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As she plays Laurie Strode for the sixth time in Halloween Kills, she discusses sisterhood, survival – and the parallels between Michael Myers and Donald TrumpJamie Lee Curtis is describing herself to me. “I’m in a black hole wearing an orange suit,” she says. “It’s early morning in Los Angeles and I’m feeling really good. Fit as a fiddle.” The visual pointers are unnecessary, since we are talking via a video call and that suit could be seen from space: she looks like a human Tic Tac. It is almost as dazzling as the raspberry ensemble she wore, offset by her trademark silver crop, in the whodunit Knives Out.“I have a very close friend who’s a fashion girl, and she posted a picture of herself in that top and pants, so I sent it to our wardrobe designer and said: ‘That’s my character!’” Curtis has told the story before, but no matter: when she talks, it is as though she is linking her arm through yours. She takes you along for the ride. Continue reading...

Khin Maung Zaw has been the only source of information on the ousted Myanmar leader’s trial and wellbeingThe head lawyer representing Myanmar’s ousted leader Aung San Suu Kyi has said that authorities in the military-ruled country have imposed a gag order on him because they said his communications could cause instability.Myanmar’s state media has not reported developments in Aung San Suu Kyi’s multiple legal cases, filed after she was ousted in a February coup, and her lawyer, Khin Maung Zaw, has been the only source of public information on her trial and her wellbeing. Continue reading...

Westpac upgrades 2021 forecast, with the biggest gains expected in Sydney, up 27%, spurred on by low interest rates during the pandemic

Attracting more than half a million views within an hour of the song being uploaded, the emotional ballad is the singer’s first release in six yearsAdele has finally released a much-anticipated new single, Easy on Me – with a film clip that attracted more than half a million views within an hour of being uploaded to YouTube.After a six-year hiatus for the 15-time Grammy-winning singer, the song is the first track from her fourth album, 30, due out on 19 November, which reflects the “inner turmoil” she experienced after her divorce from Simon Konecki in 2019. Continue reading...

The controversial film’s first Tasmanian screening was described as ‘like going to a funeral’. How will it be received in a town that won’t speak the killer’s name?There were no posters advertising the Tasmanian premiere of Nitram at the independent State Cinema, which took place on Thursday night.Justin Kurzel’s new film dramatising the lead-up to 1996’s Port Arthur massacre, opened to a quiet, small crowd in the mass shooter’s home town of Hobart. Its trailers were not included in any other scheduling, and the film’s opening lagged two weeks behind its national release. Continue reading...

Security experts say technology on iPhones could open door to mass surveillance and be misusedTechnology like that proposed by Apple to search iPhones for child sexual abuse images would open the door to mass surveillance and be vulnerable to exploitation, world-leading security and cryptography experts have said.Client-side scanning (CSS) gives access to data on users’ devices, including stored data, which “brings surveillance to a new level”, according to analysis from academics at Harvard Kennedy school, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Cambridge, among others. Continue reading...

Company cites ‘challenging operating environment’ in announcing site will be replaced with jobs app without social networking featuresMicrosoft says it will shut down LinkedIn in China, citing a “challenging operating environment” as Beijing tightens control over tech firms.The US-based company will replace the career-oriented social network in China with an application dedicated to applying for jobs but without the networking features, according to the senior vice-president of engineering, Mohak Shroff. Continue reading...

Overheard comment suggests anger at possible no-shows at Cop26 by leaders of countries with worst CO2 emissionsThe Queen has criticised world leaders’ inaction on addressing the climate crisis, admitting she is “irritated” by individuals who “talk but don’t do”.She made the remarks, which were picked up on a livestream, at the opening of the Welsh parliament in Cardiff on Thursday. Continue reading...

