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 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. Or sometimes a little bit later if the diarist is me. I have a terrible habit of cutting things close.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
Pictures of the week from the BBC, and Live Science.
Our first story tonight is about a poor innocent animal. Not the human kind. It comes from Vox.
Worst. Houseguest. Ever.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may be one of the world’s most feared activists after helping
Russia interfere in elections and exposing
military secrets of the United States. But he’s also one of the world’s worst houseguests.
Assange has lived inside Ecuador’s embassy in London for about six years after he fled there to escape extradition to Sweden in 2012. But now he’s overstayed his welcome — mostly because he won’t take care of his cat.
Assange has a pet cat, but he apparently hasn’t been cleaning up after it or feeding it properly, at least as far as the Ecuadorian Embassy staff is concerned. So instead of, you know, doing what a normal person would do and taking care of his pet, he’s chosen to sue the Ecuadorian government for violating his “fundamental rights and freedoms.”
From the BBC, giving us other news from Europe:
Macedonia's parliament has voted to start the constitutional procedure formally changing the country's name to the Republic of North Macedonia.
Two-thirds of the chamber - 80 of 120 deputies - backed the start of the process, the requisite majority to start the move.
Several more votes will follow before the switch is confirmed.
From the Washington Post:
On the jagged edge of a mountain outside the Spanish capital, a dictator lies in eternal repose, guarded by statues of militant angels beneath a soaring granite cross. But soon Francisco Franco may be roused from his slumber and his posthumous reign may end.
Spain’s new minority government, headed by Pedro Sánchez, a 46-year-old Socialist who was 3 when Franco died, has ordered the exhumation of the dictator’s bones. Some Spaniards see the move as long overdue, others as post facto revenge. Either way, the Sánchez government risks reviving divisions in a nation that, while generally untroubled by nostalgia for its authoritarian past, has never achieved consensus about its bloody civil war and decades of dictatorship.
From Velonews.com:
Reckless fans, disappointing TV ratings, and controversy marred the 2018 Tour. We go inside the challenges facing cycling's biggest race.
The scene in Paris had all the trappings of a poster-perfect Tour de France moment. Geraint Thomas sparkled as a feel-good winner in the yellow jersey. The Champs-Élysées was packed and the Arc de Triomphe provided the frame. Jets flew overhead releasing vapor trails of the red, white, and blue French “tricolore.”
Yet what started three weeks earlier under a cloud of fury in the Vendée ended wearily in Paris. Just like the Tour of 20 years ago when the Festina Affair nearly brought the race to its knees, there was a sense of relief upon arriving in the City of Light.
From CNN:
(CNN) — Ever been in an airplane that's landed sideways? Probably not given that it's a very tricky maneuver to pull off.
That didn't stop a TUI Boeing 757-200 make an incredible dramatic landing at Bristol Airport, in the UK, last week.
Storm Callum brought challenging high winds and stormy weather to parts of Britain last week -- so the aircraft's skilled pilot, Captain Brenda Riepsaame Wassink, had to go to extreme lengths to ensure safe landing.
And from the BBC:
By Adam Fleming
The pavement cafes and bars were packed last Sunday as Brussels basked in an unseasonably warm weekend.
Among the drinkers were diplomats from the EU member states who had been kept in the dark ever since negotiators from the European Commission and UK had entered an intense and secret period of talks, jokingly known as "the tunnel".
"You can have a couple but not too many," advised one official close to the talks, hinting that movement was imminent.
Also from the Beeb:
By Caroline Gall
Relatives of five African men crushed by a wall in 2016 say they would have answers by now if they had been white and British, the BBC has been told.
All five, from The Gambia and Senegal, died when 15ft of concrete fell on them at a scrap metal plant in Birmingham.
A spokesman for their families said the two-year wait for an inquest, due to take place next month, had "taken a toll" on those left behind.
News of Brits elsewhere comes from The Telegraph:
A British backpacker is facing 10 years in a Thai prison after spray painting "Scousse Lee" on 800-year-old fortress wall as he complained that he "was blind drunk".
Lee Furlong, 23, from Liverpool, was caught on CCTV using a can of black spray paint to deface the historic Tha Phae gate in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, on October 18 in the early hours of the morning.
The young backpacker, who faces prosecution under Thailand's Antiques, Objects of Art and National Museums Act 1961, said he had been drinking all day before the incident happened and that he is “terrified” at what will happen to him.
