(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Overnight News Digest June 2, 2023 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-06-02 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. BBC India train crash: More than 280 dead after Odisha incident At least 288 people are now known to have been killed and 900 injured in a multiple train collision in India's eastern Odisha state, officials say. More than 200 ambulances were sent to the scene in Balasore district, says Odisha's chief secretary Pradeep Jena. One passenger train is thought to have derailed before being struck by another on the adjacent track late on Friday. It is India's worst train crash this century. Officials say the death toll is expected to rise further. Indian Railways said the two services involved were the Coromandel Express and the Howrah Superfast Express. Sudhanshu Sarangi, director general of Odisha Fire Services, said that the death toll stood at 288. Mr Jena said earlier that more than 100 additional doctors had been mobilised. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was distressed by the incident and his thoughts were with the bereaved families. NPR YouTube will no longer take down false claims about U.S. elections YouTube will no longer remove videos falsely claiming the 2020 U.S. presidential election was stolen, reversing a policy put in place in the contentious weeks following the 2020 vote. The Google-owned video platform said in a blog post that it has taken down "tens of thousands" of videos questioning the integrity of past U.S. presidential elections since it created the policy in December 2020. But two and a half years later, the company said it "will stop removing content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches occurred in the 2020 and other past U.S. Presidential elections" because things have changed. It said the decision was "carefully deliberated." "In the current environment, we find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm," YouTube said. The Guardian Nova Scotia hopes forecast rain will help contain largest wildfire on record Rain on Friday and a rainy forecast for the weekend have fire officials hopeful they can get the largest wildfire ever recorded in Canada’s Atlantic coast province of Nova Scotia under control. That wildfire and three others in the province have prompted air quality warnings in US regions as far south as Virginia and Maryland. “My weather app says 80% chance rain. Giddy up to that,” Halifax’s mayor, Mike Savage, tweeted. The huge Barrington Lake fire in Nova Scotia’s south-west is now considered the province’s largest wildfire on record. Burning more than 200 square kilometers (more than 75 sq miles) in Shelburne county, the blaze continues to withstand round after round of water-bombers and air tankers dropping water and fire retardant from the cloudy skies. The Guardian Vietnam: outcry after leading climate activist arrested, accused of tax evasion Police in Vietnam have arrested a prominent environmental activist after accusing her of tax evasion, charges that have been dismissed by critics as politically motivated. Hoang Thi Minh Hong, a former CEO of Change, an environment-focused NGO, was detained by police along with her husband, Nam Hoang, and former staff members of Change in Ho Chi Minh City on Wednesday. “The police searched our house and Hong’s office,” Nam told the Guardian. “Many staff members from Change were detained, but we were all released except Hong … I hope she will be released.” Phil Robertson from Human Rights Watch, said: “Vietnam’s selective use of its vague and flawed tax law to target environmentalists and climate change activists with politically motivated prosecutions is a new, extremely troubling development. Reuters Russian forces tried to blow up my men, says mercenary boss Prigozhin June 2 (Reuters) - Russian mercenary boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, who has been arguing with top military brass for months, on Friday escalated the feud by accusing pro-Moscow forces of trying to blow up his men. Prigozhin's Wagner Group troops have largely pulled back from the eastern Ukrainian town of Bakhmut, most of which they captured last month after taking heavy casualties, and handed over their positions to regular Russian forces. Prigozhin, writing on Telegram, said his men had discovered a dozen locations in rear areas where defence ministry officials had planted various explosive devices, including hundreds of anti-tank mines. When asked why the charges had been set, the officials indicated it was an order from their superiors. "It was not necessary to plant these charges in order to deter the enemy, as it (the area in question) is in the rear area. Therefore, we can assume that these charges were intended to meet the advancing units of Wagner," he said. Deutsche Welle Germany's far-right AfD sees poll numbers surging Never before have voters in Germany been this unhappy with the current coalition government: Only one in five says they are doing a good job. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the neoliberal Free Democrats (FDP) are plummeting in the polls, after only one and a half years in office. This is according to pollster infratest-dimap who surveyed 1300 eligible voters on May 30 and 31, 2023, and published the results in its monthly "Deutschlandtrend." The far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) is the main beneficiary. Its approval ratings have gone up by another 2% since May and, if elections were held now, would win 18% nationwide putting them on a par with Chancellor Olaf Scholz's SPD. In several eastern states, the AfD has long been the strongest party. The center-right bloc of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the regional Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU) which led most West German governments since the end of WW II, is polling at a steady 29%. In the general election in 2021, the CDU/CSU managed only a weak 24.1%. The SPD, however, won 25.7%, the FDP 11.5%, and the Green Party 14.8% of the vote. In the following months, the Greens saw their support rise to 23% by the summer of 2022 but have been losing ground again since then, slipping again to 15% this month. The FDP polls at 7%. And the opposition post-communist Left Party would narrowly fail to clear the 5% threshold required for representation in the Bundestag. Deutsche Welle Russia accused of holding 20,000 Ukrainian civilians captive "Everyone keeps saying: 'You have to wait.' We've been waiting for a year now. The conditions in captivity are not the best, to say the least," said Anton Chyrkov, inviting people into a living room where several women are sitting at a large table. He took a seat at the head of the table, a massive piece of furniture that his father, Oleksandr Chyrkov, a funeral director, made himself, like much of the furniture in the house. The house is located on a pleasant housing estate not far from the village of Dymer on the shore of the Kyiv Reservoir, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) north of Ukraine's capital. The Russian army occupied the area on February 25, 2022 as it planned to continue on to Kyiv. In the first three weeks of the occupation, when the phone lines were down and there was no electricity, Oleksandr Chyrkov and the neighbor Dmytro Bohazhevsky kept life going in the village. Locals often crowded around the Chyrkovs' well. Anton suspects that is why the Russians thought his father, whom he has not seen for over a year, was the leader of the resistance. "When they came to us on March 16, the first thing they asked for was weapons. Everyone here has some. We had three in the safe," said Anton, explaining that the Russian soldiers came to collect the arms the next morning. "And my dad was told to pack his things." Washington Post Interruption of children’s choir singing national anthem at U.S. Capitol stokes furor [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/6/2/2173021/-Overnight-News-Digest-June-2-2023 Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/