Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, annetteboardman, jck, Rise above the swamp, and Besame. Alumni editors include (but are not limited to) Man Oh Man, wader, palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse (RIP), ek hornbeck (RIP), ScottyUrb, Interceptor 7, Neon Vincent, 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 news of Russia, from Newsweek, first:
Russian military exercises involving forces from China and other allies are a PR stunt that will involve far fewer troops than previous war games, according to British defense officials.
Russia said the Vostok 2022 (East 2022) exercises that last until September 7 would take place at seven firing ranges in Russia's Far East and the Sea of Japan, involving more than 50,000 troops and 5,000 weapons units, including 140 aircraft and 60 warships.
General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian general staff, will oversee the drills, which will involve troops from several ex-Soviet nations as well as China, India, Laos, Mongolia, Nicaragua and Syria.
Pavel Palazhchenko, Gorbachev’s interpreter for decades, says the late Soviet leader was traumatised by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, was shocked and bewildered by the Ukraine conflict in the months before he died and psychologically crushed in recent years by Moscow’s worsening ties with Kyiv, his interpreter has said.
Pavel Palazhchenko, who worked with the late Soviet president for 37 years and was at his side at numerous United States-Soviet summits, spoke to Gorbachev a few weeks ago by phone and said he and others had been struck by how traumatised he was by events in Ukraine.
PARIS — The annual gathering of France's largest business association, Le Mouvement des Entreprises de France, had a different tone this year. As CEOs and executives hobnobbed at the grassy Longchamp Racecourse in Paris, their main concerns were no longer stubborn French unions or a left wing that rejects capitalism. The pressing matter on everyone's minds was rising energy prices, and whether Europe will have enough gas to make it through the winter.
"If Russia completely turns off the spigot this winter, there won't be enough gas in Europe," French Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne told the influential group this week. "There is no immediate alternative source to plug that hole today."
And from the Associated Press:
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — The heavy rubber gas masks placed atop small wooden desks are nothing strange to these children as they file past the bomb shelter’s iron door to attend classes in weapons theory.
Nearby, children giggle, trying to keep up with their English teacher as she sings and gestures “Head and shoulders, knees and toes. Knees and toes!” each repetition getting a little faster.
Unique in Ukraine, Volodymyr the Great school Number 23 on the outskirts of Kyiv trains children to become military cadets, starting at the age of 7.
Salvage teams have rushed to pump fuel off a grounded ship after it collided with a gas tanker off Gibraltar and began leaking into the sea.
Authorities said there had been a significant leak from the OS 35 on Thursday and conservationists fear major ecological damage.
Chief Minister Fabian Picardo described the next 48 hours as crucial.
A drug-sniffing dog has led frontier police at a Milan airport to discover some 13 kilograms (nearly 30 pounds) of cocaine stuffed into the upholstery of a motorized wheelchair, whose user was immediately arrested
The specialized canine unit was being deployed at Malpensa airport to check arriving passengers and their luggage from a flight from the Dominican Republic, since previously drug couriers had used that route, the Financial Guard police said in a statement.
(CNN) Poland estimates its World War II losses caused by Germany at 6.2 trillion zlotys ($1.32 trillion), the leader of the country's ruling nationalists said on Thursday, and he said Warsaw would officially demand reparations.
From The Times of Israel:
Amid widespread ignorance about genocide, state law requiring museums to label plundered art will inform public and pressure museums, but implementation remains unclear
NEW YORK — The painting depicts a man, chiseled like a sculpture with a dagger held high, lunging at a woman. She appears caught off guard, and raises an arm in self-defense as an overturned urn spills liquid at her feet. Lustrous, vibrant fabrics swirl around the pair and a servant flees the scene in the background.
The arresting, 6-foot tall image in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is displayed among gallery 621’s other Baroque masterpieces. Visitors pause to read a placard identifying the scene as “The Rape of Tamar,” painted around the year 1640 by the French artist Eustache Le Sueur.
From the Times of Israel:
Attacker emerged from a taxi and pulled a knife out of a plastic bag; clashes erupt at scene near West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba
By EMANUEL FABIAN
An Israeli soldier was moderately hurt in a stabbing attack near the West Bank city of Hebron Friday afternoon, close to the settlement of Kiryat Arba, the military and medics said. The attacker was shot dead.
The IDF said the two soldiers were securing the Route 60 highway, which passes near the Palestinian city, when the assailant attacked them.
A mass hunger strike by Palestinian prisoners in Israel set to begin on Thursday night has been called off, the official Palestinian news agency says.
About 1,000 inmates had been due to stage the action in protest at their conditions, officials said.
Wafa news agency said it was stopped after the prison service met detainees' demands. Israeli officials have not commented.
Satellite images show the strike tore a hole through the runway, as well as igniting a grass fire at the airfield.
An Israeli attack targeting a Syrian airport tore a hole in the runway and also damaged a nearby stretch of tarmac, as well as a structure on the military side of the airfield, satellite photos have revealed.
The attack on Aleppo International Airport on Wednesday night came as an Israeli strike only months earlier took out the runway at the country’s main airport in the capital, Damascus, targeting Iranian weapons transfers to the country.
Pro-Taliban imam among the dozens dead and wounded in a suicide attack on the Guzargah Mosque in western Herat city.
An explosion at a mosque in the city of Herat in western Afghanistan killed a high-profile pro-Taliban scholar as well as more than a dozen civilians.
Images on social media on Friday showed what appeared to be blood-stained bodies scattered around the mosque compound. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.
Pakistan’s foreign minister made an urgent call for international aid, with the death toll from historic flooding across the country expected to rise in the coming days.
By Brad Lendon, Vedika Sud, Esha Mitra and Swati Gupta
New Delhi (CNN) India joined an elite league of the world's naval powers on Friday, when it commissioned its first domestically built aircraft carrier, the INS Vikrant.
Sri Lanka's former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled abroad after mass protests in July, has returned to the country.
Mr Rajapaksa had been staying in Thailand on a temporary visa and flew back home via Singapore.
Some Sri Lankan ministers are reported to have met him at the airport.
The Nobel laureate and figurehead of Myanmar's opposition to decades of military rule has been detained since a coup early last year and has already been sentenced to more than 17 years in prison. She denies all the allegations against her.
Former UK ambassador to Myanmar Vicky Bowman and her husband, Myanmar artist Htein Lin, convicted over alleged immigration offences.
By Thompson Chau and Dominic Oo
Yangon/Taipei – Former British ambassador to Myanmar, Vicky Bowman, and her husband, Htein Lin, have been sentenced to one year in prison for immigration offences following a trial in Yangon, a diplomat with knowledge of the matter said.
Bowman and her husband Htein Lin, a renowned Myanmar painter and former political prisoner, were sentenced on Friday following their arrest in Yangon last week for alleged immigration offences.
Mass demonstrations in the Chilean capital, Santiago, have marked the final day of campaigning for, and against, a new constitution to replace the document drawn up during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. The vote on Sunday will take place amid a climate of uncertainty driven by a storm of falsehoods and divisive campaigns
And finally, from CNN, if you haven’t seen it: