Bhinneka News Online: Tuesday Morning Briefing: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern voices New Zealand's grief

Tuesday, 19 March 2019

Tuesday Morning Briefing: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern voices New Zealand's grief

Top News

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern praised the bravery of mosque worshippers as a lone gunman massacred their friends and family, saying the nation stood with its grieving Muslim community in this “darkest of days”. “The families of the fallen will have justice,” said Ardern, adding she would never mention the alleged gunman’s name. Bodies of the victims were being washed and prepared for burial in a Muslim ritual process on Tuesday, with teams of volunteers flown in from overseas to assist with the heavy workload.

Democratic congressional leaders have asked the FBI to investigate the founder of a Florida massage parlor chain who is an alleged acquaintance of President Donald Trump, according to a letter released by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer. It asked investigators to look into “public reports about alleged activities by Ms. Li ‘Cindy’ Yang and her apparent relationship with the president.” The Democrats’ letter said Yang’s website, which has been taken down, once offered clients the “opportunity to interact” with Trump and other political figures as well as participation in White House and Capitol Hill dinners.

“My view is that every vote matters. And the way we can make that happen is that we can have national voting. And that means get rid of the electoral college and everybody counts,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said, eliciting some of the most enthusiastic applause in a televised CNN town hall in Jackson, Mississippi. It was the first time Warren has explicitly called to eliminate the system established by the U.S. constitution, in which each state is allotted a set number of “electors” based on the combined total of the state’s representation in Congress.

Mozambique cyclone

“Everything indicates that we can register more than 1,000 deaths,” President Filipe Nyusi said on Radio Mocambique. The potential death toll from a powerful storm and preceding floods in Mozambique could greatly exceed current figures. President Nyusi said he had flown over the affected region, where two rivers had overflowed. He said villages had disappeared and bodies were floating in the water.

A storm ravaging southern Africa is possibly the worst weather-related disaster ever to hit the southern hemisphere, with 1.7 million people in the path of the cyclone in Mozambique and 920,000 affected in Malawi, U.N. officials said on Tuesday. Storm surge floods up to 6 meters deep had caused “incredible devastation” over a huge area, World Food Programme regional chief Lola Castro said.

World

Dutch authorities were trying to determine the motive behind the shooting incident on a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht in which three people were killed and five wounded. A Turkish-born man, 37-year-old Gokmen Tanis, was arrested after a seven-hour manhunt by security forces. Prosecutors have said he is suspected of three fatal shootings, possibly with terrorist intent. It was still unclear whether Tanis, who has a history of run-ins with law enforcement, was acting on political beliefs or a personal vendetta.

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plans were in disarray as her government sought to plot a way around the speaker of parliament’s ruling that she had to change her twice-defeated divorce deal to put it to a third vote. Speaker Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow blindsided Theresa May’s office by ruling the government could not put the same Brexit deal to another vote in parliament unless it was substantially different to the ones defeated on January 15 and March 12.

“This is not a victory announcement, but a significant progress in the fight against Daesh,” said Mustafa Bali, an SDF media official on Twitter after U.S.-backed fighters said they took a big step towards eradicating Islamic State’s last territorial possession in eastern Syria, seizing the jihadist camp at Baghouz and cornering remaining fighters against the Euphrates river.

Investigators into the Boeing 737 MAX crash in Ethiopia have found striking similarities in a vital flight angle with an airplane that came down off Indonesia, a source said, piling pressure on the world’s biggest planemaker.

Reuters Top News

@Reuters

Two @Reuters journalists have been imprisoned in Myanmar for 463 days. See full coverage: reut.rs/2TXsJJP

4:33 AM - 19 Mar 2019

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