Overnight News Digest: Friday Night International Edition

Welcome to the Overnight News Digest with a crew consisting of founder Magnifico, current leader Neon Vincent, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, wader, Doctor RJ, rfall, annetteboardman and Man Oh Man with guest editor Chitown Kev and Magnifico. Alumni editors include (but not limited to) palantir, Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse, ek hornbeck, ScottyUrb, Interceptor7, BentLiberal, Oke 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 12:00AM Eastern Time (or if it is Friday night and the editor is me, a bit later).

Please feel free to share your articles and stories in the comments.

The first several stories are about the past, in a variety of ways.  

From Fred Barbash in The Washington Post:

Construction workers in Spain unearth 1,300 pound trove of ancient Roman coins

Spanish construction workers find ancient treasure

Workers laying pipes in a southern Spanish park unearthed a 1,300-pound trove of Roman coins. Cultural officials say it is a unique historic discovery. (AP)

Some 1,300 pounds of bronze Roman coins dating to the 3rd and 4th centuries have been unearthed by construction workers digging ditches in Spain.

The find, in 19 amphoras — storage containers — is unique not only because of the volume of coins but because the coins appear to have never been in circulation, making them almost pristine by comparison with other discoveries.

And one from the New York Times by Melissa Eddy:

Former Auschwitz Guard Apologizes at Trial in Germany

BERLIN — A 94-year-old former SS guard on Friday told a German court that he was “sincerely sorry” for failing to do anything to prevent the suffering and deaths of tens of thousands of prisoners at the Auschwitz death camp, breaking his silence after weeks of sitting motionless in the face of pleas by survivors for him to speak.

In a statement read into a microphone from his wheelchair, the defendant, Reinhold Hanning, said he “deeply regretted” having belonged to a criminal organization that was responsible for the deaths of many innocent people and the destruction and suffering of countless victims and their families.

And the most recent historical item (not international, though), in case you missed it, some coverage from Elisha Fieldstadt of NBC News:

Allison Janney Shows Up at White House Press Briefing as 'West Wing's' C.J. Cregg

Allison Janney hasn't had to act as a White House press secretary for nearly three presidential terms — but she sure isn't rusty.

The levity that fills the White House during correspondents' dinner weekend was not in short supply on Friday as Janney reprised her role as C.J. Cregg, press secretary for the majority of the Bartlet administration on NBC's "The West Wing." She took over for real-life press secretary Josh Earnest in a surprise appearance Friday.

Remember, the White House Correspondents Dinner is Saturday night with Larry Wilmore.  The BBC has highlights from past years:

Obama: Eight years, eight jokes (almost) On Saturday evening in Washington, Barack Obama will attend his last White House Correspondents' Association dinner as president. The black-tie affair is an annual gathering of politicians, journalists, celebrities and other notables from Washington and beyond. The highlight of the evening is the president's speech, during which he makes fun of himself, his allies and his opponents, often in equal measure. Mr Obama has not spared many from his zingers in past years - and that includes current Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump.

He's also returned to a few common threads throughout his presidency: jokes about his "birth country" (Kenya, as some critics falsely claim), and the challenges of facing a hostile Republican Congress.

Here's a look at some of Mr Obama's best lines and sharpest jabs from the past seven White House Correspondents Dinners, and the political context in which they were delivered.

Below the fold are some more stories from around the world.

J. Weston Phippen in The Atlantic:

Australia’s Controversial Migration Policy

Papua New Guinea’s planned closure of a detention center for those bound for its larger neighbor is putting the focus on how Canberra deals with arrivals by sea.

The first boat people to arrive on Australian shores were three young friends and two brothers from Vietnam who’d navigated the seas with a map torn from a school atlas. It was April 1976, and they fled the scars of the Vietnam War and the fall of Saigon on a 65-foot wooden fishing boat. The migrants were called boat people quite simply because that’s how they came to Australia. Over the next five years, 2,054 more would follow.

Most Australians at the time wanted to let these Vietnamese migrants stay in their country, so the newcomers were given refugee status. But that changed. The next wave of boat people came in 1989, and each year, for 10 years, about 170 of them floated to Australia, many from Cambodia. Unlike a decade before, the Australian government first detained these migrants, then processed them through the courts. The third major wave of boat people came from the Middle East, and by 2001 three-quarters of Australians wanted them turned away.

