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.
We begin with this from The Guardian:
I knew my journey home would be complicated, but I wasn’t prepared for the sense of isolation as I moved from one dystopian scene to another
Laurel Chor in Hong Kong
When I booked my flight home after spending more than two-and-a-half months in Europe, I knew what my journey would entail. With no more direct flights between Paris and Hong Kong, I would have a brief layover in London. I knew that when I landed at the Hong Kong airport, I would be tested and held at a facility for roughly eight hours until my results came back.
From the BBC:
As the UK headed for lockdown, reports flew in of wealthy homeowners rushing to the countryside, to their yachts or to private jets out of the country.
But where were they headed?
From castles and private islands to luxury underground bunkers with pools and home cinemas, we take a look at how the super-rich have spent lockdown.
From the NYTimes:
The British government promised 100,000 daily tests by April 30. It delivered. But the frantic push to hit that deadline has left labs scrabbling for supplies just when they need to expand further.
LONDON — On May 1, a visibly relieved Matt Hancock announced that the British government had exceeded its target of 100,000 coronavirus tests a day. As health secretary, Mr. Hancock had set the goal after enduring intense criticism for the country’s lagging coronavirus testing program.
He called the milestone “an incredible achievement.”
But leaked documents and interviews with doctors, lab directors and other experts show that the push to hit the April 30 deadline — and arguably salvage Mr. Hancock’s career — placed a huge strain on public laboratories and exposed other problems that are now slowing efforts to further expand coronavirus testing.
From ABC News:
French nurses and doctors have faced off with President Emmanuel Macron at a leading Paris hospital, demanding higher pay and more investment in their once-renowned medical system
ANGELA CHARLTON Associated Press
PARIS -- French nurses and doctors faced off with President Emmanuel Macron at a leading Paris hospital Friday, demanding better pay and a rethink of a once-renowned public health system that found itself quickly overwhelmed by tens of thousands of virus patients.
“We are desperate. We no longer believe in you,” said a nurse who confronted Macron at the Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital, saying she's using a long-expired surgical mask. “We are the shame of Europe.”
From Al Jazeera:
France's decision to make masks mandatory in public raises important questions about its ban on Muslim face veils.
by Rokhaya Diallo
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, France is faced with a paradox: It has just made the wearing of masks compulsory in certain public spaces, but maintained the years-long ban on Muslim full-face veils. This suggests, as the Washington Post recently noted, "if an observant Muslim woman wanted to get on the Paris Metro, she would be required to remove her burqa and replace it with a mask".
The French government made the use of face masks in public mandatory on May 10 in an effort to safely ease the country's strict coronavirus lockdown. More than 50 other countries, from Germany to Uganda, had previously passed similar laws and provisions to stem the spread of the virus and get people back to work.
From the BBC:
The Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have opened their borders to one another, creating a coronavirus "travel bubble".
From midnight on Thursday, citizens and residents can move freely between the three EU nations.
From Al Jazeera:
The Dutch government has issued new guidance to single people seeking intimacy during the pandemic, advising them to find a "sex buddy".
The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) says singletons should come to an arrangement with one other person.
But pairings should avoid sex if one of them suspects they have coronavirus, the advice says.
From NPR:
The coronavirus pandemic has hit the global business of surrogate birthing, leaving many infants and their new parents thousands of miles apart.
In Ukraine, the company BioTexCom, which runs a human reproduction center in Kyiv, brought attention to the issue when it released a video showing dozens of babies in rows of cots, apparently waiting for their parents to collect them.
In non COVID news, this from Slate:
There is a lot of uncertainty around the prime minister’s pledge to assert Israeli sovereignty over occupied territory.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo flew to Israel in the middle of a pandemic this week for a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We don’t know exactly what the two talked about, but the topic of annexation certainly came up. The prime minister’s pledge to assert Israeli sovereignty over at least some of the occupied territory—which could happen as early as July 1—has the potential to radically upend Middle East politics, deal a death blow to already faltering hopes for a two-state solution, and give prospective future president Joe Biden his first foreign policy crisis before he even takes office. But there’s a huge amount of uncertainty over how it could play out—and if it will even happen at all.
From Al Jazeera:
Local journalist at a major newspaper arrested on 'terror' charges, a move sharply condemned by press advocacy groups.
Egyptian officials have arrested a journalist at a major newspaper on "terrorism" charges, his lawyer said, a move a global press advocacy group called a "brutal campaign" against journalists in the country.
Security officers burst into the home of Haisam Hasan Mahgoub in the capital of Cairo earlier this week, confiscating his phone and arresting him, lawyer Karim Abdelrady said.
From The Guardian:
Village of Atulie’er gained worldwide fame for precarious ladder journey 800 metres up a cliff face
Residents from a famous village perched 800 metres up a cliff are among thousands being relocated by the Chinese government into apartment complexes as part of a national poverty alleviation program.
Atulie’er village in Sichuan province drew worldwide fame in 2016 after images emerged of the residents climbing perilous rattan ladders – some hundreds of years old – up the cliffside to reach their homes.
