Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Besame, jck, and JeremyBloom. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) Interceptor 7, Man Oh Man, wader, Neon Vincent, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), rfall, ScottyUrb, Doctor RJ, BentLiberal, Oke (RIP) and jlms qkw.
OND is a regular community feature on Daily Kos since 2007, 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.
Whole pod of 77 whales die in 'biggest mass stranding in decades'
A pod of 77 pilot whales has died after washing ashore on a beach in Orkney in what could be the biggest mass stranding for decades.
The British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) had established 12 of the animals at Tresness Beach on the island of Sanday were still alive when they came out of the water.
However the decision was taken to euthanise them after refloating efforts failed.
The pod included male whales up to seven metres (22ft) long as well as females, calves and juveniles.
Experts say it is too early to know what has caused the stranding, but it is likely one of the whales got into trouble and the rest of the pod tried to help.
The sperm whale 'phonetic alphabet' revealed by AI
Researchers studying sperm whale communication say they've uncovered sophisticated structures similar to those found in human language.
But exactly how sperm whales catch squid, like many other areas of their lives, remains a mystery. "They're slow swimmers," says Kirsten Young, a marine scientist at the University of Exeter. Squid, on the other hand, are fast. "How can [sperm whales] catch squid if they can only move at 3 knots [5.5 km/h or 3.5mph]? Are the squid moving really slowly? Or are the whales stunning them with their vocalisations? What happens down there? Nobody really knows," she says.
Sperm whales communicate with each other using rhythmic sequences of clicks, called codas. It was previously thought that sperm whales had just 21 coda types. However, after studying almost 9,000 recordings, the Ceti researchers identified 156 distinct codas. They also noticed the basic building blocks of these codas which they describe as a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet"
‘Absolutely incredible’: Man rowing solo across Atlantic is surrounded by whales
Tom Waddington is on a quest to row across the Atlantic Ocean all by himself — but on Sunday, he found plenty of company at sea, when a pod of pilot whales thronged around him. They followed him for hours, growing from a few playful animals to hundreds of large creatures. At least one smacked into his small boat.
The whales popped their heads above the surface and seemed to play together — a gam of whales, gadding about — as Waddington, who is rowing some 2,000 miles from the Newfoundland coast to Penzance, in the United Kingdom, watched in amazement.
“This is so cool,” Waddington said as he took a video of the whales’ antics. With a laugh, he added, “I love it, but I'm scared they're gonna hit my rudder.”
Miami Herald
Gasps erupted from the port side of the boat. The people on board watched the colossal creature weave the ocean surface, only yards away. Believed to be the first time in over 20 years, a blue whale was spotted in Massachusetts waters. In a video of Cape Ann Whale Watch’s July 8 encounter, an enormous blue whale drifts by the boat, the air above the giant disrupted by massive puffs of vapor as it exhales.
The whale watchers with CAWW had hoped to see a few dolphins and maybe a humpback that day, but this was a whole other ballgame. Staff said the sighting was a career-high. “Our naturalist shed tears and could barely speak, interns too had tears and were in total awe,” CAWW said in a post recounting the incredible sighting.
The Guardian
Deforestation in Colombia falls to lowest level in 23 years
Deforestation in Colombia fell sharply in 2023 to its lowest level in 23 years, the country’s environment ministry has said.
The amount of forest loss fell from 1,235 sq km in 2022 to 792 sq km in 2023 – a 36% decrease, official figures revealed.
Most of the environmental gains were in the Amazon rainforest, where the Colombian government is focusing much of its conservation efforts.
“It is a truly iconic year in this fight against deforestation,” Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, told journalists in Bogotá.
Deforestation in Colombia rose to a record high in 2017 after the country’s largest guerrilla group, the Farc, demobilised, leaving a power vacuum in the country’s forests.
The Guardian
Moscow angered by US plan to site long-range missiles in Germany
A US announcement of a plan to station long-range missiles in Germany for the first time since the cold war has set off a diplomatic furore between Washington and Moscow and elicited comparisons to the European missile crises of the 1980s.
Russian and US officials both accused each other of provoking the escalation on Thursday, as arms control experts warned that the deployments of missiles on the European continent, after the collapse of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, could fuel a new arms race.
