Hello Australia!! - The US and friends allegedly killed way more civilians than previously acknowledged - Tropical trees disappear at a stunning pace - Biden's in - And more in your CareerSpot Global News Briefs:

The world lost some 12 million hectares of forest in the world's tropical regions in 2018, according to the Global Forest Watch report.  That's roughly equivalent to 30 football fields per minute.  The loss includes an area of these older, untouched trees the size of Belgium, and the report warns it is unlikely these gems can be replaced.  By far, the biggest loss of primary rainforest land last year was seen in Brazil, where some 1.35 million hectares disappeared.  That was followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Colombia, and Bolivia.   "The world's forests are now in the emergency room," said Frances Seymour, senior fellow at the US-based World Resources Institute (WRI), which led the research. "It's death by a thousand cuts - the health of the planet is at stake and band aid responses are not enough."

US-led coalition air and artillery strikes killed 1,600 civilians during the battle to oust the so-called Islamic State from its former stronghold in Raqqa, Syria in 2017.  Amnesty International and monitoring group Airwars interviewed survivors and investigated the number of covilian losses at the scene and are urging the West to "end almost two years of denial" about such deaths.  The coalition claims only 180 civilians died.  Amnesty's senior crisis response adviser Donatella Rovera said, "Many of the (coalition) air bombardments were inaccurate and tens of thousands of artillery strikes were indiscriminate, so it is no surprise they killed and injured many hundreds of civilians."

Sri Lanka has revised the death toll from the Easter Sunday Bombings to about 100 fewer deaths than previously reported:  "It could be 250 or 260. I can't exactly say," said Anil Jasinghe, the director general of Sri Lanka's health services.  "There are so many body parts and it is difficult to give a precise figure," he added.  Also, Sri Lanka's defense secretary Hemasiri Fernando announced his resignation in response to the intelligence failures before the bombings - India had passed along information of a bombing plot, but that was not shared among relevant officials including the president and prime minister.

After five months of raucous and costly Yellow Vest demonstrations in the capital and other cities, French President Emmanuel Macron has announced long-awaited reforms meant to placate the protesters.  He's offering tax cuts, a reform of the civil service, and the introduction of proportional representation in response to inequality, budget cuts to social services, and capital flight from the provinces to the big city.  Macron says he recognized that Yellow Vests were making "fair demands".  The reforms were supposed to have been introduced last week, but the announcement was preempted by the Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral fire.

Former US Vice President Joe Biden released a video announcing he's running for President in 2020, ending speculation.  Directly attacking Donald Trump for claiming there were "very fine people on both sides" of the deadly Charlottesville racist riots of 2017 in which a young woman was murdered by a neo-nazi coward, Biden said the "core values of the nation" and "our very democracy, everything that has made America America, is at stake".  Biden enters a very crowded Democratic field against candidates with much better progressive bona fides than his own, and will likely focus on his "regular guy" image and perceived ability to connect with the white working class.