👋 Salam!*
Welcome to Thursday, where Britons are expected to vote out Rishi Sunak, embattled Joe Biden vows to stay “to the end” despite calls to step down and an Australian wildlife park says koala cuddling is no longer cool. Meanwhile, Maíra Streit in Portuguese news website Mensagem keeps an eye on the threat of rising seas for a local community near Lisbon.
[*Azeri - Azerbaijan]
✅ SIGN UP
This is our daily newsletter Worldcrunch Today, a rapid tour of the news of the day from the world's best journalism sources, regardless of language or geography.
It's easy (and free!) to sign up to receive it each day in your inbox: 👉 Sign up here
🗞️ FRONT PAGE
Chinese People’s Daily devotes its front page to President Xi Jinping’s state visit to Kazakhstan to meet with Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, and take part in a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). On the sidelines of the summit, Xi met Russian President Vladimir Putin, who said the two countries’ “comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation are experiencing their best period in history.” The SCO, which also includes Iran, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, was founded by China and Russia in 2021 as a tool to counter Western influence.
🌎 7 THINGS TO KNOW RIGHT NOW
• Britons expected to deliver Labour landslide. Britons began voting on Thursday in a parliamentary election that is expected to bring Keir Starmer's Labour Party to power, moving away Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's Conservatives after 14 years. Opinion polls put Starmer's center-left party on course for a landslide victory but also suggest many voters simply want change after a period of turmoil under the Conservatives that led to Brexit and five prime ministers in the last eight years.
• Biden vows to stay “to the end” despite growing pressure to quit campaign. U.S. President Joe Biden is fighting to keep his candidacy alive amid growing alarm over his physical and mental fitness. The president insisted that he would keep running despite growing pressure from within his party to step aside following last week’s disastrous debate performance against Republican Donald Trump. Follow our international Eyes on the U.S. coverage here (or click here to receive it directly in your inbox!)
• Gaza ceasefire talks show signs of life as Israeli security cabinet meets. A renewed push is under way to end the war in Gaza as both Israel and Hamas speak to mediators about a long-stalled ceasefire plan. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will convene a meeting of his security cabinet on Thursday to discuss the latest proposal from Hamas.
• Hurricane Beryl batters Jamaica. Hurricane Beryl has hit Jamaica with heavy winds and rain, damaging buildings and felling trees on the Caribbean island. The category four storm brought winds of up to 130 mph on Jamaica's southern coast, and has killed at least seven. Downgraded to a category three storm, it’s due to make landfall in Mexico on Friday.
• Pro-Palestinian protesters breach security at Australia’s Parliament House to unfurl banners. Meanwhile, a senator quit the government over its direction on the war in Gaza. The four protesters were arrested after draping the words “war crimes” and “genocide” over the building’s façade known as the Great Verandah.
• India's X alternative Koo to shut down services. Millions of social media users in India are stranded after homegrown microblogging platform Koo announced it was shutting services. The platform's founders said a shortage of funding along with high costs for technology had led to the decision. Launched in 2020, Koo offered messaging in more than 10 Indian languages.
• An iconic wildlife park has banned koala cuddles. Tourists (including Vladimir Putin and Taylor Swift) have long flocked to the wildlife park in Queensland, Australia, to cuddle koalas. But as of this month, the small zoo has decided it will no longer offer “koala hold experiences,” which are considered bad for the animals.
#️⃣ BY THE NUMBERS
51,200 years
Scientists have discovered what they believe to be the world’s oldest artwork, dating back some 51,200 years ago, in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The painting depicts three people around a wild pig, in a single shade of dark red pigment. “This is the oldest evidence of storytelling,” said Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Australia’s Griffith University. For the team of scientists, this is proof that Europe is not the birthplace of cave art as it has long been assumed.
📰 STORY OF THE DAY
Aguas grandes: How a Portuguese town faces a rising threat of flooding
Floods have had a regular presence in Segundo Torrão, near Lisbon. But they are now threatening the lives of residents, as well as the survival of the local community, reports Maíra Streit in Portuguese news website Mensagem.
🌊 Carminda Calado sees the waves of the Tagus river, where it meets the Atlantic Ocean, through her living room window. She has lived a few meters from the beach in the Segundo Torrão neighborhood of Trafaria, near Lisbon, since the 1970s. Accustomed to the coming and going of the sea, Calad never imagined that her life would one day be endangered by its fury. But in 2002, she was swept away by waves that reached her backyard and was only saved when she hit a tree. The physical and emotional scars of that episode are visible to this day. She says she is now always vigilant.
✊ Stories like that of “Dona Mimi,” as Carminda Calado is called, are quite common here. And they have sparked the mobilization of a neighborhood where walls are very fragile; Segundo Torrão is one of the largest self-built neighborhoods of greater Lisbon. This led to the creation of a different method to face the challenge, which unites residents' traditional knowledge with the scientific knowledge of coastal geology and oceanography researchers investigating natural phenomena in the area.
⚠️ The situation in Segundo Torrão caught the attention of Xavier Bertin, from the LIENSs Laboratory at the University of La Rochelle in France, who was put in charge of the technical studies for this project. And to this day, Bertin alerts the community whenever he detects possible threats. That information is then passed on to the local Civic Protection unit, so they can intervene and protect families.
➡️ Read more on Worldcrunch.com
✉️ Want to receive all Worldcrunch articles by email? Subscribe to The Latest here (and check our other — free! — newsletters while you’re at it!)
📹 THIS HAPPENED VIDEO — TODAY IN HISTORY, IN ONE ICONIC PHOTO
➡️ Watch the video: THIS HAPPENED
💬 LEXICON
フロッピーディスク
Japan’s government has recently announced it had “won the war on floppy disks” after eliminating the use of the outdated storage devices in all its systems as part of efforts to modernize its bureaucracy. Up until last month, people were still asked to submit documents to the government using floppy disks (フロッピーディスク, pronounced furoppīdisuku — a phonetic adaptation of the English word). The Digital Agency, which was set up during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, scrapped all 1,034 regulations governing the devices’ use. Digital Minister Taro Kono has also vowed to get rid of fax machines and other analogue technology in government.
👉 MORE FROM WORLDCRUNCH
• Gaza Diary: Searching For "My Home" After War Destroys The House — DARAJ
• Make No Mistake, Le Pen And Trump Victories Would Be Very Bad News For Ukraine — FRANCE INTER
• Far Right Frenemies? Le Pen And Meloni Jostle For European Leadership — LA STAMPA
✍️ Newsletter by Emma Albright and Anne-Sophie Goninet
Let us know what’s happening in your corner of the world!