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Exclusive: Some may predate earliest cases of new variant found in South Africa last week

Nicola Sturgeon and Mark Drakeford call for Cobra meeting and tougher travel rules amid spread of Covid variant

Outgoing German chancellor’s choice of soundtrack for military tattoo hints at uncharted hinterlandAngela Merkel has left Germans wondering how well they really know the chancellor who has governed them for 16 years, after picking a song by the punk rocker Nina Hagen as the soundtrack for her military leaving ceremony.Merkel, whose Social Democrat successor, Olaf Scholz, is expected to be sworn in as chancellor next week, will be given a customary military farewell in the courtyard outside the defence ministry on Thursday evening. Continue reading...

Locals in Barcelona accuse religious foundation in charge of Gaudí‘s masterpiece of highhandednessA gigantic 12-pointed star was installed on Monday on one of the main towers of the basilica of the Sagrada Família, Antoni Gaudí’s masterpiece that has been a work in progress since 1882.But the star is unlikely to brighten the mood of local residents whose lives have been blighted for years by the city’s biggest tourist attraction, which before the pandemic brought 60,000 visitors a day to the area. Continue reading...

Teenager is charged with murder of 12-year-old and possession of bladed articleA teenage boy has appeared in court charged with the murder of a 12-year-old girl in Liverpool city centre.Ava White had been in the city with friends on Thursday following a Christmas lights switch-on when she suffered “catastrophic injuries” in an assault at 8.39pm, Merseyside police said. Continue reading...

Staff of Yorkshire’s Tan Hill Inn plan best-dressed snowman competition for guests trapped by Storm ArwenSixty-one people face a fourth night snowed in at Britain’s highest pub with a best-dressed snowman competition planned on Monday to pass the time.Guests who had travelled to the 17th-century Tan Hill Inn in the Yorkshire Dales on Friday night to watch an Oasis tribute band have been trapped ever since as Storm Arwen hit the UK, with staff laying on pub quizzes, board games and karaoke for entertainment. Continue reading...

From their exhilarating collaborations to a supper for two that ended in tears, the director shares his most personal memories of the musicals legend who took theatre to extraordinary new heightsHe kept a selection of grooming utensils in his guest bathroom: nail scissors, implements for trimming nose hair, that sort of thing. He had a slightly shambolic air, and a listing gait, like a grad student impersonating a grownup, or as if his nanny had brushed his hair for him that morning. He would rock his head back when he talked and often spoke with his eyes closed, like someone communing with a higher power, which he probably was. His latest enthusiasms were always near the surface – to hear him speak about Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet, for example, was to make one want to go and see it all over again (he actually flew a group of his New York friends to London to see the production). He was equally expressive in his condemnation of work he didn’t care for. He was passionate, opinionated, uningratiating, sharp as a knife.Until his later years, when he chose to spend more time in Connecticut, he was all New York. Steve saw everything: he taught me how to calculate exactly the amount of time it would take to walk to each individual theatre by judging how many blocks east to west (five minutes per block) and north to south (two minutes). For this particular wide-eyed Brit, Steve’s life on East 49th Street was a dream of New York in the 20th century. A beautiful brownstone, wood-panelled, with walls full of framed word games and puzzles. A grand piano looked out on a walled garden filled with vines and flowers. Continue reading...

From designing homewares to recording music, many who fled to Europe are building independent lives against the oddsPieces of fabric of various vibrant shades fill the Naples studio where Paboy Bojang and his team of four are working around the clock to stitch together 250 cushions for their next customer, The Conran Shop.They are not long from dispatching their first orders to Selfridges and Paul Smith, and with requests for the distinctive cotton cushions with ruffled borders flooding in from around the world, they will be busy for months to come. Continue reading...

Woman and man left hotel where they were in quarantine after testing positive for Covid-19

Gallup survey reveals the two countries have the world’s highest levels of trust in scientists, with 62% saying they trust them ‘a lot’

Study calls on Home Office to integrate gender and trauma sensitivity into asylum systemVictims of sexual violence face further abuse and trauma as a result of the UK asylum process and are systematically let down by authorities, according a report.The research found that gender-insensitive and sometimes inhumane asylum interviews, sexual harassment in unstable asylum accommodation and a lack of access to healthcare and psychological support were just some of the factors compounding the trauma of forced migrants in the UK. Continue reading...

