The Overnight News Digest is a nightly series dedicated to chronicling the day’s news. Please recommend and then add news stories of import or interest in the comments.
Guardian: Truck rams Bastille Day crowd in Nice killing at least 70🇫🇷 At least 70 people were killed and about 100 more were injured when an armed man drove a truck at full speed into a crowd who had gathered to watch the Bastille Day fireworks display over the seafront in Nice on Thursday night.
At least 70 people were killed and about 100 more were injured when an armed man drove a truck at full speed into a crowd who had gathered to watch the Bastille Day fireworks display over the seafront in Nice on Thursday night.
A police source told Le Monde that the driver was armed. Christian Estrosi, head of the local region, said there were explosives in the truck.
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USA Today: Hillary Clinton: U.S. is at "war" against "radical jihadist" groups🇺🇸 Hillary Clinton said she views the battle against terrorism as a “war” against “radical jihadist” groups, in the aftermath of a Bastille Day attack in Nice, France.
In her first interview in the past eight years on Fox News’s O’Reilly Factor program, Clinton also called for an intelligence surge between the U.S. and its closest allies and “strong, tough diplomacy.”
“We've got to do more to understand that this is a war against these terrorist groups, the radical jihadist groups,” Clinton told O’Reilly.
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Washington Post: BP’s big bill for the world’s largest oil spill reaches $61.6 billion🇺🇸 On Thursday, BP issued its final estimate of the cost of the spill, the largest in U.S. history. The company said that it would take a pre-tax charge of $5.2 billion in the second quarter of this year, but said that would be enough to cover anything that hasn’t been resolved already.
On an after-tax basis, BP’s spill costs will amount to a mere $44 billion with the additional charge of $2.5 billion in the second quarter, the company said…
BP said it believes that any further outstanding spill-related claims “will not have a material impact” on BP’s finances.
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NY Times: Leader of 2014 Massacre at Pakistani School Is Killed in U.S. Airstrike🇵🇰 🇦🇫 A Taliban commander responsible for the 2014 attack on a Pakistani school in which more than 130 children died has been killed in an airstrike in Afghanistan, United States and Pakistani officials said.
The commander, Omar Mansoor, also known as Umar Naray, was killed in an American airstrike on Saturday in the eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar, said Peter Cook, the Pentagon press secretary, according to The Associated Press.
Mr. Mansoor was the leader of the Taliban faction Tariq Gidar and was known as one of Pakistan’s most brutal militants.
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Dallas Morning News: Dallas police shooter killed 4 officers on the street, 1 through a second-floor window🇺🇸 Four of the five police officers fatally gunned down last week in downtown Dallas by Micah Johnson were shot on the street, said law enforcement officials with knowledge of the ongoing investigation.
The fifth officer — Dallas police Sgt. Michael Smith — was shot and killed when Johnson fired from the second floor of El Centro College, where he sought refuge, one law enforcement official told The Dallas Morning News.
The painstaking investigation continued to inch forward Thursday as the city marked one week since the deadly shooting that also wounded nine other officers and two civilians. Dallas police, the FBI, Texas Rangers and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are working together.
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BBC: Theresa May meeting Nicola Sturgeon for Brexit talks🇬🇧 Prime Minister Theresa May is set to meet First Minister Nicola Sturgeon in Edinburgh for talks on the future of the EU and the union.
Ms Sturgeon said she wanted to discuss options to protect Scottish interests, which she believes have been put "at risk" by the UK's vote to leave the EU.
Speaking before her visit, the PM vowed to fully engage with the Scottish government on Brexit negotiations.
Mrs May said her message was that the UK government was on the side of Scots.
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NY Times: Congress Recesses, Leaving More Stalemates Than AccomplishmentsCongress limped out of town Thursday for a seven-week recess, leaving behind a trail of partisan fights, a failed bill to help fight the Zika virus, a stalemate on gun safety and a few mundane accomplishments that members hoped to sell as awesome to voters in an unsparing mood.
The fierce partisanship was evident as some House Republicans filed a resolution to impeach the Internal Revenue Service commissioner, John A. Koskinen, while Hillary Clinton, over lunch at the Capitol with Senate Democrats, stressed that their hopes of reclaiming the majority were bound up with her aspirations of winning the White House.
Although Congress began the year with some legislative accomplishments, including an important energy measure, Democrats have been eager in recent months to rob Republicans of even modest victories as they head into the election. Republicans, in turn, have been unable to resist attempts to legislate social policy through spending and other unrelated bills, furthering the impasse. The result has largely been inertia.
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LA Times: Some of the people who are supposed to be saving rhinos are helping them die out🇲🇿 🇿🇦 They are supposed to save the rhino — police in Mozambique, South African soldiers, park rangers and government officials.
But the people who could help stop the species’ extinction are often making things worse, according to a report Wednesday that laid out a series of damning failures of governance and law enforcement.
The problem is part corruption, part incompetence and partly the petty refusal of neighboring governments to cooperate, as rhinos face ruthless, highly organized international syndicates, according to the report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, an analytical group.