Highest daily cases in UK since mid-July with a further 157 Covid-linked deaths; Russia registers 31,299 new cases in one day

Decision follows hours of deliberation over whether it is fair for four Egyptian security officials to be tried in absentiaA court in Rome has suspended trial proceedings against four Egyptian security officials accused of kidnapping, torturing and murdering the Italian student Giulio Regeni in Cairo, following hours of deliberation over whether it is fair for the men to be tried in absentia.The trial was returned to a preliminary court, after judges debated for seven hours about whether hearings could continue amid any doubt they were aware of proceedings against them. Continue reading...

Transport secretary under pressure to resolve ongoing dispute with 54,000 HGV licences awaiting processingStaff at the DVLA have been promised payments worth £735 as the government seeks to avoid strike action that risks exacerbating the backlog of tens of thousands of licences awaiting renewal.It is understood the money will come in two payments, and has been offered as though unrelated to the fact the PCS trade union is currently balloting staff over renewed strike action. Continue reading...

Friday: teachers fear schools are not ready to return amid ongoing Covid outbreak. Plus: the fashion side hustle promoting city prideGood morning. Schools in New South Wales and Victoria may open their doors next week, but teachers are concerned not enough has been done to welcome them back safely. Restaurants and bars are also slowly reopening as restrictions ease, but many found a lucrative side-hustle during lockdown – fashion.Teachers are warning that some students will be left out in the cold – literally – when schools go back next week, as plans to make classrooms Covid-safe will not be ready. Concerns have been raised over poor ventilation, a lack of air filters and no guidance on how to safely manage class sizes. Principals say they will not be able to fit every student in classrooms if they adhere to the NSW government’s ventilation report, which says how many students should be in each room. “We have situations where room capacity leaves eight to 10 students out in the cold, literally,” the senior vice-president of the NSW Teachers Federation, Amber Flohm, said. Schools in NSW and Victoria have been promised air purifiers and ventilators, but do not currently have them. Continue reading...

After disastrous City presentation now is moment for senior independent director Zillah Byng-Thorne to earn her feeShares in THG, or The Hut Group, finally bounced on Thursday, but, given how far they’re fallen, even a 10% move doesn’t repair the damage. At 306p, the price is still only modestly above its level on Tuesday after the disastrous City presentation where founder Matthew Moulding tried to display the wonders within the Ingenuity subsidiary but drew a collective gasp of: “Is that it?”In a blistering research note, Numis analyst Simon Bowler ascribed a value of precisely zero, or “option value”, to Ingenuity, the bit that provides “end-to-end technology services” – web-hosting, marketing and logistics – for brands, include THG’s own. “Ingenuity is critical in many ways, but feels increasingly nascent, opaque and lacking sufficient proof points to justify a significant valuation,” he wrote. He values the whole company at 230p, or less than half last year’s float price. Continue reading...

Group of 17 organisations including the Guardian win inaugural Daphne Caruana Galizia prize for journalismThe European parliament has jointly awarded a major journalism prize to a consortium of 17 media outlets including the Guardian for the Pegasus spyware scandal revelations.A series of stories over the summer revealed evidence that global clients of the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group had identified human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and leading political figures, including the French president, Emmanuel Macron, as potential targets for phone-hacking software. Continue reading...

A witness of a bow and arrow attack that killed five people in the town of Kongsberg recalled on Thursday seeing one of the victims walking on a street with an arrow in his back. Investigators named the suspect as Espen Andersen Braathen, a 37-year-old living in the municipality where the attacks took place. Police had been concerned about signs of radicalisation in the suspect before the attacks, carried out with a bow and arrow and other weapons, a senior officer said.

Everyone in the Pacific has stories of times the climate crisis hit our lives. For me, it is the birth of my daughter between cyclonesMy daughter was born between cyclones.It was January 2013, and as we drove to the hospital, we passed the wreckage left by Cyclone Evan which had devastated my home island weeks earlier. Evan had been the worst tropical cyclone to hit Samoa in over two decades. There were huge holes in the road. Debris where homes once stood. Continue reading...

