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, jck, 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.
Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.
From Al Jazeera:
Despite change in one-child policy in 2015, pregnancies have not increased, leading to fears of a demographic crisis.
China's birthrate dropped last year to its lowest level since the formation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, adding to concerns of a long-term challenge for the government, as the ageing society and shrinking workforce pile pressure on a slowing economy.
From CNN:
Laurel, Philippines (CNN) Maria Evangeline Tenorio Sarmiento struggles to wade through ankle-deep mud and debris to reach her house that's been inundated with thick sludge.
Inside, the 52-year-old mother of two finds the roof over her kitchen has collapsed under the weight of ashfall.
The once-blue walls are now smeared in a thick layer of gray ash. Her son is up on the roof scraping off the mud in an effort to stop the rest from caving in.
"It was totally destroyed. I only saw it yesterday. I saw our barangay (village) and can't help but cry," she told CNN from the ruined house in Laurel in the Philippine province of Batangas.
From The Guardian:
Rangers say refusal to obey trail closures are foiling their efforts to save the county’s oldest and most sacred trees from deadly fungus
Charlotte Graham-McLay in Wellington
Adeadly fungal disease putting a treasured species of New Zealand native trees at risk of extinction has generated desperate attempts by Auckland park rangers to prevent the spread in what they believe is an “unprecedented” conservation effort globally.
But their efforts to bar hikers in areas most at risk of kauri dieback are foiled, they say, not by clueless tourists but by “entitled” locals who will not accept their favourite walking routes being disrupted.
From CNN:
By Rob Picheta and Jack Guy, CNN
A pregnant woman and six children -- including a 1-year-old baby and a 3-year-old -- were tortured, slaughtered and buried in a mass grave in Panama as part of a bizarre, ritualistic killing by a religious cult, authorities have said.
Nine indigenous people have been arrested and will be charged over the grisly attack, which took place in a remote part of the Ngäbe-Buglé region, home to a large community of native Panamanians.
Authorities said the bodies of three boys and three girls -- two 9-year-olds, plus others aged 1, 3, 11 and 17 -- were found in the grave. The 32-year-old mother of five of the children, who was between four and six months pregnant, was also found dead in the grave.
From The Guardian:
Roberto Alvim set off a storm of outrage with comments about culture that were eerily reminiscent of Hitler’s propaganda chief
Sam Cowie in São Paulo
Brazil’s culture secretary, Roberto Alvim has been fired after he appeared to paraphrase the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in an online video to promote a national arts prize.
“Brazilian art in the next decade will be heroic and national,” said Alvim, to the music from Wagner’s Lohengrin, said to be Hitler’s favourite opera, with a portrait of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, and a Brazilian flag in the background.
From the BBC:
Two Chinese nationals in their early 20s have been found dead at the site of a 1973 plane crash in southern Iceland.
Police said the man and the woman were found near the Sólheimasandur crash site, which draws tourists.
A police spokesman told the BBC a post-mortem would take place early next week to establish the causes of death.
From the BBC:
A clock counting down to the moment the UK leaves the EU on 31 January will be projected on to Downing Street as part of government plans to mark Brexit Day.
The clock will tick down to 23:00 GMT, while Prime Minister Boris Johnson will give a "special" address to the nation in the evening, the government said.
A special 50p coin will also enter circulation to mark the occasion.
From CNN:
(CNN) — If your sweetheart turns to you tonight and whispers "shall we try for a little one?", don't dismiss them out of hand.
It could be they're talking about an Irish island.
Great Blasket, on Europe's Atlantic fringes, is seeking a couple to become summer caretakers and sole full-time residents of this unoccupied island off Ireland's west coast.
One more from the Beeb:
Spain's Balearic Islands have passed a law banning pub crawls and happy hours in three popular tourist destinations in a bid to crack down on alcohol-fuelled holidays.
Restrictions apply to the tourist hotspots of Playa de Palma and Magaluf in Majorca and Sant Antoni in Ibiza.
The regional government said it was the first law of its kind in Europe.
From The Washington Post:
MOSCOW — Eight years ago, President Vladimir Putin decreed that Russia must become a leading scientific power. That meant at least five top-100 Russian universities by 2020, and a dramatic increase in the number of global citations of Russian scientific papers.
Now a group at the center of Putin’s aspirations, the Russian Academy of Sciences, has dropped a bombshell into the plans. A commission set up by the academy has led to the retraction of at least 869 Russian scientific articles, mainly for plagiarism.
A couple of arts stories:
From The Guardian:
Stella Nyanzi, imprisoned in Uganda after writing poem about president’s mother’s vagina, lambasts regime’s ‘fear of writers’
Alice McCool in Kampala
The Ugandan academic, writer and feminist activist Dr Stella Nyanzi, imprisoned for criticising the country’s president, has been awarded the Oxfam Novib/PEN International award for freedom of expression.
Nyanzi has been in Luzira women’s prison in Kampala, the capital, for nearly 15 months after writing a poem about President Yoweri Museveni’s mother’s vagina. The poem uses the metaphor of her vagina and Museveni’s birth to criticise his near 35-year rule.
And from the BBC:
A painting discovered by chance last month is a Gustav Klimt original that was stolen nearly 23 years ago, Italian authorities have confirmed.
The painting, Portrait of a Lady, was taken from a gallery in the northern city of Piacenza in 1997.
It was thought to have disappeared for good until gardeners clearing away ivy found it concealed in an external wall at the same gallery.
The Klimt has an estimated value of at least €60m ($66m; £51m).
From the PBS News Hour:
Joshua Barajas
Miss Dunn’s eyes appear to be closed — or at least busy reading the newspaper in her hands. Standing out against a simple yellow background, her red-striped dress mirrors the lines of the broadsheet she holds. We don’t know who she was, but in the 1930s, she was important enough to a 12-year-old child to be immortalized in her own painting.
“Portrait of Miss Dunn” is one of 12 paintings on view now in “From the Perspective of a Child,” an exhibit at the Children’s Museum of the Arts in Manhattan as part of this year’s Outsider Art Fair.
From WAMU’s DCist:
An art collector and widow of a former Howard University professor has donated 152 works by African American artists to Howard University. The collection, valued at $2.5 million, includes some of the earliest surviving works by African Americans in this country.
“Many of the earlier artists—what I call the masters—didn’t make any money off their art,” says Patricia Turner Walters, who started collecting in the late 1980s. One of her favorite pieces that she’s donating is the oldest work in her collection—an 1864 landscape by Robert S. Duncanson.