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LA Times: Zika epidemic in Latin America may have peaked, and scientists predict it will be over in 3 years🇧🇷 Researchers modeling the rampant spread of the Zika virus say that, like a wildfire consuming a parched landscape, the epidemic that has caused a plague of birth defects in Brazil is already showing signs of slowing and is likely to largely burn itself out in three years.
Peak Zika spread may already have passed, said researchers writing in the journal Science. At a slower rate and with seasonal ebb and flow, the Zika virus’ march across the Americas, they reckon, will likely grind to a halt.
After Latin America’s current Zika epidemic goes to ground, the group’s epidemiological model suggests that another epidemic spread of Zika in the Americas is unlikely for “at least a decade.”
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AFP: Strikes kill 12 in rebel-held half of Syria's Aleppo🇸🇾 Air strikes killed at least 12 civilians including children in two rebel-held neighbourhoods of Syria's divided city of Aleppo on Thursday, a monitoring group said.
Nine people were killed in the Tariq al-Bab area, and another three in the district of Salhin, both in eastern Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported.
The Britain-based group said it was unclear whether the strikes were carried out by warplanes of the Syrian government or its ally Russia.
In Tariq al-Bab, civil defence workers sifted through debris for survivors. "A missile hit... and two whole families lost their lives," said one of them, Mohammed al-Ismael.
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NY Times: Iran Sticks to Terms of Nuclear Deal, but Defies the U.S. in Other Ways🇮🇷 A year after President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, the worst predictions of what would happen next have not come to pass.
The Iranians, defying the expectations of the deal’s most vociferous critics, gave up 98 percent of their nuclear material. They dismantled thousands of centrifuges and filled the core of a major plutonium reactor with cement. Inspectors roam their facilities.
By late January, even Israel’s top military officer said he was impressed. “The deal has actually removed the most serious danger to Israel’s existence for the foreseeable future,” Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, told a conference in Tel Aviv, “and greatly reduced the threat over the longer term.”
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Reuters: As North Korea pursues the bomb, its military wanes🇰🇵 Like many in North Korea's army of 1.2 million, Eom Yeong-nam spent more time holding the wooden handle of a shovel than a Kalashnikov rifle during his years in the 501 Construction Brigade.
"Except for basic military training two to three months a year, we worked on building apartments or concrete structures for nine to ten months," said Eom, who served 10 years in the army before defecting to the South in 2010, a year before Kim Jong Un assumed power in isolated North Korea.
The young leader has since expanded the use of so-called "soldier-builders", fuelling a construction boom as many of North Korea's Soviet-era conventional weapons become outmoded.
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Voice of America: Kenyan Police Officer Fatally Shoots Six Colleagues🇰🇪 A gunman who shot dead six Kenyan police officers inside a police station in western Kenya on Thursday is a police officer himself, witnesses said.
Initial reports widely spread by both local and international media outlets said the man was a suspected recruiter for al-Shabab, an armed militant group based in neighboring Somalia. But later two Kenyan police officers in the area told VOA on condition of anonymity that the killer was a Kenyan police officer.
"The shooter was a police officer named Maslah. As soon as he came to his shift at the station around 4:00 a.m. local time this morning, he took his gun and shot five of his fellow police officers and later he killed another police officer," one Kenyan police officer told VOA Somali.
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Japan Times: Emperor’s abdication plan poses challenges for Japan’s Imperial system🇯🇵 A day after Japan was shocked by reports that Emperor Akihito is planning to abdicate, high-ranking officials remained silent Thursday, despite the potentially huge ramifications of such a move and intense interest both at home and abroad.
“I would refrain from comment given the nature of the issue,” Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Thursday at Tokyo’s Haneda airport before leaving for Mongolia to attend the two-day Asia-Europe Meeting from Friday.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said the government has no plans to contact the Emperor regarding his reported intention to abdicate “within a few years.”
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NPR: Egypt's Population Surges Past 90 Million, Straining Resources Of A Poor Nation🇪🇬 An electronic billboard hangs on the side of a towering government building in eastern Cairo, the home of Egypt's statistical agency, CAPMAS. In an alarming red, the billboard ticks off the estimated number of Egyptians, and on a recent day it said there were more than 91 million. Or 91,034,024, to be precise.
Egypt has long been the most populous nation in the Arab world, and is more than twice as large as the second biggest Arab state, Algeria, with around 40 million people. And with Egypt's numbers growing by close to 2 million a year, analysts are sounding the alarm about the strain this places on the country's limited resources…
The population has risen by some 20 million over the past decade, according to Hassan Zaky, a demographer who consults with the National Population Council…
It's a recipe for unrest, says Zaky. There are more mouths to feed, more services are needed, more people are angry that life isn't getting any better. Overpopulation is the biggest threat to Egypt's future, he believes.
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Washington Post: The diversity of life across much of Earth has plunged below ‘safe’ levels🌎 In an ambitious study that represents the latest merger between big data approaches and the quest to conserve the planet, scientists have found that across a majority of the Earth’s land surface — including some of its most important types of terrain and its most populous regions — the abundance or overall number of animals and plants of different species has fallen below a “safe” level identified by biologists.