Police say Danish suspect’s motives yet to be firmly established and he will undergo psychiatric evaluationA bow-and-arrow attack that left five people dead in Norway appears to have been an “act of terror”, but the motives of the Danish suspect will only be firmly established after a full investigation, the Norwegian security service has said.Police said the suspect, who they identified as 37-year-old Espen Andersen Bråthen, was a Muslim convert with previous criminal convictions who had previously been flagged as a possible Islamic extremist. Andersen Bråthen would be undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, police said. Continue reading...

Cancelled services likely as RMT and Unite unions plan action over wages at StagecoachServices on the UK bus network, already in “crisis” because of a shortage of thousands of drivers, are set to get worse as unions plan a series of strikes.The RMT is going ahead on Monday with a walk-out of bus workers at Stagecoach Southwest, and Unite is planning a strike for the first week of November in many of Stagecoach’s other franchises. Continue reading...

Armed clashes erupt at demonstrations demanding end to judge’s investigation of huge blast last yearAt least six people have died in Beirut’s worst street violence in 13 years, as hundreds of armed militia men took to the streets and much of the city was forced into lockdown by heavy fighting.The bloody violence took on a sectarian tone that invoked images of the Lebanese civil war and alarmed residents who had long feared that the multiple crises ravaging the country could spark a deadly conflagration. Continue reading...

25-year-old tourist was found handcuffed in an apartment after parents raised alarm with National Crime AgencyItalian police have freed a 25-year-old British man who was found barefooted and handcuffed in the room of an apartment where he had been held hostage for eight days.The man from London, whose name has not yet been released, had been on holiday in Italy when he was allegedly kidnapped by a group of four people and held captive in Monte San Giusto, a town in Macerata province in the central Marche region. Continue reading...

Kristina Keneally says immigration minister already has power to deport temporary visa holders who perpetrate domestic violence

Anger erupts and gendarme lynched after schoolgirl is shot at checkpoint in anglophone regionAuthorities in English-speaking western Cameroon have appealed for calm after a police officer killed a five-year-old girl and was lynched by a mob.The incident took place in Buea, a hotspot city in a region where anglophone separatists and government forces in the French-majority nation have been locked in bitter four-year-old conflict. Continue reading...

Principal of college attended by Hazrat Wali, who was killed on Tuesday, says he had a bright futureAn Afghan refugee who was fatally stabbed yards from the west London college where he was studying had a “a bright future ahead of him”, its principal has said as a 16-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of murder.Students and staff at Richmond upon Thames College in Twickenham told of their shock and fear after the killing of Hazrat Wali, 18, who came to the UK two years ago and lived in Notting Hill. Continue reading...

Tory Philip Allott caused outrage in wake of the murder by saying women ‘need to be streetwise’A Conservative police commissioner accused of victim-blaming in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard has resigned after being told there was a “catastrophic lack of confidence” in his position.Philip Allott, who oversees North Yorkshire police and the region’s fire service, was criticised after he said women “need to be streetwise” about powers of arrest and should “just learn a bit about that legal process” in case they were approached by officers. Continue reading...

Residents of Knoydart peninsula, which is only accessible by boat or 18-mile hike, awarded grant to buy Old Forge pub

(Polydor)

Those who fought the so-called caliphate fear a US withdrawal could help the terrorist group to rise againOn a blazing afternoon in Syria’s eastern desert this month, a Kurdish commander was hot under the collar. An American raid had just taken place against remnants of Islamic State (IS), and Lukman Khalil, the region’s most senior military leader, had known nothing about it.The US forces had flown across the wasteland of the terrorist group’s last redoubt. Three years ago it was teeming with diehard IS members, but when thousands of holdouts emerged from the decimated town of Baghuz, the war against the so-called caliphate was won, or so it seemed. Continue reading...

