This is The Loop, your quick catch-up for this morning's news as it happened.
Key events
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That's it for The Loop today
By Felicity Ripper
Hi, thanks for joining us for another later version of The Loop.
If you're catching up, here's a few items we covered this morning. (click the link to jump straight to the post):
Trouble for Tik Tok in the US
By Felicity Ripper
Tik Tok representatives say the Biden administration has demanded that the Chinese owners of the company divest their stakes in the popular video app or face a possible US ban.
It's a drastic move in a series of recent steps by US officials, who've raised fears that TikTok's US user data may be passed on to China's government.
ByteDance-owned TikTok has more than 100-million users in America.
It's the first time under the administration of President Joe Biden that a potential ban on TikTok has been threatened.
February jobs data has dropped
By Felicity Ripper
A strong bounce in jobs last month will maintain pressure on the Reserve Bank to keep increasing official interest rates, despite global banking jitters.
The unemployment rate fell back to 3.5 per cent in February, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, with almost 65,000 jobs estimated to have been added to the economy last month.
The business team will have more:
Another 2,000 inmates sent to El Salvador mega prison
By Felicity Ripper
El Salvador’s government has sent 2,000 more suspects to a huge new prison built especially for gang members, sharing more images of the inmates being herded away.
The justice minister vowed that “they will never return” to the streets.
The tough statement came as the administration of President Nayib Bukele asked for yet another extension of an anti-gang emergency measures that would take the crackdown into its 13th month.
Over the last 354 days, about 65,000 people have been arrested in the antigang campaign.
Human rights groups say that there have been many instances of prisoner abuses and that innocent people have been swept up in police raids.
Calls for a flight compensation scheme
By Felicity Ripper
There are calls for Australia to establish a simple compensation scheme for airline passengers hit by delays and cancellations.
The Australian Lawyers Alliance has made the argument for such a scheme in their submission to the federal government's aviation White Paper which will set the long-term direction for the aviation sector.
Travel lawyer Victoria Roy says Australians travel as much as anyone in the world but have fewer protections than other countries.
Suspected spies have been arrested in Poland
By Felicity Ripper
Polish officials have confirmed that a group of foreign citizens have been arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia.
Radio station RMF FM is reporting that Polish security services have broken up a spy network working for Russia.
It says six people have been detained on suspicion of having installed secret cameras to film transport infrastructure used to deliver aid to Ukraine.
Poland is one of Ukraine's strongest allies and its security forces have arrested several people on suspicion of spying for Russia since the invasion last February.
Storms have ended Southern California water restrictions for 7 million people
By Felicity Ripper
California’s 11th atmospheric river left the storm-soaked state with a bang Wednesday, bringing flooded roadways, landslides and toppled trees to the southern part of the state.
It also brought drought-busting rainfall that meant the end of water restrictions for nearly 7 million people.
Even as residents struggled to clean up before the next round of winter arrives in the coming days — with some 27,000 people still under evacuation orders statewide — the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California's decision brought relief amid the state's historic drought.
Coming up: Greece is set to strike over a deadly train crash, halting transport
By Felicity Ripper
Flights to and from Greece today will be grounded and ships will remain docked at ports, as Greek workers walk off the job.
They're protesting over the country's deadliest train crash on record which killed 57 people on February 28.
The 24-hour strike on Thursday called by Greece's largest private and public sector unions is also expected to shut public services and state schools and disrupt urban transport.
It is the latest in a series of protests since the head-on collision of a passenger train with more than 350 people on board, most of them university students.
North Korea has held a meeting on agricultural stability amid food shortages
By Felicity Ripper
North Korea has held a cabinet-level meeting to discuss the issue of agricultural stability amid fears of food shortages, state media KCNA has reported.
The meeting led by Kim Tok Hun, premier of the cabinet, saw senior officials come up with "various detailed action plans" to ensure stable agricultural production, the report said.
This comes after leader Kim Jong Un urged officials to engineer a "fundamental transformation" in agricultural production during a meeting last month.
South Korean politicians, citing intelligence officials, said earlier this month that the North was facing an annual rice shortage of 800,000 tonnes and that the current food shortage situation was caused by the country's grain policy, distribution problems and the COVID-19 situation.
A recent United Nations report estimates that 60 per cent of the population in North Korea suffered from food insecurity by the end of 2021 versus 40 per cent prior to the pandemic.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recognises 60 years of Lifeline
By Felicity Ripper
Calls to Lifeline are on the increase, as the support service marks 60 years of operations today.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Summer bushfires, Lifeline received an average of about 2,400 calls a day.
That number has now grown to 3,800 a day, totalling more than 2.5 million calls every year.
"Lifeline, you have the gratitude of our nation," the Prime Minister says.
Chile has culled 40,000 poultry amid an industrial bird flu outbreak
By Felicity Ripper
Around 40,000 poultry have been culled and buried in central Chile after the country detected its first case of bird flu in an industrial setting.
Carlos Orellana, head of livestock protection for Chile's farming and livestock SAG agency, said it was a "limited event" and authorities hadn't detected more cases in the surrounding area.
"It's a very limited event, our surveillance in the peripheral region keeps giving us negative results," Mr Orellana says.
"We hope to have this situation contained and that Chile regains its status of being free of highly pathogenic bird flu."
The outbreak was detected on Monday in a plant belonging to meat producer Agrosuper, in Rancagua in central Chile, leading the government to suspend chicken exports for a 28-day period.
A judge is mulling a ban on an abortion pill in US
By Felicity Ripper
A federal judge has heard arguments in a lawsuit that poses a threat to the availability of a popular abortion medication in the United States.
The hearing comes as a conservative Christian group seeks to reverse federal approval of the drug mifepristone.
A two-pill combination of mifepristone and another drug is the most common form of abortion in the US and the ruling would affect states where abortion is legal as well as those that outlaw it.
The case has raised concerns about court transparency and so-called judge shopping.
Astronauts set to get new spacesuits
By Felicity Ripper
Moonwalking astronauts will have sleeker, more flexible spacesuits that come in different sizes when they step onto the lunar surface later this decade.
The company designing the next-generation spacesuits Axiom Space revealed its prototype on Wednesday at en event in Houston.
It says that it plans to have new versions for training purposes for NASA later this summer.
The moonsuits will be white like they were during NASA’s Apollo program more than a half-century ago, according to the company.
That’s so they can reflect heat and keep future moonwalkers cool.
The suits will provide greater flexibility and more protection from the moon’s harsh environment, and will come in a wider range of sizes, according to the Houston-based company.
