BitGou: Thursday Morning Briefing: Forgotten victims

Middle East

The children of parents who left their countries to join Islamic State are trapped in Iraqi prisons. With no universal law governing repatriations, it is unclear how to deal with these children, who many call innocent victims of their parent’s decisions. Some countries are dragging their feet, refusing to acknowledge citizenship claims. Children as young as nine face prosecution. Read our special report.

“Before the war we managed to get food because prices were acceptable and there was work,” Across Yemen’s remote mountain villages, the country’s war-induced economic crisis has left parents like Hussein Abdu destitute, hungry and watching their children waste away from malnutrition and unclean water. Here is a timeline of the impoverished Arabian Peninsula country’s slide into violence and how the conflict has developed.

U.S.-backed Syrian fighters said they were still searching territory captured from Islamic State at its final enclave in eastern Syria and denied a report the jihadists had been finally defeated. The final capture of the Baghouz enclave at the Iraqi border will mark the end of Islamic State territorial rule that once spanned a third of Syria and Iraq after years of military campaigns by a range of international and local forces.

United States

Midwestern farmers have been gambling they could ride out the U.S.-China trade war by storing their corn and soybeans anywhere they could - in bins, plastic tubes, in barns or even outside. Now, the unthinkable has happened. Record floods have devastated a wide swath of the Farm Belt across Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and several other states. Early estimates of lost crops and livestock are approaching $1 billion in Nebraska alone. With more flooding expected, damages are expected to climb much higher for the region.

The U.S. Department of Defense is proposing to pay for President Donald Trump’s much-debated border wall by shifting funds away from projects that include $1.2 billion for schools, childcare centers and other facilities for military children, according to a list it has provided to lawmakers. Military officials have vowed that they would not use any funds from military housing. A recent Reuters investigation found thousands of U.S. military families were subjected to serious health and safety hazards in on-base housing.

U.S. Supreme Court justices appeared poised to side with a black Mississippi death row inmate put on trial six times for a 1996 quadruple murder who accused a prosecutor of repeatedly blocking black potential jurors, though the court’s only black member sounded skeptical. Justice Clarence Thomas, who had not posed a question during an oral argument in three years, asked several in the case involving Curtis Flowers, 48, who has argued that his constitutional right to a fair trial was violated.

World

In the land that had become his sanctuary, Ibrahim Abdelhalim was struck by fear that he was about to watch his family be slaughtered as they gathered for prayer. Reuters interviews victims of New Zealand’s deadliest mass shooting.

The captain of a doomed Ethiopian Airlines flight did not practise on a new simulator for the Boeing 737 MAX 8 before he died in a crash with 157 others, a pilot colleague said. Yared Getachew, 29, was due for refresher training at the end of March, his colleague told Reuters, two months after Ethiopian Airlines had received one of the first such simulators being distributed.

“They have kidnapped @ROBERTOMARRERO, my chief of staff,” Juan Guaido said in a post on Twitter. The Venezuelan opposition leader said intelligence agents had arrested his chief of staff following a pre-dawn raid, signaling that President Nicolas Maduro may be cracking down on the opposition’s challenge to his rule. He added that the Caracas residences of Marrero and opposition legislator Sergio Vergara had been raided before dawn. “We do not know their whereabouts. They should be freed immediately.”

Thailand goes to the polls on Sunday under a new system that critics say the military government has devised to prevent the most popular political party, which has won every election since 2001, from returning to power. The military government says the new rules will usher in stability after more than a decade of fractious, at times violent, politics.

Sponsored by IBM: Where do you stack up? Forrester ranked the top 9 providers of enterprise insight platforms - see where your vendor stacks up. Read the Forrester Wave

Reuters Top News

@Reuters

Two @Reuters journalists have been imprisoned in Myanmar for 465 days. See full coverage: reut.rs/2U2Z16c

4:01 AM - 21 Mar 2019

Business

Boeing, FAA face more pressure from U.S. lawmakers over 737 MAX accidents

Pressure mounted on Boeing in Washington as U.S. lawmakers called for executives to testify about two crashed 737 MAX jets, even as the world’s biggest planemaker worked to return the grounded fleet to the skies.

6 Min Read

Solar and wind firms call the 'Green New Deal’ too extreme

U.S. solar and wind power companies may have the most to gain from the Green New Deal, an ambitious proposal backed by several Democratic presidential candidates to end U.S. fossil fuel consumption within a decade. But do not expect the renewable energy firms to endorse it. Representatives of America’s clean energy companies are withholding their support for the climate-fighting plan, calling it unrealistic and too politically divisive for an industry keen to grow in both red and blue states.

7 min read

U.S. whiskey exports dry up as tariffs bite

American whiskey exports slumped in the second half of 2018, taking a blow from higher duties by the country’s trading partners following President Donald Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, an industry group said. Overall for the full-year 2018, whiskey exports rose 5.1 percent to $1.18 billion, a significant drop from the 16 percent rise seen in 2017.

2 min read