Also from The Guardian:
Exclusive: Four former prison officers seeking asylum in Australia claim Francis Kean, brother-in-law of Fiji’s PM, ran a brutal campaign of intimidation
Four former prison officers from Fiji are seeking asylum in Australia claiming the prime minister’s brother-in-law, who is the commissioner of the corrections service, routinely ordered the beating and mistreatment of prisoners and at one point ordered them to assault a fellow staff member.
Detailed accounts given to the Guardian by the four officers claim Francis Kean, a powerful figure inside Fiji, waged a brutal campaign of intimidation, coercion, bullying and violence on both prisoners and staff – which human rights campaigners say may amount to torture – with impunity.
From The Hill:
A gang of cybercriminals claimed in a post to the dark web on Friday that it had obtained documents on President Trump, and is threatening to release them and other hacked documents unless it receives a $42 million ransom.
According to Variety, which has seen the dark web post, the criminal group hacked the major entertainment law firm Grubman Shire Meiselas & Sacks and obtained a trove of documents on Trump, Lady Gaga, Madonna, Nicki Minaj, Bruce Springsteen, Mary J. Blige, Ella Mai, Christina Aguilera and Mariah Carey.
News of the arts:
We begin with the BBC:
At 9am on Tuesday the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam posted an image of Rembrandt's The Night Watch (1642) on its website. Nothing particularly unusual about that, you might think. After all, the museum frequently uploads pictures of its masterpieces from Dutch Golden Age. But there was something about this particular photo that made it stand out just like the little girl in a gold dress in Rembrandt's famous group portrait of local civic guardsmen.
From Fox News (sorry but I didn’t see the story elsewhere:
The coronavirus has inspired a new work by Chinese dissident artist Badiucao in support of Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters.
The piece is Badiucao’s personal take on one of the iconic images of the 20th century: the lone man standing in the path of a tank during protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, according to Reuters.
From The Guardian:
From transformative nights in the grubbiest of fleapits to spellbinding screenings under the stars, film-makers and critics recall the communal thrill of going to the cinema
• Walter Murch: why movies need cinemas
‘You didn’t sit where the tramps peed themselves’Mike Leigh
In my days as an impecunious young cineaste, there was the Tolmer cinema in Euston, the cheapest picturehouse in London, or anywhere – two shillings a time. A converted church, it was filthy, decrepit and gloriously eclectic. It showed whatever they could find, new prints and old. The Leopard – the original version, no subtitles; Hellzapoppin’; Rashomon; Svenska Flickor I Franska Sexorgier. Incomplete prints, sudden random reels from other films, frames catching fire in the projector. Wonderful. An education in cinema. But you didn’t sit where the tramps peed themselves.
From Billboard:
Lovato will also perform a new song 'In the Mirror.'
Fans of absurd costumed singers, pop vampires, techno-dancing grannies, masked metal monsters, turkey DJs and songs about 13th century emperor Genghis Khan are super bummed that this year's Eurovision song contest -- which would have taken place Saturday night (May 16) was canceled due to the coronavirus.
Luckily, Netflix has a movie for that. The streaming service and Arista Records have teamed up for the soundtrack to the upcoming Will Ferrell, Rachel McAdams movie Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
From E!:
Jean Seberg spent the 1960s as an internationally recognized actress, an icon of French cinema's New Wave and one of the chicest women in Hollywood, or New York, or Paris.
The 1970s were far less kind, and by the end of the decade, she was gone, dead of a "probable suicide."
At a glance, the tragedy that was Seberg's heady rise and ultimate descent into drug addiction and mental illness makes up the majority of her legacy—that, and her legendary turn in Jean-Luc Godard's 1960 classic Breathless, playing Patricia, the dubiously loyal American girlfriend of Jean-Paul Belmondo's doomed criminal Michel.
From the New York Times:
The shuttering of the Northeast tradition seems to represent the end of live performance in America this summer.
Summer after summer, the Boston Symphony Orchestra retreats to its seasonal home: Tanglewood, a bucolic and beloved outdoor destination for music, tucked away in the Berkshires. New England’s vacationers and classical buffs follow by the hundreds of thousands.
But this year, for the first time since the Second World War, Tanglewood’s season, a staple of summer in the Northeast, has been canceled because of the continued threat of the coronavirus pandemic.
From Al Jazeera:
In Pakistan, the show's popularity reveals reverence for the Ottoman Empire and a hankering for a glorious Muslim past.
One rarely expects the prime minister of a nation to become a cheerleader for a television show. But, in October 2019, that is exactly what Pakistani leader Imran Khan did. And with it, he unleashed a phenomenon that has since gripped his nation and become the talking point among fans and critics alike.
That the drama series in question is Turkish and not Pakistani only adds to the intrigue.
Also from Al Jazeera:
Art, opera and the Holocaust - the story of a couple at the centre of the Nazi party.
"Suddenly we heard a loud cry in the distance, which turned into an overwhelming cry of joy, ‘Heil Hitler'. It approached like a surging human sea, getting closer and louder."
Charlotte Wächter recalling the events of March 15, 1938.
In July 1949, a 48-year-old man died of unknown causes in a Vatican hospital in Rome. A few months earlier, he had assumed a false identity, that of Alfredo Reinhardt.
The last months of his life had been spent in a monastery in a southern suburb of Rome.
But the story of who he really was and how he ended up there is one that leads to the very heart of Nazi Europe and the slaughter of roughly 11 million people, including six million Jews.