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.
We begin this evening with a follow up on a story that has been rather interesting, from Deutsche Welle:
The result had been under review after President Erdogan and his AKP party cried foul. The president has called for a rerun of the vote, yet it is unclear if the election board will accede to that wish.
Opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) candidate Ekrem Imamoglu was confirmed as the winner of the March 31 Istanbul mayor's race by Turkish election authorities on Wednesday.
Speaking from the steps of city hall Wednesday, the 48-year-old Imamoglu called the victory, "a new dawn for Istanbul."
More election news from The Guardian:
Pawan Kumar had voted for Modi party in confusion over symbols on machine
Agence France-Presse
A man has chopped off his index finger in desperation after voting for the wrong party in India’s general election.
Pawan Kumar became confused by the symbols on the electronic voting machine and voted for Narendra Modi’s party instead of its regional rival in Uttar Pradesh state on Thursday, his brother said.
Distraught, Kumar, 25, went home and chopped off his finger with a meat cleaver.
Also from The Guardian:
Polls suggest comedian Volodymyr Zelenskiy is due to score an overwhelming victory in Sunday’s vote
Shaun Walker
A noisy, boisterous standoff in a cavernous stadium. A police cordon separating the two rival fan sections, rock music pumping and insults flying. It had the feeling of a boxing grudge match, but instead it was the final act of Ukraine’s chaotic, unpredictable election campaign.
Polls suggest that despite a complete lack of political experience, the 41-year-old comedian and actor Volodymyr Zelenskiy is due to score an overwhelming victory over the incumbent, Petro Poroshenko, in Sunday’s vote.
And from the BBC:
By Jonathan Paye-Layleh
Snakes have been found in Liberian President George Weah's office, forcing him to work from his private residence, the BBC has learnt.
Press secretary Smith Toby told the BBC that on Wednesday two black snakes were found in the foreign affairs ministry building, his official place of work.
All staff have been told to stay away until 22 April.
More news below the fold…
From the Independent (UK):
Israeli health officials urged air companies to immunise staff members
A flight attendant for El Al, Israel's national airline, is comatose after becoming ill with measles on a flight from New York City to Tel Aviv, according to the country's Ministry of Health.
The woman, 43, is suffering from the measles-related complication of encephalitis, or swelling of the brain, according to Eyal Basson, a spokesman for Israel's Health Ministry.
Two on tax avoidance, essentially, with the first from Deutsche Welle:
Every year African countries lose at least $50 million in taxes — more than the amount of foreign development aid. So where is it all going and how can multinational companies be held to account?
NGOs continue to raise the alarm. African countries are being cheated out of billions in tax revenues — mainly by large foreign companies in the energy and resource sectors, but also increasingly by small and medium-sized enterprises, such as safari organizers in countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and even Egypt. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the annual loses of up to $50 billion (€44 billion) have actually exceeded the amount of development aid given to Africa in the same amount of time. Meanwhile, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) puts the estimate much higher at $100 billion.
And from The Independent:
This dispute arose as Mr Elwartowski claimed 'the home is outside of Thailand’s territorial waters', but Thai authorities seem to disagree
Victoria Gagliardo-Silver
The “First Seasteaders”, American bitcoin trader Chad Elwartowski and his girlfriend Nadia Supranee Thepdet, may face the death penalty after defying Thailand’s sovereignty by building a ‘sea home’ 12 miles off the coast of Phuket.
Mr Elwartowski was a proponent of ‘seasteads’ - platformed homes in the sea which Mr Elwartowski claims do not fall under the sovereignty of any country.
News of the weird (and potentially tragic) from The Guardian:
Man is in critical condition after being shot while trying to fix faulty satellite dish
Press Association
A 74-year-old man is in a critical condition after being shot with a crossbow while trying to fix a faulty satellite dish outside his home in Wales.
The man raised the alarm shortly before 12.35am on Friday and was taken by ambulance to hospital.
North Wales police said they were called by staff at Ysbyty Gwynedd hospital in Bangor who concluded he had injuries consistent with being shot with a crossbow.
Detectives are appealing for witnesses to the incident, which happened on the outskirts of Holyhead.
And from The Independent:
The blur of a speeding peregrine falcon crossing the sky at up to 200mph is "extreme photography" and it creates a "buzz" for Norfolk wildlife snapper Chris Skipper.
For nearly a decade the 41-year-old has followed the drama of urban peregrines nesting on the spire of Norwich Cathedral.
And one more from the animal world, this from CNN:
Text by Lilit Marcus;
It's pretty surprising to see a 27-year-old jump into her mother's arms and insist on being held like a baby.
At The Sloth Sanctuary outside of Cahuita, Costa Rica, though, such a sight is ordinary. Particularly when the 27-year-old is a sloth named Buttercup and the mother in question is a human.
In the more than a quarter century since, what began as one couple (Judy Avey-Arroyo and her late husband, Luis Arroyo) taking in an injured animal has turned into a combination animal rescue, hospital, research center and tourist attraction.
From Reuters (via NBC):
The marble steps will remain bare for devout pilgrims to climb until they are covered again in June.
ROME — Rome's "Holy Stairs," which some Catholics believe were climbed by Jesus in Jerusalem, have been uncovered from a protective wooden casing for the first time in nearly three centuries and restored.
