BBC
Israel is set to hold a fifth general election in under four years, after its fractured coalition government concluded it could not survive.
In a major political development, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett will switch places with Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid under an existing deal.
An election could take place in late October, commentators say.
The former prime minister and current opposition leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, has vowed to return to office.
Monday's announcement comes after weeks of speculation that the coalition - the most diverse in Israel's history - was on the brink of collapse.
It risked losing an important vote next week after a member of Mr Bennett's own right-wing Yamina party quit the coalition, leaving it a minority in the 120-seat Knesset (parliament).
Mr Bennett said he had made the "right decision" in the interests of Israel's security, as dissolving the Knesset extended temporary laws which were put in jeopardy by the vote.
Der Spiegel
Kirill Krechetov still has clear memories of the moment he found the white-and-red envelope in his mailbox. Inside was a summons instructing him to show up the next day at his local draft office. "Damn it, now I have to go to Ukraine," he recalls cursing to himself. Over the telephone, he says he was immediately filled with fear.
Krechetov, 35, is a construction worker and the father of a two-year-old daughter. He lives in Nizhny Novgorod, located about seven hours by car east of Moscow. Speaking rapidly, he asks that his real name not be used out of concern for his safety. Ten years ago, Krechetov completed his mandatory military service with a special unit belonging to the military intelligence agency GRU, and he is now a private first class in the reserves. He was initially contacted several weeks before the summons letter landed in his mailbox – in the form of a message sent via the messaging service Viber: Kirill Ivanovich, we are waiting for you, Krasnodarski Krai, 10th Brigade of the GRU Special Forces." Krechetov deleted the message. "I know how many of our boys are dying in Ukraine." He has learned of the casualty numbers, he says, from Telegram. "They only lie on the television."
Al Jazeera
The government of Canada announced that it will ban the manufacturing and import of a number of “harmful” single-use plastics, with several new regulations coming into place in December.
The new rules, announced Monday, will apply to checkout bags, utensils, food-service products with plastic that is difficult to recycle, ring carriers, stir sticks, and straws with some exceptions, the government announced in a release.“
Our government is all in when it comes to reducing plastic pollution …That’s why we’re announcing today that our government is delivering on its commitment to ban harmful single-use plastics,” said environment minister Steven Guilbeault in a press conference Monday.
Al Jazeera
The Taliban have released several British citizens who were detained in Afghanistan after an agreement was reached between the two countries, Taliban and UK officials have said.
The detainees were released on Sunday following a series of meetings between Afghan and British officials, said Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesman for the Taliban government, in a statement on Monday.
“A number of British nationals were released, who were arrested about six months ago for violating the laws and traditions of the Afghan people,” he said.
Mujahid didn’t say what laws the UK citizens had broken or elaborate on why they had been detained.
The statement said all of them pledged to respect the laws of Afghanistan, the traditions and culture of the Afghan people and not to violate them again.
London said five Britons had been released, but did not provide their identities or details on when they were arrested and on what grounds.
Bangkok Post
Thailand’s exports of cassava products between January and April jumped 28% from the same period last year as importers sought grain alternatives, a senior official said on Monday, amid a food crisis brought on by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
The world's largest cassava exporter shipped 4.6 million tonnes of cassava and its products including tapioca, cassava starch and pellets worth 54.8 billion baht in the first four months of the year, up 28.2% from the same period a year earlier, the Commerce Ministry said.
Nearly 70% of exports went to China. Other destinations included Japan, Indonesia and South Korea.
Deutsche Welle
German authorities have seized three private apartments and a bank account belonging to a sanctioned member of the Russian Duma parliament and his wife, the public prosecutor in the southern Bavarian city of Munich said on Monday.
"As far as we know, this is the first case in Germany that assets have not only been 'frozen' due to sanctions, but actual real estate has been seized," senior prosecutor Anne Leiding said.
The sanctioned individual, named as L. by the prosecutors, was one of the members of the Duma who voted to support Russian President Vladimir Putin's call to recognize the Ukrainian breakaway regions calling themselves the People's Republic of Donetsk and People's Republic of Luhansk as independent states.