The reason is not exactly a surprise — from grasslands to tropical forests, humans are using more and more land for agriculture, to live on, to and build roads and infrastructure upon. When we take over, we clear the land or otherwise convert it for our purposes. This doesn’t always cause extinctions, but it does reduce the abundance of species and what researchers call the “intactness” of ecosystems — and when biodiversity levels fall too low, it can mean that larger ecosystems lose their resilience or even, at the extreme, cease to function.
“Exploitation of terrestrial systems has been vital for human development throughout history, but the cost to biosphere integrity has been high,” notes the study published Thursday in Science…
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Bloomberg: Xi’s ‘Neighborhood Diplomacy’ Runs Aground in South China Sea🇨🇳 An international tribunal’s rejection of China’s claim to most of the South China Sea has exposed a problem with President Xi Jinping’s "neighborhood diplomacy." It hasn’t been very neighborly.
The Permanent Court of Arbitration on Tuesday determined that China’s island-building and other efforts to assert control over the disputed waters had "aggravated" tensions, "inflicted irreparable harm" to the environment and "violated" Philippine sovereign rights. It found China had laid claim to large swaths of the waterway where it had no historic rights and infringed on the Philippines’ ability to fish.
The ruling, which resulted from a Philippine complaint, showed the shortcomings of Xi’s effort to break from the "hide and bide" diplomacy of predecessors since Deng Xiaoping and proactively expand ties with China’s neighbors. In the South China Sea at least, the decision has made it harder for China to argue it intends to treat adjacent states "as friends and partners, to make them feel safe and to help them develop," as Xi pledged when announcing his "neighborhood diplomacy" in October 2013.
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NY Times: Salvadoran Court Overturns Wartime Amnesty, Paving Way for Prosecutions🇸🇻 In a ruling that clears the way for El Salvador to prosecute the perpetrators of war crimes committed during its brutal civil war, the country’s highest court has struck down an amnesty law that has protected soldiers, rebel fighters and death squads for more than two decades.
The Supreme Court announced its decision late Wednesday in a ringing statement, citing international human rights law to declare the amnesty unconstitutional.
The amnesty is “contrary to the access to justice” and the “protection of fundamental rights,” the court said, because it impedes the state from fulfilling its obligation to investigate, try and punish grave violations of those rights.
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Guardian: Dispute turns deadly as indigenous Brazilians try to 'retake' ancestral land🇧🇷 Jesus de Souza still struggles for breath, despite the assistance of an oxygen tube. He has had two operations after a bullet pierced his intestine. Lying in hospital, the 29-year-old teacher from the Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous community in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul tries to control his emotions as he recalls the day he was shot by local landowners, in an attack that left his brother, Clodiodi, dead, and five others seriously wounded. “Since this happened, I have not shed a single tear,” he says. “I won’t until I am back in my village.”
Tension over land rights between the early inhabitants of the southern part of the state and the European-origin farmers who settled there in the 19th and 20th centuries is boiling over. In a feud that dates back decades, indigenous people seize private property they claim as their ancestral lands and farmers respond with deadly violence.
On 12 May, in the final hours of the government of President Dilma Rousseff, whose presidency has now been suspended, the indigenous affairs agency, Funai, finally approved a long-delayed report that would massively expand the Guarani-Kaiowá territory, from 3,600 hectares (8,900 acres) to 56,000.
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Guardian: Uprooted in Mexico: the US children 'returned' to a country they barely know🇲🇽 After 14 years as an undocumented farmworker in the US, Julia Aguilar returned to Mexico last year with her two sons, both of whom were born in California. The boys, then seven and 10, had never previously visited their new home town of San Martín Peras in an isolated corner of the southern state of Oaxaca.
The move was not easy: the two boys spoke English and the region’s indigenous Mixteco language, but barely any Spanish. Life was hardest for the eldest, Jorge, who was unable to make friends or participate in classes at school.
“The children called him names and laughed at his Spanish. The teacher didn’t care, he just sat in class unable to understand or speak to anyone. He cried every day and begged me to send him back to the US,” said Aguilar, 39. […]
Since 2010, 1.4 million Mexicans have been repatriated by US migration officials, and more are likely to follow after last month’s supreme court decision that will block legal recognition of 4 million undocumented parents.
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Ottawa Citizen: How a gay Ottawa Anglican got the same-sex marriage vote overturned🇨🇦 The course of Anglican church history shifted this week, in part because an Ottawa layman seized on a tiny procedural moment to effect the change of a lifetime.
Ron Chaplin, 64, is an openly gay man who has fought for equal rights — including same-sex Christian marriage — for a good part of his adulthood.
He was part of a 10-person delegation from the Ottawa diocese that attended the church’s General Synod held in Richmond Hill, the meeting that ended with the bizarre miscount — then flip-flop — on a critically-important change in the Anglican canon.
If not for Chaplin’s attention to detail, the historic approval of same-sex marriage might have been lost.
“I was pretty happy with myself,” he said later, before laughing.
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