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, perhaps a bit later).
We begin this evening with news from Angola, via enca.com:
LUANDA – Angola's parliament passed a law on Friday that will drastically limit the powers of the country's future presidents in matters of security and defence.
The law will only apply to successors of the current head of state, President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has enjoyed unfettered control of Angola's sprawling military and security institutions since taking power in 1979.
Supported by a large majority of lawmakers, the new bill sets out limited circumstances in which the powerful officials can be removed - including instances of criminal behaviour and old age.
And from Al Jazeera, pictures of the week.
A photo round-up of some of last week's key events, including wildfire in California and Al-Aqsa tensions.
More pictures of the week, from the BBC. And the same from the BBC, pictures from Africa’s week.
And a news video, also from Al Jazeera:
Syrian women who have resettled in Turkey are learning new skills to enter the workforce.
Syrian women who have resettled in
Turkey are learning new skills to enter the workforce.
A women’s centre in the city of Kilis is doing its best to help them.
Al Jazeera’s Mohammed Jamjoom reports from Kilis, Turkey.
Another item from Al Jazeera, a commentary:
Failure to prosecute perpetrators of extrajudicial killings in Iraq could be dangerous.
Zaid al-Ali (Zaid al-Ali is an Iraqi lawyer who has published widely on Iraq and on constitutional law.+
There have been no surprises in Mosul. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) was roundly defeated, and the combined forces of the Iraqi security services are victorious.
In eastern Mosul, which was liberated months before the rest of the city, Iraqis are seeking to return to normality as fast as possible, by reopening their businesses, resuming classes and exams, organising cultural activities, rebuilding libraries and engaging in reconciliation initiatives. In case there was still any doubt, Iraqi society is once again proving just how resilient it is.
Moving a bit east, this news from India, via Reuters in Free Malaysia Today:
Indian government officials previously have said these marketing activities violate the country's Cigarettes and Other Tobacco Products Act and its accompanying rules, but companies get away with it because enforcement is weak.
NEW DELHI: India plans to seek an explanation from Philip Morris International Inc about its marketing practices after Reuters reported that the tobacco giant used tactics that government officials say flout the country’s law, a health ministry official said on Friday.
Philip Morris advertises Marlboro cigarettes, the world’s best-selling brand, at tobacco shops in India and distributes free smokes at nightclubs and bars frequented by young people to promote the brand, Reuters reported earlier this week.
And one more from India, this via the BBC:
Food served on trains and at railway stations is unfit for human consumption, an official report says.
The annual audit report said checks on 80 trains and at 74 stations had found that some food was contaminated, while packaged and bottled items were past their expiry date.
Food was stored in the open, attracting flies, rats and cockroaches, it added.
From The New York Times:
MUSE, Myanmar — She was born to royalty in British colonial Burma, but rejected that life to become a cross-dressing warlord whose C.I.A.-supplied army established opium trade routes across the Golden Triangle. By the time of her death, last week at 90, she had led hundreds of men, endured prison and torture, generated gossip for her relationship with a film actress and, finally, helped forge a truce between ethnic rebels and the government.
Olive Yang grew up as one of 11 children in an ethnic Chinese family of hereditary rulers of what was then the semiautonomous Shan state of Kokang. According to relatives, she wore boys’ clothes, refused to bind her feet and frequently fell in love with her brothers’ romantic interests.
Concerned about their unconventional daughter, her parents arranged for her to marry a younger cousin. Shortly after she became pregnant, archives show, she left her husband to pursue a life among opium-trafficking bandits. Her son, Duan Jipu — named for the American jeeps Ms. Yang had seen in the Chinese city of Kunming during World War II — was raised by other family members.
From the Straits Times of Singapore:
MANILA - The terrorist network battling Philippine forces in Marawi may be prepping Muslim militants for similar attacks in Singapore and in East Asia, said a report released on Friday (July 21).
The network, run by Bahrumsyah, a young Indonesian fighter in Syria, and Malaysian former university lecturer Mahmud Ahmad, recruited fighters and carried out an audacious bid by ISIS to seize Marawi.
"The Marawi operations received direct funding from ISIS central and reveal a chain of command that runs from Syria through the Philippines to Indonesia and beyond," the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC) said in its report.
And in case you missed the announcement, there is a coffee festival coming in early August:
SINGAPORE - Want to learn how to make the perfect flat white? Or how to brew like a barista at home?
These are some topics that will be covered at 25 coffee-related workshops, called Lab sessions, at next month's Singapore Coffee Festival. Held from Aug 3 to 6, the festival is organised by The Straits Times and presented by DBS Bank.
And as always on Friday evenings, we end with a few stories on the arts:
A video from the BBC:
Mohammad Lahham is a sculptor in Lebanon who fled the war in Syria five years ago with his wife, two children and his parents.
Now based in a southern suburb of Beirut, he creates sculptures of Christian saints at a roadside studio 40km south of the city.
He says people tell him his job is forbidden – referencing Islamic tradition that discourages depictions of deities in physical form.
But he enjoys the work, saying that breaking taboos can help bring people together.
If you heard any art news today, it probably was about this item in the NYTimes:
When the remains of the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí were exhumed in Spain on Thursday night, forensics experts made a startling discovery: The artist’s trademark mustache was still intact.
“The mustache kept its classic 10-past-10 position,” Lluís Peñuelas, the secretary general of the foundation that oversees Dalí’s estate, told reporters on Friday, referring to the artist’s waxed and gravity-defying bristles, which Dalí kept pointed upward, like the hands of a clock. “Finding this out was a very emotional moment.”
This item was also in the NYTimes:
ARCUEIL, France — The most famous person to have died in the Seine River has no identity at all. She is “L’Inconnue de la Seine” — the Unknown Woman of the Seine.
Here is her story. In the late 19th century, the body of an unidentified young woman was fished out of the Seine in Paris. Because her body was free of wounds and blemishes, she was presumed to have committed suicide. The pathologist at the morgue that received her body was so mesmerized by her beauty that he called in a “mouleur” — a molder — to preserve her face in a plaster death mask.
In the decades that followed, the mask was mass-produced and sold as a decorative item for the walls of private homes and studios, first in Paris, then abroad. L’Inconnue became a muse for artists, poets and other writers, among them Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Rainer Maria Rilke and Vladimir Nabokov. L’Inconnue hung in the studio of Albert Camus, who called her a “drowned Mona Lisa.” She inspired some of the films of François Truffaut.
And from the BBC:
An up-and-coming French singer, Barbara Weldens, has died on stage, apparently by being electrocuted.
She had been performing at a church in the picturesque village of Gourdon, in the Lot region of the south-west, when she collapsed. Storms were reported in the area at the time.
Weldens, 35, suffered an apparent cardiac arrest and emergency services were unable to revive her.
She had released her first album this year and had won several awards.
And although I cannot copy any of the item for some reason, it is worth checking out this article from the New York Times about the growth in enthusiasm for public libraries.