World AM News Briefs For Friday, 9 August 2019
Good Morning Australia!! - Aussie Students skip class for the ultimate good cause - Trump's failure in El Paso and Dayton - A mystery over why an Ebola doctor was murdered - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:
Thousands of Australian University students will skip classes or walk out today in support of the worldwide student movement to urge governments to act on Climate Change. "The climate crisis is the defining political issue of our generation and an existential threat to humanity," said National Union of Students (NUS) President Desiree Cai to the SBS. "We need to educate workers to go into renewable industries and use our researchers in order to find new solutions to stop the climate catastrophe." The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) supports the strike and urges members not to take action on absent students: "The Federal Government is still treating climate change as an inconvenience, rather than the most important issue facing humanity today," said union president Alison Barnes.
A United Nations panel is warning the world to change its dietary habits in the face of man-made global warming. A full vegan or vegetarian diet isn't necessary, but the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says chopping down forests willy-nilly produces out of control amounts of planet-warming CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide; agriculture guzzles up 70 percent of the planet's fresh water. And once the planet gets past an average temperature rise of 2 C Degrees - the very thing the Paris Climate Accord is trying to avoid - the ability to produce meat protein-rice diets diminishes. In other words, "Less Meat, Less Heat".
White House aides are privately admitting that Donald Trump's trips to Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas didn't go well at all. Instead of consoling greiving cities after two mass shooting massacres by young white men with easy access to military-style assault weapons, Trump behaved like Trump. After meeting with Dayton officials who pressed for more gun control, Trump waited until he was flying away at 500 miles an hour to pick fights with them over social media. In Texas, he bragged about the size of the crowd for an ugly, anti-immigrant rally he held in El Paso weeks earlier. Several patients who were wounded in the Walmart store by a racist quoting Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric refused to meet with him.
Meanwhile, Trump's anti-immigration policies are killing people. 41-year old Jimmy Aldaoud, helpless with diabetes and schizophrenia, died in Iraq this week because he couldn't get insulin. His Iraqi parents brought him to the US shortly after he was born in Greece, but apparently never filled out the right papers. Caught up in the unthinking cruelty of anti-immigrant hysteria, he was sent back to the country where US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) decided he belonged - Iraq, a place he had never visited, had no family, and couldn't speak the language. Jimmy Aldaoud spent his last two months homeless, begging for food, and sleeping rough, thanks to ICE and Trump.
ICE agents raided several agricultural plants in Mississippi, arresting 680 undocumented workers from Central America who were cutting up, processing, and packing chicken because Americans won't do that sort of work. Since these plants tend to operate in "factory towns" where both parents in a given family work, the raids left hundreds of very young children stranded at daycare and school, or otherwise without supervision. "It was very devastating to see all those kids crying, having seen their parents for the last time," said area resident Gabriela Rosales. Strangely, the plant's executive offices - located hundreds of kilometers away in Park Ridge, Illinois outside Chicago - were not raided for employing undocumented workers. Can't figure out how that could have been overlooked. US Democratic Presidential hopeful and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders describes the mass raid as "evil".
Brazil's top judge has ordered the police and government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro not to investigate journalist Glenn Greenwald, whose website "The Intercept" published proof of collusion between prosecutors and judges to sabotage the presidential campaign of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. "Freedoms of expression and press cannot be vilified by investigations directed against a journalist in the regular exercise of his profession," Judge Mendes stated. Lula was convicted of corruption charges that supporters say were trumped up and remains jailed.
Cruise ships could be banned from Venice, Italy's city center within a couple of weeks now that the historic city of water has banned them. Residents have been protesting big ships for a while now, complaining they show up and dump thousands of tourists at a time. "They are destroying Venice, they are physically destroying Venice, physically destroying our lungs," local activist Tommaso Cacciari told the ABC a few months ago. The last straw was in June when the MSC Opera crashed into a dock injuring four people.
Police in the DR Congo arrested three local medics in the murder of a doctor who had come from Cameroon to help efforts to stop the Kivu Ebola Outbreak. Richard Mouzoko was shot dead in April - the UN World Health Organization (WHO) lauded him as "always ready to go where people would need his help most". But the motive for such a crime remains unclear. The Kivu Ebola Outbreak has killed more than 1,800 people, more than two-thirds of those infected with the dreaded virus.