Friday's Morning Email: Obama's Historic Hiroshima Visit

Friday's Morning Email: Obama's Historic Hiroshima Visit

morning email

obama hiroshima

Lauren Weber is out on a reporting trip until June 7, so Eliot Nelson and I are filling in -- and attempting to write like much nicer people than we are so it seems like she’s still here!

More than seven decades after the U.S. destroyed Hiroshima with an atomic bomb during the Second World War, Barack Obama on Friday became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the Japanese city. Obama will pay his respects at a memorial for the dead, but will not apologize to Japan for the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. He delivered a speech and met with elderly survivors of the bombings. [NYT]

Congress split town for a two-week recess despite never coming to an agreement on a spending package to help prepare for a domestic Zika virus outbreak this summer. No one in the U.S. has contracted the tropical illness, which can cause serious birth defects when pregnant women become ill, but the coming warm weather and mosquito season have the health care community and senior government officials like Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Thomas Frieden seriously concerned. Hundreds of Americans have returned home carrying Zika and more than 900 people have become infected in Puerto Rico. [WaPo]

"Security researchers have tied the recent spate of digital breaches on Asian banks to North Korea, in what they say appears to be the first known case of a nation using digital attacks for financial gain … On Thursday, the Symantec researchers said they had uncovered evidence linking an attack at a bank in the Philippines last October with attacks on Tien Phong Bank in Vietnam in December and one in February on the central bank of Bangladesh that resulted in the theft of more than $81 million." [NYT]

"The chief investigator in the EgyptAir plane crash that killed all 66 people on board last week has said search teams in the Mediterranean have picked up a beacon believed to be from the doomed aircraft. Ayman al-Moqadem said the beacon signal had narrowed down the search to a 3-mile radius. He insisted, however, that it did not mean the flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- the so-called 'black boxes' -- had been found." [AP]

Nihar Saireddy Janga and Jairam Hathwar are your 2016 Scripps National Spelling Bee co-champions. It's the third straight tournament that ended in a draw. That includes two years ago, when Hathwar's older brother, Sriram, was one of the joint champs. And because we know you're wondering, the winning words were "Feldenkrais" and "gesellschaft." No, we don't know, either. [WaPo]

"Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton doubled down on defending her email practices as Secretary of State, arguing that the use of a personal account was 'allowed,' and rules have since been 'clarified.'” [ABC News]

Enthusiastic anti-Semites and some prominent American Jews like Ari Fleischer see what they want to see when they look at Donald Trump. Hard to envision how this alliance could possibly go wrong. [Jessica Schulberg, HuffPost]

WHAT’S BREWING

The superbugs are coming! A Pennsylvania woman has become the first person in the United States known to contract a bacterial infection that's immune to antibiotics. [WaPo]

Now that he knows who his real enemy is, Gawker honcho Nick Denton has some words for "thin-skinned billionaire" Peter Thiel. [Gawker]

He’s suddenly just fine with taking outside money for his campaign after talking a big game about self-funding (even though it was never really true). Now he's recruited New York Jets owner Woody Johnson -- a man whose money Trump trashed Jeb Bush for accepting.[NYT]

A fly landed on Trump's head. It was huge, and there's video.[CNN]

"House Republicans unexpectedly sunk their own $37.4 billion water and energy spending bill on Thursday because it included a provision ensuring that people who work for government contractors can’t be fired for being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender."[HuffPost]

"On any given day, 1.2 million full-time students are drinking alcohol and more than 703,000 are using marijuana, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration." [LA Times]

For more from The Huffington Post, download our app for iOS or Android.

WHAT'S WORKING

HuffPost interviews a former child laborer in the Philippines has devoted her life to helping children forced into lives of forced labor and sex work. [HuffPost]

For more, sign up for the What's Working newsletter.

BEFORE YOU GO

~ Khloe Kardashian wants to divorce Lamar Odom -- for real this time.

~ A woman camping in Botswana was rudely awakened by a lion licking the outside of her tent. Thank goodness there's video.

~ Bernie Sanders might not become president, but he's using his popularity to keep influencing politics. For example, he's helping progressive Democrat Russ Feingold raise money to regain his Wisconsin Senate seat.

~ Aww, Dolly Parton has been married for 50 years!

~ Yet another baseball player is suspended over domestic violence charges.

~ Gawker watched 21 YouTube videos of different songs called "The Trump Train" so you don't have to.

~ This week on “So That Happened,” The Huffington Post podcast team say flattering things about Elizabeth Warren, if you can believe that.

The Morning Email will return on Tuesday, after the holiday weekend.

Send tips/quips/quotes/stories/photos/events/scoops to Lauren Weber at lauren.weber@huffingtonpost.com. Follow us on Twitter @LaurenWeberHP. And like what you're reading? Sign up here to get The Morning Email delivered to you.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot