BitGou: Wednesday Morning Briefing: New Zealand begins funerals for mosque shooting victims

World

“I cannot tell you how gutting it is...a family came here for safety and they should have been safe here,” said Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, visiting the city for the second time since the massacre. The bodies of victims from New Zealand’s mosques mass shooting were carried in open caskets on the shoulders of mourners into a large tent at Christchurch’s Memorial Park Cemetery - the first burials of the 50 victims. The majority of victims from Friday’s attack in the South Island city were migrants or refugees from countries such as Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey, Somalia, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

Exclusive: The pilots of a doomed Lion Air Boeing 737 MAX scoured a handbook as they struggled to understand why the jet was lurching downwards, but ran out of time before it hit the water, three people with knowledge of the cockpit voice recorder contents said. The investigation into the crash, which killed all 189 people on board in October, has taken on new relevance as the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and other regulators grounded the model last week after a second deadly accident in Ethiopia.

Mozambique started three days of national mourning on Wednesday after a powerful cyclone and flooding killed hundreds of people and left a trail of destruction across swathes of southeast Africa. Cyclone Idai hit Mozambique’s port city of Beira with winds of up to 170 kph (105 mph) on Thursday last week, then moved inland to Zimbabwe and Malawi, flattening buildings and putting the lives of millions of people at risk.

Algeria’s army chief declared that the public has expressed “noble aims” during weeks of demonstrations against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, his strongest signal yet that the military is distancing itself from the long-serving ruler. The general’s comments, made on Tuesday during a tour of a military district and carried by Algerian media on Wednesday, came as an influential party in the governing coalition publicly turned on Bouteflika and those around him.

Indian women, especially those working in precarious informal sectors, are at the sharp end of what economists and opposition politicians describe as a jobs crisis in India. According to the private Center for Monitoring Indian Economy, 90 percent of around 10 million jobs lost last year were held by women. Several unemployed women interviewed by Reuters said they had soured on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who swept to power in 2014 vowing to turn India into an economic powerhouse but has struggled to create jobs.

Europe’s first underwater restaurant opens in Norway with more than 7,000 customers booked in to eat among the fish. It was designed by Norwegian architecture firm Snoehetta, which also created the Opera house in Oslo and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Located on the southern tip of Norway, the restaurant looks like a large concrete tube partly submerged in the North Sea. It is called Under, which also means “wonder” in Norwegian.

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12:50 AM - Mar 20, 2019

U.S. Politics

Democratic voters want to know how their eventual nominee will match up against President Donald Trump in the November 2020 general election. In the most polarized political environment in decades, candidates are trying to convince voters in early primary states that they would provide the best Trump opposition. And in a large field with few variations on policy so far, each contender is using different tactics to make their case.

Following the live-streaming on social media of the mass shooting in New Zealand, the chair of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security wrote a letter to top executives of four major technology companies urging them to do a better job of removing violent political content. Representative Bennie Thompson urged the chief executives of Facebook, Alphabet’s Google, which owns YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft to more swiftly remove content that would spawn political extremism.

Vice President Mike Pence took stock of the devastation in Nebraska as floods unleashed across the U.S. Midwest have killed four people, left one missing and caused more than a billion dollars in damage to crops, livestock and roads. The flooding that devastated the U.S. Midwest is likely to last into next week, as rain and melted snow flow into Kansas, Missouri and Mississippi, the National Weather Service said.

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