World AM News Briefs For Thursday, 2 June 2016
Good Morning Australia!! - The first hint of the location of the crashed EgyptAir jet - The UE warns Poland over its fading democracy - An ominous sign of what's to come in the Philippines - And more in your CareerSpot World News Briefs:
A French search team says it detected the locator signal from one of the black box flight recorders from EgyptAir Flight MS803, which crashed into the Mediterranean Sea last month while flying from Paris to Cairo. "The signal from a beacon from a flight recorder has been detected," said Remi Jouty of France's Bureau of Investigations and Analysis. The ship, named LaPlace, is using acoustic detection systems to listen to the locator "pings" given off by the black boxes underwater. Another French vessel with mini-subs that can dive to the floor of the Mediterranean arrives on the scene within days.
A United Nations aid convoy arrived in the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Darayya carrying food and baby formula, and medicine and vaccines. The town has been cut off from the world since 2012, and is suffering dire shortages of food, clean water and medicine. Meanwhile in northern Syria, Kurdish fighters have opened a new front against Islamic State in the town of Manbij, after a series of US airstrikes.
Two MPs are among the ten or more people killed in an Al Shabaab attack on a hotel in Somalia. The attackers set off a car bomb outside the Ambassador Hotel on Maka al-Mukarama street, and entered shooting. This closely followed the Somali government's announcement that troops killed 16 militants in an overnight raid, including Mohamed Kuno - believed to be the planner of the April 2015 attack on Kenya's Garissa University in which 148 people were killed.
Kenya is accusing an Egyptian diplomat of referring to sub-Saharan Africans as "dogs and slaves" during a conference in Nairobi. Cairo says there appears to be no evidence of the slur and is demanding that Kenya produce audio recordings to back up the allegation. The allegedly offensive Egyptian official has not been identified.
The European Union is warning Poland's right-wing government for threatening the rule of law - specifically, passing legislation that strips power from the country's highest court. The EU's enforcement arm the European Commission could invoke Article 7 of Lisbon Treaty, which would suspend Warsaw's voting rights over EU policy. It's not clear how much of a threat that is to a whack job Euroskeptic government. Justice Minister and Prosecutor General Zbigniew Ziobro said he was "surprised and saddened" by the European Commission's position and would continue to look for compromises.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is condemning the US-friendly Organization of American States (OAS), whose leader has called for an emergency session to discuss Venezuela's continued membership. Luis Almagro claims Caracas could slide backward into a "petty dictatorship" - although Almagro didn't seem to have any concerns about Brazil, which actually DOES have a coup government supplanting the democratically-elected one.
The Philippines is about to turn into a blood-soaked hellhole. Media groups are condemning psychotic president-elect Rodrigo Duterte for saying some journalists deserve to die. At a briefing on Tuesday, a reported asked Duterte about the high number of attacks on journalists - he replied, "You won't be killed if you don't do anything wrong." He then railed against a journalist who was murdered while Duterte was mayor of Davao City, and said the constitution can't help journalists who "disrespect" someone. So good luck with that.
Two men are dead after a shooting at the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, home to thousands of students from California and around the world. The entire campus was locked down for a few hours after shots rang out in an Engineering Department building, and all of Los Angeles went on alert. The murder-suicide was the 186th school shooting since the massacre of a second grade class at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.