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, 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.
Pictures of the week come from the Associated Press and the BBC (general) and the BBC (Africa).
In non-disaster news for the stories above the fold, this comes from CBS News:
By Stephen Smith
Nearly 1,000 pieces of treasure — including copper coins and ornate pottery from the Ming Dynasty — were recovered from a pair of ancient shipwrecks discovered in the South China Sea, officials said on Thursday.
The yearlong retrieval operation came after the two shipwrecks were discovered in 2022 about 5,000 feet underwater near the northwest continental slope of the South China Sea, according to China's National Cultural Heritage Administration. Archaeologists used a crewed submersible called "Deep Sea Warrior" to conduct the excavation, officials said.
Also from CBS News:
By Li Cohen
Caretakers of 36-year-old elephant Chamchuri knew she was pregnant and were thrilled when she gave birth to a male calf. Then as they were cleaning up from the birth, they heard a loud thud – and were shocked to see she had given birth to another baby, a female.
Chamchuri's second calf came 18 minutes after the first on June 7, the Associated Press reported, and when she arrived, it surprised even her mother. CBS News' partner BBC reported that the surprise second birth caused Chamchuri to panic and that she had to be restrained so she didn't step on the calf.
The situation in Sudan gets worse every week. We begin with the BBC:
Mohanad el-Balal is one of many Sudanese civilians doing everything they can to ward off a devastating famine – and there is one man whose photograph he will never forget.
Sadiq, a middle-aged father, grips the arms of his wheelchair tightly to keep himself upright, his painfully thin legs poking out in front of him.
From CNN:
Darfur, a region in western Sudan, has a tragic history marked by ethnic violence and humanitarian crises. In the early 2000s, the area experienced a brutal conflict that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and displaced millions.
Today, there are alarming signs that Darfur may be heading towards another genocide.
For more than a year, swathes of Sudan have erupted in fierce clashes between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that have left more 14,000 people dead and displaced more than 8 million others, according to the United Nations.
From Deutsche Welle, on the same problem:
It has been classified as one of the world's worst crises in many ways. But aid and advocacy organizations say the Sudan war is being sidelined, which may well be making things worse.
The list of war-time atrocities in Sudan is long and getting longer. A maternity hospital bombed, causing the roof to fall onto babies inside. Refugee camps shelled, mass executions, streets filled with corpses, aid blocked, systematic sexual abuse and other war crimes: Since the civil war started a year ago in the northeast Afrcan country, an estimated 16,000 people have been killed.
Also from Deutsche Welle:
The army said hundreds were killed and injured, including senior RSF commander Ali Yagoub Gibril. The RSF siege of El Fasher city has opened up a new front in the ongoing conflict.
A leading rebel commander was among those killed in the besieged north Darfur city of El Fasher, the latest flashpoint in Sudan's ongoing civil war, the army said on Friday.
In a social media statement, the Sudanese army said Ali Yagoub Gibril, a commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) who was under US sanctions, was among hundreds killed and injured in confrontations between the rebels and the army.
More from Africa, this from The Guardian:
Marcel Malanga and Tyler Thompson, both 21, met on the football field before getting swept up in an attempted coup
Two events are uppermost in the minds of residents of West Jordan, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, right now, and they could hardly be more different.
One is the 4 July Western Stampede rodeo, the city’s hugely popular annual celebration of patriotism and pride. The other is an attempted coup d’état almost 8,500 miles away in the Democratic Republic of Congo that has swept up two of its young residents.
From the New York Times:
A new government led by the African National Congress gave Cyril Ramaphosa another term as president, though he faces challenges in Parliament.
A fragile coalition of lawmakers in South Africa elected Cyril Ramaphosa for a second term as president on Friday, marking a new era of political uncertainty in one of the continent’s most stable democracies.
After suffering a sharp decline in support in last month’s national election, Mr. Ramaphosa’s party, the African National Congress, undertook feverish negotiations to form a governing coalition with rivals, inking a deal only after Friday’s parliamentary session had begun.
From the Associated Press:
MINA, Saudi Arabia (AP) — In sweltering temperatures, Muslim pilgrims in the Saudi city of Mecca converged on a vast desert tent camp Friday, officially starting the annual Hajj pilgrimage. Earlier, they circled the cube-shaped Kaaba in the Grand Mosque, Islam’s holiest site.
More than 1.5 million pilgrims from around the world have already amassed in and around Mecca for the Hajj, and the number was still growing as more pilgrims from inside Saudi Arabia joined. Authorities expected the number to exceed 2 million this year.
From the BBC:
By Meryl Sebastian
An Indian Air Force flight has brought back the bodies of 45 workers who were killed in a fire in Kuwait.
The fire broke out on Wednesday at a residential building in Mangaf city where 176 Indian workers lived.
Kuwaiti authorities said 50 people were killed in the fire, including 45 from India and three from the Philippines. Two bodies are yet to be identified.
From Al Jazeera:
Reuters news agency investigation reveals how US military launched a clandestine programme during the pandemic to discredit China’s medical efforts.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus, an investigation by the Reuters news agency has found.
Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vaccination campaign, Reuters reported in a story released on Friday. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.
From The Guardian:
With one-third of drowning victims in Australia born outside the country, advocates say more funding is needed to reach diverse communities
As Supt Joe McNulty explained the circumstances behind the drowning of two women in Sydney, he said they hadn’t come from a “swimming background”.
That meant someone who was not a strong swimmer, or “wasn’t from a culture that taught you to swim early”, he explained.
McNulty was speaking after two women drowned on Monday after being swept off the rocks near the Yena Road picnic spot at Kurnell.
From France24:
Forest fires in Canada have never been quite so destructive. In 2023, some 15 million hectares – the equivalent of more than a quarter of mainland France – went up in flames. Canada is warming faster than the world as a whole and 2023, the world's hottest year on record, was inevitably challenging. Firefighters, rescue workers and residents of at-risk localities are learning to live with the ever-increasing risk of devastating fires. Our correspondents François Rihouay and Joanne Profeta report.
From the Miami Herald:
OPINION BY THE MIAMI HERALD EDITORIAL BOARD
It’s like an unspoken social contract. When people choose to live in South Florida, they must make peace with the possibility that, thanks to hurricanes, there will be flooding and they may incur thousands of dollars to fix their homes post storm.
But that’s supposed to be during a major storm with a name — like Irma, Ian or Andrew — not any given day during heavy rains as it happened Wednesday in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.