News Headlines - 05 May 2019
▽Newly crowned Thai king carried through Bangkok in royal procession - Reuters
Thai King Maha Vajiralongkorn visited Buddhist temples and greeted his subjects for the first time since his crowning in a royal procession around the old quarter of Bangkok on Sunday, as part of intricate coronation ceremonies held over three days.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro cancelled a trip to New York Friday after several companies pulled out of an event where he was to be honoured.
In April, the Brazilian-American Chamber of Commerce named Bolsonaro 2019 Person of the Year, inviting him to take part in a gala dinner in New York the following month.
The chamber rented space at the American Museum of Natural History for the event. The museum later said it would not be hosting the gala honouring Brazil’s far right president amid backlash. Companies including Delta Air Lines and the Financial Times also said they would not attend.
▽North Korea Urgently Needs Food Aid After Worst Harvest in Decade, U.N. Says - The New York Times
About 40 percent of North Korea’s population is in urgent need of food aid after the country suffered its worst harvest in a decade, the United Nations said on Friday, even as its regime defied international sanctions in order to keep its nuclear weapons program.
The bad harvest left North Korea with a 1.36 million ton shortage of grain, forcing its government to reduce daily state rations to less than 11 ounces per person in January, compared with 380 grams a year earlier, the World Food Program and the Food and Agriculture Organization said in their joint assessment.
▽Xi Jinping Tries to Crash the May Fourth Movement’s Centenary | The New Yorker
For China’s aging political leadership, certain anniversaries teeter between the emblematic and the problematic. On Tuesday, President Xi Jinping stood in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, one of the most consequential social protests in Chinese history, in which students agitated against the incompetence of the country’s authoritarian leaders. Xi told “China’s youth” today to love their motherland, and to “obey the party and follow the Party.” He also urged them to study the May Fourth Movement, and added that “those who are unpatriotic, who would even go so far as to cheat and betray the motherland, are a disgrace in the eyes of their own country and the whole world.”
Xi was taking a risk: the legacy of the May Fourth Movement is a complicated one, and to study its history is to confront the central hypocrisy of the Communist Party.
▽Jet stream pattern responsible for heatwaves, droughts in 2018: study - Xinhua
The extreme weather conditions were "directly connected to the emergence of a re-occurring pattern in the jet stream that stretches around the entire Northern Hemisphere," said lead author Kai Kornhuber from the University of Oxford and the PIK.
At a height of about 10 kilometers within the atmosphere, the air current formed a stalled wave pattern, which made weather conditions more persistent and thus extreme in the affected regions, the PIK study found.
According to the study, the same pattern had also occurred during the heat waves in Europe that occurred during the summers of 2015, 2006 and 2003.
