World News Briefs For Sunday, 25 June 2017
Hello Australia!! - Scores are missing in a giant landslide - The biggest rock star at Glasto didn't bring a guitar - The Arnold and Emmanuel show double teams Trump - WTF is wrong with an athletic association's name? - And more in your CareerSpot Global News:
A massive landslide covered an entire village and its inhabitants in southwest China's Sichuan province. 15 bodies have been recovered and more than a hundred people are still missing. Officially, heavy rain is the cause of the slide. A local rescue official says more than three million cubic meters of material had fallen 800 meters down onto Xinmo, which sits in the middle of an area where China moved mountains and earth to build an extensive networks of dams.
Iraqi forces have freed hundreds of civilians who were trapped in Mosul's old city under the draconian rule of the so-called Islamic State, but things are not going well for those still trapped. As the people walked out through escape routes protected by the US-trained Iraqis, the battle is shaping up to be one of the deadliest in the eight-month campaign to take back Mosul, which had been controlled by IS since 2014. "Hundreds of civilians, including children, are being shot" by terrorists, according to UN Humanitarian Coordinator Lise Grande.
There are now more than 200,000 confirmed and suspected cases of cholera in Yemen, the worst such outbreak anywhere in the world. A joint statement from UNICEF and the World Health Organization says, "In just two months, cholera has spread to almost every governorate of this war-torn country," when 5,000 new cases per day. Yemen's health and sanitation infrastructures have collapsed after two years of proxy war between the Saudi-backed government and the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, along with IS and other jihadist factions out for themselves.
British Prime Minister Theresa May was heckled with booing and shouts of "shame on you" as she visited Liverpool for the city's official Armed Forces Day parade, an event that's usually very friendly to Tories. She isn't doing much better at Glastonbury, either, with artists such as Radiohead's Thom Yorke blasting her from he Pyramid Stage. Yorke finished his song "No Surprises" with, "See ya later, Theresa" and telling her to "shut the door on the way out'. That prompted the crowd to cheer and go into a chant of "Oh, Jeremy Corbyn", sung to the tune of The White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army". That chant has gone viral at the festival among thousands of young people who want to reclaim their futures from Tory meanness and penny pinching.
Meanwhile, the UK Labour leader was treated like the rock star he is at Glasto, with founder Michael Eaves welcoming Mr. Corbyn on the stage as "hero of the hour", and Jeremy responding by giving Eaves a copy of the Labour Manifesto. "And if you see that far," Corbyn told the cheering crowd, "look at the wall that surrounds this festival. There's a message for president Donald Trump. You know what it says? Build bridges, not walls." And the crowd went wild.
French President Emmanuel Macron announced he will push for a new global pact to establish and protect the human right to a clean and healthy environment. He accepted ideas at a meeting at Sorbonne University in Paris: "I pledge to act so that the work initiated continues, so that we reach a text, convince our partners, place these efforts under the aegis of the UN," he said, "And from September have the basis of a world environment pact." Backers hope to put it before the United Nations for adoption and impose legally-binding obligations on signatory states.
Attendees at the Sorbonne conference included former UN chief Ban Ki-moon and Republican former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had earlier teamed with Macron to jab at Donald Trump for pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement: "I'm here with President Macron, we're talking about environmental issues and a green future," said Arnold in a Twitter post, while Emmanuel responds, "And now we will deliver together to make the planet great again!"
The World Taekwondo Federation has changed its name because of the internet. The group's acronym is the same as the internet shorthand for "What the F***", which has transcended all languages. And no matter how hard those blackbelts might be able to kick, the trolls are not about to stop reminding them. "In the digital age, the acronym of our federation has developed negative connotations unrelated to our organization, and so it was important that we rebranded to better engage with our fans," said Choue Chung-won, president of the organization now known simply as World Taekwondo. Now, if they could only do something about Taekwondo's sibling rivalry with MMA..