Bond star says he dislikes the aggression of hetero spaces, and gay bars were a good place to meet womenFrom his portrayal of a more vulnerable Bond to his cerise suit jacket on the red carpet, Daniel Craig has worked hard to defy expectations of masculinity – so it came as little surprise when the actor revealed he likes to frequent gay bars to avoid the “aggressive dick swinging” of hetero spaces.“I’ve been going to gay bars for as long as I can remember,” Craig said on the podcast Lunch with Bruce. “One of the reasons: because I don’t get into fights in gay bars that often.” Continue reading...

Forty-one injured in ‘extremely fierce’ blaze at 13-storey building in city of KaohsiungA cross-departmental investigation has been launched in the southern Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, after at least 46 people died and another 41 were injured in a fire in that engulfed a building overnight.The 13-storey building caught fire at about 3am local time (2000 BST) on Thursday, officials in the city of Kaohsiung said. An earlier fire department statement said the blaze was “extremely fierce” and destroyed many floors. Continue reading...

TfL says resumption on Central and Victoria lines will make journeys safer, particularly for womenLondon’s night tube service will partially resume next month, having been suspended throughout the pandemic.Trains will run through the night on Fridays and Saturdays on London Underground’s Central and Victoria lines from 27 November, in a move that should provide safer travel for many people and boost the recovery of bars and restaurants. Continue reading...

Details continue to emerge though the identity of the alleged attacker and any motive remain unknownLatest news story: suspect showed signs of radicalisation, say policeA Danish man in his 30s is in custody after five people were killed and two others injured in a series of attacks using a bow and arrows in Norway on Wednesday evening.The suspect is a Muslim convert who had previously been flagged as having been radicalised, according to police, but establishing motive would be “complicated … and will take time”.The suspect, who policy say has confessed, is being held on preliminary charges, one step short of being formally charged.He is believed to have acted alone.The attack took place at around 6.15pm local time in the suspect’s home town of Kongsberg, about 50 miles (80km) south-west of the capital, Oslo.Several of the victims were fired on in a Coop supermarket in the town, and the attacker used other weapons as well as a bow and arrows.The suspect was arrested after what police called a “confrontation” about 20 minutes after the attacks began.Police said there were several crime scenes spread across a large area of the town.Norway’s national police directorate said it had ordered officers nationwide to carry firearms.The acting prime minister, Erna Solberg, described reports of the attack as “horrifying”. The prime minister-designate, Jonas Gahr Støre, who is expected to take office on Thursday, called the assault “a cruel and brutal act”.The death toll was the worst of any attack in Norway since 2011, when the far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people, most of them teenagers at a youth camp. Continue reading...

Marbella villa was lent to prime minister by Zac GoldsmithWith its two swimming pools, organic farm and private woodland, it may have seemed the ideal place to escape for a prime minister hoping to get away from it all.But the sprawling Marbella estate where Boris Johnson has been staying this week may be an awkward reminder of the questions he faced – and managed to avoid – in the wake of the Pandora papers revelations last week. Continue reading...

Five people seeking compensation say they were lured to country and then denied basic human rightsFive people who say they were lured to North Korea decades ago as part of a resettlement programme have told a court in Japan they were promised a “paradise on Earth” but were instead denied basic human rights.The plaintiffs – four ethnic Korean residents of Japan and a Japanese woman who went to the North with her Korean husband and their daughter – are seeking 100m yen (£644,000) in damages from the regime of Kim Jong-un. Continue reading...

Campaigners fear climate breakdown, Covid and violent conflict are threatening any progress made in food security in recent yearsGlobal targets to eradicate hunger by 2030 will be missed as a “toxic cocktail” of the climate crisis, conflict and the Covid-19 pandemic reverses progress, new projections have revealed.The fight to end hunger is “dangerously off track” and the UN sustainable development goal of zero hunger “tragically distant”, according to the 2021 Global Hunger Index (GHI), published on Thursday. Forty-seven countries will fail to achieve even low levels of hunger (ie countries that have adequate food and low numbers of child deaths) by 2030 and millions of people will experience severe hunger in the coming years. Continue reading...

