 470 trial requests were within the sphere of oncology.
From the Minneapolis Post:
The world’s beacon of democracy doesn’t shine so bright when it comes to actually, you know, voting
Belgium ranked #1. The United States, which likes to consider itself the beacon of world democracy, came in 27th.
In the most recent national election in Belgium, 87.2 percent of the voting-age population turned out to vote. In the United States, in last year’s presidential election, it was 55.7 percent. The current incumbent won the election with the support of 46.1 percent of those whose votes were counted, which means he had the votes of 25.7 percent of the voting-age population. (Of course, in fairness, his leading opponent, Hillary Clinton, received the votes of just 48.2 percent of the votes cast which comes to just 26.8 percent of the voting-age population.)
Those numbers (except for the last bits about Trump and Clinton’s share of the vote) are from a hot-off-the-presses Pew Research Center study, which counted and ranked all 35 of the member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, all of which are democracies, on voter participation.
Let’s have a palate cleanser of art, shall we? The first is from artnet.com:
6 Forgotten Art Darlings From the Gilded Age Market Boom
Artists that appear utterly prosaic to us now were once the toast of the art world.
Julia Halperin
The results of New York’s auction gigaweek may be in, but the Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting is here to remind you: Don’t read too much into them. The Dan Colens and Adrian Ghenies of today may well become the John Hoppners and Ludwig Knauses of tomorrow.
Lest we forget, the original art market boom—the Gilded Age—produced a number of artists who were outrageously successful in their day and have since become obscure footnotes to history.
While the Impressionists were languishing in poverty in the 1870s, a host of other artists—academic painters, aristocratic portraitists, members of the Barbizon school, and genre painters—were hungrily snapped up by collectors.
“Collectors liked going to artists’ studios and getting to know the artists,” says Inge Reist, the director of the Frick Art Reference Library’s Center for the History of Collecting. “They were collecting contemporary almost exclusively.” Work by some of these original market darlings did end up in major museums (perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the caliber of their patrons), but none is a household name today.
From The Times (London) Saturday Review:
The painting princess who fed art critics caviar
As the unique work of Fahrelnissa Zeid goes on show, the artist’s turbulent story is unveiled
Bel Trew
Silhouetted by the rich reds of his mother’s abstract painting, Prince Ra’ad bin Zeid is explaining how the shock waves of a massacre rippled into the kitchen of a modest London flat.
At the time of the 1958 Iraqi coup, his mother — the Turkish artist Fahrelnissa Zeid, who receives her first large-scale British retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern next month — commanded the attention of the international art scene, holding lavish soirées at her home in the Iraqi embassy in London. The flamboyant painter was working on a scale that few women had attempted, blending Byzantine, Islamic and Persian influences with European abstraction to create huge kaleidoscopic pieces, such as Alice in Wonderland (1952), which dwarfs the 81-year-old prince as he speaks.
From Inverse.com:
These 14 Stunning Works of Art Were Made by Robots
Results from the second-annual Robot Art Competition, a celebration of beautiful artwork created by A.I., are finally in. The winner and recipient of a $40,000 grand prize was Columbia University, with their vivid, robot-created oil paintings of a man’s face, a distant house, and a dancing flame.
The contest was created by Andrew Conru, an engineer who saw painting and artwork as a way to better integrate robotics into society and culture, and this year’s contest ranked submissions from 38 teams who represented ten different countries. Conru hopes that the contest will foster new developments into machine learning.
From The Canadian Jewish News:
NEW DOCUMENTARY DEMYSTIFIES THE ART WORLD
How do you get people socially engaged in contemporary art? By making it accessible.
Blurred Lines: Inside The Art World, directed by Barry Avrich and produced by Jonas Prince, had its Canadian premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto on April 28.
From inews.co.uk:
Fake News hoaxes from history turned into Piltdown art exhibition
Adam Sherwin
A century before “fake news”, Piltdown Man deceived science’s finest minds. Now the famous anthropological hoax has been turned into a work of art for an exhibition celebrating fraudsters who fooled the world.
Simon Patterson, the Turner Prize-nominated artist, has created an installation featuring the human skull, which combined with the jaw of an ape, was presented by amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson as the “missing link” between ape and man in 1912.
Patterson, creator of The Great Bear artwork reworking the London Underground map, has also produced a work using artefacts relating to Archibald Belaney, the English imposter and conservationist, who passed himself off as as Grey Owl, a First Nations aboriginal Canadian.
And finally, from Michigan’s Fox47 news (an AP article):
Michigan woman starts 'abandoned art' scavenger hunt
CLYDE TOWNSHIP, Mich. (AP) - An eastern Michigan woman has started an art project by painting local scenes on various driftwood and rocks, and placing them in different areas to create a scavenger hunt for residents.
The Times Herald reports that about a half dozen pieces have been discovered as of Thursday in 41-year-old Heather Gierman's "Abandoned Art Project."