The governing body is pushing to make the game more welcoming for women – but is change happening fast enough?Towards the end of the Queen’s Gambit, the Netflix show that helped supercharge the new chess boom, Beth Harmon crushes a series of top male grandmasters before beating Vasily Borgov, the Russian world champion. Fiction, though, remains sharply separated from fact. As Magnus Carlsen was reminded before starting his world title defence in Dubai last week, there is not a single active woman’s player in the top 100 now that Hou Yifan of China, who is ranked 83rd, is focusing on academia. The lingering question: why?For Carlsen, the subject was “way too complicated” to answer in a few sentences, but suggested a number of reasons, particularly cultural, were to blame. Some, though, still believe it is down to biology. As recently as 2015 Nigel Short, vice president of the world chess federation Fide, claimed that “men are hardwired to be better chess players than women, adding, “you have to gracefully accept that.” Continue reading...

Storm Arwen brought wind gusts of almost 100mph late on Friday, before weakening and drifting towards continental Europe. Heavy snow and the severe gale wreaked havoc on road and rail transport across the UK and forced the cancellation of Sunday’s Premier League football match between Burnley and Tottenham Hotspur in north-west England Continue reading...

Painstaking effort to locate two campers continues in rugged bushland north of Dargo after murder charges laid

Clarence House denies claim in new book that Charles asked about ‘complexion’ of Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s future childrenThe private office of the Prince of Wales has dismissed as “fiction” claims in a new book that Prince Charles was the royal who speculated on the skin colour of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s future children.The American journalist and author Christopher Andersen, a former editor of the US celebrity news magazine People, alleges in the book that Charles made the comment on the day Harry and Meghan’s engagement was announced in November 2017. Continue reading...

Labor dubs schedule – which suggests a May election – ‘more of a slouch than a sitting calendar’ as government runs out of time to establish federal integrity commission

Exclusive: Privileges committee says Porter didn’t break rules but calls on all MPs to provide the ‘greatest’ transparency regarding the source of gifts

Billions of these tiny plastic pellets are floating in the ocean, causing as much damage as oil spills, yet they are still not classified as hazardousWhen the X-Press Pearl container ship caught fire and sank in the Indian Ocean in May, Sri Lanka was terrified that the vessel’s 350 tonnes of heavy fuel oil would spill into the ocean, causing an environmental disaster for the country’s pristine coral reefs and fishing industry.Classified by the UN as Sri Lanka’s “worst maritime disaster”, the biggest impact was not caused by the heavy fuel oil. Nor was it the hazardous chemicals on board, which included nitric acid, caustic soda and methanol. The most “significant” harm, according to the UN, came from the spillage of 87 containers full of lentil-sized plastic pellets: nurdles. Continue reading...

Two more Omicron cases confirmed in NSW; Labor targets Coalition on quarantine facilities during question time; sitting calendar for 2022 released; Greg Hunt gives press conference; national cabinet meeting brought forward to Tuesday to discuss response to new variant; NSW floods worsen; Victoria records 1,007 new Covid cases and three deaths; NSW records 150 new cases, no deaths. Follow all the news live

Thousands of migrants, most of them from Iraq and Syria, have attempted to cross the EU border since the summer. The development appeared to signal an escalation of a crisis in which the regime of Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko has encouraged migrants to illegally enter the EU, at first through Lithuania and Latvia. The two Baltic states, along with Poland, are accusing Lukashenko of ‘hybrid warfare’ Continue reading...

On the organisation’s 50th anniversary, former head of photography at Greenpeace International talks about the motives behind the creation of its picture deskFifty years ago, on 15 September 1971, a ship named the Greenpeace set out to confront and stop US nuclear weapons testing at Amchitka, one of the Aleutian Islands in south-west Alaska.Two years later a small boat called the Vega, crewed by David McTaggart, Ann-Marie Horne, Mary Horne and Nigel Ingram sailed into the French nuclear test site area at Moruroa, French Polynesia in the southern Pacific Ocean. Photographers had been using their images for years to publicise situations around the world. But Greenpeace was a young organisation pioneering a new kind of activism: this was the moment they began to realise that capturing images of what they were doing and seeing would play a vital role in their work.Vega boarded by French commandos in Moruroa, 1973 Continue reading...

We celebrate everything from Lil Nas X’s conservative-baiting Montero to Wet Leg’s instant indie classic – as voted for by 31 of the Guardian’s music writers Continue reading...