The decision to station non-nuclear Tomahawk cruise, SM-6 and hypersonic missiles in Germany from 2026 was welcomed by Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, who said it “fitted exactly” into his government’s security strategy, even as the move attracted fierce criticism amid fears it would make Germany more vulnerable to attack.
The Guardian
California wildfires have burned five times the average area this year, officials say
California’s wildfire season is off to a ferocious start, with the state’s top wildfire official saying that fires have already burned through five times the average amount of land for this time of year.
Speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, Joe Tyler, the director of the California department of forestry and fire protection (Cal Fire), said the state has responded to more than 3,500 wildfires so far this year. Together, those fires have scorched nearly 220,000 acres – more than five times above what is typical for mid-July, which is considered fairly early in the state’s wildfire season.
“We are not just in a fire season, we are in a fire year,” Tyler said at the news conference. “Our winds and the recent heatwave have exacerbated the issue, consuming thousands of acres. So we need to be extra cautious.”
Authorities across the US west have warned of the rising risk of wildfires amid a protracted heatwave that has dried out the landscape and smashed temperatures records from California to Oregon to Nevada.
“Climate change is real,” said California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, on Wednesday. “Those extremes are here present every day in the great state of California.”
Reuters
Trump lawyers invoke immunity ruling in bid to toss hush money verdict
NEW YORK, July 11 (Reuters -
Donald Trump's lawyers on Thursday said Manhattan prosecutors improperly relied on evidence of the former U.S. president's official acts in securing his conviction on criminal charges stemming from hush money paid to a porn star.
In a court filing dated July 10 but made public on Thursday, defense lawyers said the May 30 guilty verdict in the first-ever criminal trial of a U.S. president
should be set aside following the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity.
They said evidence of official acts that were improperly shown to the jury included Trump's conversations with former White House aide Hope Hicks and some of his Twitter posts while he was in office from 2017 to 2021.
"The use of official-acts evidence was a structural error under the federal Constitution," defense lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote. "The jury's verdicts must be vacated."
Al Jazeera
Ukraine seizes cargo ship carrying ‘looted’ grain for Russia
Ukraine has seized an international freighter it says was transporting stolen Ukrainian grain from Russian-occupied Crimea.
Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) said on Thursday that its forces stopped the vessel in the Black Sea near Ukraine’s Odesa region, seizing it and apprehending its captain.
The Cameroon-flagged vessel, Usko Mfu, had been working for Russia to export grain to the Middle East, the SBU said. It had repeatedly docked at the Crimean sea port of Sevastopol since last year to pick up several tonnes of the “looted” products, the statement said.
To conceal its movements, the SBU said, the vessel regularly shut off its GPS tracker and logged false travel information.
Its captain, an Azerbaijani citizen, could face up to five years in prison for violating travel restrictions governing Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territories.
Washington Post
See Beryl’s 6,000-mile path of destruction, from Africa to Vermont
Hurricane Beryl was named on June 28, and meteorologists have tracked its progress for more than two weeks. The exceptionally long-lived system has traveled over 6,000 miles, passing through the Atlantic, the Caribbean, the Bay of Campeche and the Gulf of Mexico, making three landfalls as a destructive hurricane while setting records.
At long last, though, Beryl is about to fade away. The storm has devolved into a “post-tropical cyclone,” or a leftover mid-latitude low-pressure swirl, and is trekking through Canada. In its wake, more than 1 million Houston-area customers are still without power, and people across the Mississippi and Ohio valleys and the Northeast are cleaning up from tornadoes and flooding spurred by Beryl’s remnants.
The storm caused the most severe damage in Grenada, where Beryl hit at Category 4 strength on July 1. It became a Category 5 shortly after.
N Y Times
Costco Raises Membership Fees for First Time in 7 Years
Costco is increasing its annual fee for members by more than 8 percent in the United States and Canada, the first increase in seven years, the company announced on Wednesday.
Beginning Sept. 1, the fee for customers who shop at Costco Wholesale stores will increase by $5 to $65 annually for the basic Gold Star Membership and by $10 to $130 annually for customers with the Executive Membership.
“The fee increases will impact about 52 million paid memberships, a little over half of which are Executive,” a spokesman for Costco, the Washington State-based membership wholesale retail store, said in a statement. “As a reminder, we last raised our membership fees in the U.S. and Canada in June 2017.”