French PM offers concession to unions

French labor union members and workers on strike attend a demonstration as France faces its 38th consecutive day of strikes against the French Government’s pension reform plans in Paris on Saturday. French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe on Saturday offered a big concession to unions contesting his government’s overhaul of the pension system, in a move aimed at ending strikes.SD-Agencies

Australian PM’s approval rating slumps

The latest polling shows that Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s approval rating has declined sharply in the face of the horrendous natural disaster, which has so far killed 28 people and destroyed 2,000 homes.

Morrison has come under attack for being slow to respond to the unprecedented crisis — he even took a family holiday to Hawaii while fires were burning — and acknowledged on Sunday he had made some mistakes.

“There are things I could have handled on the ground much better,” he said on Sunday. Morrison in early January announced a 2 billion Australian dollars (US$1.4 billion) bushfire recovery fund and called on 3,000 army reservists to back up state emergency workers.

Iran admits shooting down airliner

Iran’s military said on Saturday it “unintentionally” shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet.

The plane was bound for Kyiv when it came down shortly after takeoff in Tehran, killing all 176 people on board.

A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guards commander said on Saturday that he knew a missile had brought down a plane the same day it happened and accepted full responsibility, saying his force had acted in error while on alert for “all-out war.”

“I wish I could die and not witness such an accident,” the head of the Guards’ aerospace division, Amirali Hajizadeh, said on state television.

US storms death toll rises to 11

Severe storms sweeping across southern portions of the United States and up into the Midwest were blamed on Saturday in the deaths of at least 11 people, including two first responders, as high winds, tornadoes and unrelenting rain battered large swaths of the country.

Storm-related fatalities were reported in Texas due to icy weather, in Alabama from a deadly tornado and in Louisiana, where winds were so strong that a trailer home was lifted off its foundation and carried several hundred meters. A man drowned in Oklahoma and the storms even touched the Midwest with at least one death on an icy highway in Iowa. Hundreds of thousands of people were left without power from Texas to Ohio, parts of highways were closed in Oklahoma and Arkansas.

Prince Harry and Meghan step back as ‘senior’ royals

Britain’s Prince Harry and his wife Meghan will step back as senior members of the royal family and spend more time in North America, the couple said in a shock announcement last week.

“We intend to step back as ‘senior’ members of the royal family and work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty The Queen,” they said in a statement released by Buckingham Palace. “We now plan to balance our time between the United Kingdom and North America.”

NASA finds another potentially habitable planet

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered another Earth-sized, potentially habitable planet orbiting around a star in the range of distances where conditions could allow for the presence of liquid water on the planet’s surface.

Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists confirmed the find, called TOI 700 d, according to a statement from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

The new planet joins other Earth-sized planets discovered by NASA, including several in the TRAPPIST-1 system, and other worlds discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, JPL said.(SD-Agencies)