Up to 3.2m facial images collected over a 10-month period from people who used in-store tablets to fill out feedback surveys

Josh Frydenberg says 90% of jobs lost in September were in Victoria as state records most infectious day with 2,297 cases; NSW reports 406 cases and six deaths; ACT records 46 cases, one death. This blog is now closed

Migrants, many fleeing the Taliban regime, claim they are being beaten, harassed and turned back by Turkish border forcesAs the sun sets over a dusty ravine on the outskirts of Van city in eastern Turkey, Muhammdullah Sangeen and dozens of other Afghans are preparing for another night sleeping rough.The 22-year-old, who has a bruised left eye and fresh cuts all over his arms, arrived from Iran a few days earlier with the help of smugglers. “I am not OK,” said Sangeen, his legs trembling. “I’m not feeling human.” Continue reading...

From painting nudes at a time when it was forbidden to sleeping among the troops in both world wars, the vitality of her work makes her still strikingly relevant“It is my opinion that fine realism is indeed true abstractionism,” the British painter Laura Knight wrote in 1954. Her critics complained that she was just copying life, but Knight believed that she transformed the world more than abstract painters, who seemed to her, to ignore its sensuality and specificity.We can decide for ourselves at the largest exhibition of her work since 1965, curated at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. What becomes swiftly clear is the copiousness of Knight’s subject matter and style. She was a modern painter in many ways: committed to taking on modern life and experience, and to being a modern woman. She wanted to do all that men could do, painting nudes at a time when female art students weren’t allowed to do so. She treated her subjects with seriousness and commitment, but also with enormous sensuous energy and a feel for the pleasures of looking, whether it’s the naked women on Cornish beaches, the garish clowns in her 1930s circus pictures, or even the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force commanders of the 1940s, surrounded by the meticulously rendered paraphernalia of their working lives. Continue reading...

Unmasking tax dodgers, sexual predators and corrupt officials can be lonely, daunting, unnerving work. But it can change the worldInvestigative journalism is costly, time-consuming, risky and difficult, and sometimes results in legal threats, personal abuse to our journalists – or no publishable story at all. So why do we do it? Six of our investigative journalists answer questions from editor Mark Rice-Oxley.Why does the Guardian feel it has to do this work – isn’t investigation for the police, or parliament?Make a contribution from just £1.Become a digital subscriber and get something in return for your money.Join as a Patron to fund us at a higher level. Continue reading...

Competition opens to find six young creators in sub-Saharan Africa who will be funded to produce movies for 2022For Nelson Mandela they were “morsels rich with the gritty essence of Africa but in many instances universal in their portrayal of humanity, beasts and the mystical.”Passed down through the generations, whispered at bedtimes and raucously retold by elders, folktales have long been a mainstay of African cultural heritage. Continue reading...

A new two-part HBO Max series on the Clueless actor’s shocking death at 32 in 2009 is less monument to her short life than exploitation of her deathIt’s telling that What Happened, Brittany Murphy?, a new docuseries on the Clueless and Girl, Interrupted actor’s confounding death in December 2009, is bookended by two overwrought sleights of hand. The two-part HBO Max series begins with the frantic 911 call by her mother, Sharon Murphy, over a recreation of the EMS trip from Murphy’s house in Hollywood Hills to Cedars Sinai medical center, where she died from a combination of pneumonia, severe anemia and several prescription and over-the-counter medications at age 32. It ends with a hammy montage of fan videos made by internet detectives – straight-to-camera, brightly lit, skeptical recaps that often double as makeup tutorials – spliced with scenes from Murphy’s films, as if her expressive face is in conversation with their fascination.That dialogue is a ruse; for the two hours between these moments, What Happened, Brittany Murphy? takes on the role of amateur sleuth. Combing through tabloid reports, medical documents and first-hand accounts of people orbiting her death, it purports to explain Murphy’s tragic, untimely demise and, more pertinent to headlines, her abusive, constrictive marriage to Simon Monjack, who died five months after her of pneumonia. Continue reading...

