5, July 2017
Half Americans trust CNN more than Trump 0
A new opinion poll shows that half of all Americans have more trust in the CNN news outlet than President Donald Trump, as tensions escalate between the US administration and the media. The online poll, conducted by Survey Monkey and reported by Axios Media Company on Tuesday, found that 50 percent of the respondents believed the CNN broadcaster was more trustworthy than Trump, compared to 43 percent who thought the opposite.
Trust, however, is largely split among partisan lines with 89 percent of Republicans favoring the US president and 91 percent of Democrats viewing the CNN news outlet as more trustworthy. Trump was also pitted against the American press and lost out to The Washington Post and The New York Times, with the newspapers being judged more trustworthy by 9 points.
Additionally, the Survey Monkey poll analyzed the attitude of US citizens toward Trump’s tweets, of which the majority of adults with 64 percent (89 percent of Democrats and 38 percent of Republicans) expressed their disapproval. Forty-seven percent of all adults responded by calling the tweets “undignified” and 34 percent describing them as “mean.” The Tuesday poll surveyed 4,965 adults between June 29 and July 3, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points.
Since his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump has repeatedly used the term “fake news” to accuse the CNN and mostly for any coverage criticizing him or his allies. On Sunday, Trump posted on Twitter an altered video of himself wrestling and punching a man with a CNN logo superimposed on his face. The 30-second video became an instant hit after it was retweeted by more than 93 thousand users in less than three hours.
Source: Presstv
6, July 2017
Japan: 10 missing, 400,000 flee flooding 0
At least 10 people, including a child, were missing and 400,000 were forced from their homes after record rains battered southwestern Japan for a second day on Thursday, sending rivers surging over their banks, a government official and media said.
Parts of Fukuoka Prefecture on the southwestern island of Kyushu were hit by 774 mm of rain in nine hours on Wednesday, about 2.2 times the amount of rain that falls in a normal July, NHK national television said.
Some 7,500 rescuers, including police, firefighters, and soldiers from Japan’s Self Defense Forces, were mobilized to help with evacuations and search for the missing. Forty helicopters were on standby until the weather improved.
“There are many reports of people whose safety cannot be confirmed, things like ‘a child was swept away by the river’ and ‘my house was swept away and I can’t get in touch with my parents,'” chief cabinet secretary Yoshihide Suga told an emergency early morning news conference.
“We will keep in close contact with the disaster-hit areas and work with all our energy to save lives and ascertain the extent of the damage,” he said. Fukuoka and Oita prefectures, both largely rural areas, were the worst-hit by the rain, which was caused by a low pressure area on the Pacific Ocean that fed warm, moist air into Japan’s seasonal rainy front.
Residents spent a worried night at evacuation centers set up at schools and government buildings on high ground amid reports of landslides and flooded roads. “It wasn’t just the rain, there was thunder and lightning, too. I couldn’t see anything ahead of me,” one woman at an evacuation center told NHK.
A schoolboy sitting with his family told NHK, “I haven’t heard from some of my friends, and I’m really worried.” There were no immediate reports of major transportation problems, but television footage showed a railway line left broken and twisted by floodwaters.
The same area was pounded by heavy rain earlier this week from Tropical Storm Nanmadol, which has since passed out to sea. The rain in Japan comes on the heels of a storm system that caused severe flooding across southern China and that killed 56 people and cost almost $4 billion in damage.
(Source: Reuters)