Francis Chan for the Straits Times:

ISIS 'may set up caliphate in South-east Asia' Experts: ISIS may target S'pore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines as it weakens in Middle East As the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) loses its grip on territories in the Middle East, the militant group is expected to look towards South-east Asia to perpetuate its claims to a caliphate.

Counter-terrorism analysts say the region's long history of militancy and rising number of extremist groups adopting ISIS ideology make it attractive to the Sunni extremist network.

Possible targets include Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore, where the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) and Jemaah Anshar Khilafah terror networks, as well as the Abu Sayyaf, operate.

Justin Bergman writes for the BBC:

This is why China's airports are a nightmare

You've never truly been late until you've travelled China's unfriendly skies. And that's a problem for those doing business in the Middle Kingdom.

Danny Armstrong is used to dealing with flight delays and cancellations.

As general manager of China Banking at National Australia Bank, he travels for business around China a couple of times a month. At the mercy of the nation’s notoriously unpredictable flight system, Armstrong has had to become adept at contingency planning: booking on a certain carrier he believes has better on-time performance and switching to the high-speed train during times of the year when delays are common.

On occasion, he’s taken even more drastic measures to be punctual, including the time when he hired a police escort from the airport to get the CEO of his company, on a visit from Australia, to a high-level meeting after flight delays from Shanghai to Beijing. “We just did it by the skin of our teeth,” he said. “It cost us a fair bit of money, as well.”

And one final one from east Asia (Malaysia) which is a few days old (the 26th of April) but I bet you didn’t see it.  From The Straits Times (you really should follow the link and look at the picture):

Probe on human-looking goat carcass will take up to a month to see if it's a human-animal hybrid: Official

JOHOR BARU (THE STAR/ASIA NEWS NETWORK) - It will take around two weeks to a month to finalise the investigations on the carcass of a baby goat in Malaysia's town of Kota Tinggi that was said to resemble a human infant, said an official on Monday (April 25)

Johor state Agriculture and Agro-based Industry committee chairman Ismail Mohamed said then they would be able to find out the possibility that it could be an offspring produced by a human and an animal.

Since we are talking a bit about odd stories, here is Ed Davey from the BBC with one of the questions you didn’t know you needed to know the answer to, but you really do:

What is the most expensive object on Earth?

True or false? A new nuclear power station in the south-west of the UK will be the most expensive object on Earth. That's the claim about the proposed plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset - but has anything else ever cost so much to build?

"Hinkley is set to be the most expensive object on Earth… best guesses say Hinkley could pass £24bn ($35bn)," said the environmental charity Greenpeace last month as it launched a petition against the project.

This figure includes an estimate for paying interest on borrowed money, but the financing arrangements for Hinkley C are so opaque that it is impossible to calculate exactly what the final cost will be.

From Africa we have a couple of stories.  The first from Krista Mahr in the Washington Post:

South African court says embattled president must face corruption case In another blow to South Africa’s embattled president, a high court ruled Friday that a 2009 decision to drop 783 corruption charges against President Jacob Zuma should be set aside, calling the earlier decision “irrational” and saying that Zuma should face the charges.

It was Zuma’s second dose of bad news in South Africa’s courts in less than a month. In March, the nation’s highest court unanimously ruled that the president failed to uphold the constitution when he did not repay some of the public funds spent on upgrades to his private estate, Nkandla. That judgment — and a subsequent presidential apology that many South Africans felt was insufficient — was followed by a parliamentary vote to remove him from office. Zuma easily survived that vote with the backing of the governing African National Congress (ANC).

And we will end with a happier story about a happy ending, from Janine Costa, for Reuters:

Former circus lions begin journey to South African refuge from Lima​

A blind lion, one that is missing an eye, and 31 others that had worked in circuses began the journey to a South African wildlife sanctuary from Lima, Peru, on Friday in what their rescuers called "the biggest transfer of animals in captivity" ever undertaken.

“These lions have endured hell on earth and now they are heading home to paradise. This is the world for which nature intended these animals for," Jan Creamer, president of Animal Defenders International, said in a statement. "It is the perfect ending to ADI’s operation which has eliminated circus suffering in another country.”