Rossiglione receives 740.6mm of rain in 12 hours, while 496mm falls over Cairo Montenotte in six hoursTorrential thunderstorms in Italy have set new European rainfall records, with a colossal 740.6mm (29in) of rain falling in just 12 hours over Rossiglione in Genoa on 4 October. In another record, set 20 miles west, Cairo Montenotte received a 496mm deluge in just six hours.Above average temperatures, rich moisture-laden Mediterranean air and an advancing low pressure system aided spectacular thunderstorm development over large parts of Italy. The staggering rainfall amounts caused landslides, damage to fields and blocked roads. Continue reading...

At the 1968 Olympics, Tommie Smith, winner of the men’s 200 metres, stood on the podium and lifted his hand to protest racism. That moment would end his running career – and shake the worldTommie Smith still gets chills when he hears the opening bars of The Star Spangled Banner. It takes him right back to that night in October 1968 when he stood on the Olympic podium in Mexico City, wearing his gold medal, and made the raised-fist salute that has defined his life. “It’s kind of a push, when I hear ‘dum, da-dum’,” he says, singing the opening notes of the United States national anthem. “Because that’s the first three notes I heard in Mexico, then my head went down, and I saw no more of it until the last note.”While the anthem played, all that was going through Smith’s head, he says, was “prayer and pain”. Pain because he had picked up a thigh injury that day on the way to winning the 200m final (he still set a world record). And prayer because Smith was not just putting his career on the line – he was risking his life. There was a real possibility that somebody in the stadium might try to shoot him or his team-mate John Carlos, who was making the salute beside him after winning bronze. In the months leading up to the Olympics, he had been receiving death threats. Two weeks before, Mexican police had fired into a crowd of student protesters, killing as many as 300 people. Martin Luther King had been assassinated just six months earlier. So Smith fully expected that the last thing he would hear, halfway through The Star Spangled Banner, would be a gunshot. “So when I hear that ‘dum, da-dum’, I get chills,” he says. “I got chills then when I sang it,” he laughs, holding out his arms to show the hairs standing on end. Continue reading...

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has watched an extreme martial arts demonstration by soldiers at a military event marking the 76th founding anniversary of its ruling party. In the video aired by the North's state-run television station, KRT, soldiers performed multiple shows of strength: smashing items, breaking free from chains, lying on glass and throwing knives. Kim smiled and clapped as he watched the show at the Defence Development Exhibition 'Self-Defence-2021'. During the exhibition, Kim said his country's weapons development is necessary in the face of the US' hostile policies and a military buildup in South Korea.

Fully vaccinated travellers from select countries including New Zealand and Australia will be able to visit from NovemberFiji says it is already experiencing a boom in demand after announcing this week that it would open up quarantine-free travel to visitors from select countries, almost two years after closing its borders due to the Covid-19 pandemic.“Our website data is well up – we are seeing a real lift in interest. It is exciting, and we want to encourage people to come and spend Christmas and new year in Fiji,” Tourism Fiji chief executive Brent Hill said. Continue reading...

Police say suspect in his 30s lived in the town of Kongsberg, where the attacks took placeA Danish citizen in his 30s has been arrested and charged after five people were killed and two others injured in attack using a bow and arrows in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg, police said.The suspect lived in the town and was transported to the nearby town of Drammen on Wednesday night, the police said in a statement issued early on Thursday. Continue reading...

Plans for how health system would deal with surge revealed as country records 71 new cases

Northern Territory chief health officer Hugh Heggie has blamed misinformation from faith organisations and anti-vaccination groups for influencing the slowing vaccination rates in the Top End. In an emotional press conference, Heggie said misinformation is spreading through social media among Indigenous communities. 'Who is going to take responsibility for the first death in the Northern Territory? Who is going to take responsibility for the first Aboriginal death in the Northern Territory?' he said► Subscribe to Guardian Australia on YouTube

A group of 26 experts will also be tasked with examining new pathogens and how to prevent future pandemics