From ABC news:
A speeding train ran over a crowd watching fireworks during a religious festival in northern India on Friday evening, killing at least 60 people and injuring dozens more, police said.
The train failed to stop after the accident on the outskirts of Amritsar, a city in Punjab state, said the state governing Congress party politician, Pratap Singh Bajwa.
From Economic Times (India):
By Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury
NEW DELHI: China has informed India about a landslide in the trans-border Yarlung Zangbo river or the Brahmaputra and activated the emergency information sharing of hydrological data on an hourly basis.
“On the early morning of October 17, a landslide took place near Jiala village in Milin county in the lower ranges of Yaluzangbu river in Tibet Autonomous Region. The river was blocked, and a barrier lake was formed. After the incident, ministry of water resources of China informed the Indian side immediately and activated the Emergency Information Sharing Mechanism,” a Chinese official told ET.
And some happier news from the BBC (with a video):
Rejected by its mother in a Sri Lankan zoo, this little lion cub was struggling to survive.
It was saved when the zoo found a dog that had just given birth to puppies.
From China (via the Beeb):
A Chinese company has announced ambitious plans to put a "fake moon" into space to brighten the night sky.
According to the People's Daily state newspaper, officials at a private aerospace institute in Chengdu want to launch this "illumination satellite" in orbit by 2020, and say it will be bright enough to replace street lights.
The straight-out-of-sci-fi news has sparked fascination, scepticism from scientists, lots of questions and outright mockery.
Now for news of the arts (kinda), from France 24:
Marie Antoinette's dazzling diamonds and pearls, unseen in public for two centuries, went on display in London on Friday before going on sale next month in one of the most important royal jewellery auctions in history.
The treasures were secretly whisked out of Paris in 1791 in the aftermath of the French Revolution and have been privately owned by relatives ever since.
The collection, held by the Italian royal House of Bourbon-Parma, is being sold by Sotheby's auction house in Geneva on November 14.
From The Art Newspaper:
The movement remains a touchstone for creativity and resilience, says the show’s organiser Wil Haygood
VICTORIA STAPLEY-BROWN
A poem by Langston Hughes has lent its title to the exhibition I, Too, Sing America: the Harlem Renaissance at 100 (19 October-20 January 2019), which opens today at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. The show is a celebratory deep dive into this flourishing of African American culture, arts and intellectualism, which had its nexus in the uptown New York neighbourhood but fanned out across the country and still resonates deeply a century later.
From CNN:
(CNN) — After more than a century of illegal construction work, Barcelona's towering Sagrada Familia church has finally agreed to make things right with the city council.
Under the terms of a historic deal, church trustees will be able to get the permits they need in return for payments totaling €36 million ($41 million) over the next decade.
The money will be used to fund projects designed to mitigate the impact of approximately 4.5 million people who visit the unfinished basilica every year.
Not the arts, but museum news, from The Guardian (AP story):
Also sorta art and sorta not, from the BBC:
Residents of a southern US city hope to raise tens of thousands of dollars to restore a statue of a giant peanut damaged by Hurricane Michael.
"I'm from the town with the big peanut," is how petition founder Sarah Mastrario Cook says locals of Ashburn, Georgia, proudly identify themselves.
But the campaign to "Restore Ashburn's Big Peanut" has some way to go before reaching its target of $50,000 (£38,350) in donations.
So far, a modest $725 has been raised.
From The Guardian as well:
As audio of frenzied audience reactions to the original Halloween has gone viral, we want to hear your stories of seeing defining films at the cinema
The much-hyped release of the latest Halloween installment (tipped to break records with a $70m opening) has led many to think back to the film that started it all back in 1978.
While there have been rankings aplenty, there’s also been a rather fascinating video going viral that gives us an idea of what it would have been like to see the original on the big screen. Audio from the time has been matched with remastered footage and the result is a nifty leap back in time when Michael Myers was still a terrifyingly unknown quantity.
From Live Science, sorta music:
By Mindy Weisberger
The Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica has a haunting voice. Winds scouring its chilly snow dunes create waves of surface vibrations; these produce near-nonstop seismic tones that resemble a mournful song, scientists recently discovered.
While the ice shelf's "music" is played at a frequency that isn't audible to human ears, the researchers were able to eavesdrop using seismic sensors, they wrote in a new study.