She overcame racism and abuse to break Hollywood, romanced Brando, dated Elvis to make him jealous, fought hard for civil rights and won an Egot. Now in her 10th decade, she is busier and happier than everRita Moreno pops up on my computer screen in a bright red hat, huge pendant necklace and tortoiseshell glasses. “Well, here I am in my full glory,” she says from her home in Berkeley, California. And glorious she sure is. Moreno is a couple of weeks short of her 90th birthday, but look at her and you would knock off 20 years. Listen to her and you would knock off another 50.Can I wish you an advance happy birthday, I ask. “Yes, you can. Isn’t it exciting?” Moreno is one of the acting greats. But she could have been so much greater. She is one of only six women to have bagged the Egot (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards), alongside Helen Hayes, Audrey Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, Whoopi Goldberg and Liza Minnelli. Yet she has spent much of her career battling typecasting or simply not being cast at all. Continue reading...

After the death of her husband, Marilyn Bersey struggled with her identity. But she had been a performer all her life, and suddenly a new world opened up to herWhen Marilyn Bersey, 74, stands on stage and removes her last piece of clothing to reveal her nipple tassels, she triggers the pyrotechnics. From the audience there is “the admiration, the affirmation, the claps, the whoops, the cheers”. Well, she explains: “When I retired, I promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those pensioners who sit and knit.”Becoming a burlesque performer may seem an extreme form of resistance to this stereotype, but Bersey, who lives in warden-assisted accommodation in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, had finally stabilised a huge weight loss. At the same time, she was adjusting to life without her second husband, whom she had cared for through Parkinson’s disease. She was searching for a form of exercise and self-expression that would fit the new shape of her life.Tell us: has your life taken a new direction after the age of 60? Continue reading...

Bodies in 28 countries file appeal for waiver of intellectual property agreement and end to ‘grossly unjust’ distribution of jabsNursing unions in 28 countries have filed a formal appeal with the United Nations over the refusal of the UK, EU and others to temporarily waive patents for Covid vaccines, saying this has cost huge numbers of lives in developing nations.The letter, sent on Monday on behalf of unions representing more than 2.5 million healthcare workers, said staff have witnessed at first hand the “staggering numbers of deaths and the immense suffering caused by political inaction”. Continue reading...

We explain what border restrictions have changed and what the new Covid variant means for visa holders planning to travel to Australia

Instead of drafting legal papers, award-winning group make short films intended to explain assault on judiciaryIt was a summer day in 2017 when Sylwia Gregorczyk-Abram, a 34-year-old lawyer, heard a crazy idea.She had been messaged by a legal acquaintance, Michał Wawrykiewicz, who like her was worried about changes that Poland’s nationalist government was introducing to the judicial system. He wondered how they could convince people that the independence of the judiciary was not some abstract nicety but the firm ground underpinning democracy. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Milorad Dodik dismisses fears Serb separatists are planning breakup of Bosnia-HerzegovinaThe Bosnian Serb leader accused of risking war by pursuing the breakup of Bosnia-Herzegovina has dismissed the threat of western sanctions and hinted at an imminent summit with Vladimir Putin, saying: “I was not elected to be a coward”.In an interview with the Guardian, Milorad Dodik, the Serb member of the tripartite leadership of Bosnia-Herzegovina, said he would not be deterred by the outcry from London, Washington, Berlin and Brussels. Continue reading...

Troops will join Australian-led force that also includes Papua New Guinea.Fiji will contribute 50 troops to an Australian-led peacekeeping force in Solomon Islands after anti-government rioting that razed parts of the capital, Honiara, the Fijian prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, has said.The Fijian contingent will lift the number of peacekeepers to about 200 troops and police officers, mostly Australian with a contribution of at least 34 personnel from Papua New Guinea. Continue reading...

South African president and WHO’s Africa chief urge against travel bans, saying they ‘attack global solidarity’

Leader of royalist Funcinpec party was overthrown as prime minister by Hun Sen, who has ruled country as a despot ever sinceCambodia’s former prime minister Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the king’s half-brother who spent his later years in the political shadow of his one-time rival prime minister Hun Sen, has died in France. He was 77.The information minister, Khieu Kanharith, said he had received the information from the royal palace. The prince, whose royalist political party won elections in 1993, was ousted in a 1997 coup by coalition partner Hun Sen, who remains Cambodia’s authoritarian leader today. Continue reading...

Pact covers Iran as well as cybersecurity, despite controversy over use of Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in UKBritain and Israel will sign a 10-year trade and defence pact in London on Monday, promising cooperation on issues such as cybersecurity and a joint commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.The agreement was announced by Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, and her Israeli counterpart Yair Lapid, despite evidence that spyware made by Israeli company NSO Group had probably been used to spy on two British lawyers advising the ex-wife of the ruler of Dubai, Princess Haya. Continue reading...

