在线英语听力室_免费在线英语听力学习网站

Hello everyone, I'm Creshon Saunders at the CNN. com newsroom in Atlanta. Here's a look at what's happening NOW IN THE NEWS.

Decision day for the Democrats¹. The National Committee's Rules Committee is meeting in Washington right now. The committee is trying to decide what to do with the delegates from Florida and Michigan. Both states you may remember lost their delegates as punishment for moving up their primaries to January.

Afghan officials say 100 suspected Taliban militants² have been killed. An Interior Ministry³ spokesman says Afghan security forces aided by coalition⁴ troops fought for two days to retake an area of Farah province. He says five Taliban commanders and two Afghan policemen are among the dead.

Chinese crews are working around the clock desperately⁵ trying to stop another earthquake-related disaster in Sichuan province. A huge lake formed by a landslide⁶ is threatening to spill over its banks and flood the hard-hit communities below. Teams are digging a spillway to drain that water. Two hundred thousand people have already been told to evacuate⁷ those at-risk areas. That means many victims are being uprooted⁸ yet again after first losing their homes in the earthquake.

The Atlantic Hurricane Season doesn't officially begin until tomorrow but you know what? Why wait? The first named tropical storm of the season, Authur, has formed near the coast of Belize and is already moving inland. Its maximum sustained winds are about 40 miles an hour right now. Authur is expected to weaken as it moves further inland today. Projections⁹ show it moving over the Yucatan Peninsula today, then back over the Gulf¹⁰ before it hits southern Mexico later next week.

Getting a plumber¹¹ to fix your toilet can be costly¹² as most of us know, but you imagine how much it's costing to fix a malfunctioning¹³ toilet at the International Space Station. NASA says all systems are go for today's shuttle launch. Among the items Discovery is carrying, a new pump for the space station's toilet which has been on the fritz lately. Yuck! The shuttle is also loaded with the contribution from Japan to the space station, the Kibo lab.

Those are the headlines at this hour. For more on these stories and other news of the day, CNN is your source, online, on TV, even when you are on the go.