L. has been on the list of EU sanctions since February 23. Bavarian authorities are investigating both the husband and wife for infringing against sanctions.
Deutsche Welle
Germany must limit its use of gas for electricity production and prioritize the filling of storage facilities to compensate for a drop in supply from Russia, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said Sunday.
In a move that goes against the principles of his environmentally-friendly Green Party, the country will also have to increase the burning of coal, Habeck said.
Russian gas company Gazprom announced last week that it was reducing supplies through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline for technical reasons, saying there had been delays in the repair of compressor turbines by the German company Siemens Energy.
Germany has come under intense criticism in the past, particularly from the United States, for its reliance on cheap Russian energy sources, which Washington has always seen as a security risk for Europe.
The Guardian, US Edition
Bills with benefits for low-income mothers don’t counteract bans that would lead to higher risks for maternal mortality, say experts.
A number of Republican-led states that are moving to ban abortion are, at the same time, extending health insurance benefits to new mothers, professing to support “women in crisis”.
As the US supreme court prepares to rule on national abortion rights, many Republican states are seeking severe abortion bans that would force many women to carry pregnancies to term, likely worsening the US maternal mortality crisis.
Some of those same lawmakers are now passing bills that extend Medicaid benefits to low-income mothers, typically for one year after they give birth rather than the current two months.
Arizona, Florida, Tennessee and Texas have all extended health benefits for low-income mothers in recent months, and Alabama and Georgia have both moved to implement such extensions, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. All have also sought to impose severe abortion restrictions or bans.
The Guardian, US Edition
Abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked in a famous speech in 1852: ‘What to the American slave is your Fourth of July?’ For formerly enslaved persons, Juneteenth, celebrated in the US today, was their freedom story. Today, it’s commemorated by their descendants and an entire nation.
Last year, Joe Biden signed a law designating 19 June (Juneteenth, for short) as a federal holiday.
In 1865, two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing enslaved persons in the Confederates states, Union major general Gordon Granger landed in Galveston, Texas, and delivered the news. Since then, Black Texans, including Opal Lee, called the ‘Grandmother of Juneteenth’, have commemorated the day with parades, picnics and speeches.
As Black people migrated across the country, they carried Juneteenth with them, helping to turn an event once recognized only in Black communities into a national holiday.
Here’s a look at the celebrations over time.
The Guardian, UK Edition
Boris Johnson has responded to the biggest rail strikes in a generation with plans to break the industrial action by allowing firms to bring in agency staff, a move that unions have decried as unworkable, unsafe and potentially breaking international law.
As 40,000 workers prepared for Tuesday’s strike, the most wide-reaching on the railways in 30 years, Downing Street brought forward changes to enable employers to replace employees with temporary staff.
The highly controversial measure would make disputes long and bitter, unions warned on Monday, with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) accusing Johnson of taking a step that “even Margaret Thatcher did not go near”.
The Guardian, UK Edition
The Times swiftly withdrew a story that made allegations about the prime minister and his wife after Downing Street intervened to complain about it, No 10 has confirmed.
The piece alleged that Boris Johnson attempted to hire Carrie Symonds, who he has since married, as his taxpayer-funded chief of staff when he was foreign secretary and she was a Conservative party press chief.
The story claimed the plan fell apart when his closest advisers learned of the idea. Johnson was still married to the barrister Marina Wheeler at the time.
A spokesperson for Carrie Johnson said the allegations were “totally untrue”. A Downing Street source described it as a “grubby, discredited story”.
However, the freelance journalist who wrote it, Simon Walters, has defended the article, which appeared on page five of some early print copies of Saturday’s Times but was dropped for later editions after the intervention from No 10.
On Monday Downing Street confirmed it contacted the newspaper on Friday night and asked it to retract the story.
The Guardian
Transporting food from where it is produced to our dinner plates creates at least triple the amount of greenhouse gas emissions as previously estimated, a new study suggests.
So called “food miles” are likely responsible for about 6% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, the authors of the study found after calculating that 3bn tonnes of CO2-equivalent was produced in transporting food for human consumption each year.
Scientists who carried out the research, which analysed 74 countries and regions and 37 different types of food, found richer countries accounted for 46% of the emissions from food miles but just 12.5% of the world’s population.
The Guardian, Australian Edition
Tanya Plibersek says a damning national environmental report card received by the former Coalition government last year but not released, tells an “alarming story” of decline, native species extinction and cultural heritage loss.
In one of her first interviews as the new federal environment and water minister, Plibersek said the state of the environment report – a five-yearly official scientific assessment – would be released when she gave a National Press Club address on 19 July. It would help inform changes Labor planned to strengthen the country’s widely criticised national environment laws, she said.
The Guardian, Australian Edition
The Victorian Greens will introduce a bill to parliament to impose a ban on all new gas connections to homes within three years, with the requirement for residences to be connected to the network to be scrapped in the meantime.
The party’s leader, Samantha Ratnam, will introduce the Planning and Environment Amendment (Transition From Gas) Bill 2022 in the upper house on Tuesday as part of the Greens platform ahead of the November state election.
If passed, the bill will scrap the existing requirements for residential developments to connect to the gas network “where available” and plumbing regulations requiring solar water heaters to be gas-boosted. It will also ban all new gas connections from 2025.
Gas is usually described as having about half the emissions of coal when burned, though studies have found its impact on the climate is greater than this once methane leaks during extraction and transport are factored in.
The Guardian, International Edition
Palaces, yachts and vineyards reportedly provided to Vladimir Putin by friends and oligarchs can now be linked to what appears to be an informal network holding assets worth more than $4.5bn (£3.7bn).
A digital paper trail appears to suggest that an array of holiday homes and other assets reportedly used by the Russian president, which according to available records belong to or have been owned by separate individuals, companies and charities, are linked through a common email domain name, LLCInvest.ru.
A snapshot of leaked email exchanges from last September further suggests directors and administrators associated with some of the separate entities that hold and manage these assets have discussed day-to-day business problems as if they were part of a single organisation.
An anti-corruption expert in Russia, who requested anonymity given the political situation in Moscow, said the findings raised questions as to whether there was a level of “common management”.
CNN
(CNN)A sprawling 3,400-year-old city emerged in Iraq after a reservoir's water level swiftly dropped due to extreme drought.
Kurdish and German archaeologists
excavated the settlement in the Mosul reservoir, along the Tigris River in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, in January and February. The project was in partnership with the Directorate of Antiquities and Heritage in Duhok to preserve the area's cultural heritage for future generations.
The archaeological site, Kemune, is believed to be the Bronze Age city Zakhiku, a major hub of the Mittani Empire that reigned from 1550 to 1350 BC. The kingdom's territory stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to northern Iraq, according to Ivana Puljiz, junior professor in the department of near eastern archaeology and assyriology at the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, Germany, and one of the directors of the project.
CNN
(CNN)The city council in Texas' capital approved a resolution to explore raising the age for purchasing AR-15-style rifles and other semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21 during a meeting Thursday.
The
resolution directs Austin City Manager Spencer Cronk to "explore every option" to would allow the city to restrict the sale of such guns to people under the age of 21, despite a Texas statute prohibiting local governments from setting their own restrictive gun measures.
Lawmakers passed the resolution with a 10-1 vote. Council member MacKenzie Kelly, who was opposed, raised questions about potential legal action from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, and local businesses, because the higher gun purchasing age for semi-automatic weapons increase could violate state law.
Local municipalities in Texas lack the authority to regulate the sale, ownership, transfer and registration of firearms and ammunition, according to
Texas' local government code.
The crew of the Overnight News Digest consists of founder Magnifico, regular editors side pocket, maggiejean, Chitown Kev, eeff, Magnifico, annetteboardman, Rise above the swamp, Besame and jck. 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.