Figures show that 93% of those charged over protests are under 25 and many therefore not eligible to access current UK visa schemeMore than nine in 10 people who have faced protest charges in Hong Kong are too young to access a UK visa scheme dedicated to helping Hongkongers flee to Britain, according to advocates and MPs calling for new laws to assist them.The release of the figures on Sunday by the advocacy group Hong Kong Watch comes before a parliamentary debate this week on proposed migration law amendments that would widen the pathway for people with British national (overseas) (BNO) status to resettle in the UK. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Gérald Darmanin says UK ministers must stop saying one thing in private while insulting his country in publicThe French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, has said British ministers including his counterpart, Priti Patel, should stop saying one thing in private while insulting his country in public if there is to be a solution to the crisis in the Channel.In an interview with the Guardian, Darmanin strongly criticised what he called “double talk” coming out of London and said France was not a “vassal” of the UK. Continue reading...

The fashion maverick, also creative head at Louis Vuitton, had been suffering from an aggressive form of cancer for two yearsFashion designer Virgil Abloh has died after suffering from cancer, it has been announced.The 41-year-old, who was the creative director for Louis Vuitton and Off-White, had cardiac angiosarcoma, a rare, aggressive form of the disease, according to an announcement on his official Instagram page. Continue reading...

Red-listing of 50 African countries and use of phone monitoring technology among measures approved by Israel

Without a resale royalty scheme, struggling artists are missing out on much needed money for their workThis month New Zealand artist Ayesha Green watched in surprise as one of her artworks fetched $48,000 at auction – $29,000 more than she sold it for just a year earlier. The hammer price was sizeable for an artist who describes herself as somewhere between emerging and mid-career, and if the country had a resale royalty scheme for artists in place, Green would have taken home a healthy paycheque to put towards her practice.But, like all local artists whose work sells at auction, Green gets nothing. Continue reading...

Expect more wintry conditions says Met Office, after three people killed and half a million households left without powerA minus 10C Arctic blast is forecast to follow the blizzards and close to 100mph winds of Storm Arwen which left half a million households temporarily without power at the weekend and killed three people.A cold weather alert issued by the UK Health Security Agency will remain in place until Monday after swathes of the north of England, Scotland, Wales, the south-west and the Midlands were left without electricity. Gales caused transport disruption and damage to buildings, while heavy snow led to lorries getting stuck and ploughs being used in a number of areas. The Met Office said that as the storm was clearing towards Europe temperatures would drop to the coldest of the season so far. Continue reading...

Purchase designed to enable Indigenous objections to Mulga Rock project as environmental approval set to expire in three weeks

After overcoming personal tragedy, the rapper has clawed her way back – with a politically potent debut EP dedicated to First Nations womenBaarka didn’t come to mess around. Born Chloe Quayle, the 26-year-old rapper was a former teenage ice addict who did three stints in jail – during her last, five years ago, she gave birth to her third child.Now the Malyangapa Barkindji woman has clawed her way back from what she describes as “the pits of hell” and is on the verge of releasing her debut EP, Blak Matriarchy, through Briggs’ Bad Apples Music. She has been celebrated by GQ as “the new matriarch of Australian rap”; and has her face plastered on billboards across New York, Los Angeles and London as part of YouTube’s Black Voices Music Class of 2022. (“I nearly fainted when I saw [pictures of it],” Barkaa says when we meet over Zoom. “The amount of pride that came from my family and my community ... It was a huge honour.”) Continue reading...

Shadow foreign secretary Lisa Nandy says joint policies needed to prevent more dying in Channel crossingsBoth the UK and France are “engaging in a blame game” over people making perilous Channel crossings in small boats, Labour has said, rather than sitting down together to try to work out a way to prevent more deaths.The diplomatic spat between the countries, which saw France disinvite Priti Patel from a meeting of EU ministers in Calais on Sunday, after Boris Johnson tweeted a letter on the issue to Emmanuel Macron before the French president had received it, was “simply unconscionable”, Lisa Nandy said. Continue reading...

Mediterranean street food, modernist marvels and politically inspired nightlife are some of the surprises chosen by this writer and film-makerInspired by the city’s activists and creatives, journalist and film-maker Alex King moved to Athens in 2017 to chronicle attempts to breathe new life into a city worn down by crisis. Continue reading...

