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 come from the Atlantic, Roll Call, BBC, BBC Africa, The Guardian (wildlife), Yahoo, Buzzfeed, and The Washington Post.
We begin with news from the Sydney Morning Herald:
Sexual harassment, bullying and a contempt for motherhood are driving aspiring female surgeons out of operating theatres.
Women training to become surgeons have seriously contemplated suicide, been invited to fondle the nipples of a male colleague and dismissed as childbearers undeserving of medical training, a series of in-depth interviews reveals.
The testimonials confirm the shocking case of surgical trainee Dr Yumiko Kadota is not an isolated one, but an endemic problem in Australian hospitals.
From the BBC, news about another woman:
Thailand's King Vajiralongkorn has denounced as "inappropriate" his sister's unprecedented bid to run for prime minister in March's election.
In a palace statement, he said such an act would "defy the nation's culture".
Princess Ubolratana Mahidol, 67, has been nominated as a candidate for a party allied to divisive former PM Thaksin Shinawatra.
Such a move would break with the tradition of the Thai royal family publicly staying out of politics.
More news from the east below the fold…
From Channel NewsAsia:
BEIJING: Fifteen people were killed in China on the night of the Chinese New Year in two family tragedies, after one man started a fire and another went on a knife rampage.
As people celebrated to welcome in the Year of the Pig Monday night, a man surnamed Lu set fire to the home of his brother in the northern province of Shaanxi, killing seven, according to police in the town of Baoji.
The brother, his wife, their fathers and their three children died in the blaze, police said on the Twitter-like Weibo platform.
Also from Channel NewsAsia:
SINGAPORE: A jobless man slashed a cook with a knife and left a 4cm-long wound on his head after his repeated requests for free roti prata were turned down.
Murugan Joseph, 45, was sentenced on Friday (Feb 8) to 10 months and two weeks' jail, six strokes of the cane and a S$3,000 fine after the attack.
From the BBC, and India:
India's capital Delhi was hit by a strong hailstorm on Thursday, turning the city white and leaving people stunned and delighted.
Pictures and videos posted on social media show cherry-sized ice balls and streets covered in white.
Many people compared the unusual sight to scenes from Chicago or London.
Hailstorms "are not rare for Delhi, but their occurrence is infrequent," according to US website Accuweather's senior meteorologist Jason Nicholls.
And from USA Today:
Customs officials in India intercepted a passenger after his flight who was trying to smuggle a one-month-old leopard cub through Chennai International Airport.
The animal was discovered in the 45-year-old man's checked luggage Saturday, according to the Times of India.
"On Saturday morning, (air intelligence unit) officers noticed that a male passenger was moving in a suspicious manner in the arrival area," Rajan Chaudhary, Chennai Airport's customs commissioner, told the Times of India. "After he collected his checked in luggage, he was walking in a rather hurried manner. A faint sound was coming from his checked-in luggage."
And now news of the arts, beginning with two from the BBC:
In the bicentenary of his birth, it’s time we looked again at the forward-thinking and influential ideas of the great Victorian, writes Daisy Dunn.
If we think of John Ruskin at all today it tends to be as the buttoned-up Victorian who was so repulsed by his wife Effie Gray’s pubic hair that he could not consummate their marriage. The anecdote, which was actually invented in the 20th Century, has overshadowed the fact that Ruskin was one of the most influential figures in modern history, inspiring everyone from Charlotte Brontë to Mahatma Gandhi and the founders of the UK’s National Trust. An artist, critic and social reformer, he was born in London 200 years ago this month, on 8 February 1819, the same year as Queen Victoria. And he was without question one of the most important Victorians of all.
Ruskin was a man of intense contradictions. Like a fish, he said, it is healthiest to swim against the stream. He described himself mostly as a Conservative, but many of his ideas were socialist in outlook. He believed in hierarchy but also that the rich had a responsibility to protect the poor. He had a privileged background but gave away much of his wealth, reflecting in his autobiography that “it was probably much happier to live in a small house, and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick Castle and have nothing to be astonished at”.
And the other from the Beeb:
Four men have been arrested for vandalising a Unesco World Heritage site in the southern Indian town of Hampi after a video emerged recently.
In the clip, three of them are seen shoving a pillar, which then toppled and broke apart.
The video went viral earlier in the week and prompted widespread outrage on social media.
Hampi, famous for its 16th century ruins and temples, is a popular tourist spot in India.
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
Long touted as our next great Nobel hope, the acclaimed author has found happiness in a rural corner of Victoria.
By Jason Steger
A set of cufflinks, a couple of hats with feathers – a share of a car being bought on the never-never, binoculars and a Rolex. That's what Gerald Murnane inherited from his father Reg. And there was one more thing, as Murnane puts it in his poem The Ballad of RTM, "... all of his way with words".
Reg Murnane, he says, could talk to anyone. It was a boon when he went to the races; he'd hobnob with barristers and such like "when he was nothing but a public servant of the lower class", according to his son.
From The Guardian:
The sale of the artworks has sparked outrage with one landscape attributed to the Nazi leader expected to fetch at least €45,000
Agence-France Presse
Five paintings allegedly by Adolf Hitler will be auctioned off on Saturday in the German city of Nuremberg, sparking anger that the Nazi memorabilia market is alive and well.
The city’s mayor, Ulrich Maly, has condemned the upcoming sale as being “in bad taste,” speaking to Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
Among the items to go under the hammer are a mountain lake view with a starting price of €45,000 ($51,000) and a wicker armchair with a swastika symbol presumed to have belonged to the late Nazi dictator.
And finally, this from Forbes:
Deadline is reporting that The Wandering Earth, which opened in fourth place on Tuesday as one of eight new Chinese flicks hoping to cash in on the lucrative New Year frame, has risen to the top spot on Friday. The fantasy drama has increased its daily grosses each day, with $30m on Tuesday, $38.2m on Wednesday, $50.7m on Thursday and a whopping $54m on Friday. That gives the $50m-budgeted disaster epic a $175m four-day cume (with around $15m of that in IMAX alone) as it looks to win the whole weekend amid a slew of Chinese movies.
Also in play is Crazy Alien (which was tops on Tuesday with $61.3 million and has now earned $166.8m, Pegasus ($120m in four days), the animated Boonie Bears: Blast into the Past ($50.5m) and Stephen Chow's The New King of Comedy ($71.3m). But wait, there's more as Jackie Chan's kid-friendly fantasy The Knight of Shadows has earned $16.2m as of Thursday, Peppa Pig Celebrates Chinese New Year (yes, that Peppa Pig) has earned $14m in its first three days and Integrity has earned $12.3m as of Thursday. For those wondering, Crazy Alien is a comedy about a zookeeper who finds a mysterious and chaotic animal which turns out to be, yes, a crazy alien.