The 28 marble steps will remain bare temporarily for devout pilgrims to climb on their knees with direct contact with the stone until they are covered again in June.
According to tradition, the stairs, known as the "Scala Sancta," were part of Pontius Pilate's palace in Jerusalem and brought to Rome in 326 by St. Helen, the mother of Roman emperor Constantine, after she converted to Christianity.
And one final one for the news section, from The Guardian:
Leica, whose biggest growth market is China, say short film was not officially sanctioned
Emma Graham-Harrison
Western companies trying to do business in China learned long ago that they must bow, at least in part, to the political demands of an authoritarian state. So when the German camera-maker Leica released an advert featuring perhaps the greatest political taboo in contemporary Chinese history, it looked like an unusually audacious gamble.
In fact the short film referencing the Tiananmen Square crackdownappears to have been an extraordinary – and potentially very expensive – mistake.
China is currently Leica’s biggest growth market, according to the South China Morning Post. It has a partnership with the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei supplying lenses for its high-end phones, and it recently launched the Leica Akademie for young photographers.
News of the arts, beginning with one from the BBC:
The Israeli TV show about an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family may not seem like the usual TV phenomenon, but the unexpected combination is a hit, writes Jennifer Keishin Armstrong.
- By Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
A bar-mitzvah-aged boy rides a bus with his bearded father, both of them in the black, brimmed hats and long, curled payots of traditional ultra-Orthodox Jewish men. The boy, on his way to study the Talmud and Torah at Yeshiva, is taking his first trip out of their insular community and into the city. He’s clearly enchanted by the sights, especially women’s exposed legs and a breastfeeding mother.
“You know what, Kive, when I was your age, and your grandfather took me to town, he used to do this thing to help me,” the father says. “He would remove his glasses and put them on me. That way he couldn’t see well and neither could I. Shall we try it?”
From The Guardian:
Defoe’s book has inspired novels, Hollywood movies and games – but the shipwrecked slave-trader should never have become a role model
Charles Boyle
In February 1719, two months before the publication of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe proposed in the Weekly Journal that the South Sea Company – founded just eight years earlier to manage the national debt and awarded a contract to supply the Spanish colonies in Latin America with several thousand African slaves per year – should oversee the founding of a British colony at the mouth of the River Orinoco on the coast of present day Venezuela. The government would be required “to furnish six Men of War, and 4000 regular Troops, with some Engineers and 100 pieces of Cannon, and military Stores in Proportion for the maintaining and supporting the Design”, but “the Revenue it shall bring to the Kingdom will be a full amends”. Defoe chose to locate the fictional island on which Crusoe is stranded around 40 miles from the mouth of the Orinoco, and furnish it with a kindlier climate than that of the actual island on which Alexander Selkirk, the presumed model for Crusoe, was marooned. His book (no one was calling it a “novel” at the time) was a prospectus for potential investors, lacking only glossy photos of beaches and palm trees.
From Deutsche Welle:
This Easter, the Leon Cathedral will awe many Mass-goers with its powerful organ. Though DW's Cristina Burack knows the cathedral well, discovering the organ was made by Klais Orgelbau in Bonn sparked a hunt for meaning.
-
A GERMAN-MADE ORGAN FOR THE LEON CATHEDRAL
A new organ for an ancient cathedral
The Santa Maria Cathedral in Leon was built in the 13th and 14th centuries and for the past 35 years it has hosted an annual international organ festival, drawing some of the world's greatest organists and ensembles, as well as international audiences. After deciding the old organ was no longer up to the task, a music foundation began to push for a new instrument. Getting it would take decades.
About 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) separate the city of Bonn in western Germany's Rhine valley from the Spanish city of Leon on the high Castilian plateau. But they're connected by some 4,130 hollow tubes of wood and tin. And every day during the Easter weekend those tubes will be filling Leon's Gothic cathedral with sound, bouncing off its limestone vaults as Mass-goers from around the world take in the sanctuary's luminous stained-glass windows.
Though I now live in Bonn, I know Leon well: My relatives live there, and the city feels like a second home. I've visited the cathedral many times, even sung in it for a friend's wedding. But it was only recently that I found out its organ was built by Klais Orgelbau, a world-class organ maker in Bonn just blocks away from where I live!
And one last one, from Deutsche Welle:
In a country where anti-Semitism thrives, Greeks describe a Holocaust-themed game offered by an escape room company as "an undeniably entertaining adventure." Anthee Carassava reports from Athens.
In Greece, Schindler's List isn't just seen as an epic, landmark film in the history of Holocaust storytelling. It's an escape room based on a Holocaust-themed game that is taking Greek youth by storm, much to the chagrin of the Jewish community.
The outcry has prompted the company, Great Escape, to change the game's name — a direct reference to Steven Spielberg's film on the Holocaust — to "Secret Agent."
But the game's goal roughly remains the same: to draw up a list of survivors who will be spared a grisly death by enemy forces — a blurred imitation of the lists featured in the award-winning Hollywood movie.
While the game, advertised prominently on the company's website, makes no explicit reference to Jews or the Holocaust, initial descriptions featured on Greek websites lured players, challenging them to assist a German businessman, Oskar Schindler, in "saving as many innocent people from the pursuit of SS forces," in Krakow, Poland.