The long-running series in which readers answer other readers’ questions on subjects ranging from trivial flights of fancy to profound scientific and philosophical conceptsWhich British monarchs would have survived their illness or wounding if today’s medical knowledge had existed then? (Bonus question: which monarchs would we have had but for illnesses that are now easily preventable?) Jane ShawSend new questions to nq@theguardian.com. Continue reading...

A Spanish trans woman’s memoirs, a Mumbai gangster drama, Israeli sisters in trouble… the Covid era is a rich moment for TV drama. Critics from Spain to South Korea tell us about the biggest shows in their countries Continue reading...

Two British film-makers have shone a light on a campaigning lawyer and her clients in an expose of misogyny and dangerous politicsOnce, not that long ago, Kubra and Arzu were healthy young Turkish mothers, looking forward to raising their children. Today, sadly, this is no longer all these charismatic, determined women have in common. They are now both among the many damaged survivors of violent attacks at the hands of husbands who believed it was their right to inflict potentially lethal injury on their wives.This autumn, the two mothers are the impressive stars of Dying to Divorce, a British-made documentary, out last week, that has just been selected to represent Britain at the Oscars as the official entry in the Best International Feature Film category. The film is a startling, sensitively made exposé of the murderous misogyny and dangerous politics behind an epidemic of femicide in Turkey, a country where an astonishing one in three women is subjected to some form of domestic violence. Continue reading...

Brexit solved with a slogan ‘take back control’ has left the UK with a border that is now harder to controlAt the Spectator magazine’s parliamentarian of the year awards, the swankiest shindig in the political calendar, one of the gongs went to Nadhim Zahawi. He received a big cheer from an audience heavily populated with Tory MPs and ministers when he used his acceptance speech to remark: “How did a boy from Iraq end up on these shores without a word of English at the age of 11 and become the secretary of state for education? This is the greatest country of the world, my friends.”On the same day, just a few hours earlier, at least 27 souls, among them a pregnant woman and several children, had also tried to make it to these shores only to die in the attempt. Less fortunate than Mr Zahawi, they and their dreams of making a better life in “the greatest country of the world” were drowned as they risked the treacherous crossing from the coast of northern France to that of southern England. We will never know if a future cabinet minister might have been among them. Continue reading...

Gaga rules in Ridley Scott’s at times ridiculous drama based on the true-life sagas of the Italian fashion dynasty“The most Gucci of them all” is how Patrizia Reggiani described herself in a 2014 interview and, judging by this entertainingly ripe, comedically tinged tragedy, she has a point. Variously known as “Lady Gucci” and “Black Widow”, Reggiani became the centre of a very 1990s scandal involving lust, money, fashion, murder… and a clairvoyant. To that tabloid-friendly cocktail, Ridley Scott’s latest “true story” potboiler adds a dash of pop superstardom, with Lady Gaga (Oscar- nominated for her close-to-home performance in A Star Is Born) relishing the chance to find the human cracks beneath a larger-than-life, femme fatale surface.Adapted by screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna from the nonfiction book by Sara Gay Forden, House of Gucci charts a crowd-pleasing course from the Milanese party scene of the 1970s to a high-profile, end-of-the-century trial. At its heart is the doomed romance between Patrizia and Maurizio Gucci, the latter played behind stylishly studious glasses by cinema’s sexy nerd de nos jours, Adam Driver. “I want to see how this story goes,” says Patrizia, embarking upon a twisted fairytale romance with the grandson of Guccio Gucci that starts with masked balls and talk of midnight chimes and pumpkins and ends with family back-stabbings, jealous rages and deadly rivalries. Continue reading...

Laws would require companies to reveal users’ identities but experts say focus on defamation will not help curb rates of online bullying

Most of the people who reach the UK after risking their lives in small boats have their claims for asylum approvedLast week’s tragedy in the Channel has reopened the debate on how to stop people making dangerous crossings, with the solutions presented by the government focused on how to police the waters.Less has been said about where those people come from, with most fleeing conflicts and persecution. About two-thirds of people arriving on small boats between January 2020 and May 2021 were from Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Syria. Many also came from Eritrea, from where 80% of asylum applications were approved. Continue reading...

Two passengers who tested positive in NSW overnight have the new Covid variant; Mark McGowan ‘won’t hesitate’ to keep WA border shut; UK, Germany and Italy detect cases; Victoria records 1,061 Covid cases and four deaths; NSW reports 185 cases and no deaths; three cases in Queensland and seven in ACT; $10m Australia Day ad campaign criticised. Follow all the day’s news live